Posted in out and about, tagged Cambridge, dragon, objectives, politics, propinquity, public speaking, year on 31/12/2014|
Reflecting on the year as it draws to a close: that’s a thing, isn’t it? Much has happened during the past year, much of which I have no intention of discussing right now. However, I’ve remembered that I set myself some goals for the year, and so now would be a good time for reviewing them.
The goals were: to meet Puffles the Dragon Fairy; to use the word “propinquity” more often; and to do some public speaking.
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Posted in out and about, tagged Cambridge, culture, politics on 22/09/2014| 1 Comment »
Saturday afternoon of last weekend, I went to Anglia Ruskin on East Road for Cambridge Conversation Café, the inaugural event of Be The Change Cambridge. This is my write-up of the event. Or rather, it’s more a write-up of my experience of the event. If you want something more objective you might want to try Michelle Brook’s account.
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Posted in out and about, tagged cake, Cambridge, Classics, computer, launderette on 27/10/2013| Leave a Comment »
I’ve recently had a number of headhunter types waving opportunities under my nose and asking if I’d consider relocating. Whilst it’s nice to feel wanted, it’s even nicer to remind myself of some of the reasons why I’m very happy to stay where I am. So: what is there to see in Cambridge?
Posted in arts and crafts, tagged Cambridge, data, demography, embroidery on 29/09/2013| 3 Comments »
G. made a square for a community quilt being put together by the local Women’s Institute:
It possibly isn’t quite what they had in mind, but the crossover between needlework and data science had to happen sooner or later. (The jump on the data around 1911 apparently coincides with a significant boundary change. There was no census in 1941 due to the Second World War.)
Posted in out and about, tagged Agile, Anthropology, Cambridge, management, pub, Richard Berry on 16/07/2013| Leave a Comment »
Some years ago, at an “all hands” meeting at a company where I worked, the head of the company enthused at length about Jack Welch’s famous ruthlessness. At the time I said to various people that if I wanted to work for General Electric then I knew where to find them. I wasn’t joking: GE have an office in easy walking distance of my house. However, I never set foot in there until last night, when I attended a talk by Richard Berry—part of their series of “agile talks”.
The talk was about management and leadership, and the differences in management style (command-and-control vs. facilitation) and the importance of different personality types in how teams work. Management theory, then. (And yes, there were flip-charts, and a 2×2 matrix, and book recommendations at the end.)
I’ve seen some disappointment expressed about the content of the talk. Surely this is all rather old hat: no-one now believes that command-and-control is a sensible way to organize a software development team. I’d have two responses to that, the first of which is that overt command-and-control may be rare but that the common alternative—insisting that people “take ownership” without giving them any meaningful control isn’t really the same thing as facilitation.
My other response would be that even if the broad outline of Richard’s talk didn’t hold any surprises, it’s possible to do this sort of thing badly or well, and Richard did it well. The last presentation I saw that covered this rough area was given by some ex-marketing guy who seemed to speak largely in clichés taken from trashy pop psychology books (“don’t sweat the small stuff”, “change is the only constant”, etc.). Regardless of the big picture being peddled, there were telling little details in Richard’s talk that, for me, showed that he knew what he was talking about. This wasn’t an occasion for buzzword bingo.
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Posted in arts and crafts, tagged C++, Cambridge, Java, knowledge, programming, skill on 13/02/2013| 1 Comment »
I’ve previously mentioned Rodney Brooks approach to robotics, and also “bottom up” views of knowledge. Here’s a nice quote (from Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign, p115):
Brooks’ attachment to the bottom-up procedure is also performative, ruling the description as well as the content of his approach. Thus, not only mind—problem solving, central control, representation—is subordinated within his model of intelligence but also its sociocultural correlates—philosophy, abstract thought, theory—are likewise invoked by him on a minimal, need-to-know basis.
This appeals to me, in part, because it chimes with my views about another form of abstract knowledge that’s central to programming: knowledge of programming languages.
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Posted in out and about, tagged Cambridge, Open Source, pub, search on 02/11/2012| 2 Comments »
This week had risked turning into a disappointment, what with Richard Sennett’s lecture on “The Open City” being cancelled. But last night more than made up for it. The Data Insights Cambridge meetup group, er, met up, for a brilliant talk by Charlie Hull, founder of Flax, about open source search engines.
Instead of talking about how search engines are implemented, as fascinating as that stuff is, he largely talked about industry politics, which turns out to be fascinating too.
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Posted in out and about, tagged Alan Blackwell, Cambridge, ice cream, Open Source on 01/11/2012| 1 Comment »
I was having a conversation the other day about a talk Alan Blackwell gave a couple of years back, about the history of the “Cambridge phenomenon”. This reminded me how, many moons ago, I attended a conference he organised entitled Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy. It was about the possible wider cultural significance of challenges, in the software world, to entrenched ideas of intellectual property.
At the time I wrote a report on it, for my then employers. If only I’d had the foresight to keep a copy for myself…
I’ve forgotten much about it, but before I forget even more, here’s a brief review, a decade too late.
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Posted in arts and crafts, tagged artificial intelligence, Cambridge, embodiment, Frank Stejano, knowledge, psychology, Rodney Brooks, security, world on 17/11/2009| 1 Comment »
Frank Stajano’s presentation on security (and the recent Cambridge Stack Overflow Dev Day) was based on the premise that hustlers and scammers understand human psychology in a way that engineers do not, and so security engineers would do well to learn from how classic scams work.
rdn32 