Sir Isaac Newton was a brilliant scientist who's publication of the law of gravity and the three laws of motion in 1687 changed the face of science. According to a poll of scientists, Newton is consider more influential than Einstein. This may be attributed to the fact that Einstein's physics is understood by few people whereas Newton's legacy continues into the present day and his mathematical genius forms much of the curriculum used to train modern engineers.
When you also consider that the work was published in Latin, the title being "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", you begin to understand that students in that era were expected not to understand just their specialty but to also be competent in a broad range of disciplines. Understanding Latin, Philosophy, mathematics, and other subjects such as theology and astronomy meant that Newton was able to apply this broad range of understanding to his own work.
Compare that to the education of children today. In some ways, the curriculum attempts to give children broad access to a number of subjects. There's opportunities to learn about history, geography, science, maths and English. Equally, design technology, IT, physical education and languages are made available to your everyday secondary student in the United Kingdom.
For all this advancement, we're not producing intellectual giants who rearrange the world as we know it. That's not to say that children today are born with lower intelligence than those of Newton's time. Yet we don't seem to be able to leverage the heights that our intelligence are capable of. In the UK our children are assessed until they are sick of it. They don't seem to learn much, apart from knowing how to pass exams. There's a feeling that they're not getting the opportunity to delve into who they are from a secure platform.
Our society in the UK needs to take a long look at what we want the next generations, deliberate plural, to achieve. After all, without the creative thinking and ability to shape how we interact with the world the prospects for the UK and the planet as a whole are quite grim.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Did you eat all your dinner tonight?
This UK government, to use the term loosely, continues to astonish me. We're wasting food we're told and it's all our fault that there's none left for the poorer nations. Yet good old Gordon's off to Japan getting stuck into a 48 dish dinner that I'm pretty sure that about 42% of the prepared contents ended up in the bin.
I'm beginning to really dislike the way this horrible man appears to push us to become Scottish Protestants. Be prudent, be responsible, work hard, record your achievements, and educate your children. If it were the 1800's I'd expect to see him waving the, allegedly, holy book in his hand to boot. Repent of your sins and repair your immoral ways, you evil children of Eve, he might admonish. Mankind (deliberate emphasis on the sex) you are wicked and you shall taste the fires of hell should you continue to ignore the commands of the lord you bow down to.
I often wonder if Gordon would be happiest with us kowtowing before him, acknowledging just how great and powerful he is. After all he has single handedly delivered the UK such an enormous list of improvements that we must all consider ourselves so lucky that this man was delivered unto us. Nick Clegg, honorable leader of the Liberal Democrats, understands the problem. When Gordon's on the back foot about an issue or doesn't like the question presented to him, he reads out a list of, primarily, his achievement, though this is normally preceded by "Under this Labour government, we have delivered...". As Mr Clegg spoke out to the Speaker in one PM's question time "He's doing it again, he's confusing reading out a list with answering the question."
Dear Mr Speaker, can you please ask our honorable PM to answer the question next time? Unfortunately it's very difficult to heckle from the galleries, now that they've installed the perspex partition to keep our MP's safe from terrorists.
Back at the food ranch, it's becoming clear that one of the simpler ways to ease the burden on food production is to eat less of it. Perhaps our know-it-all Government can order us to weigh in once a month, figure out each persons BMI and determine just how fat we all are. Then they can set another of their famous "targets" for us to lose 20% of the national body-weight just by not eating. There could be ration coupons that limit you to a certain number of calories per day and ensure that you eat the correct portions of each part of the food circle. There would need to be consideration for pregnant or nursing women, children and the elderly. This of course would mean a public consultation on the matter, the formation of a Quango to ensure that the right level of dietary intake is set for various categories of people, active professional sports players would be in their own category, excluding darts and snooker players, and then of course the Parliamentary debating of the matter before final ratification.
Along the way, Gordon could do another of those Labour wheezes where he announces several rounds of funding, each time implying that this is new funding bestowed upon the people. All of this, of course, will include the pet "prudence" phrase and say how terribly important (hands out in front like he's hugging another fat person) it is that this vital work succeeds and helps make Britain the best place to live. Wrapped up in a sinecure of "proper British diets for proper British people".
I'm beginning to really dislike the way this horrible man appears to push us to become Scottish Protestants. Be prudent, be responsible, work hard, record your achievements, and educate your children. If it were the 1800's I'd expect to see him waving the, allegedly, holy book in his hand to boot. Repent of your sins and repair your immoral ways, you evil children of Eve, he might admonish. Mankind (deliberate emphasis on the sex) you are wicked and you shall taste the fires of hell should you continue to ignore the commands of the lord you bow down to.
I often wonder if Gordon would be happiest with us kowtowing before him, acknowledging just how great and powerful he is. After all he has single handedly delivered the UK such an enormous list of improvements that we must all consider ourselves so lucky that this man was delivered unto us. Nick Clegg, honorable leader of the Liberal Democrats, understands the problem. When Gordon's on the back foot about an issue or doesn't like the question presented to him, he reads out a list of, primarily, his achievement, though this is normally preceded by "Under this Labour government, we have delivered...". As Mr Clegg spoke out to the Speaker in one PM's question time "He's doing it again, he's confusing reading out a list with answering the question."
