Having just moved to Tampa, BarCamp Tampa (2013) was a brilliant opportunity to lots of friendly people with interesting things to say. I thoroughly enjoyed myself! How to write programs that are right – lessons from science for software engineering The title’s tongue-in-cheek – it’s really about best practices for writing programs where you really care that the […]
We’re building a site that we want people to love using, so we want as much feedback on it as we can get. From the get-go, we’ve had a big red UserVoice ‘Feedback’ button on the lefthand site of every page. But only a tiny proportion of our users ever suggested, voted or commented on […]
[Thanks to Stephen Hartley-Brewer for the kernel of this idea] My brother is my musical weather vane, my song-canary who knows what’s good long before the rest of the world has cottoned on, and points out the things I’ll like. I treasure his advice, partly because it’s good, and partly because it comes from him. […]
In the past, running a Premortem has been the single most helpful exercise I’ve found for dealing with complex, risky projects. This is the core idea, but there’s a little more to it. I’m not joking when I say that a premortem refocused the hardest death-march I’ve been on, and another premortem was a key […]
What if I suggested that you finish each day with nothing left on your todo list? This is the only rule of Todo Zero. You might find yourself biting back some choice words. This sounds like unhelpful advice from someone with a much simpler life than yours. Not so fast. Picture a world-class juggler with […]
Hearing those words makes me feel like I’m tied mutely to a railway track, unable to scream for help as a train thunders towards me. We humans are walking sacks of blood, bile and bias, and estimating how long things will take brings out the worst in us. A product manager recently asked me if one can […]
Abe Gong asked for good examples of ‘data sidekicks‘. @AbeGong @johnmyleswhite @vagabondjack @acarman @seanjtaylor brain-data sidekick: sanity-check you can classify blank screen vs stimuli — Greg Detre (@gregdetre) February 5, 2014 I still haven’t got the hang of distilling complex thoughts into 140 characters, and so I was worried my reply might have been compressed […]
[Back to Research] For my thesis, I worked on a series of behavioral and fMRI memory experiments to understand a little more about forgetting, called ‘Weakening memories by half-remembering them’ (PDF). Here’s the gist. The act of remembering something – dredging it up from your memory and letting it blossom fully into a recollection – is […]
mumblings and misconceptions – half-formed thoughts about AI, cognitive science and philosophy (250K) blatherings and babblings about more or less (80K) and even more The Oxford Consciousness Society webpage (now very defunct) I tried stand-up comedy a couple of times. This was an early version Statement of purpose for application to MIT Media lab Project proposal, smattering of ideasand final paper for Deb Roy‘s Computational Semantics class – […]
All blog posts Data science Sanity checks as data sidekicks. Organizing knowledge A long time ago, I wrote my own note-taking software. This got me thinking a lot about how we organize knowledge on computers. We want to tag things, and for those tags to have their own hierarchy. (also) Wouldn’t it be great if our […]
Greg Detre 