All Summer In A Day

I saw this story when I was a kid. It was fascinating then, and is still now. It's based on the Ray Bradbury short story.

It's below in three parts.

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3

What is The Best Leadership Style for The Software Team?

Software Creation Mystery » What is The Best Leadership Style for The Software Team?:

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From the site:
http://softwarecreation.org/2007/what-is-the-best-leader-for-the-software-team/

What is The Best Leadership Style for The Software Team?

Aug 8th, 2007 | Management, People, Teams

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4 Effective Leadership Styles in Software Development

What should be the qualities of the best leader for the software team: strong decisive knowledgeable or quiet supportive cooperative? Best leaders have two main concerns – people and getting things done (Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid). Both concerns have cumulative effect – high concern for people makes them motivated and therefore more productive, high concern for production creates sense of achievement and makes people more satisfied at work.

However, there is no one leadership style that suits all situations, projects and individuals. There are 4 main leadership styles (based onThe Hersey and Blanchard model and Vroom and Yetton’s Normative Model), which could be effectively used in software development: The Commander, The Coach, The Supporter and Self-Organization.

1. The Commander

In tough times people need a strong leader – the person who can take responsibility and make decisions, the person who could motivate and inspire, the person who could move against winds and resistance.
Commanders are needed

• in crisis, when bold, quick and direct decisions should be made. The project is doomed, customers are leaving or there is fire in the building.
• when changes are necessary and there is strong resistance and barriers to make them. The leader creates a vision, finds a way to accomplish it and leads a change. The company moves to the new market or adopts new approaches as Agile.
• when people lack commitment, faith in company and willingness to work, because of previous failures, degrading environment or unpopular management. The leader can wake them up, inspire and move forward.

Commanders make and influence most decisions. The downside of this leadership style is that leader can slide to autocratic methods, demotivate and annoy people. Often decisions are not optimal – they don’t take in consideration all available information, options and perspectives. This style is effective in short-term, in long-term it could be dangerous for people and projects.

Skills and traits of Commanders are very important as they are the main factor of success. The Commander should be energetic, confident, decisive. Also as Commanders make most decisions they should be knowledgeable, forward-thinking and broad-minded.

2. The Coach

The Coach is experienced, knowledgeable and supportive person, who is needed when team lacks focus, expertise and understanding what should be done and how.
Coaches are concerned about growing people, creating enabling and trusting environment. This leader makes decisions collectively with a team. The Coach explains rationale behind decisions, listens and provides feedback. He encourages personal growth, builds long-term capabilities and prepares team and individuals for independent work.
This style has high relationship focus. The downside of this style could be micro-management and low concern for productivity.

Important qualities for Coaches: knowledgeable, empathetic and cooperative.

3. The Supporter

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Supporters are needed to help teams, remove barriers and coordinate activities. The Supporter is an ego-less quiet leader and facilitator. Supporter makes joint decision with the team as equals, delegating majority of decisions to the team. In addition, this leader concerns about creation of harmony and balance between team members.
Important qualities for The Supporter: good communicator and facilitator, socially skilled and diplomatic

4. Self Organization

A cohesive, motivated and confident Team doesn’t need formal leaders. The team makes most decisions, while every member could step in and become leader in specific areas and situations. People are highly capable, committed and self-driven. The team should have diverse and independently thinking team members to prevent groupthink (see Wisdom of Crowds).

It is most preferable and most difficult to achieve style. Usually the team transcends through previous steps and becomes truly self-organized team after experiencing victories and failures, growing and gaining experience together. The Team have shared purpose, principles and values. Team members trust, support and respect each other. Almost everything is possible for such team.

Selecting Style

Teams and leaders use these 4 styles depending on a situation and specific people. The best leaders guide their team and people through these stages to the point when formal leaders are no longer needed – self-organizing team. It is possible that a self-organizing team will need a strong leader in tough time, a coach when moving to the new domain or a supporter to resolve external problems. However, the team, which experienced flow, independence and self-organization will strive to get back to this state again.

Important factors

1. Commitment - are people ready, motivated and willing to accomplish goals?
2. Competence and clarity of direction: do people know what to do and how to do it?
3. Cooperation and cohesiveness: can team effectively work together, make decisions and avoid conflicts? The larger group need more coordination.
4. Resources and support: does team have necessary tools, money, people, etc? Do they face serious barriers and require support?
5. External coordination: does team need to collaborate with other groups?
6. Leader - last, but not least: does leader have necessary authority, knowledge and experience?