Dear Mr Speaker, can you please ask our honorable PM to answer the question next time? Unfortunately it's very difficult to heckle from the galleries, now that they've installed the perspex partition to keep our MP's safe from terrorists.
Back at the food ranch, it's becoming clear that one of the simpler ways to ease the burden on food production is to eat less of it. Perhaps our know-it-all Government can order us to weigh in once a month, figure out each persons BMI and determine just how fat we all are. Then they can set another of their famous "targets" for us to lose 20% of the national body-weight just by not eating. There could be ration coupons that limit you to a certain number of calories per day and ensure that you eat the correct portions of each part of the food circle. There would need to be consideration for pregnant or nursing women, children and the elderly. This of course would mean a public consultation on the matter, the formation of a Quango to ensure that the right level of dietary intake is set for various categories of people, active professional sports players would be in their own category, excluding darts and snooker players, and then of course the Parliamentary debating of the matter before final ratification.
Along the way, Gordon could do another of those Labour wheezes where he announces several rounds of funding, each time implying that this is new funding bestowed upon the people. All of this, of course, will include the pet "prudence" phrase and say how terribly important (hands out in front like he's hugging another fat person) it is that this vital work succeeds and helps make Britain the best place to live. Wrapped up in a sinecure of "proper British diets for proper British people".
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
User Acceptance Testing
Those of you familiar with the Information Technology (IT) industry will be familiar with the term User Acceptance Testing, or UAT Testing as people lovingly refer to it. I'm not sure why there's the need to double up on the testing, but hey why say one TLA when you can stick another word on the end to make it sound like you know what you're doing?
Today I've sat in a meeting discussing how you can meet a clients needs by getting them the data they want. The noises from the other side of the table were all of the "ah-but-no" kind. Ah, well we could do that and it's a good idea; but it means that we won't be able to complete the BIG project work we need to do and therefore, no, we won't do it because it could compromise the end deliverable. Then you get a whole bunch of techno-babble that indicates they really don't understand what they're saying at all. I'm sure there's a Dilbert cartoon out there describing this very phenomenon.
So in the life of any project, after you've waded through the joy of figuring out what the user really wants and then fight endlessly with IT to get some useful scrap of functionality onto your desktop you get into UAT and start to execute well laid out plans with rigidly documented test cases to ensure you've fully tested the application and ensured that nothing goes wrong at delivery.
The problem with this approach is that it fails to cater for the "do stuff" test conditions. There's a distinct lack of imagination about how a person interacting with the system might choose seemingly random and meaningless key strokes, enter all sorts of weird search data and generally play about with the system the way a two year old randomly pounds the keyboard on your machine. This is the testing approach I favour most. By all means, it's great to run through a documented set of scripts that ensure you didn't cock anything up with the latest release. But if you have a complicated interface you should really put it through its paces by coming up with all sorts of weird combinations that lie outside the documented tests. You will be surprised by how many weird errors pop up in systems that don't have many users; especially when the developers were under pressure to get the end product out the door.
As they say, if engineers built buildings the way computer programmers wrote code, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Unfortunately in the world of IT, the scum of mediocrity floating on top of the pond is choking the undergrowth to death.
Today I've sat in a meeting discussing how you can meet a clients needs by getting them the data they want. The noises from the other side of the table were all of the "ah-but-no" kind. Ah, well we could do that and it's a good idea; but it means that we won't be able to complete the BIG project work we need to do and therefore, no, we won't do it because it could compromise the end deliverable. Then you get a whole bunch of techno-babble that indicates they really don't understand what they're saying at all. I'm sure there's a Dilbert cartoon out there describing this very phenomenon.
So in the life of any project, after you've waded through the joy of figuring out what the user really wants and then fight endlessly with IT to get some useful scrap of functionality onto your desktop you get into UAT and start to execute well laid out plans with rigidly documented test cases to ensure you've fully tested the application and ensured that nothing goes wrong at delivery.
The problem with this approach is that it fails to cater for the "do stuff" test conditions. There's a distinct lack of imagination about how a person interacting with the system might choose seemingly random and meaningless key strokes, enter all sorts of weird search data and generally play about with the system the way a two year old randomly pounds the keyboard on your machine. This is the testing approach I favour most. By all means, it's great to run through a documented set of scripts that ensure you didn't cock anything up with the latest release. But if you have a complicated interface you should really put it through its paces by coming up with all sorts of weird combinations that lie outside the documented tests. You will be surprised by how many weird errors pop up in systems that don't have many users; especially when the developers were under pressure to get the end product out the door.
As they say, if engineers built buildings the way computer programmers wrote code, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Unfortunately in the world of IT, the scum of mediocrity floating on top of the pond is choking the undergrowth to death.
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