My long-time business partner, Dr. Erich Longie, is a very experienced pool player. Today, we were discussing a business decision where someone had to choose between two potential employees. One was exceptionally talented but not particularly ethical – nothing terrible, mind you, like stealing out of the cash register, or sexually harassing the interns –…
I have a quad-core i5 with 12GB RAM on my desk that has an ethernet connection as well as a back-up wireless connection option. I also have a Macbook pro for business travel. These are what I use for development and other work. I also have three increasingly POS (as in piece of shit, not…
These days, about half of my time is spent in management and collaboration, a fourth on writing code for a game and the remaining fourth on statistical analysis. This isn’t how I’d choose to divide my hours if I was in charge of the universe, but, that’s the way it is. Bwoo-ha-ha That is the…
In History of Psychology, a course I was required to take for reasons still unclear to me, each students was required to give a presentation on a famous, dead psychologist. It got kind of boring after the first 13 seconds, so we all started doing different things – debates, slideshows. My friend who drew Sigmund…
Oddly, Sandra Scarr, author of both the seminal study on IQs of black children adopted into white homes and the book on child care, “Mother care/other care” gave this advice to working mothers. I quoted her years ago in a chapter I wrote for a book used in Freshman 101 courses. The title (of the…
When I send bills to clients, I often, both for their information and mine, include the initials for the staff members being charged to that project. Of course, people are charged at different rates and this helps us internally keep track of who is being charged to what project and also allows us to easily…
I thought it would be really interesting today to get back to looking at SAS Enterprise Miner, especially the text mining. I thought it would be cool to take another look at Statistica. I also thought it would be cool to finish a blog post I started on power analysis for mixed models. And I…
Want to start a business? Think you’re a good programmer? Have a good design? (By a good design, I don’t mean an idea, I mean pages of scene, character and action description if it’s a game, plus – well, let’s just say one HELL of a lot more than “there should be an app for…
Being sick with only half of my brain cells functioning, I spent the weekend reading random articles on some of my favorite sites. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find one had the stock title: “Do you want to start your own business, escaping the cubicle, be the next Mark Zuckerberg, do you have…
The very first month I started this blog, four years ago, I wrote a short post, Tinkerbelle visits The Julia Group. I said that after twenty years of writing grants for other people, I made a wish just for me, as Tinkerbelle said. I sent off a grant to create an on-line high school algebra…