From Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F: This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use…
60 Minutes said most stock trades are made by computers without human involvement designed by math wizards for pennies of profits per trade over billions of trades. Milliseconds become important to beating the competition (other computers) by being faster. Getting close to or in the stock exchange buildings has physical effects. Of course, a bad algorithm…
A friend posted the Internet Explorer users ‘have below-average IQ’ story on Google+. On the one hand, I love the idea of bashing IE users as incapable computer users who ought to get off the Internet. But then my Psychology background screams at this study as generally worthless. The lack of a statistical analysis ought to…
Facebook and Google+ both have ways of categorizing people for targeted sharing. The first way I attempted to handle my Facebook lists was basic categories like Coworkers, Family, Friends, Internet, and Locals. Then I switched jobs. It became a little weird to gripe about the new job to both, so I went down the crazy…
Analyst asked me to look at the server logs for a case where students were getting system exceptions. Armed with the JSESSIONID, I found many cases in the webct.log of an error called: “Stack size too large”. In my old email, I found a September 2010 discussion with Rajini Prabhu and Mike Cooling about thread-dump analyzers. In it Rajini…
Hi Blackboard Support, Today, without warning, you changed Behind the Blackboard. Clients dislike surprises. We like knowing how things work. Give us access to the new thing before we have to deal with it. That way we become familiar with it. Even if you do not give advance viewing of the service, then advance warning…
Humans are fallible. Humans write the code. Therefore, there will be bugs in the code. But that is okay. Humans are smart. Humans can try new ways of working with the software until they find the way the programmer intended it to work. … Or they hire people like me to help them. So it…