That day I was walking along
the beach at Zandvoort; the sky was filled solid with white clouds and several seagulls were gliding in the gentle wind.
As I walked I thought about
myself and asked a funny question of God. I asked,
“Well, just where do I stand in the great scheme of things, how do I rate?”
Just then the sky opened up
and a strong beam of sun shone squarely on a seagull above me
and towards the sea, about
120 feet away.
The gull was white but
now all that I could see was a massive, golden array of rippled muscles forming his chest, back, and left wing.
As his wings gracefully moved,the muscles continued to shine brightly in the newly forming blue sky;
and with great freedom and command of his world,
he flew off.
And I thought to myself,
so that’s it, I’m no better than a lowly gull.
Contact Dan DuPort at
ON YOUR NEXT VACATION
Expect good company surfing,
and good company fishing, too.
But expect a few delays along the road,
and to sometimes have a hard time finding your way.
It goes without saying, the local culture will abound
and it will amaze you.
All making for some great story telling back at the office.
So you think that you....
So you think that you’re
where you are now because
when you think about every
turn you took, you think
“if only I’d done that instead”,
then things would be different, things would be a lot better.
When in fact, you really did the that that you thought you should have done. If you did something different, you would still be sitting here thinking about why you should’ve done something else.
A different that. And that’s just because there is no real difference between the this and that of where you’ve been; you’d be in the same place now regardless of which prior choices you have made.
That is, if you take all the yous that you could have been, all the ones gotten by making the different choices, and then consider all that
is common to all these yous;
then that is the you of which I speak.
So you see, you could be no
different from the way you
are now.
There's a lot that's not right. If you let any of it disturb you, you miss the point of it.
The bright side relies on your recognition of it; not your submission to it.
Learning is tough because, while a little knowledge that you're missing
can often bridge large gaps, it is not accessible to you -
for if it was, you would reach out and grasp it.
And no one else can provide it,
because no one but you knows exactly what you
know and don't know.
This is why we have few friends in our neighborhoods,
just acquaintances and strangers.
Pickwick’s Umbrella
In London, half of the days have some rain. The weather forecaster is correct 2/3 of the
time, i.e., the probability that it rains, given
that she has predicted rain, and the
probability that it does not rain, given that she has predicted that it won’t rain, are both
equal to 2/3. When rain is forecast, Mr.
Pickwick takes his umbrella. When rain is not forecast, he takes it with probability 1/3.
Can you find
(a) the probability that Pickwick has no umbrella, given that it rains.
(b) the probability it doesn’t rain, given that he brings his umbrella.
This problem appears in
K. L. Chung, Elementary Probability Theory With Stochastic Processes, 3rd ed. (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1979), p. 152
NOTE: You may not assume that the probability that she predicts rain is 1/2 or that the probability that she predicted rain given that it rains is 2/3; however, you need that, so prove it first.
HINT: Show that for any two events R & F such that a = P(R|F) = P(~R|~F)
P(F) = 1 - (a +P(R)) ,
1 - 2a
a ≠ ½ and under the further constraints that place the RHS between 0 and 1 inclusive.
When P(R) = ½ a drops out of the RHS and P(F) = ½ .
Like a train whose length spans your entire journey,
with doors wide open at each station, the river sometimes fails to move you.
If you continually see the same shoreline,
check that you are on the boat.
At least look at your ticket.
I have worked about half my life in education, as a teacher, and the other half as a software developer. I have lived for the past eight years in Paris, France with my French wife and have held several concurrent positions at business schools teaching Quantitative Business Methods and Information Science, from 2007 to 2011. These schools are
ISG - Institute Superior de Gestion 4 years
ESG - Paris School of Business 3 years
EBS - European Business School 1 year
I have retained a consulting relationship with some of these schools, and with others, to help them with their curriculum and implementations of interactive and on-line learning, of which I am a proponent. I am also the author of an interactive course text in Linear Programming.
In the early years of my relocation to France in 2004, I taught English as a Foreign Language, mostly to executives at various corporations in Paris. In doing so, I got involved in the pharmaceutical industry, and finished up working for a CRO in IVRS software development.
As a result of the 2002 recession in the SF Bay Area, I couldn’t find work doing software, so I called on my alma maters, CCSF and SFSU, to see if I could teach a course or two. I was given a year position at CCSF, teaching Math for Liberal Arts and Statistics. After discovering numerous errors in the math for liberal arts book, I talked Addison – Wesley into paying me a good amount to edit and critique the book , which is the ever popular “Using and Understanding Mathematics”, by Jeffrey Bennet and William L. Briggs.
I spent most of the early 1990s recuperating from the prior 8 years that I spent working with California wineries as a developer and vendor of a case goods accounting package that I wrote in dbase, originally, and then moved to Foxbase (today Microsoft’s FoxPro). But in ’93 I worked with Levis Strauss to provide them with a casual dress policy database system (I wrote it in Microsoft Access) that allowed them to market “business dress policy” seminars to corporations worldwide. Shortly after, I developed a Regional Office Lead, Sales, and Enrollment (ROLES) package for the California Offices of FHP healthcare.
From 1997 to 2001, I developed and supported an enterprise wide Environmental Health and Safety management of information system for Norcal Waste Systems that is used by 86 waste facilities in California, ranging from San Francisco garbage companies to California landfills and waste incinerators.
From time to time I also wrote some time and billing systems, and case management systems, for attorneys. And did some performance dance.
In the 80s, I wrote an accounts payable system for the law office of Melvin Belli and David Sabih, for tracking costs in the famous Dalkon Shield lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company A.H. Robins. (See THE SAD LEGACY OF THE DALKON SHIELD at http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/06/magazine/the-sad-legacy-of-the-dalkon-shield.html)
Prior to working with the PC, I developed accounting systems on DEC mini computers using the DIBOL language; and before that wrote financial consumer loan software in HEX code for Sharp calculators.
During 1975 and thru 1978 I was a lecturer at SFSU and an instructor at CCSF; I taught courses in mathematics and computer science.
My education is from 4 outstanding colleges and my last field of endeavor was logic and the foundations of mathematics, specifically artificial intelligence. My proposed dissertation was a good proof of the completeness of resolution with para-modulation. Since one does not yet exist, I'm glad I gave up on it, I guess.
Education:
I studied knowledge representation and reasoning, under a post-graduate fellowship at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. 1975
M.S., Mathematics, graduate fellowship, University of Nevada, Reno. I studied probability theory, and the foundations of mathematics. 1974
B.A., Mathematics with computer science option, magna cum laude, San Francisco State University. Physics minor. 1972
A.S., Physics, with highest honors, City College of San Francisco. 1971
Today, I am once again right back at that point I left in 1975; thinking about AI, reading about it, and writing about it – but this time all that is current, all that has been discovered, and all those that are working in the field - everything I need, is at my fingertips (was it Bill Gates that said that’s the way it would be?). This time it’s different.
My BIO is not complete without mentioning my wife.
We met on the Greek island of Patmos, in late June, 1997.
We first met as our paths crossed
in the woods along a trail to the monastery on the island.
We were engaged in 1998, and married in 2003.
We are statistically
significant in that we have been together 8 years yet have married later in life than most, and for each of us, it was our first marriage.
We couldn’t
be happier any other way.
