Newsletter Volume 28 Issue 9, Sep 2016
From The Editor
“The positive brain is 31% more productive than the brain in a negative, neutral or stressed state.”
Yes, positive thinking is one of several September 2016 recommendations for innovation, coming from Australian and overseas public and private sector researchers. While there are differences of opinion, there are also valuable insights on successful approaches. See below, Think Yourself Lucky.
“In tests on several common algorithms, programs written in the new language were four times as fast as those written in existing languages. But the researchers believe that further work will yield even larger gains.”
The above quote is from a September 13, 2016 Science Daily article from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describing a new programming language for managing big data. See below, Language delivers fourfold speedups on big-data problems.
“our own research and that of others suggests that confusion, rather than being a negative, can actually be a productive aspect of the learning process.”
This quote is from a September 14, 2016 article in The Conversation, which tells us how to distinguish between unproductive and productive confusion. See below, Confused? Don’t worry because that can be a good thing.
A September 7, 2016 Science Daily article on ship building has some insights that will ring a bell for software engineers. “On a technological behemoth like a ship, in many cases the crew, or ‘human element” get little attention when planning the design and operations – a mistake, as statistics show: most accidents at sea can be traced back to human error, not technical error”. See below Human ahoy! Addressing human error in ship building
Current Issue
Articles in the current Issue cover:
Think Yourself Lucky
“Surveys from the American management consulting company Gallup continue to find that only 13% of employees are actively engaged at work. In the US alone, this could mean a cost of up to US$550 billion in lost productivity annually. A 700-person study by economists at the University of Warwick found that happy employees were 20% above the control group in terms of productivity.”
Language delivers fourfold speedups on big-data problems
“It’s as if, every time you want a spoonful of cereal, you open the fridge, open the milk carton, pour a spoonful of milk, close the carton, and put it back in the fridge.”
Confused? Don’t worry because that can be a good thing
“ Glossy, high production value resources have been shown to give people an inflated sense of understanding.”
Human ahoy! Addressing human error in ship building
“above the captain wants to move ahead as quickly as possible, below the engineers see the safety and durability of their engines first”
QESP Blog
Anna-Lucia Mackay was one of the speakers at the popular ACOSM16 Australian Conference on Software Management in June. Anna-Lucia has provided some further information and links on
Key Learning Outcomes and “Tapping into Your Full Potential”, For further details, see http://qesp.org/tapping-your-full-potential-learning-series.
Events
A further joint QESP/ ACS NSW evening networking event is now being planned, see http://qesp.org/progalore.
Quotes
Quote of the Day
If not for the compulsions of engineers, mankind would never have seen the wheel, settling instead for the trapezoid because some Neanderthal in marketing convinced everybody it had great braking ability. ? Scott Adams
Quote from Yesteryear
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. –Donald Knuth
Ted Smillie
QESP Chairman