A new programming term to me from a Technology Review article: aspect-oriented programming. It’s a concept that has made it out of Xerox PARC and into an actual Java language extension, AspectJ (yay for research from PARC that makes it in the real world! ;-). If you want to duplicate and enforce a behavior for all instances of a specific situation, you can create an aspect to help propagate and maintain that behavior. These would be behaviors that aren’t easy to modularize because they need to occur over many disparate modules; some of their examples are design patterns, error-checking strategies, and resource sharing. If you’re like me and need an example to actually figure out what this all means, see the short AspectJ overview. (Apologies to the non-programmers out there. I’m sure this is as fascinating as more election coverage.)