These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• The new user story back­log is a map

  “I find that the big things on the top of the story map look a lit­tle like ver­te­brae. And the cards hang­ing down look a lit­tle like ribs. Those big things on the top are often the essen­tial capa­bil­i­ties the sys­tem needs to have. I refer to them as the “back­bone” of the soft­ware. I stole this term from Dr. Dan Raw­sthorne who might use the term slightly dif­fer­ently than I do. When it comes time to pri­or­i­tize sto­ries, I don’t pri­or­i­tize the back­bone. It just “is.” I do pri­or­i­tize the ribs — the sto­ries hang­ing down from the back­bone. Place them high to indi­cate they’re absolutely nec­es­sary, lower to indi­cate they’re less nec­es­sary. When you do this, you’ll find that all the sto­ries placed high on the story map describe the small­est pos­si­ble sys­tem you could build that would give you end to end func­tion­al­ity. This is what Alis­tair Cock­burn refers to as the “walk­ing skele­ton”. I always try to build this first.”
  
  plan­ning agile-​​practices card-​​sorting project-​​management tech­niques

• Last Gasp Books — AMERICAN SURREAL

  “This is the lat­est col­lec­tion of paint­ings by one of con­tem­po­rary surrealism’s most influ­en­tial artists. Amer­i­can Sur­real picks up where Dream­land, Schorr’s pre­vi­ous best­selling col­lec­tion of mind-​​bending paint­ings, left off. The viewer can look for­ward to count­less hours of eye bulging inves­tiga­tive thought while exam­in­ing the impec­ca­bly ren­dered sub­ject mat­ter that has become the hall­mark of Schorr’s out­ra­geous vision.”
  
  sur­re­al­ism art col­lec­tion want

• Twit­ter Engi­neer­ing: Faster Ruby: Kiji Update

  “0.11 is a much more per­for­mant and oper­a­ble run­time than Kiji 0.10. How­ever, through this work we iden­ti­fied a prac­ti­cal strat­egy for mak­ing an even bet­ter, fully-​​generational ver­sion that would apply well to Ruby 1.9. Time will tell if we get to imple­ment it.”
  
  Ruby software-​​engineering inter­preter per­for­mance

• iPad Usabil­ity Study Reveals What We Do and Don’t Like In Apps Apple News, Tips and Reviews

  “What users find very annoy­ing accord­ing to the report are splash or load­ing screens. No mat­ter how clever, or how easy on the eye, splash screens and ani­ma­tions become annoy­ing very quickly. Startup sounds, in par­tic­u­lar, are sin­gled out as espe­cially bad, because of the poten­tial they have for unpleas­antly sur­pris­ing peo­ple who open apps in sur­round­ings where noise might not be appre­ci­ated. Also, almost uni­ver­sally, apps will ben­e­fit from hav­ing back but­tons on nearly every page, and should aim for a sim­ple homepage-​​like table of con­tents over more com­pli­cated nav­i­ga­tion schemes. Users pre­fer a home base from which to oper­ate with­out hav­ing to hunt through carousels or wade through long columns of thumb­nails, and they always want the option to go one step back from their cur­rent posi­tion, because of acci­den­tal taps or to refer back to some­thing they just saw.”
  
  user-​​experience usabil­ity inter­face iPad iPhone design

• The Unwis­dom of Elites — NYTimes​.com

  “Does any of this mat­ter? Why should we be con­cerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad poli­cies onto the gen­eral pub­lic? One answer is sim­ple account­abil­ity. Peo­ple who advo­cated budget-​​busting poli­cies dur­ing the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass them­selves off as deficit hawks; peo­ple who praised Ire­land as a role model shouldn’t be giv­ing lec­tures on respon­si­ble gov­ern­ment. But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by mak­ing up sto­ries about our cur­rent predica­ment that absolve the peo­ple who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the cri­sis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chas­ten our pol­icy elites. Oth­er­wise, they’ll do even more dam­age in the years ahead.”
  
  financial-​​crisis macro­eco­nom­ics public-​​policy Bushism con­ser­vatism

• Finch, The $99 Robot That Makes Com­puter Sci­ence Fun | Co.Design

  “I’m jeal­ous of high school com­puter sci­ence stu­dents these days. I had to tap out my GOTO 10 com­mands on a crappy CRT mon­i­tor; they get a cheap, rugged robot to play with. The Finch, as it’s called, costs just $99, so every stu­dent in a class­room can have their own. And its design was rig­or­ously based on edu­ca­tional research that uncov­ered the five key attrib­utes to mak­ing the per­fect edu­ca­tional toy.”
  
