I found that I was excited and interested in technology until it got to the point of maintaining and then I'd want to move on. So I went through web design, to network admin, to system engineer, to consultant, to senior systems engineer, to IT Manager.

While my case is a little off the beaten path (I don't have a college degree, and floundered a bit back and forth through my career), I've learned a number of things - often the hard way - that eventually got me an offer of IT Manager. I'm happy with the job and love the company, but management can be an exceptionally different beast than sysadmin/engineer/etc. Even though I still handle most highly technical tasks, my job is becoming more planning, paperwork, policies, delegation and organization, interaction between departments and other managers, budgeting, research, and goals/KPI review.

If you're planning your career, you may first want to consider what type of IT Management you want to pursue. You can be a technical manager, with a focus on something like a CTO position - where you are still immersed in keeping up with technology and market factors to drive technical solutions to corporate problems. CTOs often make more money than CIOs, but may even report to them.

Traditional IT Management/Director positions move toward the CIO function - which is utilizing information technology to drive business success. A CIO is typically more management-focused, and is highly responsible for the growth and success of a company instead of just the quality and success of the technology behind it. This is where you find Digital Masters, that drive success throughout an organization (e.g., identify the opportunity to migrate the sales team to CRM, and drive orders through a separate channel, implement tracking systems to identify bottlenecks in production and push company-wide directives that increase throughput and revenue directly).

My background came from the highly technical (I was dedicated and interested, especially early on in my career, testing things in a home lab, researching stuff we weren't even using so I could see how things like Samba worked with AD). As my jobs progressed, I landed a Senior Systems Engineer contract with a local company. After working through a few successful projects, they were changing their structure and offered me an IT Manager position.

It still took about 6 months after becoming an IT Manager before I was officially part of the executive management team. It takes time for people to trust you, and on the IT side, a lot of times other managers don't have a large grasp of what you bring to the team.

So here's a few summarized things that I can provide from my perspective. I'll break them into two things I have learned:

Becoming an IT Manager:

• Communication. This is so vital I would suggest a business communication class over ANY technical or management training. IT is complicated to us, much less others, and in management, your peers will not have time to comprehend and understand your discussion of the powershell scripts to migrate the database and implement transaction log shipping so you can have a report server. Focus on the result, the reason, and the requirements. If there's more information needed, you will be asked.
  
  
• Become a Generalist - either direction you take into management will move you further away from specialization. Yes, it's great I had my MCITP Enterprise Messaging Administrator. I work for a company that doesn't use Exchange or Outlook 360. Certifications are a good idea, and you'll need them to validate your abilities to employers and yourself as you work through the technical side of IT and toward management. But as you raise in rank, you will need to have a larger view of the landscape to understand the direction of technology. You cannot be unaware of things like DevOps and Agile nowadays, as you couldn't be unaware of the Cloud six or seven years ago. If you're going to lead a company's technical direction, you need to be very well versed in the current state of technology.
  
  
• HOMELAB - I can't tell you how many people in IT I talk with that don't have a home lab. When I was getting started I had a chance to talk to a lot of consultants and successful people and everytime I asked them the first thing they looked for in a (whatever) technical position was "Are they interested in this stuff? Do they live and breath technology? Do they have a home lab?". It's easy now with Digital Ocean,or a cheap dedicated server from WholesaleInternet to setup your own lab at home or not. It will help you a lot.
  
  
• Honesty and Dedication - This field is seen by outsiders as either "magical", a "hassle", or "confusing and misunderstood". This is a fight against you from the start. It's vital to be honest ("I was working on this new server, but ran into a problem I'm trying to fix, it may be another day or two.", "I made a mistake with the DNS and it may have caused some problems for you guys connecting to the AS/400. We're aware of this and working to fix it, we will keep you posted."). And dedicated means basically, get the stuff done you can do, within the time you have or told someone. If you can't, you need to tell someone immediately. For management, it's important to gain a strong understanding of how long things take (even if this technology hasn't been created or used before), and it's a skill that takes real experience to master. Start immediately!
  
  I mention these things not because stuff like Project Management training, IT certifications, and specific experience in certain things are not important. However, everyone gets caught up with this training things and do not realize that you will not move into management (easily, at least), without soft skills. Communication, honesty, dedication, broad understanding of the technologies. These are the type of people that other managers are interested in working with.
  
  Without trying to turn this into a huge post, I'll also add some things I believe have helped me (or I'm working on) since I've moved into true IT Management:
  
  
• Read The Goal
  
  
• Read The Phoenix Project
  
  
• Read It's Not Luck - Also by Eliyahu M. Goldratt of The Goal, this book focuses more on market-level insights and understanding.
  
  
• Now, map out your company's process - how does inventory flow through your company, what is the throughput, what is the work in process, what are the line of business requirements, where are the bottlenecks, how are these things affecting operating expenses? This sounds complicated and overbearing, but you can do this even if you're helpdesk. The better you understand how the business operates, the easier it will be for you to understand the needs of the business and focus technology to support the areas that will drive the bottom line. Regardless of who you are, where you are, if you crack this, and have the soft skills necessary, you will become a successful manager.
  
  
• I'd also suggest learning time management before you undertake project management. Something like Eat That Frog's "Do First Things First, Second Things Never" mantra works really well for IT. Learn how to prioritize your own schedule and tasks before you attempt to prioritize others.
  
  
• Learn to delegate. This is something I struggled with for awhile (mostly self-taught, only child, apparently I trust myself to do things properly and others, not as much) - this has to change as a manager, and will likely be the early bottleneck to your success in management. I finally realized that - for me, your results will be different - if I focus on my weaknesses (I know I enjoy rolling out new solutions rather than monitoring and maintaining current systems), then I realize these areas are apt for my to delegate. If I can delegate monitoring and maintenance to a systems administrator, I just freed up my time to be used on understanding our business better and finding new solutions to larger problems. Don't delegate for delegating sake, if you don't have something for someone to work on, give them direction on how to better their career, or involve them in things you're working on, have them work with different departments to shadow some of what they deal with day-to-day, or sit in on a sales call. This way you're developing relationships and getting your department out there.
  
  There's a lot more, and others on this subreddit are going to be much better at providing some direction - technical stuff like DevOps is where I'm spending my time now, and any IT Manager should be focused on that first and foremost if you have a Dev staff. Budgeting isn't easy, but whether you're responsible for it or not, it's always a good time to start doing as much of this as possible simply for the real-life exercise. No one is going to be upset that you spend your unproductive time trying to figure out what the IT budget would be for your company if you were in charge, versus watching cat videos on Facebook.
  
  Remember that Information Technology is a SERVICE department to other business lines. As vital as this is to us, we are seen as something like "The guys that keep the phones working." When things go well, people will think we don't do anything. Only when things break, does IT become top of mind for employees or customers. You can get kudos for great successes, but an IT Manager's greatest success will be when things run smooth and no one is impeded by IT or its servers, networks, phones, or computers.

I'm sorry if the reply turned out a bit too general, but the individual steps depend a lot on the specifics :)

As I said before, it's crucial that you understand the problem domain as good, or better than your customers. I like to think of it as the Fog of War in strategy game maps. I can only effectively perform once I have explored enough territory to see the big picture. Here's roughly how I would try to wrap my head around such a challenge, if the company hired me to help:

Customer

Who are the customers? It's actually possible to think of the customers just in terms of their needs and desires. But it's useful to know their demographic attributes, so you can choose whether your solution is going to be a lateral or a niche one. For instance.. Trello is a lateral solution, because the kan-ban methodology can be applied to many different types of problems. On the other hand, It could be argued that 500px is a niche solution, because it caters to photographers more than meme authors. It's very easy for 500px to figure out where photographers hang out online and in the real world, should they choose to reach out to them in any way.

The job (Problems / Desires)

The customers usually have some sort of job to be done. That job is driven by their desire for a benefit, or a lingering problem that needs solving. Those benefits can range from monetary to peace of mind or social status. And problems can range in severity. Furthermore, different customer segments can rate some problems and benefits as more important than others. This is the combinatorial explosion of stakeholders and their points of view, that informs a strategy of a good product designer, and causes an uninformed designer to arrive at an optimal solution only through brute force or sheer luck.

Solution

Sometimes the solution has to be drawn up from scratch, optimized or entirely re-imagined. So what is the existing solution? What would an utopian solution look like? A complex problem might require a solution in the form of a toolkit of multiple core activities (Like Google, HubSpot or Moz). A focused solution though, can be embodied in a single product (Caffeine.app keeps your mac from going to sleep). If a solution is complex behind the curtains, but you make it simple and gratifying from the user's point of view, it may seem like magic to them.

Business

The things that you do behind the curtains are some core activities, that might require some key resources. That's how the business makes sure it spends less than it earns on a customer (unit economics). It's easy to paint a picture where the world is split between sociopathic capitalists with a greedy agenda & empathic designers, who champion the user's priorities. But a similar solution with a sound business foundation will always be better for the customer, because it stands a better chance of outperforming the economically inferiour solution in the long run. It's the job of a designer to balance between the two aspects. So much so, that the Elements of User Experience places big emphasis on both Business Objectives & User Needs.

Communication

Once you love your people, and you have a way to show it to them, you'll have to start and maintain some sort of relationship. You can identify Touch Points or Channels. If, for instance, your customers are tourists looking for a place to grab a meal before boarding the next train, you can administer your solution right then and there, at the train station. But most of the time you'll be reaching out to your potential users somewhere between you and them, probably through a third party (online publication, app or ad network). It may take multiple exposures in different contexts, before somebody decides to give your solution a try. So a customer might bump into your message at certain touch points, open a communication channel like a newsletter or notification subscription, and only then decide to commit. There's often talk about a multiple stage funnel, through which we try to shove as much of our target market. But you can also look at customer lifetime stages as vertebrae in the cohort spine. For instance.. Slicing out customer segments by lifetime lets SoundCloud identify differences between a newcoming podcaster & a long-time podcaster, and communicate with each of them appropriately, even though most of the people that care about SoundCloud are producers and record labels. Staying on top of communication also helps you avoid conversion attribution mistakes, so you can communicate more effectively.

Here are some resources related to those subjects:

• Value Proposition Design, Alexander Osterwalder: How to map the Customer, their Problems and Desires to a Solution.
  
• The Innovator's Dillema, Clayton Christensen: Describes how disruptive innovators solve existing problems in novel ways.
  
• Minto Pyramid Principle, Barbara Minto: How to communicate the value propositions to a rationally minded customer.
  
  A bit more business related:
  
  
• Four Steps To The Epiphany, Steve Blank: A user-focused methodology for efficiently finding a viable business model, called Customer Development.
  
• Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder: His first book takes a broader look, dealing with booth the business and customer side of things.
  
• Lean Startup, Eric Ries: What Steve Blank said.
  
  Once I have a good understanding, I would focus on Information Architecture, Experience Design, Production & Iteration. I can't spare the time to write about those now, but here are some related resources:
  
  
• Elements of User Experience, Jesse James Garret: What a typical experience design process is made up of.
  
• About Face, Alan Cooper: Another take on the whole process, dives a bit deeper into every stage than Garret's book.
  
• Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug: One of the first books to gave the issues of IA and UX design a human, customer point of view.
  
  I might write more about the specific subjects of IA and UX later, when I find the time. In the meanwhile, check any of the three books with italicized titles, if you haven't already.
  
  Peace o/

It's a good question that's hard to answer exhaustively. Here are some pointers. Maybe they can help to start a discussion.

1. Paul Zeitz writes the following advice in The Art and Craft of Problem Solving (emphasis added):
   
   > It isn't hard to acquire a modest amount of mental toughness. As a beginner, you most likely lack some confidence and powers of concentration, but you can increase both simultaneously. You may think that building up confidence is a difficult and subtle thing, but we are not talking here about self-esteem or sexuality or anything very deep in your psyche. Math problems are easier to deal with. You are already pretty confident about your math ability or you would not be reading this. You build upon your preexisting confidence by working at first on "easy" problems, where "easy" means that you can solve it after expending a modest effort. As long as you work on problems rather than exercises, your brain gets a workout, and your subconscious gets used to success. Your confidence automatically rises.
   
   
2. A useful term to know is self-efficacy, which means "one's belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task". The Wikipedia article mentions four factors affecting self-efficacy, which are worth looking at. "The experience of mastery is the most important factor determining a person's self-efficacy. Success raises self-efficacy, while failure lowers it." This is consistent with Zeitz' advice to start with easy problems and then gradually increase the level of difficulty.
   
