This is a very interesting way of looking at Agile. The talk is a based on an assumption – that the people involved in software development processes deserve more attention. I agree with the many of the points made in the talk, particularly around the intangible nature of the software we build. Which is one of the reasons we are still, as an industry, trying to discover the best practises, and a true sense of engineering discipline.
Its well worth watching this talk, especially to get a different perspective on Agile, focusing on the social and cognitive effects. She used the Prisoners Dilemma to illustrate some of these points and to be honest I had never thought of Software Engineering in those terms, yet as a metaphor it fits so very well,
in software engineering this is reflected in the fact that software is an intangible product so sometimes we cannot verify that our colleagues behave in the same way … so what Agile software development does is it banishes the inability to verify that co-operation is reciprocated, by increasing the process transparency, in such a way it banishes the working assumption of the prisoners dilemma.
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
-- by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Karen Armstrong is a wonderful writer and an original thinker on the subject of religion in the modern world. I’ve already commented on some her writings and find that I have great respect for her work.
In this talk she talks about The Golden Rule, how it is a fundamental tenant of all the Abrahamic faiths ( Judaism, Christianity and Islam ), as well as many others. She touches on how she feels, and quite rightly, that these religions have diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. She talks about how what the golden rule truly embodies is the notion of compassion, and how it is our compassion that will ultimately change the world for better. It’s an inspired talk and one that left me feeling hopeful.
One of the most profound things she says during her talk, one that I was immediately drawn to because it echoes a sentiment that I have long struggled to articulate, which is that:
If religion is not about believing things then what is it about?
What I found across the board is that religion is about behaving
differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God
first you do something, you behave in a committed way and then
you begin to understand the truths of religion.
Religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action, you only
understand them when you put them into practice.
In many ways The Golden Rule is a summons to action, for those who don’t know what Golden Rule is, it is a simple ethical edict that states (as Confucius first propounded):
"do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you."
As Karen points out in her talk though the key to this ideal is that you treat all people with the same consideration, not just members of your own faith or social/political/ethnic group. As I mentioned the origins of this rule can be traced back the core traditions of each of the major faiths, and in fact can be traced much further back to older traditions. I fundamentally agree with Karen when she says:
Compassion, the ability to feel with the other ...
is not only the test of any true religiousity it is
also what will bring us into the presence of what
Jews, Christians and Muslims call God or the Divine.
It is compassion says the Buddha which brings
you to Nirvana.
There’s a profound conviction in her words, and one that should touch us all regardless of what faith or tradition we choose to follow. Compassion, to my mind, transcends the world traditions, it’s what each of those traditions should be reaching for, and yet, for whatever reason, we often find that those traditions have diverted from it. Karen’s idea of a Charter of Compassion seeks to restore the Golden Rule as a the central global doctrine … and as a Muslim I applaud her for that. After all, didnt the Prophet Muhammed, in his final sermon, say that:
"Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you"
And also in the hadith:
"None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for
his brother what he wishes for himself"
During her talk I also think that Karen was quite right to dismiss the notion that Religion is the cause of all war and suffering:
The cause of our present woes are political. But make
no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line and
when a conflict gets ingrained in a region then religion
can get sucked in a become part of the problem. Our
modernity has been exceedingly violent.
I think fundamentally Karen has a point, I think that religion can be a force for harmony but only when each of us embraces the idea of compassion, as embodied in The Golden Rule. Could that ever be a reality? I don’t know, the cynic in me says probably not, but the romantic in me says that we should never loose sight of that ideal.
How does one even begin to summarise the life and achievements of a man like Arthur C. Clarke, who sadly died at his home in Sri Lanka yesterday. Clarke wasn’t just a writer of science fiction he was a visionary whose creative ideas did often materialise in the real world years after he first envisaged or described them. I always remember being fascinated with how he first came up with the idea of geo-synchronous communication satellites in 1945, which became a reality twenty years later after he first posited the notion. He was ahead of his time, and in many ways I can’t help but think we are still struggling to catch up with his visions of the future.
