A report from the faculty of medicine in Lisbon, Portugal, which conducted the research, said: "If confirmed, this finding should have a major impact on the prevention of alzheimers disease."

Lisbon, Portugal is where I drank the strongest cup of coffee I've ever had. If memory serves (this was the 1986 trip), a "cup of coffee" in Portugal gets you an unbelievablely strong espresso called a "bica" and came with a sugar packet as big as the cup. Forget all these lame "extreme caffeine" drinks, a bica will blow your head clean off faster than a Scanner.

12:00:23 PM    

An Open Offer to Utah State IT Employees.

I believe that the 900 or so IT employees of the State of Utah would benefit from speaking and listening to each other more. I think we need groups of specialists inside various departments to communicate with others in their specialty and without.  Consequently, I'd like to see more people writing blogs and communicating their ideas through an open forum like the one blogs engender.  To that end, I'm willing to pay the licensing fee to Userland for the first 100 employees who start a blog.  Here are the conditions:

1. Download the software and begin using on the 30-day free trial.  I'd like to see you get a start before I pay the fee.  Let me know when you're up and running.
2. I'm biased toward IT employees, but other are welcome too, particularly if they're interested in eGovernment.
3. You're responsible for what you post.  If you're going to talk about things that shouldn't be public on Userland and need to be kept behind the state firewall, let me know and we'll set up a place inside the state network for that.  We could even set up an authenticated area, if needed. 

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

11:58:51 AM    

• Give your clients/peers as much information about a failure as you can.
• Don't limit your error information to "IEB021314" if you can help it.

Clemens Vasters: "Arrogance is a design pattern for asynchronously decoupled systems. "If you give me an XML schema and the data I give you is valid according to that schema, it's your problem and job to process it properly. Not mine." Synchronicity is for people who worry too much about other people's problems. If a remote system fails processing data that was perfectly valid according to its own rules, what are you doing with that returned failure code? Panic? Call your mom?" The general philosophy of distributed application development on the Net is that everyone needs to handle their own end of the equation and if they don't, too bad.  I'm holding up my end.  My application works.  If your's doesn't, that's your problem.  At the same time however, Nash's equilibrium still holds true.  I'm going to implement my application based on standards and provide all of the information I can to help you make sure your end can work with mine. [snellspace]

11:51:12 AM    

Georgia Tech's portal project, and how extreme programming and interaction design might help.

A bit of introduction: the major project I'm working on at Georgia Tech is a campus portal. I'll try to blog more about the subject of portals at another time, but for now, portal software aims to give each member of the campus a personalized view of the resources of the campus: a student might see their class schedule and grade information, a faculty member might be able to update a class calendar, staff members might have a view of their own, alumni another .. you get the idea. But to the point: I've been thinking about two schools of thought that seem to be in conflict, but both of which might have applicability in Tech's campus portal project: Extreme Programming, and Alan Cooper's Interaction Design.

...
[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]

11:41:13 AM    

After championing truncating your RSS feed to the first paragraph, I'm going back to an untruncated RSS feed. Truncation works very well if you write like a reporter. If you get everything important into that first paragraph, folks can decide if they want to click further. But sometimes I feel more like telling stories than reporting the news. And in that case, it's very hard to get everything you want to say into that first 'graph.

This was brought home to me this week. I put in an item about the emotional risk you take when you decide to share your blog/klog with others. The first 'graph was very short, but at least one person took the trouble to read further, and found something of value in the next to last paragraph.

If I had a choice, I suppose I'd like a mechanism that would let me specify whether or not to abridge my blog entry into something shorter for my RSS feed. But since part of the point of this weblog is offer things that others might be interested in, I'll try sending out an unfiltered feed again.

11:39:03 AM    

A dozen years ago, the psychologists Robert Hogan, Robert Raskin, and Dan Fazzini wrote a brilliant essay called "The Dark Side of Charisma." It argued that flawed managers fall into three types. One is the High Likability Floater, who rises effortlessly in an organization because he never takes any difficult decisions or makes any enemies. Another is the Homme de Ressentiment, who seethes below the surface and plots against his enemies. The most interesting of the three is the Narcissist, whose energy and self-confidence and charm lead him inexorably up the corporate ladder. Narcissists are terrible managers. They resist accepting suggestions, thinking it will make them appear weak, and they don't believe that others have anything useful to tell them. "Narcissists are biased to take more credit for success than is legitimate," Hogan and his co-authors write, and "biased to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their failures and shortcomings for the same reasons that they claim more success than is their due." Moreover:

Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people . . . and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition, narcissists tend to "self-nominate"; consequently, when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.

How *not* to succeed at Consulting.

How to Succeed at Consulting. Nice take on how consultants can really help your company. [Blunt Force Trauma]

» Tom DeMarco describes the effects of a "rank & yank" culture very well in his book Slack.  It creates a culture of fear where no-one is prepared to help anyone else for fear of falling down and being one of the "yanks."

In his book The E-Myth revisited Michael Gerber talks about a totally different hiring policy.  Based around the idea of a turn-key operation with fully documented processes he recommends hiring not A-graders but people who have the skills to do the job and are willing to play the game you have created for them.

It's certainly a different way of thinking.

 

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

10:48:54 AM