“Agile 2009 will be an excit­ing inter­na­tional con­fer­ence about tech­niques and tech­nolo­gies, atti­tudes and poli­cies, research and first-​​hand expe­ri­ence, from both the man­age­ment and tech­ni­cal sides of agile soft­ware devel­op­ment. The agile approach focuses on deliv­er­ing busi­ness value early in the project life­time and being able to incor­po­rate emer­gent require­ments. It accen­tu­ates the use of rich, infor­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels and fre­quent deliv­ery of run­ning, tested sys­tems, while attend­ing to the human com­po­nent of soft­ware development.

… The con­fer­ence is not about a sin­gle method­ol­ogy or approach, but rather pro­vides a forum for the exchange of infor­ma­tion regard­ing all agile devel­op­ment technologies.”

“The Twenty-​​First Inter­na­tional Con­fer­ence on Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing and Knowl­edge Engi­neer­ing (SEKE’09) will be held at the Hyatt Har­bor­side at Boston’s Logan Int’l Air­port, Boston, USA, July 1–3, 2009.

The con­fer­ence aims at bring­ing together experts in soft­ware engi­neer­ing and knowl­edge engi­neer­ing to dis­cuss on rel­e­vant results in either soft­ware engi­neer­ing or knowl­edge engi­neer­ing or both. Spe­cial empha­sis will be put on the trans­fer­ence of meth­ods between both domains.”

“It’s christ­mas, baby, and do we have a present for you. We’re end­ing the bick­er­ing between Merb and Rails with a this bomb­shell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3!”

“With the retrench­ing in Web 2.0 prop­er­ties — either sites get­ting bought up and closed down, aban­doned by their new own­ers, orphaned, or mutated beyond recog­ni­tion in the search for profit, it’s time to start look­ing closely at what kinds of rem­nant “inter­net pres­ence” I have lurk­ing on the inter­nets and see about turn­ing off any­thing that’s no longer rel­e­vant or up to date. Here’s a list of sorts of long-​​forgotten enthu­si­asms that should be mer­ci­fully excised or repub­lished in some cur­rent format.”

“What bet­ter rea­son, then, to sit back and savor the sim­ple enjoy­ment of a get-​​together with friends at a hang­out like the Chip-​​in, which Miller thinks is just a for­mal venue for the kind of casual gath­er­ings that occur all over town.”

“Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 “Kun­st­for­men der Natur” [Art­forms of Nature] is a clas­sic of bio­log­i­cal illus­tra­tion. What is less gen­er­ally known is that the artist started as a Christ­mas card designer. The book was orig­i­nally sim­ply an album of hol­i­day designs.”

“Evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers are only begin­ning to under­stand this new dynamic and to account for the dam­age that has been done to the image of Chris­tian­ity by the pol­i­tics of divi­sion that has been prac­ticed by the Chris­t­ian Right over the last few decades. In his recent book, Unchris­t­ian: What a New Gen­er­a­tion Really Thinks about Chris­tian­ity, David Kin­na­man, the young pres­i­dent of the Barna Group, found that “Chris­tian­ity has an image prob­lem” among America’s youth (16– to 29-​​year-​​olds).”

“Which means that finan­cially speak­ing, the spec­tac­u­larly high dropout rate boils down to a spec­tac­u­larly bad invest­ment. Though there’s no spe­cific data, one can imag­ine the count­less mil­lions that are wasted financ­ing edu­ca­tions that never come to fruition. We could try to pre­dict which stu­dents would be part of the 46% who don’t fin­ish, then encour­age those stu­dents not to go to col­lege. But to do this would mean a lot of stu­dents who might grad­u­ate never get to give it a shot. That wouldn’t be fair. So what we can do instead is iden­tify the 5% or 10% of stu­dents who are the least likely to grad­u­ate, and not send them to college.”

“It is impor­tant to keep in mind that car­toon extremes often cloud the debate. How smart is it to advo­cate open trade when some coun­tries stack the deck by hav­ing arti­fi­cially cheap cur­ren­cies? That is tan­ta­mount to an export sub­sidy, but we haven’t done much except jaw­bone China very late in the game (and the yen has been awfully cheap until recently too, and Japan has remained an export pow­er­house, but we never gave them a hard time due to the sorry state of their domes­tic econ­omy). Sim­i­larly, we con­sider it com­pletely rea­son­able to restrict exports of advanced mil­i­tary tech­nol­ogy, and acqui­si­tion of strate­gic assets. ”

““These find­ings sug­gest that the hos­pice eli­gi­bil­ity cri­te­ria of Medicare and other insur­ers requir­ing patients to give up can­cer treat­ment con­tribute to racial dis­par­i­ties in hos­pice use,” the authors wrote. “More­over, these cri­te­ria do not select those patients with the great­est needs for hos­pice ser­vices,” they added.

The basis for these dis­par­i­ties is likely related to both cul­tural dif­fer­ences and eco­nomic char­ac­ter­is­tics. The results from this study indi­cate that hos­pice access could be made fairer by using eli­gi­bil­ity cri­te­ria that are more directly need-​​based. For exam­ple, the inves­ti­ga­tors sug­gested that eli­gi­bil­ity might be deter­mined by assess­ing needs for spe­cific hos­pice ser­vices such as pain or symp­tom management.”