I saw this poster in a high school, supposedly said by a basketball coach: People say, “Follow your dreams. ” I say, “Forget your dreams, kid, follow math.” He goes on to give the percentage of high school athletes who compete in college – 3.4% for men’s basketball, by the way, 1% of high school…
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,…