Background NWO is the Dutch funding agency, comparable to the NSF in the US. One of their funding categories is the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. This scheme consists of three grants for creative talented researchers, called veni, vidi and vici, for researchers 3, 5 and 10 years away from their getting their PhD. These three grants are […]
Spreadsheets: The Ununderstood Dark Matter Of IT
After a successful performance at last year’s Strata conference in London , I was invited back this year as a keynote. I talked about the omnipresence of spreadsheets in the business world and what we can learn from the success of spreadsheets. Duration 15 minutes Conference O’ Reilly Strata London Audience about 1000 attendees Rating 4.4 / […]
The role of Social Media Chair
Several people have asked me about some advice on how to be a social media chair at a conference, as I have filled this position at ICSE, ICSM and WCRE this year. Instead of emailing those people, I have promised them all a blog post, so here goes What is a social media chair anyway? A […]
Presentation techniques – Overview
Recently, I gave a tutorial on presentation techniques at the SNT institute in Luxembourg City. The material for this tutorial is organized in three themes: structure, story and support. The three themes I will detail each of these topics in a separate blog post later, but for now, I’ll detail the general idea of the tutorial. Structure […]
On bad arguments and stereotypes
Last week there was a small Twitter storm in the Netherlands because of this toy advertisement. Quite interesting, as this was the topic of my first blog post in 2011. The pink letters translate to ‘you want to be just as good as mommy’. Eventually the story also ended up in regular media, and then on tv. In the Dutch show Pauw […]