Articles, awards, books, chapters, interviews, speaking engagements
over the years with links when available.
Articles
- Plan for a New University
- Traditionaly, universities provide rigor at the expense of relevance,
education at the expense of training, and individual learning at the
expense of organizational learning. "Plan for a New
University" advocates a new conception of a university that
encompasses Rigor and Relevance, Education and Training,
and Individual and Organizational Learning as a seamless whole.
- A Win-win Approach to the Mideast Conflict
- The focus on win-lose solutions has caused all sides to overlook the
fact that history provides just as many examples of difficult situations
that were solved by win-win solutions. These work far better in that they
yield a unified population, undamaged by war and invigorated by treating
diversity as a strength, not an reason for conflict.
- Planning the Software Industrial Revolution
- IEEE Magazine Special Issue on Software
Engineering, republished in Byte Magazine as There is a Silver Bullet
. Also see No
Silver Bullet by Dr. Fred Brooks.Building
Blocks of Silver by Tom Ochs contrasts the two viewpoints in Byte
magazine.
- Objects as Property
- IEEE Software Magazine; Managers Column; Jan 1997
- No Silver Bullet Reconsidered
- American Programmer Magazine, Nov 1995, ed. Ed Yourdon.
- Superdistribution?
- Wired Magazine; Ideas Fortes, Sept 1994. Here's another version of the same paper.
- What if there's a Silver Bullet and the competition gets it first?
- Originally an editorial in the Journal of Object-oriented Programming
and subsequentlyl replublished in Dr. Dobb's Journal. Mentioned in Peter
Huber's article, Three Cheers for
Price Discrimination, in Forbes Magazine.
- Market Processes as a New Foundation
for Software Engineering
- 1993 SIGSOFT Conference on New Foundations for Software Engineering.
Awards
- 1998 Paul Allen Foundation Online Course competition
- The Outstanding Online Course Award was conceived with two purposes
in mind. First to recognize
distinguished accomplishment in the new and fast-developing world of
online learning. Second, to reveal something about the general state of
current practice among those developing the best online courses. After
careful consideration the judges awarded the $25,000 prize to Dr. Brad Cox
of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA.. Dr. Cox's course,
"Taming the Electronic Frontier," represents an outstanding
combination of creative instructional design that takes real advantage
of the online environment backed by a careful and continuous process of
evaluation and refinement based on student feedback.
Books
- Superdistribution;
Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier
- (Addison
Wesley 1996; ISBN 0201502089). "Now that object-oriented
technologies ranging from programming languages to graphical user
interfaces to the WWW have made it feasible to manufacture readily
transferable objects made of bits, what does it mean to buy, sell
and own them? Brad Cox proposes "superdistribution" as
a solution that allows software to flow freely without resistance
from copy protection or piracy -- a "charge as you play"
model that will work well in a world of Java-like applets. A
well-worked out and "modest proposal" from one of the
founders of object-oriented programming. Cox, an early pioneer
in the Object-Oriented Technology revolution, anticipates how
the electronic frontier will be tamed by putting the information
revolution in context with other historic revolutions. He proposes
a humancentric framework in relation to electronic goods, with
the superdistribution approach detailed." (Reviewed by amazon.com)
- Object-oriented
Programming, An Evolutionary Approach
- Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Second Edition 1986.
Chapters
- Forward: Developing Software Using OVID
- Authors: Dick Berry (reberry@us.ibm.com), Dave Roberts, Scott Isensee, John Mullaly
Forward: Brad Cox, 12 Jun 1997
- Evolving a Distributed Learing Community
- Chapter for Designing the Online Classroom in K12 edited by Zane
Berge and Mauri Colins.
Interviews
- IEEE Computing Magazine Interview
- Dec 1998.
- Software's Chronic Crisis
- Excerpts from interview by W. Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American Sept 1994.
Reviews
- Review of the Middle of Nowhere web
- by Mike Swaine; inaugural issues of Web Techniques magazine.
