I often seem to be dealing with multidimensional clutter. I think it's mostly a problem - a really difficult problem - but maybe sometimes it's an opportunity.
Why all the clutter? Some of it may be my personality type (a Myers-Briggs "P" - we like options and have trouble with closure and throwing things out). Some is lack of time. Some is probably learned behavior.
Also circumstances. For me, there are a lot of ways to categorize clutter. A lot, but not all, is self-inflicted. A lot is also externally imposed - my occupation and personal life create time clutter as well as space clutter. I also came into a number of family artifacts - old photos, furniture, etc. - that something meaningful needs to be done with.
There's a high cost to it - it limits both current operations and future pathways. At the same time, life-as-a brainstorm seems to work well for me, but there's a kind of optimum point past which it becomes a handicap.
With some clutter, there also seems to be a compound-interest factor - it can go from challenging to bad quickly.
Besides resolving to do better and wishing for more hours in the day and a bigger home, I may need better tools. One thing that looked promising was a mailroom literature organizer with mail slots, so that daily mail could be categorized.
One interesting website: http://unclutterer.com/
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
MS in Technology Commercialization
After seeing the Texas program in the Sept Fasttrack and doing some searches, I was stunned: "technology commercialization" as a search term is way hot, especially for life-hack graduate degrees.
Lots of hits, not just in North America. But they ain't cheap. Trying to solve the problem of bang-for-the-buck. I hope there's a lot of bang, because the ones so far all involve a lot of bucks.
Programs:
Univ. of Texas MSTC: http://www.ic2.utexas.edu/mstc/
Unfortunately this is an "elite executive degree" which means it's probably expensive and not very accessible - not factors if you can get an employer to send you and pay for it, but if you're trying to do your own lifehack, not realistic. Candidates learn to identify and evaluate emerging technologies, identify customers and marketing strategies, develop broad, flexible business plans, build a high-functioning management team to drive the new venture, devise approaches for securing funding and manage and protect intellectual property. Also see http://www.uniguru.com/studyabroad/United-States-courses/Master-Science-Technology-Commercialization-course-details/cseid/602082/cid/72181/programs.html for this and other interesting leads.
====
Northeastern Univ. MSTC: http://www.cps.neu.edu/mstc/
Online (good) - $514 per quarter hour. A MSTC degree is 40 quarter hours (? - courses are 3 hours each), so the whole thing ends up costing over $20000. Does anyone else think that's a lot of money? Wonder if you ever make it back. Still, looks interesting and the individual course tuition could be worse.
====
Penn Master of Technology Management: http://www.emtm.upenn.edu/companies/industries/technology_commercialization.html
Probably $expensive$ but Penn is an Ivy League school, so prestigious. Prestige might be worth paying for.
====
Maryland MS in Telecommunications: http://www.telecom.umd.edu/current/OTC.html -- comes out of their Office of Technology Commercialization.
Also see their UMUC Doctor of Management: http://www.umuc.edu/programs/grad/dm/
Requires 48 hours of classes plus research. Fall 2009 tuition is $1087 a credit - the 48 credits will run a cool $52176, assuming the tuition doesn't increase (it will).
====
NIH/FAES: http://www.faes.org/graduate_school.htm
Interesting program if you're in the Washington DC area and can get to NIH (not online), but doesn't lead to a degree; none of FAES's courses do. You can get a 15-credit "certificate" (5 courses) in Technology Transfer. Courses are $345 a credit so that works out to $5175 outlay plus books plus getting there.
If you try to transfer these credits, no guarantees. Most graduate programs won't transfer more than 6 hours (2 courses). Something to consider.
====
Also see http://www.slideshare.net/infoDevSlides/technology-commercialization-handbook .
Lots of hits, not just in North America. But they ain't cheap. Trying to solve the problem of bang-for-the-buck. I hope there's a lot of bang, because the ones so far all involve a lot of bucks.
Programs:
Univ. of Texas MSTC: http://www.ic2.utexas.edu/mstc/
Unfortunately this is an "elite executive degree" which means it's probably expensive and not very accessible - not factors if you can get an employer to send you and pay for it, but if you're trying to do your own lifehack, not realistic. Candidates learn to identify and evaluate emerging technologies, identify customers and marketing strategies, develop broad, flexible business plans, build a high-functioning management team to drive the new venture, devise approaches for securing funding and manage and protect intellectual property. Also see http://www.uniguru.com/studyabroad/United-States-courses/Master-Science-Technology-Commercialization-course-details/cseid/602082/cid/72181/programs.html for this and other interesting leads.
====
Northeastern Univ. MSTC: http://www.cps.neu.edu/mstc/
Online (good) - $514 per quarter hour. A MSTC degree is 40 quarter hours (? - courses are 3 hours each), so the whole thing ends up costing over $20000. Does anyone else think that's a lot of money? Wonder if you ever make it back. Still, looks interesting and the individual course tuition could be worse.
====
Penn Master of Technology Management: http://www.emtm.upenn.edu/companies/industries/technology_commercialization.html
Probably $expensive$ but Penn is an Ivy League school, so prestigious. Prestige might be worth paying for.
====
Maryland MS in Telecommunications: http://www.telecom.umd.edu/current/OTC.html -- comes out of their Office of Technology Commercialization.
Also see their UMUC Doctor of Management: http://www.umuc.edu/programs/grad/dm/
Requires 48 hours of classes plus research. Fall 2009 tuition is $1087 a credit - the 48 credits will run a cool $52176, assuming the tuition doesn't increase (it will).