All these styles could be effectively used in software development. But at the end, the most important factor of success is people. The style should match people commitment and capabilities. It is mistake to command skilled and confident team and it is mistake to give reins to unmotivated and inexperienced people. Leadership style is one of the secret ingredients of the Software Creation Mystery – it could bring great success or miserable failure on the same project with the same people.

20 Apps (Games) for Play-based Learning:

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20 Apps (Games) for Play-based Learning

Posted by Julie DeNeen on Monday, January 21, 2013 · Leave a Comment  

Even though older adults might still carry a negative association with video game consoles and devices, today’s technology is vastly different than it was 20 years ago.

Apps have exploded on the scene, and while there are plenty of time wasting games available on the market, today’s offerings also include a wide range of affordable apps that enrich learning and allow for quick on-the-go play. Whether your child is waiting for the doctor or relaxing on a long car ride, the following apps are some of the best games that pack an educational punch.

1. The Letter School

The Letter School app won the Editor’s choice for Children’s Technology Review for 2012. It is available on iOS devices and uses three simple components for learning letters; tap, trace, and write. In the first mode, children tap on the end of the letter and watch the app draw the letter. Then they use their own finger to trace the letter. The app uses cute graphics like railroad tracks to make tracing fun. Finally, the child writes the letter himself, with guidance from the app in the event he goes off course. The app offers uppercase letters, lowercase, and numbers too.

2. Amazing Alex

From the makers of Angry Birds comes Amazing Alex. He is a boy who cleans his room in the most interesting ways. Children will not even know they are learning the principles of physics as they manipulate different objects in the room to get it clean. The graphics are stunning and the gameplay is intuitive and addicting. Amazing Alex has over 100 levels and is available for both the iPhone and Android.

3. Awesum

If your child likes puzzle games and math, Awesum is a fantastic combination of Tetris and Sudoki. Numbered cubes fall from the top of the screen and children must match the numbers so that it equals a predetermined sum. When they line up, the cubes disappear and keep the wall from filling the screen. This app is available for Android phones and tablets. Using color graphics, sound effects, and awards, this app teaches mental math skills without pain and suffering. In 2011, Awesum won awards for the best children’s educational app.

4. Barefoot World Atlas

Traveling explorers and geographers will love the Barefoot World Atlas app available for iOS devices. It is a higher priced app at $4.99 but takes kids on an interactive and magical tour of the planet. Kids can explore continents, countries, environments, and oceans. With a tap of the finger, children can explore new cultures and learn about different ways of life.

5. Jungle Time

For parents looking to teach children how to tell time, Jungle Time was featured in Parenting magazine as one of the 10 best educational apps for kids. The clock speaks in several different languages and has large numbers and hands for easy to read lessons. There are three different clock styles as well as the ability to learn 12 or 24-hour time. You can track your progress and manually set the time with a tap of your finger. This app is available for iOS devices.

6. Mad Libs

For kids who have trouble understanding the difference between a noun, verb, and adjective, the beloved Mad Libs game is now available in a lite and pro version for the iPhone and iPad. In addition to the standard word game, kids can share their stories through email and get hints for silly words to add to their story.

7. Super Why!

The Super Why App is based on a popular kid’s television show that makes literacy an adventure. The four characters, Alpha Pig, Princess Presto, Wonder Red, and Super Why each have a special super power. The app is designed for children ages three to six and includes word hunt games, tracing, rhyming, and sentence completion. This app is available for iPhone and iPad.

8. My Mathbook

Cleverly designed in a visually appealing math book layout, My Mathbook HD is a highly organized and entertaining math app for kids. The book is divided into sections such as numbers, computation, shapes, and test. There are several games for each concept, including tracing, simple computation, and shape coloring. The beautiful graphics and layout make it an educational and pleasurable activity for children ages four to six. This app is currently only available on the iPad.

9. Ladybird Ready for Phonics

Kids who love space will enjoy the Ladybird Ready for Phonics app available for iOS devices. The games consists of 12 levels that progress through important phonics principles. Parents can also unlock the levels manually if they wish. The app has been tested in classrooms with great success. In addition to phonics lessons, the space themed app helps kids learn the “tricky” words that cannot be sounded out.

10. The Android Shape Builder

The Android Shape Builder App is a fantastic educational game for children who love puzzles. Different scenes are displayed on the screen and children must use different shapes to fill in the image. With 144 puzzles, bright colors, and quality sound effects, children won’t even know they are learning geometry concepts while they put together the image on screen.

