I paid my way through college doing medical transcription. Throughout my time there, the hospital was experimenting with speech recognition, but the success rate was very low, and the doctors spent a lot of time going over and correcting the output. I believe they finally ditched the voice recognition software (though I do not know for sure).
I'm guessing that the reason the experiment failed at this hospital is that the language was non-English. In addition, most of the doctors were foreign, speaking with wildly differing accents. Also, many of the doctors would mix two languages when dictating, in addition to the usual Latin terms.
Basically, it was easier to just pay some humans to parse it.
I second (third?) this. You can also use a ViaJet (some people prefer it).
You can use salt and/or baking soda as antibacterials in the water you use for irrigation.
If you add irrigation to your routine, you may want to switch out dental floss with dental tape and "buff" your teeth (floss:tape as thread:ribbon - buffing with a thread doesn't work too well). Makes a huge difference in the buildup of plaque.
Lastly, disclosing tablets or solution (picking one at random from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W6LW6I) is not just for kids. Using it for a few weeks or months could help you see where your tooth brushing technique is a bit weak.
One discovery that kind of blew my mind a few months back was approvals. I've seen the entire bowling game kata done with a single test.
It's a bit different to code against a failing approval when doing TDD; you still code in very small increments, but you don't necessarily get to green immediately. Slightly disturbing if you feel somewhat obsessive about seeing the green bar.
Locking down legacy code is beautiful. There is a screencast where the guys who developed approvals lock down a battleship game, generating about 8000 lines of output, not even glancing at them, and then refactoring the hell out of it.
This gets even more embarrassing if you're used to typing in dvorak. I can never remember the actual keys I use to perform certain actions - my fingers obviously know how, but my brain has no longer retained the actual mapping. And I can't just look down at the keyboard to figure out which key it is, since I don't have a dvorak keyboard, just remapped the qwerty one to use the dvorak layout.
> Just ask any man who has spent twenty minutes waiting for a woman to put on her face, only to find that she looks hardly different when she comes out from the bathroom than she did when she went in.
> It makes evolutionary sense for women to invest heavily in being good-looking
It seems like it would only make evolutionary sense if the males noticed the difference.
The speaker in the TED video didn't actually say that people weren't motivated by carrots in the tasks that required creative thought, just that carrots didn't improve performance in those situations.
One study I read about described a situation where the researchers bundled the same baby up and told some people that it was a boy and others that it was a girl. The people who thought it was a girl tended to comfort the baby when it got fussy, and the people who thought it was a boy tended to try to distract it.[1] Subtle, but I can imagine that there are other ways that we train girls to be more 'face to face'.
Actually, if what he says is true (and I'm reading it correctly), then the Fed can print lots of money, lend it to the US Government so that they can pay off the national debt... but then the US Government owes the Fed, and we're kind of right where we started, except with a good deal more money in circulation.
I've found that pair programming for a bit can help me get past that initial resistance. It doesn't have to be anything special or official - just a shared screen with a friend over skype can be enough to get going.
Right! However the employee actually has a couple of choices at this point... either they can have a lot of free time, start a startup, go snowboarding, etc, or they can go to their manager and negotiate. From what I've heard, both of these actually occur.
Another interesting trend is that employees tweak what they're doing and start working more efficiently, increasing a teams output by as much as 35% without working "more".
> [it] could be costly if you have an unmotivated group doing it for the paycheck
It would appear that lack of motivation shows up in lack of results and the unmotivated group quickly has to find another job. In one case, a company fired nearly 90% of a particular department, but the retention rate sky rocketed, so their costs went way down, even when you include the cost of having to look for and hire new people.
The basic tenet of ROWE is to stop doing busy-work, and start doing only what matters. Stop wasting everyone's time. All meetings are optional. You work when and where and how you like, as long as the job gets done. That's key, by the way... as long as the job gets done.
The most common objection in the corporate world seems to be "but how will we know if people are doing their job if they aren't in the office from 9 - 5?" and the answer, of course is "how do you know now?" (hint: for the most part, you don't, unless you have clear goals and are judging people solely on output rather than on face-time etc.)
A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time looking at job boards and craigslist, and the experience was not a delightful one. Finally I found a company that hadn't posted any listings but that I really liked, and just knocked on their door. I actually still work there.
Recently I got How to get the tech job you love by Andy Lester (pragmatic bookshelf). It's a great read whether or not you have a job.