====
NIH/FAES: http://www.faes.org/graduate_school.htm
Interesting program if you're in the Washington DC area and can get to NIH (not online), but doesn't lead to a degree; none of FAES's courses do. You can get a 15-credit "certificate" (5 courses) in Technology Transfer. Courses are $345 a credit so that works out to $5175 outlay plus books plus getting there.
If you try to transfer these credits, no guarantees. Most graduate programs won't transfer more than 6 hours (2 courses). Something to consider.
====
Also see http://www.slideshare.net/infoDevSlides/technology-commercialization-handbook .
Fast Company Magazine Sept. 2009 issue - Who Needs Harvard?
Very provocative article, for working folk seeking new educational pathways even as they hit the commute at o-dark-thirty. Still on the newsstands for a couple more days, even as August seems to make time stand still for an instant.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html
This excerpt sums it up:
=====
... [H]igher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."
The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.
The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. "If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."
Wiley doesn't come off immediately as a bomb thrower. He is a 37-year-old member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with five kids. He has close-cropped gray hair, glasses, and speaks softly in a West Virginia accent. But he employs his niceness strategically, as a general in the intellectual vanguard of the transformation of higher education. The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom, he points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all.
. . .
=====
Sounds like Clayton Christensen's "disruptive technology" applied to the university enterprise, doesn't it...?
Also see http://www.claytonchristensen.com/#book_disrupting for Dr. Christensen's recent book on this new trend.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html
This excerpt sums it up:
=====
... [H]igher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."
The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.
The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. "If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."
Wiley doesn't come off immediately as a bomb thrower. He is a 37-year-old member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with five kids. He has close-cropped gray hair, glasses, and speaks softly in a West Virginia accent. But he employs his niceness strategically, as a general in the intellectual vanguard of the transformation of higher education. The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom, he points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all.
. . .
=====
Sounds like Clayton Christensen's "disruptive technology" applied to the university enterprise, doesn't it...?
Also see http://www.claytonchristensen.com/#book_disrupting for Dr. Christensen's recent book on this new trend.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Master of Financial Engineering
Enough off-label entries. I had not heard of this degree before this morning. It includes some cool math stuff, if one is into that. It comes up in career switch searches after you sift through all the usual hits (the same "top 10" you see everywhere).
It seems to be popular in Singapore. Maybe there are some US schools that offer it too. Here's a link to a reading list:
http://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1336
And an interesting wiki on the broader subject of computational finance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_finance
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Quantitative_Finance for more links and info sources.
It seems to be popular in Singapore. Maybe there are some US schools that offer it too. Here's a link to a reading list:
http://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1336
And an interesting wiki on the broader subject of computational finance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_finance
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Quantitative_Finance for more links and info sources.
Cash 4 Clunkers
FWIW I'm finding that it's making it more difficult for me to buy a new car, since I don't have a clunker - although I might have an easier time with buying a sub-20 PMG SUV, which doesn't make sense for me for all kinds of reasons.
The dealers aren't giving discounts since they know people are getting $4500.
The dealers aren't giving discounts since they know people are getting $4500.
Garrison Keillor
Is Garrison Keillor better on The Writer's Almanac than he is on Prairie Home Companion?
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Life After Music School
A most remarkable article, from Northern Arizona University's French horn department: http://www4.nau.edu/hornstudio/index_files/Page543.htm.
“There is Life after Music School: Three Stories.”
By Marilyn Kloss
What do a flute manufacturer, a hardware engineer, and a software
technical writer have in common? Well, since they are mentioned in this
periodical, you can assume that they are all horn players. But they also all
earned degrees in music and later turned to engineering for earning their
livings in the real world.
Jim Phelan, Bob Moffett, and Marilyn Kloss all attended music schools
intending to become professional horn players. But, in the reality of the
working world, they turned to technical skills for their professions, while still
retaining their love of music and horn playing. Their stories are special
while at the same time typical of those of many amateur musicians.
These three amateur horn players live in the Boston (MA, USA) area and
have known each other for many years. They have each struggled with
the question Of how long to pursue a musical career, and if giving up the
dream, what other career to choose. They have discovered that there
can be another life after music school, that it is never too late to learn
new skills and grow in another direction. ...
=======
If you're fortunate enough to be a musician, my view is that it's not wasted - both on its own merits and because there seem to be broader skills. Rumor has it that music majors are overrepresented in cryptography and medicine.
“There is Life after Music School: Three Stories.”
By Marilyn Kloss
What do a flute manufacturer, a hardware engineer, and a software
technical writer have in common? Well, since they are mentioned in this
periodical, you can assume that they are all horn players. But they also all
earned degrees in music and later turned to engineering for earning their
livings in the real world.
Jim Phelan, Bob Moffett, and Marilyn Kloss all attended music schools
intending to become professional horn players. But, in the reality of the
working world, they turned to technical skills for their professions, while still
retaining their love of music and horn playing. Their stories are special
while at the same time typical of those of many amateur musicians.
These three amateur horn players live in the Boston (MA, USA) area and
have known each other for many years. They have each struggled with
the question Of how long to pursue a musical career, and if giving up the
dream, what other career to choose. They have discovered that there
can be another life after music school, that it is never too late to learn
new skills and grow in another direction. ...
=======
If you're fortunate enough to be a musician, my view is that it's not wasted - both on its own merits and because there seem to be broader skills. Rumor has it that music majors are overrepresented in cryptography and medicine.
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