Research Proposals
- Plan for a New University
- A new conception of the university could avoid the usual concentration
on rigor at the expense of relevance, education at the expense of
training, and individual learning at the expense of organizational
learning. "New University" is a placeholder signifying a new
kind of university that seamlessly integrates Rigor and Relevance,
Education and Training, and Individual and Organizational Learning
as explained in the What section. This is distinct from the either-or
choices students make when choosing between liberal arts universities
and technical training schools, or when executives retain organizational
consulting firms for services that a new university might provide.
- A GMU Proposal in Response to the 1998
NSF Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence Solicitation
- We propose to deploy two levels of web-based technology
(T1-T2) within three academic organizations (O1-O3), and to conduct
an interdisciplinary study of the impact from the world views of the
multiple disciplines in this team (V1-V7). For example, an economist
will provide a management view by doing an accounting-style study of
the effects on costs/benefits, a psychologist will examine the effects
on paradigms and cognitive models, a sociologist will do an ethnographic
study of the effects on institutional power relationships, and so forth
as explained in the viewpoints section of the project description.
- Digital Property
- An Educom/IMS Working Paper on Superdistribution as the digital
commerce standard for exchange of courseware and software subcomponents
between universities.
- Coalition for Electronic
Markets
- CEM is a coalition of industrial partners whose goal is deploying a
techno-social solution to the electronic property issues of electronic
goods; property composed of bits instead of atoms. See No Silver Bullet
Reconsidered for conceptual background.
Objective-C
- Position Paper for the
Ecoop'91 Workshop On Exception Handling And Oopls
- Action Expressions to ad Exception handling to C-based
languages. This article shows why I started work on Action Expressions,
Exception Handling, and Light-weight Multitasking to Objective-C in the
first place; namely to provide a means for supporting a higher-level
class of object than Objective-C supports directly.
- TaskMaster
- The original article from which both of the above
originated. Describes a multitasking/exception handling library I
developed as a Stepstone product library but never released as a
product.
- TaskMaster: Card-level
Objects and User-Programmable System
- An early article on a lightweight multitasking and exception handling
library for Objective-C and their role in building user-programmable
systems.
Old Articles
Older articles, often written prior to the web. I don't have copies
of many of these and many of the dates are best guesses.
- 1994 Testing Object-oriented Components; A Human-centric Approach
- Communications of the ACM; Special Issue on Testing
- 1993 Market Processes as a New
Foundation for Software Engineering.
- 92 What if there is
a Silver Bullet and the competition gets it first?
- Guest Editorial; Journal of Object-oriented Programming; June
92.
- 92 Superdistribution and Electronic Objects;
- Dr. Dobbs' Journal; October 92.
- 92 A Revolutionary Approach
- Invited Column; Journal of Object-oriented Programming.
- 1990 Planning the Software Industrial Revolution;
- Software Technologies of the 90's special issue of IEEE Software
magazine; November 90,
- 1990 There is a Silver Bullet;
- Byte magazine, October 90.
- 1988 Specifying and Testing Object-oriented Software Components
- bimonthly column; Journal of Object-oriented Programming.
- 1988 Producer; Smalltalk to Objective-C Translator;
- OOPSLA `88 proceedings (with Kurt Schmucker)
- 1986 Object-oriented Programming; An Evolutionary Approach;
- Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
- ~1986 Objects, Icons, and Software ICs;
- Byte magazine (with Bill Hunt)
- ~1986 Object-oriented Programming; What is It? Why is it
important?;
- Computer World magazine.
- ~1985 Software-ICs
- Byte magazine (with Lamar Ledbetter)
- ~82 Message/Object Programming; An Evolutionary Change in Programming
Technology
- IEEE Software magazine.
- ~1983 OOPC; Object-oriented Pre-Compiler
- SIGPLAN Notices
- 1970 Simulation of Neural
Nets
- Decus Proceedings; Spring 1970; Papers and Presentations of the
Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society
