Organizations have a variety of options to help their software developers become their most productive selves, from modifying office layouts, to investing in better tools, to cleaning up the source code. But which options will have the biggest impact? Drawing from the literature in software engineering and industrial/organizational psychology to identify factors that correlate with productivity, we designed a survey that asked 622 developers across 3 companies about these productivity factors and about self-rated productivity. Our results suggest that the factors that most strongly correlate with self-rated productivity were non-technical factors, such as job enthusiasm, peer support for new ideas, and receiving useful feedback about job performance. Compared to other knowledge workers, our results also suggest that software developers' self-rated productivity is more strongly related to task variety and ability to work remotely.

Social networking sites (SNS), including MySpace and Facebook, and other media rich websites with social networking functions such as Bebo, Flickr and YouTube, offer new and varied ways to communicate for both students and teachers. This paper focuses on the complexities, particularly legal complexities, that may arise from teachers and students sharing social networks. For example, in October 2009, Queensland State School teachers were issued with a Code of Conduct prohibiting them from using SNS to contact or access students and mandating that any `private use' of social networks by teachers must be kept `appropriate and private'. However, this interdiction is deeply problematic, especially as SNS are designed to increase the number of users and their connections and by their very nature resist being private. Drawing upon Australian and overseas examples, this paper describes a SNS landscape in which traditional notions of privacy are much harder to maintain and can have risks, including legal risks, for teachers.

Abstract ~ This paper describes a prototype of a conversational system that was implemented on the Ford Model U Concept Vehicle and first shown at the 2003 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The system, including a touch screen and a speech recognizer, is used for controlling several non-critical automobile operations, such as climate, entertainment, navigation, and telephone. The pro-totype implements a natural language spoken dia-log interface integrated with an intuitive graphical user interface, as opposed to the traditional, speech only, command-and-control interfaces deployed in some of the vehicles currently on the market.