I read much of his works in my early teens and I recall vividly just how profound and effect his writings had on me. It was easy to loose oneself in the kinds of future he envisaged. He understood technology, he understood how embracing it could shape our future … but he often reflected on what it would be like to live without it …
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Shakespeare once wrote that the death was the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. I’ve always believed that the future is like that too, Clarke helped us all to see that with his wondrous visions of what he felt was our desire to live in a world that is shaped by our demands and need for a better future.
I genuinely feel sad … I know how much his works impacted my life and much of my thoughts about the kind of world I want to live in, he didn’t write science fiction, he showed us a future and now it’s up to us to make it a reality.
TED Talks are often described as being inspirational, and they are. Nothing epitomises this quality more than this talk by Dave Eggers, in which he challenges the entire TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. He talks about his 826 Valencia tutoring center which has been the inspiration for many similar initiatives around the world – a volunteer driven wildly creative writing labs. Dave is an energetic and passionate speaker, full of humour and an infectious enthusiasm and it’s hard not to be totally overwhelmed as you listen to him.
He has set up a web site called Once Upon a School where he asks people share their volunteering and teaching stories. To appreciate just how well received Dave’s initiatives have been, and how much they are helping pupils around the world …. Time Magazine once wrote this about Dave:
“Many writers, having written a first best-seller, might see it as a nice way to start a career. He started a movement instead.”
Read this interview yesterday on the BBC News Site, in which Sir Tim Berners-Lee voices his concern about the practice of tracking activity on the internet — with particular reference to Phorm, a Company that leading internet service providers are planning to use, which tracks users web activity in order to create personalised advertise. Tim explains some of the dangers of this …
“I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they’ve figured I’m looking at those books,”
and elaborates on this by explaining that as an individual his data and his web history belongs to him …
“It’s mine – you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.”
Privacy concerns are never going to go away. The problem though is that most users don’t understand privacy and more often than not social networking sites, like Facebook, have tried to take advantage of this. As was the case recently when Facebook tried to introduce Beacon, another ad system which leveraged users activity. Facebook was subsequently forced to provide a mechanism for users to opt out of this after some pretty damning coverage in the media.
I think it’s a good thing that Tim has made his views public, perhaps others will now stop and reconsider some of their actions … you can watch the interview below
Clouds
Down the blue night the unending columns press
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness.
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.
They say that the Dead die not, but remain
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
And men, coming and going on the earth.
-- by Rupert Brooke
Really interesting talk, that demonstrates Greenfoot a development environment designed to make it easy for novices to learn programming in Java.
The students at high school levels might not be as commited to programming and we have tried to create an interesting program that should engage the student. In order to do this, we acknowledge that students has different opinions on what might be interesting. Hence, we sought to create a flexible environment that could be customised for the specific group of students. Furthermore, in the design of greenfoot we considered the different learning styles of students.
I’m not sure if I agree entirely with this approach but I do welcome anything that helps engage students. On reflection though the top down pedagogical approach to teaching and learning that Greenfoot encourages is something I am in favour of.
The online learning framework captures a wide variety of learning problems. The setting is as follows – in each round, we have to choose a point from some fixed convex domain. Then, we are presented a convex loss function, according to which we incur a loss. The loss over T rounds is simply the sum of all the losses. The aim of most online learning algorithm is to minimize *regret* : the difference of the algorithm’s loss and the loss of the best fixed decision in hindsight. Unfortunately, in situations where the loss function may vary a lot, the regret is not a good measure of performance. We define *adaptive regret*, a notion that is a much better measure of how well our algorithm is adapting to the changing loss functions. We provide a procedure that converts any standard low-regret algorithm to one that provides low adaptive regret. We use an interesting mix of techniques, and use streaming ideas to make our algorithm efficient. This technique can be applied in many scenarios, such as portfolio management, online shortest paths, and the tree update problem, to name a few.
Pretty interesting tech talk, I found the notion of minimising regret quite interesting, but only really because I have heard of this before, but never experienced a real world implementation of this. I first heard of the significance of regret in learning from Alan who captured this vividly in an essay he wrote called The Adaptive Significance of Regret which he wrote back in 2005. In fact he even showed me some PHP code he wrote that modelled regret, which at the time I remember finding somewhat amusing … but right now it it feels far more significant.
How does one even begin to summarise the life and achievements of a man like