Author Archives: Lynwood

How to Terminate an Employee – Initial Assessment

One of my readers asked me to discuss how to “fire an employee.”  Not because this particular reader needed to fire someone, but because he, himself, had been [..]

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Hedy Lamarr and Her Patent

The American Physical Society recently posted an article that resonated with my theme on technology persuasion.  It turns out that the seductive actress Hedy Lamarr once applied for [..]

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Smiling or Facial Profiling?

Facial-recognition software has taken years to mature: I investigated the technology almost 10-years ago and it was not new then.  Now, it appears that about 40 law enforcement [..]

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Happy 98th Birthday to Willie Lee Darter

I depart from my usual theme of technology persuasion to wish a happy 98th birthday to a great woman, Willie Lee (Scales) Darter.  I assure you that when [..]

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Voyager – Happy 4th of July

Over half of the almost seven billion people living today were not even born in 1977.  In that year, NASA launched Voyager I and sent her out to [..]

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The Statistics of Pitchers – A Lesson In Persuasion

“Take me out to the ball game.  take me out with the crowd.  Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks, I don’t care …  for it’s one, two, three [..]

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Learn A Foreign Language – Decision Maker Speak

For reasons that are obscure to me, I invested some of the last 18 months learning ancient Greek.  That exercise had no practical value (not a criterion for [..]

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Br’er Rabbit and the Patent Patch

Lipitor (atorvastatin) is a well-known drug for lowering blood cholesterol.  It happens to be the biggest selling (legal) drug of all times.  The Lipitor patent expires on November [..]

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Shun Unearned Expertise

I love physics.  Why?  No one says it better than the stimulating Paul Davies. Physics is the most pretentious of the sciences, for it purports to address all [..]

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Taking Full Responsibility – Empty Words or Meaningful Deeds?

Last week another politician signed up to take “full responsibility” for his actions.  This time it was Anthony Weiner, the Democratic Representative from New York whose puerile obsession [..]

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