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Showing posts from April, 2017

Advice for My Graduating Students

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Last week one of my graduate students returned to the lab nest after seven long years away. I loved this student. I missed him when he left. He was kind and smart and organized. And he had great penmanship. He wrote well and he presented like a rock star. The only problem was that while he was great at pretty much everything, he had a passion for teaching. Which broke my heart. I don’t know any teachers with ironed shirts. Don’t get me wrong. My mom was a teacher for 40 years. I have mad love for the teachers. Teacher can tell you, it is both wildly personally fulfilling and heartbreaking all at once. But no teacher will tell you that it’s financially rewarding. “Do anything else if you can,” is what many of my favorite teachers have told me. No one goes into teaching for the money. In fact, many very sane people are deterred from teaching because the US pays so little for these folks who do pretty much everything to help students succeed. As graduation approa

Its nice being an independent turtle

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Is your marketing strategy protected against changing buyer behavior?

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This article and expertise was originally published on  Business2Community . Tech startups don’t have a lot of room for miscalculating buyer behaviors. Here’s what you need to know to be able to anticipate, identify and satisfy changing buyer behaviors for the sake of creating an effective marketing strategy. The buyer you engage with today won’t be the buyer you engage with tomorrow. The reality is that the fast-paced, whirlwind nature of the tech landscape means that the needs of buyers are changing at a rapid pace. What are some of the things that can drive the fickle natures of buyers? Most people are influenced by two factors: Rising expectations Mobile obsessions The reality is that a B2B company needs to be able to rise to the challenge when the expectations of buyers change. The goal should be to meet demands without shattering the core of what you offer. This can often be achieved by tweaking the way you deliver a product or engage with buyers instead

What’s the power plant of the future?

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The future is now! A joke that always seems to get laughs when the power plant of the future is contemplated is that only one human and one dog will be needed to operate it. The dog’s job will be to bite the human if he or she tries to touch anything; the human’s job will be to feed the dog. The point of the joke, of course, is that the power plant of the future may not need humans at all; it may be run completely by computers and controlled using artificial intelligence. Although that sounds like science fiction, so did self-driving cars a few years ago. Now, it’s not only companies like Tesla and Google that are developing autonomous vehicles; even Ford expects to have commercial models available by 2021. New technology is being used throughout the power industry to improve plant efficiency, predict trouble with degrading equipment, forecast weather trends, and train workers. A recent conference hosted by POWER brought together a number of savvy users and provider