"The uncertainty of a software development effort estimate can be indicated through a prediction interval (PI), i.e., the estimated minimum and maximum effort corresponding to a specific confidence level. For example, a project manager may be “90% confident” or believe that is it “very likely” that the effort required to complete a project will be between 8000 and 12,000 work-hours. This paper describes results from four studies (Studies A–D) on human judgement (expert) based PIs of software development effort. Study A examines the accuracy of the PIs in real software projects. The results suggest that the PIs were generally much too narrow to reflect the chosen level of confidence, i.e., that there was a strong over-confidence."

Bibliography of Roger Buehler.

Planning, personality, and prediction

"The present studies examined cognitive processes underlying the tendency to underestimate project completion times. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people generate overly optimistic predictions, in part, because they focus narrowly on their future plans for the target task and thus neglect other useful sources of information. Consistent with the hypothesis, instructing participants to adopt a ''future focus''-in which they generated concrete, specific plans for the task at hand-led them to make more optimistic predictions about when they would complete their intended Christmas shopping (Study 1) and major school assignments (Study 2). The future focus manipulation did not have a corresponding effect on actual completion times, and thus increased the degree of optimistic bias in prediction. The studies also demonstrated that the optimistic prediction bias generalized across different task domains, relevant individual differences… and other contextual variations."

[P]eople are natural scientists and tinkerers, and that this 30-year lull we’re waking up from was just a quiescent period of incubation. As W.H. Auden said, “We were put on earth to make things.”

"Yuzoz is a unique space-themed entertainment company that delivers access to the randomness of outer space through its proprietary Outer Space Random Number Generator. The new site includes the company’s APIs and detailed documentation."

"We are who we link."

Small, fast, cheap: these watchwords meld together to shape the idea behind GeneSat-1, a 22 pounds (10 kilograms) nanosatellite that's actually the product of three smaller "cubesats" fastened together. While diminutive in size, GeneSat-1 would be a fully-automated, miniaturized spaceflight system that provides life support, nutrient delivery, and performs assays for genetic changes in E. coli-that's the abbreviated name of the bacterium Escherichia (Genus) coli (Species).

"Two very different notions of the future direction of small satellites collided at an otherwise collegial conference here, with Cubesat inventor Bob Twiggs pushing for increasingly tiny spacecraft and NASA engineer John Hines advocating the use of double or triple Cubesats to increase payload capacity."