Hello, Office 2010

I just installed Office 2010 and I'm loving it! It looks like Outlook has received the ribbon treatment, which I'm a big fan of. There is some new sizzle in a couple of the other apps as well. If you're a Lynda.com subscriber, you can check out the videos that they have up giving a quick overview of the new features.

Comments

Sitting or Standing at Work

I've read some stuff about the negative effects of sitting for prolonged periods of time. As a consequence, I've been experimenting with standing more at work when the task will permit it. I've been enjoying it. I think the next step to make that work even better would be to get a desk that can quickly raise or lower. (The glacial speed movements of some electric raise/lower desks would discourage much use.) Here are some resources I've found interesting.

NY Times article is a good summary This piece from Exercise and Sport Science Reviews is co-sponsored by Steelcase, the furniture makers, so I must take it with a grain of salt, but it recommends standing as an activity that should be categorized as superior to sitting, whereas they have been both lumped together as "sedentary" in previous literature. An abstract with says standing or sitting on a therapy ball are about the same, and both more active than sitting in a chair. This survey of papers says the resu…

Preparing for New Ratings System

In January we will start in earnest on rewriting the "Student Ratings" system. The system is to allow students to rate their professors and the courses they are taking. (I am hoping we can change the name of the system to better reflect what it does. We aren't rating the students, after all. That is what grades are for.)
Gene and I had a good conversation with Nate W. and Tom M. today about the general design principles of the system. This is a project where we are going to try out our model of having separate teams work on the UI and the web services and treat them as parallel projects. Our hope is that we can get better and more reliable web services if they are ONLY way to talk to a system rather than just the tack-on way that the main programmers don't use because direct-to-database is faster.

How much will you remember?

There is a commonly passed around "stat" that, according to a blog post I recently read, isn't true. You've probably seen it or heard it.

It is said that people remember:10% of what they read20% of what they hear30% of what they see50% of what they see and hear70% of what they write and say90% of what they say as they do
The blog author says:
Quite where these numbers come from is a mystery to many, and indeed it is difficult to understand what 90% retention actually means… 90% of what for how long? As a model it looks and on first thought appears to be credible, however as many of us will know some people have almost 100% retention for a considerable period of time if they read something, others teach others from a structure or procedure which they themselves do not understand!Thanks, RapidBI, for pointing out this common misconception!

Bradley at Work

Search This Blog