A couple of years ago, I get an email from Professor Douchebag (not his real name) that he is doing a study on women entrepreneurs and would like half an hour or more of my time. I’m in favor of research, so I schedule him in a week or two later when I have a…
Today, I finished up a bonus Easter egg for the game, Aztech: Meet the Maya that you are taken to play when you click to see what Jose is thinking. You can see a rough version of it here. This plays better on a desktop / laptop because iPad blocks the autoplay for sound, but…
So you want to be a successful software developer / consultant ? If you are in any kind of quantitative field you have a VAST range of options, from working at some of the largest companies in the world in marketing research to performing efficacy studies for non-profits whose staff members can be counted on…
Last post, I talked about bricolage, the fine art of throwing random stuff together to make something useful. This is something of a philosophy of life for me. Seems rambling but it’s not … Over 30 years ago, I was the first American to win the world judo championships. A few years ago, I co-authored…
I thought the title of Al Franken’s book , The Truth, with jokes , was great and I wanted to do something just like it. Unfortunately, I’m not that funny. Often, the discussion comes up among colleagues whether it is better for one’s career to be a specialist or a generalist. It’s a little (a…
I read a comment on line saying SAS probably would not disappear as an option for statistical analysis because “it’s good when you need to do a lot of data manipulation”. I wonder what world those people live in that data comes all cleanly packaged and whether they have unicorns there. Back on Planet Earth,…
Once every year, I teach an actual course, not a workshop or professional development, but a class with 20 – 40 students. One where I need to write a syllabus, have lectures, papers to grade, homework and exams. Now, I’m not comparing teaching masters or doctoral students 3- 6 hours a week to my friends…
It may not be the secret to great joy but it is certainly the secret to avoiding unhappiness and it is simply this: The absence of self-ruminative thoughts. I’d like to claim the idea was originally mine but the truth is I first heard this phrase over a decade ago in a talk by Albert Bandura…
The most useful function Facebook has served for me is as a time machine. That is, students, friends and acquaintances I had not seen in 20, 30 or 40 years, who are in my memory as small children or teenagers all of a sudden reappear in my life as young adults with spouses and children,…
The year I turned 55, I wrote a series of blog posts on 55 things I’ve learned in 55 years. I’ve probably learned more than three things since, but one particular lesson has come back to me over and over the past few years. People are more than their accomplishments – sometimes for better and…