After I recommended a business incubator to an acquaintance, one of my co-founders protested, “But I thought you said incubators were useless.” I told her no, I didn’t say incubators were useless. I said they were useless for US at this stage in our company. There are times when the right incubator can be extremely…
Frequently, I hear adults who should know better argue against learning something, whether it is algebra, analysis of variance or learning a programming language. They say, I’m 47 years old and I’ve never used (insert thing I didn’t learn here). Yes, that is true. However, if you had learned it, there is a good chance…
According to the New York Times, 45% of people make New Year’s resolutions and although 54% of them fail, the percentage who succeed (46% , proof that I can subtract and understand the concept of percentages) is more than ten times higher than for those people who say they would like to change but don’t…
I read a lot. This year, I finished 308 books on my Kindle app, another dozen on iBooks, a half-dozen on ebrary and 15 or 20 around the house. I don’t read books on paper very often any more. It’s not too practical for me. I go through them at the rate of about a book…
One of the studies cited in Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, that really resonated with me was the one that said we judge women in the work place based on their accomplishments but men on their potential. Women are judged on accomplishments, Men on potential. This phenomena is one of the (many) reasons the whole…
This is the most depressing chart I have seen in a long time. Below are the results of our pretest on knowledge of fraction operations of 322 students in grades 3 through 7, attending schools on and adjacent to American Indian reservations. These are questions like, “Drag 6/1 to the correct spot on the number…
I was going to call this new category for my blog “Mama AnnMaria’s advice on not getting your ass fired” but it turned out to be too long to fit in the box. It may surprise young people in the work place to find out that people who admit to having screwed up are often…
I have been teaching at the post-secondary level since 1987, at schools ranging from a small liberal arts college in North Dakota to the second-largest non-profit university in the country. I’ve taught at private schools and public ones, and courses ranging from first year undergraduate to doctoral students. In all of those situations, some students…
I’ve been busy my whole life. Right now, I’m finishing the last week of a course I’m teaching on biostatistics, writing a lecture for a course on multivariate statistics that starts next week, fixing bugs in our next game, Fish Lake, working on a new project for free resources for teachers, and working on a…
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of examples of this … Malicious obedience is discussed on the englishstackexchange page (who even knew this existed) as “….when people set their boss up to fail by doing exactly as he or she says even though they know in their hearts that their actions are incorrect or not optimal.”…