11. Brain Challenge

Brain Challenge for iOS is a comprehensive app that develops math, logic, memory, and focus. There are over 40 separate mini-games that use creative thinking in puzzles, trivia, quizzes, and other mental mind exercises. It is currently $4.99 and suitable for older children and teenagers.

You can monitor your progress with status charts that detail your success in the different areas.

12. Chicktionary

Word enthusiasts will love Chicktionary- a cross between Hangman, Scrabble, and Scramble. Kids hatch the hen’s eggs, which contain letters. The goal is to make as many words as possible. Shaking the device allows you to rearrange the letters for more help.

The hens do all sorts of silly things and the game design is fun, colorful, and quirky. You can earn rewards along the way too. This app is available for iOS devices.

13. Color Splash

Art teachers love using Color Splash for the iPad. This photo-editing app allows a user to alter paintings, images, and other artistic drawings to highlight areas of color and design.

This way, students can focus in on a particular technique or concept without the use of a projector. Color Splash is one of the most affordable editing apps on the iPad for only $1.99. The app comes with robust sharing options for students to display on Facebook and other similar sites.

14. Slurpy The Frog

An activity book designed for young children between ages three and five; Slurpy the Frog is a cute and funny animal that teaches kids concepts like shapes, relationships with size, and important facts about the world. It is a visually appealing app that contains 100 different activities that progress in difficulty.

The app is available for the Windows Phone.

15. Brain Thaw

Puzzle addicts will love Brain Thaw, an app that teaches mental math concepts using different puzzles.

The main character of the game is Newton the clever penguin. He loves to eat numbers according to the math rule given, but evil yetis will try to stop you. As you pass each level, the math rules change and increase in difficulty. It covers multiplication facts, fractions, division, addition, and subtraction.

16. Meet The Insects: Forest Edition

Meet the Insects: Forest Edition is a visually stunning app available for the iPad. Now bug lovers can meet the critters up close and personal with high definition images, facts, and trivia. Kids can go through the bug story, take a quiz about their favorite insect, and record observations in a digital journal.

You can even watch the bugs in action with video clips. The app is currently $3.99 and won the Red Dot Design Award.

17. Ansel and Clair’s Ride with Paul Revere

Ansel and Clair’s Ride with Paul Revere is an educational history app designed by Cognitive Kid for ages six to twelve. Both Ansel and Clair are childlike aliens who want to learn about history. The story begins in Boston and covers the major events of American History.

At the end of each unit, there is a quiz and the opportunity to take a snapshot of the location for the child’s scrapbook. There is narration and photos of historical artifacts to go along with the story. It is available for iOS devices.

18. Shake a Phrase

Shake a Phrase is a fun language app designed for kids who enjoy creative writing. Children age eight and above will learn vocabulary and parts of speech by shaking their device and watching silly sentences pop up on the screen. When there is an unfamiliar word, just tap on it to get the definition. Creative writing prompts are also included. This app is available on iOS devices and covers over 2000 vocabulary words.

19. Jungle Coins

Jungle Coins is a money app for kids learning how to count coins and bills. The app is available for many different currencies including the Euro, the British Pound, American Dollar, Australian Dollar and more. The animals come to life while teaching children how to count change and substitute coins for bills and vise versa. Right now it is only available on the iPad for $2.99.

20. Kids Genius All in 1

Kids Genius All in 1 is an app that contains 18 games covering a range of educational concepts from math to language, music, animals and nature. Flashcards, trivia, tracing drills, and other activities are all included in one handy app so kids don’t have to exit out of the game to access another subject. The games are made for children four and up, and can be downloaded on any iOS device.

About Julie DeNeen

Julie DeNeen has her bachelor's degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of New Haven. She spent several years working for a local Connecticut school at the district level, implementing new technologies to help students and teachers in the classroom. She also taught workshops to teachers about the importance of digital student management software, designed to keep students, parents, and teachers connected to the learning process.

You can find out more about her @jdeneen4 and Google+.

Read more: http://newsroom.opencolleges.edu.au/trends/20-apps-games-for-play-based-learning/#ixzz2IZIzbMDt

Happy New Year 2013!!

It's been a while since I said anything, and even longer since I said anything worth reading!

 




With that said, not much to say so far this year except a big raspberry to the Cincinnati Bengals for losing to the Houston Texans! What an absolutely horrible game in which you played well below your capability, and ended my football watching for the season. Mostly. Except for other games that may or may not be watch-worthy.

