Archive for December, 2008

But What Goes Wrong?

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Nice video about "connected learning" --- the latest incarnation of the idea that teachers should teach students how to find and evaluate information, so that students can find and connect ideas on the web themselves to create a customized learning experience.  I'm sure it works well if everyone involved is ...

What Can Software Engineering Do to Help Climate Change?

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Or should I say, what can SE do to help us stop (or at least mitigate) climate change?  Jon Pipitone has posted a summary of a brainstorming session from a couple of weeks ago, and would welcome your thoughts.

Beautiful Testing

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

I'm very pleased to pass on Adam Goucher's announcement that he and Tim Riley (of Mozilla) will be helming a sequel to Beautiful Code called Beautiful Testing. Proceeds will go to Nothing But Nets, which provides mosquito nets to malaria-infested regions in Africa.  BT will be the third "sequel", joining ...

Martin Fowler on Academic Rotation

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Regular readers will know that I cheered this one...

Hacking the Rainforest

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Turns out logging companies in Brazil have attempted to subvert quotas on how much they're allowed to cut by hiring hackers to break into government computers and increase their numbers. *sigh*

Carl Zimmer, Faces, and Letter Writing Campaigns

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Great post from Carl Zimmer: after writing an article about the evolution of the human face, he received a slew of letters of letters from creationists in Tennessee (pretty clearly coordinated by someone).  His reply is an excellent summary of the evidence for evolution, and an even better example of ...

We Got Boinged!

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

BoingBoing finally noticed the "camel has two humps" study, in which Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat claimed that a simple test could tell whether someone would be a good programmer or not before they'd ever written a single line of code.  They mention at the bottom that Jonathan Lung, Jorge ...

Oslo

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

InfoQ has an article on "Writing a Textual DSL (Domain Specific Language) Using Oslo", which is Microsoft's whiffy new sort-of-extensible programming system.  It makes Scheme (and even Ruby) look pretty...

uTest’s Bug Battle

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Via DDJ, the results of uTest's first bug battle: over 1,330 uTesters from 68 countries competed to see who could find bugs in IE8, Firefox 3.1 beta and Google Chrome. They found a total of 672 bugs, 101 of which were showstoppers; top honors go to Prashanti G. Bharathwaj (pro) ...

Science Lessons for Movie Makers

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

The Science and Entertainment Exchange hopes to bring a little scientific reality to Hollywood.  I wonder if it'll be more effective than science lessons for MPs...