Cosmetic Surgery: Facing the Facts

Facing the Facts

This paper has two simple messages: 1. Remove overconfidence in order to make quality visible; 2. This requires earlier and more frequent review than is usually done. 'If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in' Anon. Initial questions (answers later) 1) Are defects good or bad? 2) If your reviewer tells that they found no defects in a ...

Facing the facts.

Facing facts about deliberate practice

More than 20 years ago, Ericsson and colleagues proposed that “individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice” (Ericsson et al., 1993, p. 392). We empirically tested this claim through a metaanalysis of studies of music and chess (Hambrick et al., 2014). The claim was not supported. Deliberate practice a...

Facing The Facts : Necessary Requirements For

This paper sets out a conceptual framework for the open-ended artiicial evolution of complex behaviour in autonomous agents. If recurrent dynamical neural networks (or similar) are used as phenotypes, then a Genetic Algorithm that employs variable length genotypes, such as Inman Harvey's SAGA, is capable of evolving arbitrary levels of be-havioural complexity. Furthermore, with simple restricti...

Cosmetic surgery.

C osmetic surgery is growing in popularity, fueled by a culture of youthful attractiveness, unprecedented affluence and TV “makeover” shows. In 2004, U.S. doctors performed almost 9 million procedures, including such popular operations as breast augmentations, tummy tucks and liposuction. Once the province of celebrities and wealthy matrons, cosmetic surgery today is within the reach of everyon...