Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers. Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest scientist ever to walk the planet earth, died in 1955 at the age of 76 years. Only a few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn that Einstein had written an article for Scientific American in April, 1950.  (Scientific American is targeted at the layman interested in science.)  Since this was in the twilight of Einstein’s epochal career, with all his achievements in hindsight, I wanted to read what he had to offer, and learn.  A little […]

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers. The modern geek, like the modern soldier, always needs more power, power for one more device, power for a longer flight, power for those situations where electrical plugs are nonexistent.  I have leaned against many walls waiting for the janitors to finish vacuuming and free up the plug. While the technology has been around for some time, GoalZero makes convenient solar panels that fit onto a backpack or strap to your body.   These are designed to charge up a battery pack.

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers. Without batteries, we would be lost.  I worked in the intelligence community creating listening devices, geopositioning, stand-off detectors – inventions for the modern soldier.  One problem persisted – how to power those clever innovations without adding more pounds to the already weighted warrior. A battery is essentially an electric cell, that is, a negative electrode, a positive electrode, an electrolyte that conducts ions, and a separator (ion conductor). Fundamentally, the battery has changed little since its invention in the 18th century.  If

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers. In my book, I talk a great deal about the chasm between the technology wizard and the decision maker.  The wizard likes to stay in the laboratory, stare at the computer, and massage the controls of a favorite machine.  The decision maker is not so.  If you plan to persuade decision makers, you must enter their world.  When in Rome … The Harvard Law School and the London School of Economics analyzed the daily schedules of 65 Chief Executive Officers (CEO) to

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers. In the last article, we talked about The Persuasive Word, knowing how to proffer your ideas to achieve favorable action by decision makers.  Sculpting your concepts with incisive language will ensure their effectiveness.  In this article, we discuss an even more formidable weapon, the persuasive silence. Once you begin your presentation, or even a business discussion over a meal, your adrenalin increases and all your facilities turbocharge.  This is helpful in that it hones your thinking, amplifies your logic, and expands your

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book..  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. If you want to be persuasive, learn to choose, manage, and assemble your words.  Your goal is to be as precise as an atomic clock. The power of words was known from antiquity.  Around 950 B.C., the Biblical Solomon wrote, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold on displays of silver.” Homer spoke of an even earlier time, “… when he let the great voice go from his chest, and the words came drifting down like the winter snows, then no other mortal man beside could stand up against Odysseus.” Words matter.  If you want

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. Ever since I was a boy reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I have been hooked on crime mysteries.  Ah,  the ratiocinations of C. Auguste Dupin. But, here’s a problem in modern US crime. In 2005, the FBI, along with the police force of the District of Columbia, focused their gaze on one, Antoine, Jones.  Mr. Jones was a local nightclub owner who lived south of the D.C. area.  In his photo, this African American man looks to be about 35 years of age, with finely cropped

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. The American Physical Society (APS) is the national organization of professional physicists.  Until last September, Ivar Giaever was a “fellow,” an extremely prestigious position.  Giaever shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his work on quantum tunneling in solids.  Giaever was a supporter of President Obama in the last election.  In September, Giaever publicly resigned from the APS because of its policy statement on global warming, which is: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.  If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. One of the absolute coolest products I’ve seen of late is your own personal drone.  It costs less than $300 and is a quadricopter (4-motor) carbon fiber plastic helicopter made by Parrott, called the AR.Drone.  This little feloow does not have its own controls.  It has an application that permits WiFi navigation by an iPhone, iPad, or Linux PC. Mounted on its 21”x21” frame is a 93o wide-angle lens camera with a 640×480 resolution.  That is the resolution of standard (non-HD) television. The quadricopter flies at about 11 miles

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. If you work for a technology company, your company’s technology budget is a leading indicator of where your company is headed.  Watch those expenditures closely, both by how much is being spent, and on what projects.  You do not have to be a genius to make some basic observations that will help navigate your career. Nationally, the picture is not a good one. Battelle Memorial Institute is a US nonprofit company that performs its own research, farms out its researchers, and evaluates the research industry around the world.  They