   
3. Another factor affecting self-efficacy is "vicarious experience". This is "most effectual when we see ourselves as similar to the model", but I still think it helps to know that many eminent mathematicians have experienced feelings of self-doubt at some points in their careers. Here are some quotes that illustrate this; they're from Advice to a Young Mathematician, which is well worth reading.
   
   > One struggles unsuccessfully with small problems and one has serious doubts about one's ability to prove anything interesting. I went through such a period in my second year of research, and Jean-Pierre Serre, perhaps the outstanding mathematician of my generation, told me that he too had contemplated giving up at one stage. Only the mediocre are supremely confident of their ability. The better you are, the higher the standards you set yourself — you can see beyond your immediate reach. — Michael Atiyah
   
   > When I arrived in Moscow in my last year of graduate study, Gel’fand gave me a paper to read on the cohomology of the Lie algebra of vector fields on a manifold, and I did not know what cohomology was, what a manifold was, what a vector field was, or what a Lie algebra was. — Dusa McDuff
   
   
4. Finally, in my opinion there's nothing wrong with getting nervous in office hours and fumbling with easy questions. I've done this myself several times. It's just the nerves talking. As one gets more comfortable and relaxed with the situation (the fourth factor affecting self-efficacy), one gets better at keeping calm and tackling the questions one piece at a time.

Well, sort of.

But also consider: the first company to actually TRY to handle the dynamics of animal walking with any success was Boston Dynamics and they still are only on dogs and primitive human-like physical dynamics/kinematics.

Why did it take so long? The same reason why smart phones and IoT could never have happened sooner than it did or are now: the technology was either not available at all and its cost were not cheap enough or there was a "special" cognitive barrier to the "right solution".

How does Boston Dynamic do what they do? They looked (in many ways for the first time) at how animals actually walk. The key part is "muscle memory" which is strictly called "distributed computing" in a EE/CS sense.

The key part of this: the Cartesian philosophic model of Brain and Body being two separate things is 100% wrong - humans and animals are NOT two binary parts: mind and body. So they got out of the box on that and looked to biological systems which clearly proved it's a distributed system, not a binary system.

BTW is which also why "Singularity/Transhumanism" is also a lie and will be a very long time, if not forever, out of reach. And never even mind Moore's Law's new monkey wrench in that aspiration.

Animal bodies are NOT primarily controlled by the brain but instead use distributed computing of many "small brains" throughout the body. Muscle memory is a local muscle-nerve phenomena where the local nerves sense muscle flexion/position to "know" what the physical positions, forces and loads are doing as part of a "macro" function for achieving things like standing and walking. That's why you can "walk" without having to consciously think about it (except when you are just learning to walk).

You brain does NOT micromanaged the muscles for most movement. It can do so but only clumsily. Notice when you start a new exercise or sport routine: your brain sucks at movement but you eventually train the muscles and distributed nerves themselves with local feedback paths. Then your brain is out of the picture and everything works far better.

Boston Dynamics uses local electronic sensors, actuators and local microcontrollers to mimic this distributed control. Microcontrollers only got cheap enough yet powerful enough in recent years.

This radically reduces the computational load on the "brain" or top level computing in both their robots and in all (biological) animals.

And because this is biomimicry of a 100s-million-year-evolved-and-proven system, it actually works better than anything man has ever hacked together over the last 20-40 years. So we are only seeing this now.

Combined this though with the fact that most robotic applications that actually pay money are industrial applications or "B2B" which have healthy to great profit margins.

Consumer markets (and thus consumer robotics) are "B2C, which are the worst profit margin product classes. The only worse ones are charity which have zero profit.

So you can not build an industry around consumer robots until you already have something mature that someone else has paid the development costs for. There's never been a humanoid robot market demand so they've never been developed because there's never been money in doing so.

Industrial markets simply do NOT NEED and have never needed humanoid robots. They need practical automation that does NOT need to be pretty or aesthetic but does need to be cheap by their standards and do a specific job well. So that's what most robots looks like today: the market with the money doesn't need humanoid robots; they only need minimally practical and effective robots.

Boston Dynamics primary customers are not consumer (and not industrial): their primary customers are military! DARPA funded especially.

Yes, the military literally wants Terminator robots and Star War Clone Warriors. They LOVED the Terminator movies and the Empire's military capabilities in the Star Wars movies because they imagined having them under their command. They simply dismiss the possibility of the negative storyline or of being "the Baddies" because their lust is so strong they can ignore the cognitive dissonance. "It's just a movie; we far smarter than that! It would never happen like that!"

Technophilia a uniquely American quality and military technophilia is off the charts. It's technology for its own religious sake and concerns about actual efficacy, need or side-effects are not important to them.

(I used to work in a military technology think tank so I know the mindset all too well.)

No other market can support the salaries of the engineers required to do what Boston Dynamics does. Certainly NOT consumers (who are cheap as hell because they really don't have money - at the scale of industry markets or military markets).

Always look at the money required and consider who could actually afford such things. That tells you more about if or why a technology has or hasn't been created yet!

The other issue: energy. The amount of energy required for a human is about 90W. However non-biological robots take FAR MORE energy: literally KWs. There are lots of reasons (read this book to grok why - we don't yet know how to design "fractal" though what Boston Dynamics is doing is sort of that with its "nervous system")

In general humanoid robots are energy pigs to the point of being nearly impractical. Batteries with sufficient capacitor to drive mobile computing only arrived in the last 20 years. And even then, your average lithium battery pack has an energy density comparable to a hand grenade! That's why the TSA has restrictions on them in checked luggage.

The robots that Boston Dynamics eventually deploys to military use will likely required either: 1) a small nuclear reactor or 2) gasoline/Jet-A fuel with turbine. These are required to generate the required electricity to operate them (you saw this detail in Avatar - very insightful and technically correct in terms of required energy and likely fuel source).

First things first, I'm impressed that you're already thinking about retirement at your age. A lot of people think about it too late and have to work that much harder to save for it. I've always maxed 401k's and saved since I was in my early 20's and can't believe how far ahead of the curve I am now at 40.

I live in Austin and have two properties. I've owned one in Austin for about 5 years that is a long term rental (1 year leases) and one in Port Aransas for a year, that is a short term lease (weekend, week, month, etc...).

I manage the one in Austin myself and use a property manager for the one in Port A.

• It will be more expensive than you expect (sometimes depending on your tenant). Have you ever owned a house before? Between down payment and closing costs, $50k may not be enough to get into the rental market and have comfortable security in the property. I have a similar plan to yours in that when I retire (hopefully early) I hope to have 7+ properties each generating monthly income and to also be selling them off for equity every 5 years or so. The way I started was by buying my first house at 30 and living in it for 5 years, then buying a second house at 35, moving into the new one, and turning the original into a rental. That way I was able to keep my rate lower (owner occupied homes get better lending rates than investment property) and I knew the house quite well by the time I put a tenant in it. If you currently own and live in a house, you could consider turning THAT into your rental and buying a new house for yourself ($50k may stretch farther that way).
  
  
• The rent for my LTR was about $300 over my monthly mortgage and expenses on the property. I barely broke even for the first 3 years because of expenses that came up. While the AC worked, it ran non-stop (barely keeping the house in the mid to high 70s) and would break down during the summer. I wound up replacing it to keep the tenants happy. That combined with other random expenses, and all my income was going straight back into the property.
  
  
• Which brings me to: If your handy, you'll save a ton of money. I've had to replace faucets, lights & outlets, a new front door, toilet flaps, and other general wear and tear on my Austin house. It's literally saved me thousands. I've also had to call in professional tradesmen when something was out of my comfort zone or I was too busy. As someone else suggested, find a good plumber, electrician, and general handyman that are reliable and trustworthy.
  
  
• Personally, a Property Manager isn't worth it with one LTR property. My Port A house, which is run by a property manager, gets nickle and dimed every time they have to send someone over for silly things like changing a light bulb (around $25-$35). If we decided to get another Austin property, I may consider a management company.
  
  
• I used a Realtor to help find my first long term tenants in Austin. They charge around half a month's rent. My current tenants were found by myself through Craigslist for free. There's advantage and disadvantages to both. If you find them yourself, there's lots leases available online to use. There are also credit and background check companies that will charge around $25-$35. I charge it back to the tenants as an application fee.
  
  
• Keep your real estate investment property money separate from your personal money. Putting a security deposit check in your personal bank account is a no-no. A separate account will also help you keep track of expenses on your properties.
  
  Looking at the short novel I just wrote, I could go on and on about it, but I'll stop here for now and directly answer your previous questions to the best of my ability.
  
  > What are some basics that every rental owner needs to know?
  Everything above. :D
  
  > Is it a good idea for me to get into owning rental properties?
  That's up to you. I love it.
  
  > Is there any major issue with purchasing a home and working to pay it off before investing in more homes in order to significantly decrease risk?
  Major issue? No, but you will own fewer properties this way, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
  
  > If there is, what is the alternative? I assume it's inefficient and would take too long to do it the super safe way, but how would I reasonably go about getting loans to purchase several properties at once with very little in terms of assets?
  You may not be able to purchase multiple at once. Talk to a lender to find out what your income to debt ratio is. Until you can prove a property will generate income to pay for itself, many lenders will only give you a loan if you can cover the cost of the mortgage without renting it. If a property has existing renters or has been rented for a period of time, it can be calculated into your income to debt ratio. But if you've never owned a rental and the property has never been a rental, some lenders won't count it in their income assessment.
  
  > Is this feasible even while using a rental management property?
  For a LTR, I don't think one is necessary. For a STR, they're invaluable.
  
  > What are risks/upsides that I'm not thinking about?
  Especially in the beginning, be less concerned about the monthly income and see the value in the appreciation. It's harder to see because it's not a tangible number, like a bank account, but it's where the "real" money/value is.
  
  > Is the 1% rule a set in stone rule? When is it ok to go below this? Is the one main goal to be cash flow positive after assuming some vacancy and repairs?
  Not a fan. I think it's too low and doesn't take into account enough wiggle room for random expenses. Someone else mentioned 2%, but I think 1.5 would be my minimum.
  
  I bought this book and use it regularly whenever I have a question about landlording. It's a good book for answer questions when they arise.
  amazon.com/Landlording-Handymanual-Scrupulous-Landladies-Themselves/dp/0932956378/

Strictly speaking I'm not surprised. Not because I'm an Apple Fanboy (I am - but for "right" reasons ;-) ).

But really just because if you look at the financials of each company over the last 10 years and look at how the product lines and marketing are handled, it's pretty obvious (since ~2000 to me anyway) Microsoft was going to and probably has now, hit a brick wall on revenue growth and innovation to drive more.

Where was Microsoft going to grow when Windows adoption has been stagnant and the compounding rate of adoption drying up compared to 1990s norms. Think about all those corporate users still using Win2K and WinXP; this is a very, very bad juju because corporate IT are one of the big 3 customer bases for Microsoft. And then there's Office. Between these two, there really are no other reliable cash cows in their stable of products. None.

XBox is a promising product line expansion but is it big enough to float Microsoft? I don't think so. Maybe highly profitable as an independent spin-out but where does that leave Microsoft itself? And the market size for games vs. the market size for tablets. Things that make you say "hmmm".

The laughable (when idiots spout it) and simple fact is that high market share doesn't assure revenue growth - in fact above, say 60-80% share, it seriously works against you if your products are in late adoption.

The classic Wintel PC is in late adoption as is the broader class of "computing devices" which includes all computers and tablets. Windows and Office are in late adoption as software products. And these are cash cows? What's really going to replace them? And they will have to be replaced. More Windows? More Office? LOL ROFL! Just like more Burroughs mainframes? That's all that's needed!

Tablets themselves are early adoption as a subclass. The point is, that you don't want high market share in late adoption in a rapidly changing technology. The Innovator's Dilemma describes why this is bad - it create inertia against innovation and it limits your revenue growth opportunities. It's the "why" of where Burroughs or Connor are today. Microsoft has all the classic symptoms.

Simply stated: Microsoft should have not been so aggressive in growth in the past - they wouldn't have this problem now. A simply lack of self-discipline and self-control in as much in opposition as Apple reeks with self-discipline and self-control.

Thus Microsoft's problem is akin to how Apple doesn't have the same problem now even though both companies are about the same age (give or take a year). Although you can think of this as karma for being assholes during the 1990s - it's really just that there's a real physical organization/economic mechanism behind it. Or... karma is real and physical!

Corporate IT is one of Microsoft's three major customers. Another is ISVs (most of whom were the VB6 weenies alienated in ~2000). Sure many people adopted .NET/VB7/C# etc. but Microsoft also lost a large and enthusiastic (blindly so in most cases) part of their mojo. Kind like Apple kicking out the trendy hipsters and expecting all to go well.

