My Thoughts on Competency Based Education Competency based education has gathered quite a lot of steam over the last few years. Many universities now assert that they are competency based and promote this as somehow better than traditional education. In general, it seems that competency based education is a way of expediting the educational process whereby the student can move forward more quickly so long as the student can demonstrate competence in a subject. ...

I Don’t Trust Gmail. Here’s Why. I have had an email address with Gmail for probably 20 years. I mean my email address is my name @ Gmail. No numbers, no weird abbreviations, no strange punctuations, just my firstnamelastname @gmail.com How long has it been since that was possible? Three or four years ago I began receiving emails to my address that were clearly intended for another person with my same name. Their email was literally my email address! At first I thought it was just an glitch in the system. Later I thought perhaps they had simply mis-typed their name (maybe left out a letter or something) or had made up a name so that they did not get spam emails. However, many of those emails were for legitimate purposes – receipts from Tractor Supply or from their cell phone provider. What gives? ...

A Curious Mind I am, and have always been, a curious person so when I saw this book at the book store I had no choice but to select it. Curiosity is a driving force that pushes us to learn more, understand more, and to find or create new things. Curiosity is also the foundation for creativity, which is the premise for Brian Grazer’s book, “A Curious Mind”. If the name sound familiar, but you can’t quite nail down his name, Brian is the producer of many hit movies, including Splash, Apollo 13, Friday Night Lights, and A Beautiful Life among many others. Brian credits his curiosity for both getting him into the movie industry and with his success within that industry. He points to how his curiosity, and what he calls “curiosity conversations”, has expanded his understanding of people and phenomena, allowed him to explore new ideas in unique ways, for developing a deeper understanding of others, and for providing him the foundation for identifying good ideas. ...

Noise By Daniel Kahnemnan Overview We often like to think that decision-makers use sound, rational judgment when making decisions. Using examples from the courtroom, Human Resources, insurance adjusters, and others, Kahneman and team show that, in fact, our judgments are strongly, and unconsciously, affected by a multitude of seemingly irrelevant factors such as the weather, how hunger the decision-maker is, and even whether the local sports team won their game over the prior weekend. These are what he terms Noise. He differentiates noise from bias and notes that both can, and frequently do, coexist. ...

I had never heard of Naval Ravikant until the book popped up in the search results for personal finance books on Amazon. Or wealth, I don’t really remember what that search term was! In reality, this book is not about personal finance. Instead, it is a collection of thoughts by Naval Ravikant, a venture capitalist, founder or co-founder of several successful websites including the consumer reviews website Epinions.com, Angelist.com, producthunt.com and others. He has been an early investor in over 200 companies, including Uber, Poshmark, wish.com, Twitter, and Stack Overflow. ...

George S. Clason’s The Richest Man in Babylon This book is not really a single book but a collection of short pamphlets that Mr. Clason, a businessman in the early 1900’s, wrote on the topic of financial success. Using parables set in ancient Babylonia, the pamphlets provide, generally, seven keys for becoming wealthy. Although I quickly acknowledge that repetition of concepts aids in internalizing those ideas, I don’t usually care for books that include a lot of repetitive materialBecause the book is a collection of pamphlets, the same seven concepts, with the occasional additional idea thrown in, are repeated multiple times throughout the book using different characters and settings to convey the seven principles. Knowing that the book is a compilation makes the repetition a bit more palatable. ...

My Technology A common discussion in any of the technology forums is which platform is better. Some argue that Windows is best, others that Mac is and others, still, argue that Linux beats them all. What is my take? Well… it depends. ###I am Operating System Agnostic Truly, I am. I have all three operating systems in use in my home as I write this. I started my technology back in 1984 or 1985 with a Commodore 128. It didn’t take long at all to capture my imagination and soon I was doing some Basic programming, playing games, writing papers, etc all on that little computer. I’m not sure my wife was all that impressed. But, boy, I sure was! ...

Returning to Basics The title of this blog is iamcuri.us. That title was chosen to reflect the many and sundry interests that I have and the drive I have to explore new ideas and to learn new things. While I think some of my posts here have reflected that, others seems to skew in specific directions that seem to narrow the focus on the blog. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the posts that outline my tinkering in websites and self-hosting do reflect my questioning and exploring and learning. Still, I think that it’s time I pushed into some new areas and revisit in more detail some old areas, too. ...

My 2020 Reading List I set as a goal in 2020 the ambitious aim to complete 50 books over 52 weeks. I didn’t quite get there, but I did manage to complete 26. In addition, I read parts of four others and read probably a 100 or more journal and long-form magazine articles from a variety of sources. The four that I did not complete simply failed to sustain my interest. In general, I try to muddle through a book out of respect to the author’s efforts. But, I have come to realize that sometimes the best use of my time is not to spend time on an endeavor that I found not interesting or relevant to my interests. A couple of others, chiefly on electronics, I’m still working on, as they are detailed, and time-consuming. ...

Tips for Working from Home In response to the coronavirus, many employers have shifted as many workers as possible to teleworking. That is, working from home. This can be a real challenge if you’ve not had experience with working from home. I’ve worked from home for the last seven years, so I think I have some pretty reasonable suggestions to help you be successful while working from home and to help you ensure you have an appopriate balance between work and not-work. ...