  As an aside, I recorded the game and watched it Sunday, a day after taking the girls to Enchanted Rock. they climbed, I hiked, but it was a cold, busy day.

Flashing Neon Sign Generator

Pretty neat. http://www.divaglitter.com/neon/
Neon Signs

Best Football Conversation Ever

Best Football Conversation Ever

How Good News Affects the Brain

I was looking for something else when I found this article on how the brain reacts to good news and bad news. 

Via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/sep/25/how-brain-filters-bad-news

How the brain filters bad news

We are more likely to be receptive to good news than bad, and a team at UCL has gone some way to explaining why we prefer to look on the bright side

Co-author Ryota Kanai administering transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which sends magnetic pulses into a participant's brain. Photograph: National Academy of Sciences

Most of us go through life with a selective ear for the news we take in. We hear the good more than the bad, the flattering more than the insulting. And we update our beliefs in a way that reflects that bias.

The effect appears in many guises. We update our self image when told we are smarter or better-looking than we thought. But if we hear we are more stupid and uglier than we supposed, we revise that image rather less. In the general population, about 80% to 90% of us behave this way.

 The regions to which TMS was administered. The right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is on the right, and the left IFG is on the left. Photograph: National Academy of Sciences

There are pros and cons to what neuroscientists call the "good news/bad news effect", though by the nature of the beast, you might dismiss the negatives. In building beliefs predominantly on good news, we lean towards an optimistic view of life. We are less anxious of the likelihoods of unpleasant events: cancer, burglary, internet fraud, missing a flight, divorce.

There is a cost to this rose-tinted view of the world though. To ignore bad news can be dangerous. It can make us overconfident, perhaps even reckless. It might leave us unprepared for a natural disaster, naive to the dangers of contracting disease, or oblivious to the warning signs of impending financial collapse.

In a series of experiments at University College London, a team of neuroscientists has gone some way to explaining how this preference for good news arises in the brain. Through disrupting the function of a small brain region, they neutralised the bias and left people as open to bad news as they were to good.

Cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot and others recruited 30 right-handed people aged 20 to 35 and divided them into three groups of 10. Each received a 40-second blast oftranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which sends magnetic pulses into the head, to disrupt different parts of their brains. In one group, the TMS was aimed at a part called the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), in another at the right IFG, and in the third, the target was a control region of the brain, where the pulses were not expected to have much effect.

Within half an hour of the TMS session, participants sat down at a computer which flashed up 40 things nobody wants to happen in their lives, such as developing cancer, having a car stolen, or missing a flight. Each time, the participant had to estimate how likely the event was to happen to them. On typing their answer, the computer displayed the average risk for a person in a similar socioeconomic situation. Estimate your lifetime risk of cancer at one in 10? The average is closer to one in three.

A second session followed. This time, the volunteers were given the same negative cues – cancer, robbery, missing a flight and so on – and had to estimate again the chance that each event would happen to them at some point. The scientists then analysed the answers to see how people's views shifted after they had been given accurate information.

The results were enlightening. Those who had magnetic stimulation to the right IFG, or a control part of the brain, showed the usual good news bias: that is, they updated their beliefs more on hearing good news, such as a lower risk of cancer or Alzheimer's than they originally thought. But stimulation of the left IFG destroyed the bias. Those people were just as likely to change their views based on bad news as good.

"We believe the left inferior frontal gyrus is normally inhibiting other parts of the brain from learning from bad news. But by interfering with the left IFG we're releasing this inhibition," says Sharot, whose study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A previous study highlighting the brain region appeared last year in Nature Neuroscience.

The left IFG is unlikely to have sole responsibility for the good news bias. The neurons there are connected to many other regions of the brain, and it is hard to stop one part of the brain from functioning without affecting others. The effect more likely arises from a larger neuronal network.

Chris Chambers, a cognitive neuroscientist at Cardiff University, said one surprise was that TMS had such a specific effect, apparently without affecting other aspects of behaviour, such as emotional arousal or attention. "The researchers found no evidence of such effects. Among about a dozen different measures, only the tendency to update beliefs based on bad news was affected by brain stimulation. So for me, as fascinating as these results are, this makes it difficult to understand what brain function has been influenced," he says.

Should we try to base our views more on bad news? Probably not. The good news biastends to be less common in people with depression, suggesting the optimists' view of life is good for our wellbeing and helps to motivate us. And here's where the work might be most use. To understand how the brain goes wrong, it helps first to know how it goes right.