The third leg are Wintel HW vendors who have their own disconnects with the end-user markets. All insist on keeping customers at "arm's length".

And, no, end users are not in the top-three of Microsoft's customer base. Microsoft will say otherwise but it's BS lies or self-delusional lies they tell themselves: the supply chains tell the real story. And that is and always has been a serious problem for them despite their successes.

Further the market architecture of the Wintel system is fatally flawed for late adoption innovation - Microsoft's primary customers are 1-2 supply chain links up from actual end-users of their products.

Similarly Intel itself and most of the Wintel HW vendors are 2-3 supply chain links up from the actual end-users as well. This disconnect is part of why the A4 and A5 exist!

Then compare this with Apple which has 0 supply chain links from the customer, end users, for both HW and SW and it's pretty damn obvious who is going to "own late adoption" for computing appliances.

Late adoption requires "appliance-ification" of your product which can not be done at a distance like these supply chain gaps create. No, it's not a matter of "good top-down management" - it's that "bottom-up emergent activity" can't survive or thrive with supply chain gaps. Not when you have to design things by committee across corporate legal entity barriers.

This is why you need to do both HW and SW together - a goodly part of why Apple has its success. And this is why it's a fatal market flaw for Wintel. Which Android has chosen to replicate also. Brilliant! Duh!

As an entrepreneur I've always seen this kind of "it's not my job; I do SW (HW) not HW (SW)" behavior as a wonderful, heaven-sent opportunity to skewer larger competitors. It's an Aikido thing: use their weaknesses as your strengths so they their attempt to muscle you ends up damaging themselves more. It works surprisingly well. It seems to be working for Apple too.

The funny/sad part is all the Geeks who try to defend Wintel/Linux or Android who manage to irrelevantly talk right pass the iPad-buying public with specs and tech-weenie justification that mean absolutely nothing most paying customers. It's like trying to impress the prom queen with your slide rule skillz. It doesn't even register as rational or relevant. Nobody who matters (has money and want to spend it) cares.

You see a lot of these Geeks never lived through the actual leading edge period of PCs nor have most seen an entire technology cycle to even know what early or late adoption look like or how they are different in terms of selling or buying processes. In an early adoption environment, geeks have some power to (de)leverage sales.

I think that's what most of these folks are trying to tap into with spec-talk and nerd-talk about the L33t Pwr2 of Android or OSS or Wintel. The problem is the higher order technology adoption of computer devices is not in early adoption - only the subtechnology of tablets is so in terms of majority buyers, it's a late adoption buying process, not early adoption.

In that world, geeks are nearly powerless to influence most buying decisions because you are so tiny in number and the buyer market made up of non-Geeks so enormous in number. It's a Bayesian statistic prior population thing.

It's the early adoption phase when Geek outnumber or have parity with early adopter buyer markets that Geeks can play the role of "diffusion process gatekeeper". Not in late adoption though. It's a different game at that point. And Apple knows that game far better than all of the Wintel, OSS and Android crowd combined. Funny-Sad.

If you haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s books those are good; he reads his own audiobooks and I like his speaking style. He also has a podcast called revisionist history that I really like.

Tetlock’s superforecasting is a bit long-winded but good; it’s a lay-person’s book on his research for IARPA (intelligence research) to improve intelligence assessments. His intro mentions Kahneman and Duckworth’s grit. I haven’t read it yet, but Nate Silver’s signal and the noise is in a similar vein to Tetlock’s book and is also recommended by IARPA.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was really eye-opening to me to understand the differences in the way that liberals and conservatives (both in the political and cultural sense) view the world around them and how that affects social cohesion. He has a few TED talks if you’d like to get an idea of his research. Related, if you’re interested in an application of Kahneman’s research in politics, the Rationalizing Voter was a good book.

As a “be a better person” book, I really liked 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey (recommend it on audiobook). Particularly, unlike other business-style self-help about positive thinking and manipulating people—this book really makes you examine your core values, what’s truly important to you and gives you some tools to help refocus your efforts in those directions. Though, as I’m typing this I’m thinking about the time I’m spending on reddit and not reading the book I’ve been meaning to all night =p

Read these books to get to grips with the latest techniques and ways of working. As an employer I'd be extremely impressed if you'd read these books. They will give you a big head start when trying to move into the professional work environment. Most of them will apply to any programming language but they mainly use Java as the example language but it's very similar to C#. It's books like these that are the difference between a beginner and an expert, but don't forget when you start coding 9-5 with good developers you will very quickly pick things up. We were all in your position at one point, if you get these read it'll all be worth it in the end!

Coding

C# in depth - I've not read this one since I do Java but I've just had a quick glance. This should be pretty useful and it's a respected publisher. I think you should start with this one.

Clean Code - Great book which explains how to write clean concise code, this 1,000,000x. It doesn't matter what language you are using it should apply where ever you write code.

Cleaner Coder - Another Robert Martin book, this one is easy to read and quite short, it's all about conducting yourself in a professional manner when you are coding. Estimating time, working with co-workers, etc.. Another good read.

Growing Object-Oriented Software - This book is about writing code using test driven development. It explains the ideas and methodologies and then has a large example of a project that you build with TDD. I just read this recently and it is really good.

Head first design patterns - This book goes through essential design patterns when coding with an object orientated language. Another essential read. Very easy to read, lots of diagrams so no excuses to not read it!

Work Methodologys

Kanban

Succeeding with Agile


p.s

Start building stuff, get an account on linked in and state the languages you are working with. This will help as well because having something to show an employer is priceless.

Pro tip. If you find yourself talking about "getting people on board", you are taking the wrong approach; you are thinking about how to make your life better rather than how to make the overall organization better.

I can tell you what you are going to get out of your approach:

1. You will get resistance from the people proposing features because you are asking them to do extra work to make your life easier. Whether you get agreement or not is going to depend on the politics of the situation.
   
2. You will see a wide variance in the quality of the descriptions that you get, because a) the customers don't really know what they want and b) they aren't very skilled at expressing what they want.
   
3. You will get proposals with details that contradict the expressed direction that you want to take the product, details that are don't make sense, and details that violate known laws of physics.
   
4. The details you get will age poorly; they will refer to other feature that got cut or that got changed significantly during design.
   
5. Some of these features will get cut.
   
6. Even if you get perfect details, they will be insufficient for the dev team to go off and do the implementation, and you'll need to talk with the requester anyway.
   
   I see two big violation of agile principles in what you are proposing:
   
   

• We want to minimize the amount of work in progress that we have. All of those details are work in progress, and much of that work will be thrown away.
  
• We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
  
  A relevant definition here: "A user story is a promise to have a conversation". When you pull that request as something you are going to work on soon/right now, that's a perfect time to have a conversation between the development team and the user who requested the feature. In an hour you can discover the majority of the details that you need to do the implementation, and it's efficient both for your time and for the user's time.
  
  > Lastly, I'm really curious as to how people are valuating the value and cost of a task. How do we, as a development team, map out the technical cost of a feature and how should we ask the business to map out the value of getting a requested feature?
  
  This question comes up often, and here's how I like to think about it...
  
  For a given set of feature requests, there is an ordering that maximizes the benefit and minimizes the cost. You can probably come pretty close to determining that ordering for the top 25 items if you take the 15 people involved and lock them in a conference room for a week, so that is obviously the optimal approach, right?
  
  Having once spent 3 weeks of my life costing in a room costing and ordering a multi-year backlog, I can assure you the answer is "no".
  
  The problem is that an important question is missed, and that question is, "what is the opportunity cost of having long discussions about the exact ordering?"
  
  Given that such discussions typically involve senior stakeholders and they all have much better things to do with their time, the opportunity cost is high.
  
  What you should do is ask the requesters to bucket the requests into low/medium/high value, and you should do a really quick sizing estimate of small/medium/large/extra large for implementation effort. Then you just do a simple sort, and the list will be fine in most cases, and all you have to do is discuss where it isn't, move a few things down, and you're done.
  
  
  I agree strongly that you need an agile coach; not only to help you with these things but to help have some of the conversations you need to be having across the organization. I also highly recommend a couple of books to you:
  
  Ron Jeffries has a nice book called, "the Nature of Software Development", which is a great short introduction about agile development. It's short enough that you can hand it around to people.
  
  "The Phoenix Project" is a book about apply a lean technique called "The theory of constraints" to software. It's a novel and a pretty quick read, and the reason I recommend it is that it takes a "whole organization" perspective rather than focusing in on the dev team. It is essentially an adaption/rewrite of a lean classic called "The Goal".
  
  
  
  

If you like python, I'd double-down on really knowing how to use the language well and to work fluently in it. There is a huge advantage to having a language and toolchain which you feel really comfortable with.

• Work through a book like The Testing Goat Book which will guide you through setting up the dev environment for and building a web project and also teach you some good habits as far as building robust, well-tested software.
  
  
• Get comfortable with pdb and with using it alongside automated testing to be efficient at tracking down bugs. Debugging - 9 Indispensable Rules is a really fun read.
  
  
• Get good at recognising and talking about the difference between good and bad code. 500 Lines or Less is a free a book that focuses on the design decisions and tradeoffs that experienced programmers make when they are writing code. One of the sections in there is on web scraping and you might end up getting an internship at Skyscanner, where they use python heavily and some parts of the org do a buttload of web scraping.
  
  
• Get good at explaining technical concepts clearly. the best way to do this as a fresher in uni is to form a study group where you work on homework assignments together and take turns at the whiteboard explaining tricky concepts to folks who are stuck. In addition to being just a good idea for doing well in uni, This skill will be really useful in interviews.
  
  
• Maybe play around with setting up a webapp on a server. I've been using DigitalOcean and they're pretty great and have well-written tutorials.
  
  
• Learning Git is a good idea. My go-to tutorial is Git for Computer Scientists, but its been like 8 years since I learned so someone probably has a better suggestion.
  
  
• Learn to cook simple meals and keep to a mostly-consistent sleep schedule. This will make you a better student and help you balance the internship search with schoolwork. /r/mealprepsunday and /r/instantpot are good places to start.
  
  
• Consider going there early and enjoying the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Entrepreneur Reading List

1. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
   
2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
   
3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
   
4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
   
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
   
6. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
   
7. Ikigai
   
8. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
   
9. Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
   
10. The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
    
11. Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
    
12. The Web Startup Success Guide
    
13. The Best of Guerrilla Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing Remix
    
14. From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product
    
15. This Little Program Went to Market: Create, Deploy, Distribute, Market, and Sell Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You
    
16. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
    
17. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
    
18. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to Inspire and Educate
    
19. In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
    
20. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
    
21. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
    
22. Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
    
23. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
    
24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
    
25. Eric Sink on the Business of Software
    
26. Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas
    
27. Anything You Want
    
28. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
    
29. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
    
30. Tao Te Ching
    
31. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
    
32. The Tao of Programming
    
33. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    
34. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
    
    

    Computer Science Grad School Reading List
    

    
    

35. All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
    
36. Introductory Linear Algebra: An Applied First Course
    
37. Introduction to Probability
    
38. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    
39. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
    
40. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
    
41. What Is This Thing Called Science?
    
42. The Art of Computer Programming
    
43. The Little Schemer
    
44. The Seasoned Schemer
    
45. Data Structures Using C and C++
    
46. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
    
47. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    
48. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
    
49. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing
    
50. A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming
    
51. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
    
52. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
    
53. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
    
54. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory
    
55. How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
    
56. Types and Programming Languages
    
57. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms
    
58. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Mathematical Methods
    
59. Commonsense Reasoning
    
60. Using Language
    
61. Computer Vision
    
62. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    
63. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    
    

    Video Game Development Reading List
    

    
    

64. Game Programming Gems - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
    
65. AI Game Programming Wisdom - 1 2 3 4
    
66. Making Games with Python and Pygame
    
67. Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python
    
68. Bit by Bit

Articles from reputable sources are a decent source of knowledge, but some quality business books will get you an infinitely better understanding of concepts. Here is my personal business book list if you want to get a "universal generalist" understanding of business:

• Business Creation - The Lean Start-up
  
• Value Creation - How to Make Millions With Your Ideas
  
• Marketing - Getting Everything You Can Out Of Everything You Got / All Marketers Are Liars
  
• Sales - Pitch Anything
  
• Value Delivery - Indispensable
  
• Accounting/Finances - Financial Intelligence / Accounting Made Simple
  
• Understanding the Human Mind - Making Sense of Behavior
  
• Productivity - Getting Things Done
  
• Problem Solving - The 80/20 Principle
  
• Decision Making - Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions
  
• Negotiation - 3-D Negotiation
  
• Management - Growing Great Employees
  
• Project Management - Making Things Happen
  
• Statistics - Marketing Metrics
  
• Corporate Knowledge - The Effective Executive
  
• Corporate Strategy - Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies
  
• Creativity - The Creative Habit
  
• Personal Finance - Your Money or Your Life
  
  I am graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce Honors degree in May and I can easily say that one of these books (average price ~25$) has significantly more content than most individual classes I have taken (~600$). However, keep in mind that business knowledge and business acumen are two entirely different things. Knowledge is easily obtainable through books like these, and acumen is the result of applied experience with decision making. In short, it is one thing to be book smart, but it is another to get out there and actually apply it. No one can give you that in the form of an article or book - you have to do that yourself.
  
  edit: added links to amazon

Nothing has really changed in the realm of vehicle dynamics over the last few decades, the physics understanding that is. We've known about the forces and reactions and how to calculate them for a very long time, it's just not until recent times where we've been able to actually measure them during a race. The modern race car now has telemetry to measure just about everything you can imagine but it's main purpose is to validate the theoretical models that the engineers use to design the car in the first place. Now just because we can measure them easily doesn't mean we can get lazy and stop worrying about the "why".

