Every so often I do something that is such a waste of time it makes me pause. Reading a non-fiction book I'm not into, it drags and I don't retain much of it. Horse-riding with my friend at the weekend, we booked the trail option and it was over an hour of... walking, didn't even make it to ...
Abstract: In a world where computing power doubles roughly every two years, the goal is no longer efficiency, but effectiveness. The education system prepares students for efficiency, but to be successful when we go out into the world (or before!) we need rather to learn to be effective. In this workshop, we'll discuss more useful things ...
In September, I challenged myself to say no. And so - I didn't take a trip. I set boundaries. Yes, I will do the thing I agreed to, no, you can't change it about on me like that. After reflection, my boyfriend and I decided that now wasn't a good time to move in together. ...
I confess, I've never seen Star Wars, or Star Trek. The only video games I play are the Lego ones. And so I've been seeing people in these amazing costumes, and going to talks where there are these gaming cultural references that I don't get, and thinking... woah, I'm not geeky enough. It's a little amazing ...
In a recent discussion with a colleague, I voiced the opinion that the challenge of creating presentation software is to enable terrible presentations - zooming animations, tiny and unreadable text, endless bullet-points. Helping people create good presentations? That would be easy. Really, you could do it with some nice, full-screen image viewing software. He disagreed, arguing that there ...
The wonderful Serena invited me to join her for a panel at a women/tech conference in October. We're still working out the details, but essentially we'll be talking about role models - our own personal superheros. if you will. Some points that I'm thinking about: It's great to see really successful women in tech, I adored Sheryl Sandberg's ...
Ignite is an intimidating format. 5 minutes is not a bad length of time, but the auto-advance format is very unforgiving. I'd had that topic in mind as an Ignite talk for a while, but it took me a long time to have the courage to actually present it. And by have the courage to ...
Slides and commentary for the talk I gave at Ignite Waterloo, June 15th. Missing two slides - title slide and end slide (with my twitter handle and website on it). Ignite is a tough format - 5 minutes, 15 seconds a slide, the slides auto-advance. The *'s are where I expect the slide to change ...
I'm pretty sure I have the second best job in the world. My friend and I were talking the other week and the conclusion was that working on Google doodles would be the very best job in the world. I don't know anything that makes so many people happy. Unfortunately, neither of us can draw. Today, ...
I'm working on a paper on topical communities, and as part of that I've come back to this dataset to explore the social network that emerges through @ mentions. To start with, I looked at the social network that emerges when we look at the people on the list. This network is pretty densely connected, with the ...
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