Research

Research Skills Activity

1. Diversity Issues in workplace teams.

A group of regional human resource professionals continually has made workplace diversity an ongoing educational item for its members. "Diversity in many aspects came about through attempts to address race and gender," said Scott Holsman, chapter president of the Human Resources Association of Mid-Missouri. "But they're also finding out there's more to diversity than those two issues. There's a rise of understanding on how teams work together, and I think we're moving toward more a substantial look at the role diversity plays." (Friedman, 2002, p.1)

As part of a yearly look at diversity issues in the workplace, members of Holsman's group attended a half-day conference early last week. Plummer spoke about diversity issues to about 60 of the group's members. Diversity "is a topic because it's a reality today," said Holsman, who works for Express Personnel Services in Mid-Missouri. "The leading companies really understand that diversity is many things, and it's not just a gender and racial thing. A team is made up of different talents, and the challenge is to optimize those talents to get the most benefit for an organization." (Friedman, 2002, p.1)

2. Case Studies in Object Oriented Programming

Pi is n debugger written in C+ +. This paper explains how object-oriented Programming in C+ + has influenced Pi's evolution. The motivation for Object Oriented programming was to experiment with a browser-like graphical user interface. The first unforeseen benefit was in the symbol table: lazy construction of an abstract syntax-based tree gave a clean interface to the remainder of Pi, with an efficient and robust implementation. Next, though not in the original design, Pi was easily modified to control multiple processes simultaneously. Finally, Pi was extended to control processes executing across multiple heterogeneous target processors. (Cargill, 1986, p.350)

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