A good example of an "olden days" book is Race Car Vehicle Dynamics by the Milliken Brothers, in fact this is often referred to as the bible of vehicle dynamics regardless of it being written nearly two decades ago. It's a great resource but it's not for the faint of heart, there is a lot of in-depth analysis starting from the basics (steady state, tires, kinematics, weight transfer) and then moves onto the more difficult aspect (transient responses, tire load sensitivities, dampers/springs, aero) most of which would require some sort of engineering/physics background to grasp but if you're determined to learn about this stuff, it's an enlightening read.

I've read Tune to Win several times now as well as the other books in the series when I first got into racing a while back and if you're looking for a general high level overview of vehicle dynamics/aero/driving than it's a great read, for anything more you're gonna have to move onto more serious books.

Now for an engine overview, I'm not sure what sort of background you have but for a comprehensive book that covers just about everything from basics to the black-magic sort of stuff, you can have a look at Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals which covers everything from types of engines, principals of operation, kinematics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, modelling, basically everything and similar to RCVD, is often referred to as the bible for ICE's.

Now, I've given you two resources, these are not by any means the only two authorities on these topics, there are many more (and cheaper) resources you can look at. It all depends on how much you want to know, personally I own these books and a hell of a lot more, I find I buy more books than I can keep up with but I know they all have something that I want to know about. I want to eventually make my way into F1 as an engineer so I figure I better get a head start and learn as much as I can before I make any serious attempt.

Good luck, hope this helps!

I'm not an expert, but I'll offer my humble advice. It does not sound like your daughter and her father are "connected". I'd advise trying to find ways to bring up the value of rapport and let him figure out its importance on his own. Trying to change him directly is unlikely to work, but a little bit of persuasive psychology will give you big results.

A couple suggestions:

• Leave links like this up on your computer and let him discover and read them on his own
  
  
• Get some books that support your concerns and bookmark parts you would like him to read. You don't have to ask him to read it, just leave the bookmarked copy by the toilet. I recommend The Connected Child just off the top of my head
  
  
• Lead by example. Don't tell him how you want him to interact with your daughter, model it for him.
  
  These are just a few strategies that I could think of right now, but I hope it helps. I can tell that you really want to fix this and the simple fact that you are seeking help tells me that you will. Good luck!

Plenty of good feedback on your design in this thread but I'll throw this out there. If you want to learn more about ICE engines (and you should if you want to design them) here are some good books on it. I'm an engineering student, lead engine designer for my FSAE team and taking a break from a lit review on compression ignition engines for my research project to do some redditing. These are some of the best books that I've found, presented in the order you should read them (from most basic to most advanced). Basically, if you want to revolutionize a technology you need to understand most if not all of what has come before.

• Four Stroke Performance Tuning by Graham Bell:
  
  The value of this book is largely in getting an introduction to how physics and calculations play into engines. It's intuitive but thought provoking.
  
  
• Design and Simulation of Four Stroke Engines by Gordon P Blair
  
  This is one of the most noted ICE books, he also has a 2 stroke edition, and can be read and reread. It delves deeper into discharge coefficients and gas flow through engines, with a focus on pressure waves.
  
  
• Internal Combustion Fundamentals by John Heywood
  
  The name may make this one sound basic but in reality it's the most basic book of the next level of research. Where Blair will help you characterize and optimize an existing engine Heywood will help you design one from scratch. I honestly haven't been through this book entirely but it's tremendously useful.
  
  One thing I notice about your design that I have to point out is sealing the paddle to the combustion chamber. You're looking at something very similar to an apex seal on a Wankel engine, arguably the greatest weak point for that engine. In your design, the direction of drag on that seal would change but on the other hand it would experience slower average speeds.

What I'm talking about is pretty basic knowledge. I'd suggest googling for it first and reading through that.

If you're using an IDE (seriously, use an IDE), look for debugging in <your IDE>. It should give you what you need. You should be able to stop execution at a given breakpoint, step into and over method calls, and inspect the values of object and expressions. Bonus points for learning how to "Run to the cursor position" instead of dropping breakpoints everywhere and for figuring out conditional breakpoints. It's more complicated, but being able to debug a remote application is also really useful for most web applications.

After that, if you want to get into more systematic debugging, I recommend looking at Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems

For SQL, again, read the basics and then play around with it in an SQL application. Honestly, for learning purposes, if you have it, MS Access is pretty good. MySQL is probably the most accessible free tool.

Learn how to get data, filter it, order it from a single table. Then how to use grouping and group level filtering with GROUP BY and HAVING. Then learn inner and outer joins.

That's going to put you way in front of most young devs.

If you want to really get into it, I recommend Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties, but that's kind of overkill.

Hi skunk,

Since everyone is remaining quiet I might as well give this a shot. I'm from a technical background but currently studying PM in my spare time in the hope that I can progress in this direction within my industry.

PMP

It seems like the global standard is the PMP with PMI which requires:

> A secondary degree (high school diploma, associate’s degree, or the global equivalent) with at least five years of project management experience, with 7,500 hours leading and directing projects and 35 hours of project management education.

> OR

> A four-year degree (bachelor’s degree or the global equivalent) and at least three years of project management experience, with 4,500 hours leading and directing projects and 35 hours of project management education.

I'm currently studying towards this. I've taken recommendations from this subreddit (and /r/pmp) and bought:

• Rita Mulcahy's PMP Exam Prep, Eighth Edition
  
  and
  
  
• PMI's PMBOK, Fifth Edition
  
  In order to obtain the required 35 contact hours, I bought one of several cheap Groupons for $99. I'm not going to link the course because I don't necessarily recommend it - it should be easy enough to find and people have linked to these in previous posts. It doesn't really matter anyway because it's just so I can "tick that box", as I've learnt everything I need to know from the books.
  
  The exam however will have to be sat in person. I have yet to do this so can't give you any pointers.
  
  CAPM
  
  If you don't match the above criteria, you can always opt for the lower qualification of CAPM (also with PMI) and work your way up.
  For this I reccommend CAPM/PMP Project Management Certification, Third Edition and the previously mentioned online course.
  
  Please note that you can potentially pitch anything as a project in the right light, even washing the dishes. Aim high and try to get the hours for PMP if possible.
  
  PRINCE2 & SIX SIGMA
  
  What else? Well, if I'm successful with the PMP and still enjoy PM after the blood, sweat and tears, I'm looking at these two qualifications.
  
  I've already added a few books to my Amazon wishlist but have yet to seriously look into these with enough detail to commit.
  
  
• Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2
  
• PRINCE2 Study Guide
  
• PRINCE2 For Dummies
  
  I know that the exam for the PRINCE2 foundation level (and possibly practitioner level?) can be sat online with a webcam.
  
  
• Six Sigma for Dummies
  
• Six Sigma Workbook for Dummies
  
  Six Sigma I know very little about except that several colleagues have mentioned it and my industry takes it seriously. However, I don't believe you can do these Six Sigma "belts" online.
  
  Sorry for the serious wall of text but I just thought I'd share everything I know about PM accreditation. This isn't a comprehensive list but I'm planning on doing 90% online so I'm in a similar situation to yourself.
  
  I would be grateful for any feedback myself from experienced PMs on my plans going forward.

/u/Kiwibaconator has it right, but allow me to expand on that. For both gasoline and diesel fueled engines, peak combustion temp and exhaust temp is right around 15.5 to 17:1 (lambda =~1.1); anything richer or leaner than this range becomes cooler.

As you may know, diesels generally run at 25:1 with a peak of 18:1 to 16.5:1 only during acceleration and the turbo has not produced full boost. But during steady state lug curve, generally runs at the ~28:1 (rated) to ~22:1 (peak torque) and 50 to 65:1 at idle. This steady state lug curve afr is well below the peak temperature of 15.5 to 17:1. The leaner side of afr is much cooler than the rich side of afr.
Why is lean afr cool? It is because the more excess air is available, the more the heat of combustion is spreadout among the mass of air. Think of the air as a tiny heat sink, the more Air to Fuel ratio, the more heat sink mass to energy input.

Gasoline will typically run on the rich side, from 15.5 to 14.5 afr. With modern 3-way cats and O2 sensors, the engine is designed to oscillate back and forth between 14.5 and 15 for catalyst chemistry reasons. Gasoline combustion temps are lower because of the much lower compression and boost, but the exhaust temps are still higher. Running extra rich (<14:1) also helps prevent predetonation by slowing down combustion with excess fuel and partial combustion products. Slowing down combustion with extra fuel also combines with the heat sink idea, except now the extra fuel is the heat sink, and the energy release is limited by the amount of oxygen available; so in a sense the extra fuel is not combusted thoroughly, which limits its energy release, but gets heated up a lot which helps dilute the heat and reduce the peak temperature.

Source:
Heywood
ME - engine design 10yrs (diesel)

Have you ever read the book The Goal or it's more modern retelling The Phoenix Project? They're both essentially books about process management wrapped in a "novel". The former was written in the ~80s and is about a guy who is a plant manager at Widgetco (or something) a manufacturing company, the latter is about a guy who is Operations Manager at Gagetcorp (or whatever). Both are put in a position where they simultaneously take on way more responsibility and realize that their company has been doing things very poorly which has put them in a bad position.

I would highly recommend both because they're quick and amazing reads...but one takeaway I'll offer as advice here:

Make sure to make it very clear that PROCESS is very important to building a stable platform. Having means to check your work, adapt quickly, extend where needed, etc...stress that this is critical to build something that scales beyond a certain point (the point you're at now). Then explain that the previous person in your position didn't do a bad job, they just weren't thinking in terms of the scale that this project was going to grow to (make it clear this is common, but a serious problem). The real problem isn't that the old stuff is bad, it's that it was built in a way that couldn't be extended (and also...it's bad). The point you need to get across is that the only way to do the things he wants from where he is is to start over and build something made to grow. You can only supe up a civic so much before you're better off just buying a better car and starting from there. (I'm not good at folksy metaphors)

FWIW, I've never been a dev, I started as operations engineer turned support engineer turned sales engineer turned "Technical Account Manager" (I'm a people person!); but I do have a lot of experience telling important people what can't be done. Bottom line with technology is unless you're just bad at your job there are hard requirements to doing things well. All you can do is explain those requirements must be met, or the expectation has to be that the job won't be done well and hope your boss listens. If he does, good you made a change in the world for the better. If he doesn't disagree, commit, document[1], and move on. If you're good enough to make these kinds of suggestions, you're good enough to find another job when this gets unbearable.

[1] - document (for your on use) not just that you disagreed, but exactly how you would have implemented it. When I interview people, I often like to hear times they wanted to do something one way and didn't get to. Being able to speak well about that is a positive trait to me. (Not to give unsolicited interviewing advice)

This is a great resource: https://www.oneweekpm.com. This course is a great place to start.

Hitchhiker's Guide to Product Management ( great blog ):

Books to read after the course: https://yilunzh.com/pm/

INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love: https://www.amazon.com/INSPIRED-Create-Tech-Products-Customers-ebook/dp/B077NRB36N

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Product-Playbook-Innovate-Products/dp/1118960874

Shipping Greatness: Practical lessons on building and launching outstanding software, learned on the job at Google and Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Greatness-Practical-launching-outstanding/dp/1449336574

Hope this guides help.

