general

A professional biography or overview, showcasing your background, experience and expertise, is a necessity for every business owner. This often overlooked marketing tool is an excellent way to introduce you and your business to potential clients and possible strategic business partners. Potentially, it might open up opportunities for speaking engagements, radio or television interviews, or a feature print article. While any information about you and your business is helpful, information that is presented in a professional, well-polished manner can make all the difference in how others perceive you. Consider these important points as you craft your own professional biography. 1. One page wonder. Your professional biography should be a few paragraphs and kept to one page or less. One page is perfect for copying on the reverse side of a handout or flyer. Several paragraphs, left justified make it easier to read and skim. 2. First, second, or third person? Always write your biogr...

What is an author platform? An author platform focuses on who you are as the author, and how many people you influence. It is what you represent. It is what comes to mind when people hear your name. There are four components to building a platform as an author. Authors should think of themselves in the same way as celebrities do. Becoming famous does not happen overnight. In fact, you don't become famous without having a following. And you can't have a following without first having a presence. People have to come to know you as an author. They must encounter your brand in order to get to you. Many new authors tend to believe that the only thing they need to focus on is writing the book; when that is so far from the truth. As an author, yes, you must write books; but, you also have to think about how you are going to get in front of the people who matter the most to your career: your readers. What are the four components to building your platform as an author? 1. ...

Google has updated the help page for its Location History feature to acknowledge the fact that the company still tracks users through use of its services like Google Maps, weather updates, and browser searches, according to a  report from the  Associated Press . As noted by the  AP ,  the help page for the Location History setting  has been updated to clarify that “This setting does not affect other location services on your device,” and that “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps.” “SOME LOCATION DATA MAY BE SAVED” AP  had previously reported that Google was still tracking users who had disabled the Location History feature earlier this week, noting that while the company had originally claimed that “With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored,” in reality all that was happening was that Google was no longer adding user’s locations and movements to its Timelin...

I'm planning to start this out anonymously, because I'm still not sure how controversial I'm going to get, and how much trouble I may conceivably get myself into. Depending on how things turn out, I may decide to reveal my identity at some later point. Just to give a little context though, I'm currently a first year graduate student at a well-known West Coast university in the US. My field of interest is the burgeoning systems biology, although my definition and vision of it are somewhat different than the typical sys. bio. pitch. Given my scientific orientation this blog will naturally cater to topics of that sort. Nonetheless, I'd like to think that my interests are fairly broad, and so I will touch upon many things beside science, particularly politics, business, technology, and maybe a little bit of philosophy and religion. One thing, or class of things, that I know absolutely nothing about is popular culture. So no sports, music, celebrities, etc. I do watch th...

So this was a long time coming... Not to say I wasn't surprised--I think everyone was, including Hamas itself. Nonetheless, in retrospect it does seem like it was only inevitable. On the whole I think I'm generally happy that this has happened. Not because I support terrorism--I don't. Nor because I want Islamic fundamentalism to spread in the region--I sure as hell don't. But Palestine needed a change,  some  change, and this is better than nothing. ... The media has been spinning this in an interesting way, making it sound like it was only a reaction against Fatah, as opposed to an attraction toward Hamas. There's some truth to that--Fatah is corrupt and incompetent, and the Palestinians know that all too well. But the driving reason appears to be the Palestinians' desire for resistance, and for a government that represents their desire for this resistance. They're sick and tired of being subjugated and oppressed, and have decided that resistance is the on...

My last post got me thinking about what I meant by the terms 'terrorism' and 'resistance'. Militant Palestinian actions are always portrayed as terrorism in the US, without a critical assessment of whether Palestinians hold the right to at least some forms of resistance, and if so whether the actions of various Palestinian organizations including Hamas constitute terror. First, let's take up the issue of resistance. I will assert that if a person considers the US' war on Iraq to have been legal, then that person, to maintain consistency of thought, must also hold that Palestinians have the legal right to militant resistance. I am deliberately using the term legal, as I'm not sure if violent action of any kind is ethically justifiable. That is an altogether different, and far more difficult, issue. But again, conditional on your judgment of the US war as legal, then the Palestinians also have a legal right to resistance. The argument is quite simple really, a...

I’m going to venture out of my own field, which is probably a bad idea, but I think I have something somewhat sensible to say. I doubt the following is novel—I suspect it has been suggested by others well before me, at least in some formulation. Nonetheless, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the following argument stated in this way, so it’s probably worthwhile presenting it. For starters let me come clean and state what my conclusion will be: We will never reduce physics to a single theory. There will be many possible candidates, all of which happen to be consistent with the best experimental resolution that we can get, but we will have no way of telling which is the ‘real’ one and which are mere candidates. The major assumption of this argument will be a belief in the Church-Turing thesis. If you don’t buy that, then this discussion is essentially moot. If you do buy it (and I’m not going to delve into the Thesis here—there are good books on the subject out there), then the question b...