DPL Reading List – January 8, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
What The Research Tells Us About Team Creativity And Innovation – “Creativity researchers usually make a distinction between creativity and innovation. Innovation involves two stages—the generation of new ideas and the implementation of the ideas. Creativity is considered to be the first stage of innovation. While we know a lot about both, there’s still not a lot of research to guide leaders.”
DesignStaminaHypothesis (Thanks to Doug Durham for recommending this article) – “Design activities certainly do take up time and effort, but they payoff because they make it easier to evolve the software into the future. You can save short-term time by neglecting design, but this accumulates TechnicalDebt which will slow your productivity later. Putting effort into to the design of your software improves the stamina of your project, allowing you to go faster for longer.”
10x Not 10% (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Imagine your company is choosing between two projects. Assume they have equal costs and require the same number of people. (Suspend your disbelief and bear with me.) The first project looks like a slam dunk: you give it a 99% chance of delivering an additional $1 million to the bottom line. The second project is much riskier: you estimate that it has only a 1% chance of succeeding. Yet the payoff is much bigger: it could add $1 billion in profits. Which do you choose?”
What I Wish They Would Teach In Universities (Thanks to Nathan Wilkinson for recommending this article) – “I wish a four year degree would also mean having a four years project, that you started to work on day one, and to modify and work on throughout those years. That would give newly graduated students some concepts about how to manage a codebase over time.”
Your Billion Dollar Idea Ain’t Worth A Dime (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “If you truly think your idea is worth something, there is only one thing to do. Build it. You have to put in the time, energy to and effort to build whatever it is and turn it into a reality. Yourself.”
What I’ve Learned From Monitoring Four Years Of Web Page Bloat (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “In the past six months, the average page has added another 120 KB of girth. It’s tempting to dismiss this added weight. What’s another hundred or so kilobytes in the grand scheme of things, right? But it’s not so much the extra weight that we need to worry about. It’s what this weight represents: more page assets (e.g., images, CSS files, and various scripts), more page complexity, and more risk of performance malfunctions.”
Google’s Quantum Dream Machine (Thanks to Matt Babcock for recommending this article) – “’Machine learning will be transformed into quantum learning,’ [Hartmut Neven] says. That could mean software that can learn from messier data, or from less data, or even without explicit instruction. For instance, Google’s researchers have designed an algorithm they think could allow machine-learning software to pick up a new trick even if as much as half the example data it’s given is incorrectly labeled. Neven muses that this kind of computational muscle could be the key to giving computers capabilities today limited to humans. ‘People talk about whether we can make creative machines–the most creative systems we can build will be quantum AI systems,’ he says.”