  robot­ics edu­ca­tion Mak­ing gad­gets

• Poor Mojo’s Newswire: Krug­man: Seniors, Guns, and Money

  “Any­way, the truth is that older Amer­i­cans really should fear Repub­li­can bud­get ideas — and not just because of that plan to dis­man­tle Medicare. Given the real­i­ties of the fed­eral bud­get, a party insist­ing that tax increases of any kind are off the table — as John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says they are — is, nec­es­sar­ily, a party demand­ing sav­age cuts in pro­grams that serve older Amer­i­cans. To explain why, let me answer a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion posed by Pro­fes­sor John Tay­lor of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity in a recent op-​​ed arti­cle in The Wall Street Jour­nal. He asked, “If gov­ern­ment agen­cies and pro­grams func­tioned with 19% to 20% of G.D.P. in 2007” — that is, just before the Great Reces­sion — “why is it so hard for them to func­tion with that per­cent­age in 2021?” Mr. Tay­lor thought he was mak­ing the case for not increas­ing spend­ing. But if you know any­thing about the fed­eral bud­get, you know that there’s a very good answer to his ques­tion — an answer that clearly demon­strates just how extrem­ist that no-​​tax-​​increase pledge really is. For here’s the quick-​​and-​​dirty sum­mary of what the fed­eral gov­ern­ment does: It’s a giant insur­ance com­pany, mainly serv­ing older peo­ple, that also has an army. ”
  
  public-​​policy Repub­li­cans financial-​​crisis social-​​safety-​​net

• Can the Oil Mar­ket Be Manip­u­lated? — Seek­ing Alpha

  “I have had an inter­est in track­ing oil com­pa­nies (for crude) and refiner­ies (for oil prod­ucts) trad­ing in their own vol­ume over the past 11 years. As I noted last week (in “Oil Inven­to­ries, Spec­u­la­tion, and Hedg­ing”), anec­do­tal evi­dence is already emerg­ing that ver­ti­cally inte­grated oil com­pa­nies (VIOCs) – those con­trol­ling the upstream/​downstream process from field to refin­ery through retail out­let – were unusu­ally active recently in trad­ing in near-​​month futures con­tracts in their own prod­uct. This occurred both when crude oil and gaso­line prices were ris­ing (through close on April 29) and there­after, as crude plum­meted almost 15% and gaso­line over 13% as of the end of trad­ing on May 6.”
  
  financial-​​markets trad­ing macro­eco­nom­ics fiddling-​​the-​​numbers mar­kets the-​​real-​​problem-​​with-​​market-​​fundamentalists

• Debt Arith­metic and Expan­sion­ary Pol­icy: Paul Krug­man Vastly Under­states His Case — Grasp­ing Real­ity with a Flex­i­ble Trunk

  “Yet I find none of the clas­si­cal, semi-​​classical, new clas­si­cal, or neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists who believe in opti­miz­ing growth mod­els step­ping for­ward and say­ing: “Because r < g right now, what we really need is more gov­ern­ment spend­ing and an expanded gov­ern­ment debt.“ It is very odd…”
  
  eco­nom­ics economic-​​crisis public-​​policy taxes oligarchy-​​in-​​action

• Economist’s View: “Eight Facts about Social Security”

  “Social Security’s 75-​​year short­fall is man­age­able. In fact, it’d be almost com­pletely erased by apply­ing the pay­roll tax to income over $106,000. Source (PDF).”
  
  public-​​policy con­ser­vatism Repub­li­cans Social-​​Security eco­nom­ics

• What can the movie Brides­maids tell us about the Reces­sion and Key­ne­sian Eco­nom­ics? | Rortybomb

  “Annie’s char­ac­ter in Brides­maids feels like the tim­ing and pro­gres­sion of her life has gone into a ditch. That the next step in her bak­ing career hap­pened to coin­cide with the col­lapse of the mass secu­ri­ti­za­tion of bad debt and an over-​​the-​​counter credit deriv­a­tive pro­tec­tion mar­ket is really bad luck. But it shouldn’t mean that her abil­ity to launch a new busi­ness, to exer­cise and refine her tal­ents and skills and have her employ­ment give her a proper sense of self and pur­pose, should be ruined indef­i­nitely. Full employ­ment is the friend of new busi­ness own­ers. It would be great if either of our polit­i­cal par­ties would empha­size that in a time of 9% unemployment.”
  
  public-​​policy eco­nom­ics economic-​​development Key­ne­sian­ism unem­ploy­ment

• Agile Coach Camp 2011 — Coach­ing– Eventbrite

  “Agile Coach Camp is about cre­at­ing a net­work of prac­ti­tion­ers who are striv­ing to push the lim­its in guid­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment teams, while stay­ing true to the val­ues and prin­ci­ples at the core of the Agile move­ment. We’ve invited prac­ti­tion­ers who, like you, are pas­sion­ate about their work, active in the field and will­ing to share what they’ve learned. Do you have a tech­nique or prac­tice worth shar­ing with your peers? Or an idea you’d like to test out with some lead­ers in the com­mu­nity? Are you fac­ing chal­lenges and want to get some per­spec­tive from other prac­ti­tion­ers, or hear how they do things? If you feel you’d ben­e­fit from con­nect­ing with 70–75 Open Agile Process Facil­i­ta­tors, Scrum­Mas­ters, XP Coaches, Train­ers, Change Agents, and Men­tors to talk, draw, debate, and explore ideas, then this uncon­fer­ence is for you.”
  
  con­fer­ence agile agile-​​practices Colum­bus to-​​attend