To gather insight, help teams find their own places they want to improve, and generate self-realized learning... try Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.

Consensus driving change or driving work is all about figuring out what is the next best thing to try and improve.

If you aren't already, try capturing the outputs of your retros and have the team commit to one thing you want to make better or make great. Make this an actual backlog item and track it as you would work coming in. It should be owned by everyone, and it should be a driving force to try some actions to improve it. If you can get 1 thing agreed to by the team to improve, and then a proposed action to try as a team; you will rapidly find your pain points and make them better.

Some additional information can help a lot in recommendations. I'd like to know the following:

What is your team size?

Is your team co-located (all in one place)?

Can you describe the type and flow of your work?

Do you have open channels of communication with your customer, and if not, do you have people who can stand in and more or less speak for the customer?

Do you think the leadership would be on board for a drastic change?

It is unlikely that the visibility and continuous improvement of an agile framework will not bring about significant improvements within your company. Also, if you are the type that thrives on facilitating a team and helping them grow to excellence, then this will be a great career change. Personally, I love my job and enjoy every day. With the above simple questions answered, it would be a lot easier to spark a conversation.

Jeff Southerland's book (already mentioned) is a great intro for Scrum, and not a boring read. I also like David Anderson's Kanban, if you have a more steady continuous workflow like a compliance or support team, this can fit better. Also, a good read. The Scrum Guide is rather short and is the definitive guide for the Scrum framework. Exactly how you execute under that framework is largely up to the team, but everything is based on the idea of iterative continuous improvement. Once you get this idea down in practice, you'll be hooked.

Mesa seems like a pretty decent city. I was looking for safer cities of that size and couldn't find any. Austin, Tx. is larger and safer and richer, though, so I don't think we can use that one data point to make any broad conclusions.

There are many variables that play into it, I completely agree. We are just beginning to take a more scientific approach to analyzing what the best way to network a bunch of humans together is to get the results we want.

Scale takes an interesting run at the issue. As far as I know, it is not partisan. It does reduce individuality quite a bit in its analysis but from what I hear, some white nationalists are into that.

But you bring up a good point, what all of us want is safe, prosperous cities. The rest is largely decoration.

One thing suggested in Scale is that politics is largely incidental to crime and economic growth. Stacking up a bunch of people tends to generate wealth.

Hmmm, so where does that leave our evaluations?

Great list! I have read all the above and totally agree that their value is worthwhile to anyone seeking to improve their life -- regardless of financial status, relationships, profession, etc. A couple others that I've found useful along the road:

6. The Six Pillars of Self Esteem by N. Branden. During the reawakening stage and after a particularly painful breakup, I found this book helpful. Learning the concept of "alone-ness" versus "loneliness" continues to drive many motivations.

7. Games People Play by Eric Berne. Want to understand why your plate/gf/wife went batshit insane over the stupidest thing, and how to counteract it in the future? Read this book. Want to understand why your coworker was making those strange comments to your boss? Read this book - a must for anyone wanting to learn more about game theory and its application to everyday life. (Next on my list is The Art of Strategy ).

8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. In many ways this is an antithesis to Freudian thought -- whereas Freud argued man is happy when seeking and obtaining pleasure, Frankl postulates that finding meaning and understanding is what makes us happy. In the context of TRP theory, meditating on, if not fully understanding, these concepts is absolutely necessary.

9. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. The seminal work on the concept and application of persuasion. From negotiations to dating/relationships to job performance, I would rank this book at the top of many lists.

A few other authors/books I've seen mentioned elsewhere that are worth checking out: anything by Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of War by Sun Tzu (which goes hand in hand with The Prince for a great East/West study), and Rollo Tomassi. I've also found some of Oscar Wilde's writing to be both amusing and insightful.

[edit: formatting.]

Not really sure if this will come off as condescending but here are some books for general parenting or parenting kids with behavioral issues. For any folks out there looking for resources.


The Connected Child
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001
Mainly focuses on attachment, or lack there of, for adoptive parents but some of the info is good for parents with children who have behavioral issues caused by attachment issues. Does have some religious aspects but also creates space for non-religious folks as well.

The Whole Brian Child
https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Brain-Child-Revolutionary-Strategies-Developing/dp/0553386697 great general parenting book.

No Drama Discipline
https://www.amazon.com/No-Drama-Discipline-Whole-Brain-Nurture-Developing/dp/034554806X help me understand what’s happening in my kids brain in misbehaving and tactics for working through various issues.

These really helped me feel empowered and informed as a parent. Every time we do well with the stuff we feel like the best parents in the world. Hope this helps anyone out there that might need it.

Edit: links and formatting. I suck at it and I’m on mobile so...
2: a word

First of all, it's a great question. I've been wrestling with it for quite a while now.

Might I suggest a few things...

Read Philip Tetlock's book, "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Predicting".

This is real-world stuff that has Bayesian thinking at it's heart.

If you are intrigued, consider getting involved with Tetlock's Good Judgment project to get some actual hands-on experience with it and to start developing a network of peers.

You can read about it here. I recently took the one-day workshop when I was in Washington DC, but that's not really necessary to get started.

You can also participate in Good Judgment Open, and try your hand at actual forecasting using Bayesian methods.

Another book I would highly recommend is Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts". She actually references Tetlock a lot.

I will caution you that the first time I read "Thinking in Bets" I thought it was lame, and put it down before I finished. But then I heard her on a podcast and realized she's top-notch. Not only did I go back and read the book in full, but I read it twice (with extensive marking).

If you like Annie Duke, consider signing up for her weekly newsletter.

Finally, the first step -- in my opinion -- in internalizing Bayesian thinking and such is to know, internalize, and practice Cromwell's Rule.

I don't recall either Philip Tetlock or Annie Duke referring to it explicitly, but it is the foundation upon which all they discuss is built.

Good luck!

Kanban is just a way to visualize your work, and by doing so to limit your work in progress (WIP). I've worked on Agile teams that used Kanban boards to track all their deliverables and to make the work visible so that there was absolute clarity on what was in the backlog, what was in progress, and what was done.

Tools like Trello are good, and a lot of project management/issue tracking systems aimed at Agile organization have a way to do Kanban. Jira, for example, has a way to use it. To me, however, Kanban works best with an actual physical board that you move cards or sticky notes across. It's easy to close and ignore a browser tab or an application window, it's a bit harder to do that when you've got a whiteboard mounted to the wall with brightly colored sticky notes on it.

This is a good book that explains the theory and methodology behind Kanban: Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

> I have a very hard time feeling bad for them

You don't need to feel bad, nor are you requested to feel bad. I assume you support "freedom" (as in a human right, US constitution, that sort of thing)? The thing about freedom is that it also means people and companies have the freedom to make bad decisions. They can do really boneheaded things. They can make it impossible to take your money.

Every time you decide to circumvent them you are saying that their freedom does not matter - your desires trump their freedoms. But you also hurt yourself. You only have a finite amount of time and attention. When you spend it on apps instead of the alternatives then you prevent the improvement of the alternatives. Sure the alternatives may currently be less desirable but the more they are used the more they will improve. Additionally the original gets harmed by less time and attention. This provides a feedback loop rewarding what you desire and retarding what you don't. You currently prevent that feedback loop.

A more concrete example - Microsoft piracy in China has been accepted. All those people using the pirated Windows did not pay time and attention to the alternatives. If instead they had gone with the alternatives it would have significantly strengthened them. Microsoft would have been forced to be more competitive which would have benefited everyone.

I agree that the ads are often terrible. But let them have the freedom to make dumb decisions and reward the alternatives doing good with your time and attention.

This is a fairly useful review that I believe is available via google scholar for free: Wainer, H., & Thissen, D. (1981). Graphical data analysis. Annual review of psychology, 32, 191–241.

Tufte is useful for a historical overview and for inspiration, but he has a particular style that doesn't necessarily match up with the way that you or your audience think.

Hadley Wickham developed ggplot2 and his site is a good place to start browsing for guides to using it.

There's a pretty good o'reilly book on visualization as well, and Stephen Few's book does a really good job of enumerating the various ways you can express trends in data.

My introduction to Social Engineering was in "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security" by the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick.

From the wiki:
All, or nearly all, of the examples are fictional, but quite plausible. They expose the ease with which a skilled social engineer can subvert many rules most people take for granted. A few examples:

• A person gets out of a speeding ticket by fooling the police into revealing a time when the arresting officer will be out of town, and then requesting a court date coinciding with that time.
  
  
• A person gains access to a company's internal computer system, guarded by a password that changes daily, by waiting for a snowstorm and then calling the network center posing as a snowed-in employee who wants to work from home, tricking the operator into revealing today's password and access through duplicity
  
  
• A person gains lots of proprietary information about a start-up company by waiting until the CEO is out of town, and then showing up at the company headquarters pretending to be a close friend and business associate of the CEO.
  
  
• A person gains access to a restricted area by approaching the door carrying a large box of books, and relying on people's propensity to hold the door open for others in that situation.
  
  Honestly, it was a better introduction to and explaination of social engineering than pretty much anything I've caught on this subreddit. Most things on here are more "pick-up artist" tricks than what I would personally consider true social engineering.

Oh with 11 years experience I don't think you would get much out of CAPM. It is very much a 'get-you-in-the-door' type certificate.

Rita's is a text book, https://www.amazon.com/PMP-Exam-Prep-Eighth-Updated/dp/1932735658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509553496&sr=8-1&keywords=rita which I found very helpful. The end of chapter tests are quite good, the only downside is they do relate to the material you just learned which is quite leading. I am not sure if there is going to be an updated version coming out soon with the updates to the test format and the PMBOK.

Another paid resource I found useful was PMTraining. It was a pretty reasonable cost for a 3 month subscription and I found the questions similar in format to the actual test exam.

For free resources, I found that the Oliver Lehmann questions were pretty solid. The HeadFirst mock exam was maybe a bit on the easy side, but was a good exercise in taking a 200 question multiple choice test.

The Rita Process game found @ http://pmp.aamirafridi.com/_rpg/index-3.html was really helpful to me as well. Being able to map out the processes, and figure out exactly what process group you are is very valuable IMO.

The machine learning model. Remember that Cognicism, the actual authors claims are not shown to users. The ML outputs an aggregate view of a collective of people trying to find a common truth together. The idea of "centralized arbiters of truth" really doesn't have much legs in my mind.

There are many attempts at making a "scoring algorithm" for truth. We talk about most of them in the manifesto.

Truthcoin (now hivemind) is basically just a crypto based on prediction markets. Simpler but I think it can be corrupted. [Metaculus] (http://www.metaculus.com/help/scoring/) also focuses on prediction and they concede that there are infinite scoring functions.

----------

From my perspective, the key is ML model, and FourThought API which is a constraint on how truths are evaluated. You don't just rate true or false, you rate on a spectrum of 0% likely to be true to 100% likely.

The ML model is using the raw text of the thoughts as well as the collective score. It's always trying to predict itself what accounts are making the predictions (or statements) that end up being logged to the chain.

The models seem to favor accounts that fall into the basic constraints laid out in this book They use Brier scores for evaluation like Prediction Book. In their case they find that scorers that make more nuanced predictions, and update their scores more often are more accurate. The ML models are meant to learn similar patterns in accounts.

The models are constantly learning, and becoming more rich with knowledge over time, and resistant to corruption by trolls.

Early models with not a lot of training time and pretty dumb and susceptible.

Correct for some companies. Especially, now that the internet has really helped us define affinity groups or tribes. Check out Seth Godin if you like discussing that.

The economy has scared a lot of companies into consolidating their products to target the acceptance of the mass bell-curve. This is the safe route; they don't want to wait for the adoption curve to pick up.

Here's the other kick: Some companies are too big to take small wins. A company has to show good returns on their stock every quarter. A small company can turn a profit from niche; however, a larger company has too much infrastructure to support for anything other than large wins and huge margins (to turn the same percent growth).

Suggest reading the Innovator's Dilemma if this is interesting to you.

Say no more, fam.

You don't need a degree to run a business. Having your own business allows you to experiment with these books first hand instead of taking some professor's word for it. Professor's usually just read what the book says. If they were actually good at running a business they'd probably be doing that.

