David Wiley writes More on Fuchs & Woessmann and expresses much more eloquently than I could the concerns we share about this study:

"...what possible, reasonable hypothesis could there be in which the mere availability of anything impacted learning? Would the availability of human experts (not interaction with them, now) improve learning? Would the availability of books? Would the availability of anything? If simple proximity to anything were going to correlate with learning outcomes, I would go back to sleeping with books under my pillow. This hypothesis was ill-begotten to start and muddies whatever actual message the authors want to make. Its inclusion in the report suggests to me that there was a pre-existing bias toward finding no or negative results."...

Providing the means to follow both sides of an issues such as this - involving many smart people - is precisely what's so great about the blogosphere. There's not day that goes by that I don't learn something new using this technology as an enabling medium. That's why I get so pissed off by studies such as Fuchs & Woessmann's that undermine the potential for effective use of this technology when used appropriately and, consequently, provides ammunition for modern-day luddites.

In RE: My quick hacks to tax cache Larry (another of my ex-students) describes how the knowledge of cache he gleaned from my computer architecture and design class has been used to good effect in optimising the performance of the game he's currently working on.

It was nice to hear from you Larry. Good luck with the latest game.

via Hiring Technical People - How to Interview a Programmer by Bill Venners:

"Recognizing good programmers among job applicants is not easy. This article contains interview techniques, garnered from a recent summit on writing better code, that can help you can find the most qualified programmers for your project.

Scott Meyers and Bruce Eckel organised the Writing Better Code summit and on the final morning 'hijacked' the meeting to compare notes on recognizing a good programmer in an interview. Insight +4.

Incidentally, readers of Duncan's Jotter should not read anything into these links to job interview blogs, etc. I only thought they might be of interest to some of my students who will be graduating soon ;-)

Light blogging week, first look at Longhorn fonts:

"...Today we're gonna take a hike around campus with Bill Hill. He was our first interview on Channel 9 (and still one of our most popular). His bit about why you should put only a single space after a period is still one of my favorites."

...

(Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

I was struck by Bill Hill's strong Scottish accent. Later on in the interview Bill mentions that he worked for the Scotsman newspaper as an editor and reporter. Funnily enough the Scotsman is basically my local national paper and the one I read every day. It's a small world.

BTW, I am convinced that I should put only a single space after a full-stop but it's going to be difficult to wean myself off the double-space habit!

XFN - XHTML Friends Network :

"XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their <a href> tags