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Quality of an Interactive System
Today, I spent some time in a remote visualization tutorial presented by John Clyne of NCAR. He referenced a 2005 answer to the question “What is meant by interactive analysis?” by Mark Rast of the University of Colorado: Definition: A system is interactive if the time between a user event and [the system’s] response to…
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Good Tutorials and Bad Tutorials
Are you leading a workshop or tutorial at a conference? In this post, find out how to make your 1.5-8 hour session meaningful, enjoyable, and high quality. I’m thinking a lot about how (and how not) to execute a successful tutorial session today. Why? Because I’ve spent 8 hours today in 2 tutorials, and with…
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Quality vs. Excellence
I was reading through a company’s strategic plan over the weekend and noticed that they had made the decision to shift from a “quality focus” to an “excellence focus”. This made me wonder what the difference is, and why a company might want to make such a change in its strategy. According to ISO 8402,…
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Not Invented Here
If you are part of the software development world, no doubt you are familiar with “not invented here” (NIH) syndrome. It is the scourge of the software development culture, the unfortunate tendency within a group of software-minded people to attribute value to the code that members of the group or the group itself has written,…
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Autocatalytic Strawberries
Warning: This post contains wild, imaginative speculation which I considered (nonetheless) pretty fun. I was reading yesterday about autocatalytic sets – described, on Wikipedia, as “a collection of entities, each of which can be created catalytically as a whole is said to be autocatalytic.” by other entities within the set, such that as a whole,…
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Technology Assessment from the Jetsons Perspective
My almost-4-year-old and I watched “The Jetsons” together today. In this episode, Elroy started out by solving an incomprensible math problem on the blackboard. Grade school, in the Jetsons future, was apparently much more advanced than today’s! After Elroy solved the problem, he returned to his seat where the boy next to him (the class…
Quality and Innovation 