Steve Freeman

Here’s a story, A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash, from the New York Times about a teacher David Campbell doing a first rate job for his students. One of the interesting features of the story for me is how he had to work out how to get students committed to [...]

A heavy title, but there are some great videos linked from this paper in Nature on “Attention and Awareness in Magic”, written by a team of scientists and top rate illusionists. Watch James Randi pull a fast one on Daniel Dennett, see if you can tell which is which…

via Neurophilosophy

Johanna Rothman has a nice post about why people with responsibilities need assistants. As she points out, most organisations have been stripping out administrative support except for the most exalted positions, which makes sense until one looks at the bigger picture. Is it really better that people who are supposed to be busy with activities [...]

Today I found on the way to work that I’d forgotten my glasses so, rather than waste the day, I popped into a pharmacy to pick up some cheap reading glasses. The instructions for the viewer machine that figured out which strength to buy were in small print. Hmmmm.

Here’s another post on the lines of: “Hammers considered harmful. Every time I use one, it strips the threads from my screws.” One of the clues is in the list of symptoms at the end of the first paragraph: “mammoth test set-ups”. The tests were complaining but not being heard.

In truth, we’ve done [...]

Update: The paper has now been officially published at http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/0110/whatsnew/software

Stuart Wray has posted a draft of an interesting paper on How does Pair Programming Work?. I can’t judge all the psychological claims, but many of the points appeal to my confirmation bias.

In “Mechanism 3”, Wray makes a link between code-n-fix programming and a form of [...]

We’re very pleased to announce our keynote speakers for this year’s London XpDay.

Chris Ambler, European QA Director for games company Electronic Arts, tests some of the most complex software in the world

Daniel Jones and Marc Baker, Lean Enterprise Academy, are two of the most established Lean consultants in the world. Jones wrote, with James [...]