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Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95.  For a limited time, my blog readers can receive it at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. To get an automatic email reminder of every new post, send your email address to lgivens@thepersuasivewizard.com.  Make the subject Notify Me. I will not sell or otherwise distribute your information. Until last week, Texas had 25 universities that offered undergraduate physics degree programs.  On October 27, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) voted unanimously to phase out 6 of them, namely, University of Texas at Brownsville Texas Southern University Midwestern State University Prairie View A&M University Tarleton State University West Texas A&M […]

Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95.  For a limited time, my blog readers can receive it at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. I spent this afternoon deriving the Riemannian curvature tensor.  I started with the notion of parallel transport and applied the covariant-derivative around a small closed path. Hold on!  Don’t hit the mouse button!  You don’t have to comprehend General Relativity to appreciate what comes next.  It can change your life. It goes like this … Observe technologists, like myself, like yourself.  They spend hours scribbling mathematical minutiae.  They exhaust nights checking C++ code.   They take weeks isolating a pathogen, months formulating one milligram

Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95.  For a limited time, my blog readers can receive it at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. Physicists shy away from political commentary.  Not because we are uninformed and have nothing to offer, quite the contrary, but because we are analytical and seldom politically correct.  I steer trepidatiously into the murky waters of social behavior and address the issue of a Palestinian homeland. The standard argument for Palestinian Statehood does not begin with anything Palestinian.  It begins, not by inquiry and evaluation, but by unequivocally stating exactly why, how much, and where Israel should “donate” land for a Palestinian Homeland.

The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95.  For a limited time, my blog readers can receive it at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. Each year, the Nobel Prize in physics is awarded to “ the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics.”  To ensure validity, said discovery is tested with time, that is, the winner is not selected until a number of years after the discovery.  While in other more subjective and politically-influenced fields the Nobel Prize has been made laughable and the butt of jokes, the award in physics is still the pinnacle.  If we review the

Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers on Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95.  For a limited time, blog readers can get the book at a discounted price.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. We continue with the task of predicting research outcomes, how much it will cost and when it will be complete.  Most technologists have only a vague notion of how to do this and, subsequently, they do it inadequately, if at all.  This series has several parts because I want to keep each entry succinct and blog-readable.  If you follow these proven steps, though, you will know how to make good, reliable technology forecasts.  Part V is a toughie.  We consider the Critical Elements.

The second printing of my book is now available.  Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers on Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95.  The publisher has permitted me to offer it to my blog readers, for a limited time, at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. Little Jack Horner Sat in a corner, Eating his Christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb And pulled out a plum, And said, “What a good boy am I!” (English Nursery Rhyme variously styled from Henry Carey, 1725) There was never a plum in Jack’s dessert.  Nor was he eating a pie, really.  “Christmas Pie” was a pudding, a baked slurry embedded with raisins.  The mischievous Little Jack

My book is currently off-line while the publisher goes through a second printing.  The new books will be available in about ten days.  At which point, order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for a low price of $12.95.  The publisher has permitted me to offer it to my blog readers, for a limited time, at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. In the media and on the political stage, it is popular to posit science as having all the answers.  A few mass-appeal-scientists do put considerable effort into promoting this myth.  Watch Discovery Channel.  Much of their speculation is leveled against religion, hoping, for reasons that baffle me, to dispel any notion

Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for a low price of $12.95.  The publisher has permitted me to offer it to my blog readers, for a limited time, at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. Shutting Down the Tevatron sounds like a new movie about the demise of the Tron brothers.  It could not possibly be the plot for a movie, however, because the sad ending would discourage all attendees. The Tevatron is an humongous machine built in 1985 at Fermilab.  At that time, it cost $120M but the current total investment would easily exceed a billion dollars.  (Of course that’s counting the tens of thousand of technology jobs it produced and

Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for a low price of $12.95.  The publisher has permitted me to offer it to my blog readers, for a limited time, at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. On June 30, 1905 a 26-year old Albert Einstein, working in the Swiss Patent Office, submitted a paper to what then was the most prestigious physics journal in the world, Analen der Physik.  The English translation of the title being On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Over the next several years, the theory he proposed in that paper gained the name Special Theory of Relativity (to distinguish it from an expanded General Theory of Relativity he published eleven

Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for a low price of $12.95.  However, the publisher has permitted me to offer it to my blog readers, for a limited time, at a special discount.  Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC.  The book is an excellent gift for anyone who needs to persuade others. Our present discussion is the requirement to predict research outcomes, how much it will cost and when it will be complete.  Most technologists have only a vague notion of how to do this and, subsequently, they do it inadequately, if at all.  This series has several parts because I want to keep each entry succinct and blog-readable.  If you follow these proven steps, though, you will know how to make good, reliable forecasts.  Part IV considers