“Under­neath the usual total unem­ploy­ment num­bers are the rea­sons an indi­vid­ual is unem­ployed: You are on tem­po­rary lay­off; you quit your job; you have reen­tered the labor mar­ket and have yet to find a job; or you are enter­ing the job mar­ket for the first time and have yet to find a job. Or, finally, you have been per­ma­nently sep­a­rated from your pre­vi­ous employer, who has no expec­ta­tion of hir­ing you back.

The last cat­e­gory is the dom­i­nant rea­son for unem­ploy­ment at this time. That might not seem sur­pris­ing, but it actu­ally is. Never, in the six reces­sions pre­ced­ing the lat­est one, did per­ma­nent sep­a­ra­tions account for more than 45 per­cent of the unem­ployed. The cur­rent per­cent­age stands at 56 per­cent as of Sep­tem­ber and appears to be still climbing:…”

“The 2010 Forum on Phi­los­o­phy, Engi­neer­ing & Tech­nol­ogy (fPET-​​2010) has issued its sec­ond call for papers (pdf here). fPET-​​2010 will be held 9–10 May 2010 (Sun­day evening – Mon­day) at the Col­orado School of Mines, Golden, Co. Orga­nized by the Com­mit­tee on Phi­los­o­phy, Engi­neer­ing & Tech­nol­ogy, the event is held in coop­er­a­tion with a num­ber of organizations:…”

“Let’s make the other deliv­er­able explicit: the team, and it’s grow­ing capability.

I’m increas­ingly inter­ested in the effect that social objects have on the way we work. There’s a grow­ing body of research that demon­strates the ways in which our envi­ron­ment affects our behaviour[1]. The scrum pic­ture has become a social object around which groups form — you see it in books, pre­sen­ta­tions, printed and stuck on walls, even (here at the Munich Scrum Gath­er­ing) on tat­toos (the stick-​​on vari­ety, though I won­der if any of the diehards has gone as far as mak­ing it per­ma­nent…). I worry about what hap­pens when we sur­round our­selves with process pic­tures which (1) don’t include peo­ple, and (2) only tell half the story. As soon as we regard our­selves as “means” to some other group’s “ends”, or even worse to some process’s, we are dis­em­pow­er­ing our­selves (thanks to Ari Tikka in his Scan-​​Agile 2009 pre­sen­ta­tion for point­ing this out).”

“This mys­ti­cal belief in the magic of cita­tion sta­tis– tics can be found through­out the doc­u­men­ta­tion for research assess­ment exer­cises, both national and in– sti­tu­tional. It can also be found in the work of those pro­mot­ing the h-​​index and its variants.”

“Now, as Jonathan Kohl would point out, many peo­ple march­ing behind the Agile ban­ner do the same: they use Agile as another club with which to beat peo­ple. I’m less wor­ried about Agile, though, because its base rhetoric is more explic­itly human­ist. Lean is more likely to be an attrac­tive nui­sance because the idea of dri­ving out waste appeals to exec­u­tives who find it less work to remove waste than to con­vert it into value—executives who get license to act socio­pathic because they have a fidu­ciary duty to treat busi­ness as a machine for max­i­miz­ing share­holder value, exter­nal­i­ties be damned. I worry about Lean in a busi­ness cul­ture where we are trained out of empa­thy for Lear, damned fool though he surely is.”

Abstracts of the Work­shop Phi­los­o­phy & Engi­neer­ing (2007)

Work­shop on Phi­los­o­phy & Engi­neer­ing, 2008

“PMML uses XML to rep­re­sent min­ing mod­els. The struc­ture of the mod­els is described by an XML Schema. One or more min­ing mod­els can be con­tained in a PMML doc­u­ment. A PMML doc­u­ment is an XML doc­u­ment with a root ele­ment of type PMML. The gen­eral struc­ture of a PMML doc­u­ment is:…”

“The Open Cloud Con­sor­tium (OCC) is a mem­ber dri­ven orga­ni­za­tion that:

Sup­ports the devel­op­ment of stan­dards for cloud com­put­ing and frame­works for inter­op­er­at­ing between clouds;
devel­ops bench­marks for cloud com­put­ing;
sup­ports ref­er­ence imple­men­ta­tions for cloud com­put­ing, prefer­ably open source ref­er­ence imple­men­ta­tions;
man­ages a test­bed for cloud com­put­ing called the Open Cloud Test­bed;
spon­sors work­shops and other events related to cloud computing.”

“The dashed cir­cles above rep­re­sent “for­bid­den regions” in which one of the angles would be obtuse. As Lind­gren and Cas­sidy and Lord showed, eight tri­an­gles is best pos­si­ble, and there exist alter­nate solu­tions with any even num­ber of tri­an­gles larger than eight.

Recently, John Tromp added a new twist to the prob­lem by ask­ing on sci.math how to make the angles as acute as pos­si­ble. For the eight-​​triangle solu­tion, he found a place­ment of the ver­tices in which the max­i­mum angle is only about 85 degrees, and asked if more tri­an­gles would achieve even bet­ter angles.”