• Business Creation - The Lean Start-up
  
  
  
• Value Creation - How to Make Millions With Your Ideas
  
  
  
• Marketing - Getting Everything You Can Out Of Everything You Got / All Marketers Are Liars
  
  
  
• Sales - Pitch Anything
  
  
  
• Value Delivery - Indispensable
  
  
  
• Accounting/Finances - Financial Intelligence / Accounting Made Simple
  
• Understanding the Human Mind - Making Sense of Behavior
  
  
  
• Productivity - Getting Things Done
  
  
  
• Problem Solving - The 80/20 Principle
  
  
  
• Decision Making - Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions
  
  
  
• Negotiation - 3-D Negotiation
  
  
  
• Management - Growing Great Employees
  
  
  
• Project Management - Making Things Happen
  
  
  
• Statistics - Marketing Metrics
  
  
  
• Corporate Knowledge - The Effective Executive
  
  
  
• Corporate Strategy - Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies
  
  
  
• Creativity - The Creative Habit
  
  
  
• Personal Finance - Your Money or Your Life

If you're interested in Scrum (it's not an acronym) then an easy way to get started is to take training as a CSM (Certified Scrum Master). It's a 2-day course with a fairly easy multiple-choice exam.

If you're already a Product Manager, you could also look at the CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) which will help you understand the differences in the way requirements are treated.

Scrum isn't the be-all and end-all of Agile methods, so do keep your mind open after the training! But it will help you to get your foot in the door.

After that, try looking for local Agile or Scrum groups; most big cities have them. Look out for Agile conferences too; even if you can't make it, a lot of them post the talks online.

If you do end up as a PM and you're struggling to understand something, don't be afraid to hire an Agile Coach for a few days. They'll help to mentor you, explain how Agile works, and fine-tune your processes.

The most important thing to remember about Agile methods is that they're there to help handle uncertainty. For anything you do that's new, and you've never done before, it's useful to make discoveries early rather than later and to get feedback quickly on those discoveries. In Waterfall we made sure we we're getting it right. In Agile, we assume we can't know everything up front and will inevitably get some of it wrong.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Kanban, which is related to Agile and originally derived from the Lean techniques used at Toyota, and Cynefin (my blog, the Wikipedia page is also good). Mike Cohn's books are a pretty good first stop for basic Scrum, but Kanban and Cynefin will help you to see beyond that.

Finally, if you get stuck, http://pm.stackexchange.com is your friend. You can also shout out on Twitter; there's always people willing to help and pass you links and ideas.

(Oh, and don't worry too much about the formality. I work as a Lean / Kanban and Agile consultant, have no formal qualifications in it, and am internationally recognized. Doing it and having the metrics and stories to show that you've done it is more important than a qualification.)

12-13 is a major time of transition. It is too early to know who and what he will be when he comes out on the other side of it, but it is certainly not too early to worry about it. And there is still room for parental guidance. Teens are complicated, so it's a good time to refresh your parenting library.

The first book that your post brought to my mind was this one by Paul Tough: "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character" http://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Succeed-Curiosity-Character/dp/0544104404 I'll haven't finished it, however; it didn't seem relevant to my kids. But it's popular and may be worth checking out. I also like Madeline Levine's books, which are along similar lines but fit my family a bit better.

The book that influenced my parenting the most is Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes" But I read this when my kids were very young, and I suspect it is why we didn't need Paul Tough's book at 12.

For me, it depends on two things mainly: my current level of focus, and my understanding of the problem I'm trying to solve (actually, it would be better to state that as: my understanding of the solution to the problem).

On focus, sometimes I have a spec'd out system (so I know exactly what I am going to code, often I have good pseudo-code), and I can write 500 lines of code in a couple hours. Other times, I might have the same spec, and it would take me 5 days to write the same 500 lines. I find there are a lot of variables that contribute to my level of focus. I find that I focus much better after vacations, which is why vacations actually make me more productive. I focus much better when my body and mind are in a good state - physically fit, which is why exercising is so valuable, well-rested, sufficient nutrition, how happy I am. Spending a decent amount of time outside each day, even 15 minutes, makes a huge difference for me (could be vitamin-D production). Personally, I focus much better when I listen to music than when I don't (if it's non-vocal music, it drowns out external stimuli). I have two monitors at work, and if I want to get into serious coding, I never have a web browser open in my second monitor. I usually try to keep my IDE occupying both screens, and if I need textual information, I copy it into a blank document in my IDE. If I need to reference a paper, I print it out. Caffeine can give me a temporary boost in focus, but usually results in a longer period of poor-focus.

Sometimes I work on an open-ended problem, where the problem is simple, but the solution is completely unclear. Not "bugs" per-se, but research, often involving somewhat fuzzy math. I might spend 10 days manipulating 50 lines of code. Other times, when a bug crops up, I know exactly what the issue is and I can fix it immediately.

I've heard as a rule of thumb, a good programmer will generate 50 lines of completely correct code in a day. Not sure how true that is, and obviously "lines of code" is a varying metric, depending on language, coding style, and so on.

Others mention debugging as a major factor. This diminishes with experience and learning, although of course it never goes away completely. As you specialize in some domain, you learn techniques for debugging problems in that domain. One of the things I've gotten a lot better at over time is building test data inputs to illustrate bugs.

For debugging, I recommend reading this book. It may not be useful for exceptional, highly experienced programmers, but I've found that it has probably made me 2-4x more efficient at debugging, and it's a super-short read (took me maybe 6 hours, and I'm a really slow reader). The other thing that makes a huge difference is learning clean coding style. As my code has gotten cleaner, I've introduced considerably fewer bugs, and spent less time tracking down the bugs I have introduced. If you haven't already, I recommend learning functional programming and spending some time with literate programming (which is less well-known). Literate programming isn't really that fundamentally different, but it teaches you to think about your program as an expression (explanation, even) of ideas or concepts, and that causes you to write your programs as an expression of the underlying ideas, making them much more clear.

The Phoenix Project is a great book and has some really interesting (though a bit idealistic in my opinion) theories about organization and execution. That book really jump-started my Kanban efforts. I don't think I could recommend a single book to cover everything because my current efforts have grown organically over years of trial and error and I pulled from a lot of different places to accomplish it all.

As I mentioned, I use Kanban to manage workflow and a bit of Agile/Scrum concepts for meetings. Some good resources along those lines are...

http://www.agilesysadmin.net/kanban_sysadmin

http://blog.digite.com/kanban-in-it-operations/

http://www.amazon.com/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary-Technology-Business/dp/0984521402

You may also want to look more into retrospectives, where you look back on what happened and discuss what worked, what didn't, what you could do better, how the process can be improved, etc. But also pulling in Agile concepts of iterations so your retrospectives don't wait until the end of a 6 month project, instead you'd hold them more frequently so you can derive more value throughout the process and make frequent changes/adjustments.

Aside from Tufte, you might find Cleveland's Visualizing Data worthwhile. I'm reading Stephen Few's Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis now.

Also, try following some related blogs, like Nathan Yau's Flowing Data or Kaiser Fung's Junk Charts. You can get a sense of some appropriate and/or inappropriate ways of visualizing data from these.

Finally, once you get more familiar, get something like Murrell's R Graphics. This will help you understand the basics of the base R graphics capabilities so you can make what you want, exactly how you want. ggplot2 is awesome, too, but understanding the basics is really helpful. Hope that helps.

>ignore it altogether

this is up for debate. there's a theory/business thinking called "disruptive business/disruptive technology," and one of its main tenets is that a company should go the lengths to "ignore" what its customer base is saying... but the tenet is followed up with a statement that says that a company should do all in its power to seek out new innovations the customer is not expecting or doesn't know of.

customers don't know everything, and sometimes it's not a bad idea to ignore them while you cook up some fancy new features (iPhone's visual voicemail for example).

what RIM did was the opposite of this. It's apparent that while they were caught up in their own success, their hubris led to them thinking they did not have to worry about the iPhone and its encroachment of the business sector.

They failed to notice that the walls between one's 'corporate career' and 'personal life' have been coming down over the years. Devices that make one's personal life easy to manage have now found themselves in the 'corporate career' zone, all thanks to a well developed UI and lots of research into HCI.

you can read more about this stuff in this book, it's pretty good stuff:

I wouldn't call it fluff. If read it all, it's pretty informative. He looked at Suzuki's comparables among players who produced close to his place. He separated his analysis in various groups to draw many comparisons:

• Players who scored 1.5 PPQ by their third year in the CHL versus those who didn't. Suzuki belongs in the first group, and that's quite a star-studded line up.
  
  
• The five players who scored a similar pace than Suzuki in the CHL and player four years there. The list include a few second line players (e.g., Danault and Kadri) but all players played some time in the NHL.
  
  
• The players who scored at a similar pace than Suzuki, but played only three years in the CHL (e.g., Draisaitl, Couturier, Meier). The list is of a different level, which makes sense since all of them were rushed to the NHL, but all of them tracked Suzuki eerily closely during these three years.
  
  
• The players who played either three or four years in the CHL while tracking closely Suzuki (which is a mix of the previous players, plus Huberdeau). It's a very solid list. If you ignore Etem's presence, Scott Laughton is arguably the second worst player on that list of 7 players.
  
  Obviously it gives no definitive prediction. There is much uncertain about prospects, so with the rare exception of top-end talent, it's hard to predict whether the player is NHL-ready. All of us were wrong about Kotkaniemi's NHL-readiness last year, for example. That being said, it allows us to have a better informed idea of his odds of making the NHL.
  
  If you look at the list of the four years CHL players, then Suzuki looks like it'll take some time to settle and will benefit from a year or two in the AHL. On the other hand, his first three years and his OHL playoff performance suggest a different kind of player. In either case, there's a solid chance we have a second line or better player. Suzuki's closest comparable is actually Kadri, which isn't bad at all. While it's possible he'll flop (i.e., Hodgson and Etem), he's more likely than not going to play in the NHL. He isn't overhyped.
  
  People tend to look down upon uncertain conclusions (Truman famously demanded a one-handed economist), but studies demonstrate that analysts who make these mitigated predictions are by far the most accurate. Good forecasting requires to be aware of the uncertainty, and acknowledging it is a signal of competence. I'm more wary of those who use sport analytics to arrive to very confident conclusions.

There is no one book. What you are looking for is perspectives.

My suggestion, first up: Start with The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

It is a great book for people who are currently employed, and are struggling to understand why business owners think the way they think. Also, it introduces some basic lean thinking concepts (Theory of Constraints) that are very useful regardless of whether you are trying to be an entrepreneur or not. If you plan to hire people, this should be required reading for all of them. Remember, the book was written in the last century, some culture shock is expected.

Next: I would highly recommend reading The Lean Startup. It's a bit dated now, and newer refinements are available, but every other book kind of builds upon this book.

Now you should be able to relate to whether your business idea is sound or not. Next you want to understand, how other people became successful, for this, you need to read Nir Eyal's Hooked. The book is an eye opener for how various online businesses keep making us coming back for more.

Now you are close to building your product, but maybe you need to understand if you are onto something worth selling or not? The Lean Startup will tell you to do a Smokescreen MVP or a Concierge MVP. An even better approach is defined in Sprint. This approach allows you to test business assumptions in a highly structured manner.

After all of this, hopefully, you will someday reach a stage, where you will need to go and pitch your idea to investors. Get Backed teaches you to put together a presentation for investors, and how to handle the presentation.

At the end of all of this, you might be feeling very optimistic about life and stuff, but to keep yourself grounded, read up on Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It is one of the most humbling books you could ever read, and once in a lifetime kind of a book that is as profound as the Chicken Soup books.

if they would get rid of the Oracle cert and the second SQL class(r u srs with literally writing out select and insert statements), not focus on teaching JavaFX for Software I and II(and add some heavier programming), add an assembly class( I do like how they cover AArch64 in the computer arch class though), add a "non OO language" class I would say WGU's CS program would match most other online CS programs from regionally accredited, non profit unis

adding a compiler class would make it exceptional among online CS degrees but would make the degree even harder

another class I took at my B&M is a debugging class (they assigned this book and I still quote it to this day), I think that would be really interesting to offer as well

​

as it stands I don't think it's as good as most decent B&Ms or most online CS degrees

​

source: 7 years of experience, was on last year of CS degree at good B&M

Gotcha. That really sucks, and I mean that in the most meaningful way possible haha.

That type of thinking is the complete opposite of "agile" development, where typically there is a budget, but product owners and devs work together, iteration-by-iteration to determine what needs to change. If an "estimate" is carved in stone, then it's not an estimate anymore, but a fixed-bid project--again, the complete opposite of what developing with agility is supposed to be.

Sounds like a good starting place is learning about lean development and building a minimum viable product, since they're so sensitive about estimate granularity. That manager will have to learn to lead building a very minimum viable product, with as minimally necessary a valuable feature set as possible.

I recommend reading:

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
  
• The Lean Product Playbook
  
• Inspired

Your intuition is 100% spot on and defines the difference between a product-oriented approach and a market-oriented approach.

