Category Archives: Work

The end is nigh

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Before earning my doctoral title in Sweden I need to successfully defend my thesis in a public forum. This week my main supervisor and I agreed that this defence should be in the final week of April 2011.

Committing to this deadline is nerve-racking. I still have many months of work ahead of me. But I think and hope everything should be finished in time.

This week I updated my PhD Thesis webpage. It now reflects the structure of my final thesis and provides a status update for each chapter. I will continue to update this page as I make progress. Roughly one month before the defence my thesis should be available in full.

I have opted to compile my thesis as a collection of publications. This is a common approach in Sweden. This contrasts with the monograph style commonly seen in Australia.

I expect you all want to book your plane tickets now! ;-)

A week in India

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I just got back from two weeks in Australia and as of writing this post had not published the photos from my trip to India a month earlier.

I was in India to conduct interviews and surveys as part of the research towards my PhD. This took me to Delhi and Chennai. I had one day in which I was able to be a tourist and saw some of the main attractions in Delhi. This forms the vast majority of the photos, however, they start with the offices in which I was working and finish with the view from my hotel in Chennai.

In Delhi I was very taken aback by the level of poverty. The four and a half star hotel in which I stayed was in the middle of a wasteland. The wasteland was full of many families living under tarpaulins. I am guessing there was no power or running water. At night it was pitch black. Each day, as I was driven to work, families sat around potholes in the road washing themselves. Garbage trucks would come to the wasteland, and families would sort through the rubbish on the ground. From what I could tell this was also their food source.

Chennai seemed much wealthier, but unfortunately I did not have any time to go beyond the office or my hotel.

Software engineers are like monkeys

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Last year some colleagues and I conducted an experiment to see if software product managers are likely to fall victim to biases predicted by prospect theory when deciding what a software product should do. Our results showed they do.

Laurie Santos had much more fun with this topic, conducting behavioural economics experiments based on prospect theory with monkeys. Her aim was to see if our biases are deeply innate, or just bad habits we learn. Her conclusion was that a monkey economy is as irrational as our own. Or, as I prefer to say, that software engineers make the same mistakes as monkeys.

Laurie’s presentation at TED is far more engaging than ours, so I include it here …

Maybe this is why they call me monkey?!

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What’s new in Malmö

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Today Oziel and I are working from Malmö City Library. But given the summers are short in Sweden, people don’t want to waste them inside the library. The library understands this dilemma, and has set up tables, chair and lounges in the library gardens so that you can enjoy the best of both the summer and the library.

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For lunch Oziel and I headed to Max Burger. They have new self-service terminals for ordering, much like the self check-in terminals at the airport.

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To our surprise, no one else used these terminals while we were eating our lunch – preferring the queue. But it turned out that these were even better than we expected:

  • There was no queue for the terminals, while the queues for ordering with a cashier were at least six people deep.
  • We could order by picture – meaning the cashier didn’t get confused with our Swedish.
  • We were given many more options than we knew existed (eg. swap chips out for salad, carrots, potato gratin, etc …)
  • After ordering we went to the express counter to pick up our meal and it was almost ready (fast food in Swedish is not known for being fast).

We give the Max self-service terminals the thumbs up.

My “new” campus

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Until now I have been working at the Ronneby Campus of Blekinge Institute of Technology. However, given the small student population, a decision was made to consolidate this campus with the larger Karlskrona Campus. Henceforth I have a new office located in Karlskrona.

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Today I unpacked and the above picture is the result. It’s basically the same as my old office, except for location and outlook. Before I looked across a car park, where now I look into the library and a computer lab. Plus the new building is waterside (except in the winter, when it is ice-side).