Peter Merholz and Nathan Shedroff: "Contrary to common wisdom, user-centered design is not a process, but a philosophy. User-centered design requires the inclusion of a product's end-users throughout the design process. The primary benefit of user-centered design is that, when performed well, it ensures that the product is useful, usable, and meaningful to the end-user. Also, many of the low-fidelity methods developed to accomplish user-centered design allow for shortened development cycles."

Couching knowledge sharing in terms of altruism, as some people do, is mistaken. [...] What is needed is a positive outlook, the desire to learn and teach, and long-term thinking. Positive people are excited about new knowledge and enjoy listening to or telling stories. Learning and teaching implies respect for knowledge and fellow human beings, and the awareness of one's own, constantly changing limits of knowledge. Finally, long-term thinking correlates with a focus on creating value, hence on seeking mutual profit.

Brent Ashley and Seblogging recommend enthusiasm, altruism, [and] optimism to support a culture of knowledge sharing but altruism is emphatically not what we need. Enthusiasm and optimism are correlated, but insufficient. We need people who see that it is in their own rational self-interest to work with others, because they value thinking and new ideas, as well as the power of shared knowledge and goals. It should be a deeply rooted and non-altruistic behaviour, even in a large, multinational company. I submit 3M as an inspiring, successful example. To recap: sacrifice is at the root of altruism, while self-interested value-creation is at the root of knowledge.

Thus, I started up an Instant Outline (OPML) for this project (this works only with Radio as far as I know). I'll collect material on this project to the outline. Perhaps this could be useful to someone else also.

The Genetic Algorithm Utility Library (or, GAUL for short) is a flexible programming library designed to aid in the development of applications that require the use of genetic algorithms. It provides data structures and functions for handling and manipulation of the data required for a genetic algorithm. Additional stochastic algorithms are provided for comparison to the genetic algorithms. Much of the functionality is also available through a simple S-Lang interface.

The current primary aims of this project are to produce documentation, examples and test cases for this open-source release of GAUL. Several new features are also planned for GAUL including wrappers to enable its use with programming languages other than C. The open-source release of GAUL is currently not parallelised, however this will become a priority development target.

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory if not the reputation of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and the phrase, "the pen is mightier than the sword," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."