Product Orientation states that somebody already has an idea for a product they're attempting to sell, they just need to figure out how to sell it. This is usually the case with things like restaurants, for example, who specialize in a particular category of food, but also usually the case for somebody who feels they can improve the field they already work in. This mindset believes with the correct sales push, anything can be sold. It's also where we got the phrase "location, location, location".

Market Orientation takes the opposite approach and asks, "what problems are there in the world that need solving" and then attempts to build a product revolving around that. This mindset requires an immense amount of research as well as the flexibility to work within whatever field your research suggests and goes against the "follow your dreams" mantra we've been taught as kids.

Generally speaking, product orientation is considered a bit dated and market orientation is more successful. That said, the age of the internet is changing this theory a bit. From my perspective, product orientation is still a valid strategy, it just has a higher risk of failure.

But with all that said, the book I'm grabbing that pyramid from (The Lean Product Playbook) assumes you've already designated a product you're working on. It's less for the entrepreneur and more for the average product designer working for a company who already have a product in mind.

Here's a link to the book if you felt like learning more about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Product-Playbook-Innovate-Products/dp/1118960874

How are you marketing your business currently?

Here's some good books to read although they're geared more towards managing and motivating a workforce. Others may have better recommendations for books on growing as a startup or small business. Ultimately, you need to focus on marketing your company and targeting your ideal customer.

Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet
https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Ship-Around-Turning-Followers/dp/1591846404

How to Become a Great Boss by Jeffrey Fox
https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Great-Boss-Employees/dp/0786868236/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484506909&sr=1-2&keywords=how+to+a+great+boss

How to Be a Great Boss by Gino Wickman
https://www.amazon.com/How-Great-Boss-Gino-Wickman/dp/1942952848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484506909&sr=1-1&keywords=how+to+a+great+boss

Good to Great by Jim Collins (I just started this)
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484507074&sr=1-1&keywords=good+to+great

EDIT: Here's another one.

Traction. Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. I haven't read this but the CEO did and we use the structure and methods from this book to run our company. https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

First, consistently solving A1 and B1 is a great start! Puts you well above the typical. Be sure to pay attention to how you write it up: Putnam graders are very strict and solutions most often get 0, 1, 9, or 10 points. Be also aware of what your goals are and don’t get anxious, you’re not looking to solve everything, so it's good to fully solve one problem before moving on. Putnam problems in particular often have short clean solutions that are really satisfying to find.

You also can't beat just working through problems. Putnam 1985-2000 by Vakil, Kedlaya, Poonen is fantastic as it gives many ways of solving or approaching each of the problems. It also gives just the right level of hints. This way you can learn both by working through the problem and by seeing the different perspectives. For example, with a single problem there may be a long brute-force solution, a quick but hard to discover solution, and a quick solution based on advanced math (you can use most things that come up in an undergrad math curriculum, even elliptic curves).

The Art and Craft of Problem Solving is a great read for general strategies and practice, and will remain relevant throughout any later work.

Mathematical Olympiad Challenges by Andreescu and Gelca shows off a few major problem solving styles and has a great selection of problems. I studied it in high school and it ended up being very important for me getting Putnam Fellow.

Earlier I had also studied Problem-Solving Strategies but that may be too big and not as focused on Putnam type of problems

Yes, I've read Verne's second book, Scaling Up. I would recommend skipping that one though and going straight to "Traction" which is like "Scaling Up" but for smaller companies. "Traction" has become very popular in the entrepreneurial community the past few years and it's a great system to run a business in.

I agree with you 100%, because soft skills or "non-cognitive skills" are often more indicative of future success rather than intelligence. See Walter Mischel's research. He is most famous for the Marsmellow Test:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Marshmallow-Test-Mastering-Self-Control/dp/1469249081

Also, I highly recommend:http://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Succeed-Curiosity-Character/dp/0544104404

I am glad your wife could help you despite your upbringing.

1. I'm all about this system called EOS. It's an open sourced way to run your business. You can check out the book here - https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=traction&qid=1571161933&sr=8-3
   
   
2. We did a SWOT while I was ideating the business so super early. I like to do a deck to help me think about the business. I also do a lot of journaling to brainstorm and process my thoughts.
   
   
3. It was definitely an opportunity for TrackR first and I didn't understand how I would do anything in the bathroom back when I was 23. TrackR was a nice simple idea where I learned a ton about business, manufacturing, and how to create product

I'm registered at biggerpockets.com but honestly haven't looked into it much. I just sort of winged it by doing my own market research. However, I only have 3 doors (about $300/month/door cash flow), so I'm not sure you'd want to do it my way.

Good books I recommend:

• What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow... And 36 Other Key Financial Measures - I have the slightly older version.
  
• Landlording: A Handymanual for Scrupulous Landlords and Landladies Who Do It Themselves
  
• Some version of tax/legal advice. I like the one from NOLO, but you should make it local to where your property is.

So... it depends. I've been a PM for 13 years, and PMP for 9.

I took a Project management course in my undergrad during my Bcomm at u of c so I didn't need the education contact hours, but being the keener I am took the PMP prep course at MRC.

That was a waste of time. It was taught by volunteers from PMISAC, and they don't have education as their background...

What was of benefit though was the course forced me to sit and read the PMBOK chapters to be prepped for the lectures.

Alongside the course, I picked up Rita's Guide to the PMP. Link This book is one of the two best resources for passing the PMP. It teaches you to think in the language of the exam.

The next best resource was pmstudy.com. I bought the four pack of exams. I scheduled the cert exam for a Friday, and did one test per night Monday-Thursday. On Friday, when I sat the exam, I finished in 1.5 hours as I had seen over 100 of the questions before. It was a breeze and I passed with only a few wrong.

So... if you need education contact hours, go somewhere that's cheap. Check out places like Global Knowledge or Cheetah as well. If you want to pass the exam, get Rita's book and the 4 pack of exams from pmstudy.com.

And don't forget, you don't need to maintain your PMI membership to maintain you PMP credential.

There’s also a book that covers this the topic of common patterns in nature, and goes into depth on how it applies to organisms of all sizes. Extremely interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

The answer seems to be “when working in 3 dimensions, there’s efficient ways to do things, so natural selection will tend towards them over time.“

For example, if there’s two ways to construct a circulatory system, moving the same amount of blood, but one moves blood with less energy, this frees up energy for reproductive activities, providing an advantage to that organism.

But these “laws of 3D construction” apply not just to veins/arteries, but to your brain, trees, and even cities’ sewers and power cables.

It’s all about efficient networks co-living in a single “organism”

Yes. The size of "invariant components" like cells set a limit on how small things can be. But cells are not the only component for which that is true. When it comes to mammals, the more important limiting factor is the circulatory system - mainly the size of the capillaries. The smallest mammal is the Etruscan shrew. And this is basically the smallest a mammal can be in theory. When you shrink a mammalian circulatory system smaller than a shrew's it becomes wildly inefficient. So mammals have never evolved to be smaller, even when it could have provided other advantages.

The circulatory system is also the reason why the blue whale is pretty much the biggest possible mammal. If they get any bigger, the space between capillaries becomes too large, and cells start to starve of oxygen.

There is an interesting book called Scale that goes into this topic is detail.

This is good, with respect to learning tips and tricks for competitions, I think you're best off getting a book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Craft-Problem-Solving/dp/0471789011

Is good

Man, I feel you here.
Parent of an abused foster (adopted) 13yo daughter here, whose behaviors are very similar to what you mention (multiplied by 140lb body with hormones and the vocabulary of a sailor).

Three Major Points to start:

A. Try to reduce the frequency of the meltdowns.

There are two books you should buy and read right away. The Connected Child and Beyond Consequences. (Links below) Ignore the fact that they are 'for' adoptive families. They are fantastic for bio families too. The basic idea is to promote attachment, show love, use consistency and help your child learn who she is. I can, in no way, do justice to these books in summary so I'm not gonna try. This does not mean they get away with everything. This does not mean you're going to fix everything overnight. It does, however, mean you're going to change how you parent to a totally new model that might not feel natural at first. The more you do it, the better the bond you have with your child.

The style was once explained to me as "General Patton meets Mr. Rogers". Firm, high expectations, but calm and loving all the time.


B. When a meltdown of your daughter does happen.

Just doing the stuff above, you'll still have plenty of issues. That doesn't mean it's not working.
It all boils down to natural consequences. Break all the crayons, can't color anymore. Trash the house, clean the house. Throw a 5 minute tantrum while I was going to be playing video games, kid does chores I would have done for 5 minutes so I can play video games. Threaten to kill self or kill me? Cops are called.

Un-natural consequences (otherwise called punishments) cause their own problems.
By using natural consequences, you don't enter into a secondary battle for control of trying to impose punishments that the child finds unlogical.

C. When you lose your cool during a meltdown

This will also happen, as parents, we're not perfect.
When things go south - Reconnect Quickly.
Be the one that shows the example of remorse and show how you can make up for it. This doesn't mean the child gets away with what they did, though.



All the other stuff you need to do:

Get Help / Don't be Embarrassed: Realize when you need help. In combat, if things get hairy, you ask for help, you don't just wait until 3/4 your men are dead before telling someone above you that you're in trouble.

This means you must remove any stigma you might have from this situation and put your ego aside. Doesn't mean you're a bad father. There are tons of resources you should pull from.

First, surround yourself with a circle of support. Family and friends are very important.

Second, find resources in your community. Could be private therapy, could be from a county mental health organization. Could be a church group. I promise you that there is help out there that people just like you go to.

Care for yourself / Respite
The harder things are at home, the less patience you have. The less patience you have, the harder things get.

You need time for you (and your SO if you have one).

Find ways to recharge. Kid stays with grandparents, friends (with people you trust can handle you child and understand the situation), babysitters, overnight camps, etc.
You can't care for your child if you're totally out of steam.

Ask yourself, what if you couldn't physically control her.
I've been struggling with this in the last few years. If you can only use your mind to parent, and can't physically touch the child (even just to move them into time out, for example), it changes how you will parent them. Start thinking like that, and then add on the fact you can move them in time out as a bonus.

Lastly, realize you're not alone. There are many families that struggle with this type of problem, and it is possible!



http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001/
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Consequences-Logic-Control-Attachment-Challenged/dp/0977704009/

Hello! Have you read Esther Derby's "Agile retrospectives"?

https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Teams-Great/dp/0977616649

It provides a good explanation of all the retrospective stages, as well as activities to do for each stage (in your case, the "gather data" stage). Or you could try some activities like those described in funretrospectives.com

Having said that, sometimes it is just better to talk than write. I do many of my retros on a cafeteria outside where we all sit in a table (12 people). The format is simple, no writing, we just talk one after the other (or just begin a conversation) to collect our memories and problems form the previous sprint. It is amazing how powerful that is.

If you are going for a internet business or any product-oriented business here a are the best books



BEST ONES

"The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses" (Eric Reis) - 2011

https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/

"Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works" (Ash Maurya) - 2010

https://www.amazon.com/Running-Lean-Iterate-Plan-Works/dp/1449305172

"Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days" (Jake Knapp - Google Ventures) - 2016

https://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/150112174X/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1550802301&s=gateway&sr=8-1

​

ALSO GO FOR (these are the ones that started organizing the Startup world)

"The Four Steps to the Epiphany" (Steve Blank) - 2005

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0989200507/

"Business Model Generation" (Alexander Osterwalder) - 2008

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/

Here are a couple of suggestions:

• Take up competitive programming. Go to http://uva.onlinejudge.org/ and do the problems from there (they have a few book suggestions as well). Aim to participate one day in ACM-ICPC or Google CodeJam.
  
  
• Go deeper into Mathematical areas relevant to programming such as graph theory, number theory, combinatorics, etc. Rudiments of most of these can be picked up at your level. Go through a book like The Art and Craft of Problem Solving
  
  
• Explore functional programming languages (read this: Advanced Programming Languages ) to improve your programming range.
  
  I am not an especially good problem solver, but I have done fairly OK financially. These are suggestions that I wish someone had given me when I was your age - it would have made my career slightly more fun!

There are legal publishing companies in most states that provide legal forms (rental agreements/leases) that you can purchase. We get ours from a local book store that sells legal forms.

Follow your state laws to the letter, most landlord-tenant laws are skewed to the benefit of the tenant. That is not a bad thing.

Decide if you are going to manage the place yourself or hire property management. In our experience a property manager doesn't look out for your interests nearly as diligently as you will, so we self manage.

There are lots of books out there. One called Landlording is excellent.

I recommend the book [Landlording: A Handymanual for Scrupulous Landlords and Landladies Who Do It Themselves] (https://www.amazon.com/Landlording-Handymanual-Scrupulous-Landladies-Themselves/dp/0932956378/) - it is pretty much the "bible" for making money from self-managed rental properties.

Good luck!

First, octane rating has nothing to do with the gas volatility. You can have 87 winter blend that is more volatile than 87 summer blend. Volatility and octane are two completely separate values that have no relation to each other. You need to get that right before we can move on.

Also, knock is the colloquial term for detonation, which surprisingly you are correct. It's when the gas detonates before the spark event and creates much higher pressure in the cylinder. It can sometimes be heard as an audible "knock" in certain engines. It more often is unable to be heard without special monitoring equipment.

Last, as I said before, static compression is just one factor out of many that determines what the engine's octane requirement is. I'll give you a real world example. My 1972 Sportster has a static compression ratio of 9:1 and needs a minimum of 94 AKI to not detonate. My 2002 Sportster has a static compression of 10.5:1 and will run perfectly fine on 91 AKI.

By your simple, misunderstood statements the 2002 should be blowing up compared to my 72. The real answer is that octane and compression can be related, but compression is only one small factor in determining that. There are several other things that are far more dominating in determining the required octane.

If you would like to learn more about this so we can speak intelligently about it, please pick up a copy of John Heywood's Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals (https://smile.amazon.com/Internal-Combustion-Engine-Fundamentals-Heywood/dp/007028637X?sa-no-redirect=1) and read it cover to cover. It will go over a lot of things you're misunderstanding and help you clarify some of your thoughts.

Stephen Few has some pretty decent, up-to-date books that make healthy reference to the past half-century's well-known sources such as Tufte, Bertin and others. It uses well-made examples produced with fairly modern tools.

I have enjoyed Show Me the Numbers and Now You See It and would say they are worth the read.

Might I also suggest Making Things Happen

There is very little earth-shattering in the book, but it's a breezy read and great reference. It's true utility is in having all of the 101 stuff in one place.

Hi, here I will post some great books, some free (by Santos), some not (others).

Junior problem seminar: Santos

Number Theory for Mathematical contests: Santos

The Art and Craft of Problem solving: Zeitz

Problem-Solving Strategies: Engel

Mathematical Olympiad Treasures: Andreescu, Enescu

Mathematical Olympiad challenges: Andreescu, Gelca

Problems from the book: Andreescu

Those are more or less the "general" books, they always contain the main topics of mathematical olympiads, they usually aren't focused on just one topic, for one-topic books see here: http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=319&t=405377

In your scenario, I feel like simplicity is going to be key because this your first time doing it.


I discuss your question in my video: https://youtu.be/tvK0BYO-9R0?t=529

1. Before anything, have your own books/accounting in place. That way you can just print off reports as needed.
   
2. Keep it simple, use a one page business plan as you can find from the books Traction or Scaling Up. Read the first half of Traction (a really easy read) and you will be off to a great start. You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=traction&qid=1554999664&s=gateway&sr=8-3
   
   ​
   
   A lot can get lost in extravagant business plans. The important thing is that you can PROVE what you have done and that it works. Basically, will putting more money into this engine = a return?

Debugging by Agans is great on debugging; my last company liked it so much they bought all the devs a copy, and I think that in turn was inspired by a course at the local university requiring the book.

When I took Game Theory the professor used Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics, which I really liked.

Evolutionary Dynamics is just amazing, but a bit on the biological side.

If you are studying on your own I would suggest Game Theory Evolving, which has a lot of exercises and examples to keep you going.

And for added bursts of motivation read The Art of Strategy, which is not really technical but explains the concepts incredibly well.

I'm in the same boat. Product Hunt surge, now need to work on marketing. I just read a book called "Traction" that is interesting. It lists out 19 different channels and provides recent examples and case studies. I'm not going to follow the book verbatim, but there are definitely some good takeaways.

http://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837

How Children Succeed.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Succeed-Curiosity-Character/dp/0544104404/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462241564&sr=8-1&keywords=How+children+succeed

Pretty interesting read regardless.

> Here's a link to the book if you felt like learning more about it: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Product-Playbook-Innovate-Products/dp/1118960874

Thanks for the link. How much does this book differ from Lean Startup Method? I've read that, but would be willing to give this one a shot if you think it's worth my while.

edit: ordered it anyways. Currently reading "User Story Mapping" by Jeff Patton but will dive in as soon as I'm finished, thanks for the reco.

I don't think I'd start with a certification class. I'd start with two books:

• Agile Project Development with Scrum
  
• Kanban
  
  I'd also look at some other online resources (like this agile roadmap to get a sense of what you actually want to implement and change.
  
  From there, that will guide you to what classes, or as /u/mlucero14 pointed out, if you'd prefer to bring in a coach or trainer.
  
  Given that it looks like you all are in Costa Rica, you might want to talk to the team from Pernix Solutions. I've worked with them before, and they understand the agile and craftsmanship side of things.
  
  Hope that helps!

I do a set of activities as discussed in Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby.

Mad, Sad, Glad is a really great activity to focus the team's thoughts and Gather data. However, if you can define a full set of activities to draw insights and then add Spikes/Enabler to your Backlog, it will really help the team. From the time I started doing these activities, the team performance improved dramatically and I have stuck with the template. If you are interested do read about it in an article about the template that I have written.

​

Another book by the same authors that's worth considering is The Art of Strategy. I can't recommend it personally, since I haven't read it yet, but it's the one I purchased when I decided I wanted to get a popular account of game theory. It's supposed to be good.

I suggest 3 books, all for different reasons.

1. As already suggested, Sophie's World. It's told in a story form but is a great introduction to the history of philosophy in a very practical way to understand. If you read anything from my list, please let it be this.
   
   
2. An introduction to Logic Text Book. The one I have is by William Lawhead, but I believe it is out of print. Any good begineers logic textbook will do. Now here is the kicker if you read this. It's a text book, you HAVE TO DO THE "HOMEWORK". Read the chapter and do the assignments, you won't get a full understanding just by glossing over the subject matter.
   
   The easiest I can explain it is Logic is math with words. You will learn how to form arguments and spot fallacy's. By the end of that textbook you will know how to put together a bulletproof argument and tear someone else's argument to shreds. Its practical philosophy for your ever day life. (And great for arguing on the internet)
   
   I'm a firm believer that logic classes should be taught starting in middle school.
   
   
3. The Art of Deception
   
   Read this AFTER learning the Logic textbook, it will make much more sense. After logic you will be able to put together logically sound arguments. After The Art of Deception, you will become good at putting together fallacious arguments. Because...well, sometimes you need to win even when you are wrong. Also, you will be able to spot people trying to do this too you.
   
   I think these 3 books will give you a good overview of philosophy and logic and you will be able to implement them in a practical way in your life.

The retro is the key, IMO. I recommend reading “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” by Esther Derby & Diana Larsen. Lots of good stuff there! https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Teams-Great/dp/0977616649/ref=nodl_

That is precisely it. The laws of scaling work that way. It's also the case that as population increases, average wealth increases.

There is a great book about this phenomenon:
https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

If you go the Agile approach, I'd recommend you start with retrospectives. This is a great tool to identify problems and needs of the team and start addressing them in following iterations. Even if you don't go full Scrum or whatever, I'd insist you try retrospectives. If you want some good reading try this: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Teams-Great/dp/0977616649

Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun is great.

I read an earlier edition when it had a better title "The Art of Project Management"

There's a book on this called "Scale" written by a theoretical physicist that explains why phenomenon like arteries and capillaries are all governed by physical constraints and shows you all the different ways those constraints manifest. If you liked this comment you should probably check it out. The high seas might be able to help.

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

There's a post like this every few weeks. Here's a link that links to a lot of other good links.

From personal experience, I recommend:

The Basics to Hacking and Penetration Testing

and since a lot of hacking these days has to do with social engineering, this book:

The Art of Deception

Ugh, been there. Not going to get better until the owner gets better.

Do yourself a favor. Buy this book, and anonymously leave it in his office. Highlight Chapter 2: Letting Go of the Vine.

https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837/

Interesting you should ask this question today, since today's Vice "Young Americans" column is about what it's like growing up "Asian" in America: http://www.vice.com/youngamericans/the-asian-american-experience?utm_source=vicetumblrus

This is a humorous rendering of a problem a lot of my Asian-American friends have faced growing up in the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWynJkN5HbQ

You'll find more adoption-specific questions answered in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001

If you have questions about the process you're about to go through, I used to work at the world's largest, oldest China adoption agency, CCAI, so if you have questions about the process I might be able to answer basic questions, but for the most up-to-date and accurate info, I'd advise you to just call CCAI and directly ask your questions of the professionals (ask for Sarah H, (303) 850-9998). It doesn't matter if you're planning to adopt from a different agency, they rules are set by China, so the process is basically the same regardless of what agency you go through.

I am in the same situation and I am going to take the new test in Feb. I am using the Rita Book and they released this update for the book. http://shop.rmcls.com/multisite_includes/pdfs/misc/PMP_8th_Ed_8th_printing_Updates_English.pdf

If you read around it is not that big of a change as the new test is still based off the 5th edition of the PMBOK

Good Luck and if you need the updated Rita book here is the link on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932735658/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1?pf_rd_p=1944687582&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=1935589679&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0W27D2FBPX0M5XDQHZHW

I see the same problem on StackOverflow on a daily basis - someone posts a chunk of code and says "Help - my code is not working!". I keep a standard response to this on hand, as it's such a regular occurrence:

> Welcome to Stack Overflow! It sounds like you may need to learn how to use a debugger to step through your code. With a good debugger, you can execute your program line by line and see where it is deviating from what you expect. This is an essential tool if you are going to do any programming. Further reading: How to debug small programs.

But the broader problem of course is that colleges simply do not seem to teach students how to use a debugger, or debugging techniques (arguably more important), or even development tools in general. I think the excellent Agans book, Debugging should be required reading for every undergraduate programming course.

Another pet peeve is that students seem to be completely oblivious to the need to (a) enable compiler warnings and (b) take heed of such warnings.

I highly recommend The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life.

I really like Making Things Happen. Casual tone, emphasis on heuristics, and enjoyable to read.

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick. My personal favorite book on the topic, as its both highly informative and entertaining.

After the Pragmatic Programmer, Debugging.

As a starting out programmer, so much of your time is spent debugging, and this very short (can easily be read in day) book will probably cut that time in half if not more. I mean you can read it in 6 hours, and it could easily save a new programmer 100's of hours in a year.

Reading How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. I am finding the arguments convincing and the writing enjoyable so far.

I used the following approach to pass the PMP exam--

1. Read Rita Mulcahy's Examp Prep Book:
   http://www.amazon.com/PMP-Exam-Prep-Eighth-Edition/dp/1932735658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393947324&sr=8-1&keywords=PMP
   
   
2. Take a bunch of practice tests
   
3. Read Head First PMP:
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-PMP-Jennifer-Greene-ebook/dp/B00HETLZIQ/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1393947324&sr=8-5&keywords=PMP
   
   
4. Repeat (2) until you feel ready
   
   I passed with all "Proficient". The exam wasn't nearly as hard as the practice tests I took.
   
   Edit: This is also very helpful in your preparation. A consolidated list of 100 "Lessons Learned" for the PMP exam http://www.testprepsupport.com/blog/100-pmp-exam-lessons-learned-posts-all-in-one/

from information security, Kevin Mitnick The Art of Deception
great stories of early hackers and employees giving away the keys to the kingdom.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Deception-Controlling-Security/dp/0471237124

I had seen "The Art of Strategy" by Dixit and Nalebuff recommended here before, and thought it was a great place to start.

Iti recomand "The Goal", de Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

E o carte scrisa ca o nuvela, dar care defapt te invata despre management si in special despre "The Theory of Constraints". E foarte tare.

I'm reading a book called the Innovator's Dilemma that explains how a company (and Sears is a perfect example) can do all the right things, and still lose its position as the dominant player in the market.

It's a very insightful read -- I recommend it. Very interesting if you're ever thinking of starting your own business.

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996

https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507

Forget the LeanStartUp stuff to begin with, this book is the perfect blueprint for creating and/or growing a business. I've used the ideas in the book to build my business. (https://bubblecow.com/)

The Hard Thing About Hard Things -- Ben Horowitz. GREAT as an audiobook.

Traction: Get a grip on your business -- Gino Wickman. Good for unknotting the reasons for constantly stalling out on progress. It's meant for large offices, apparently, but even my little office benefited since the habits are universal.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph -- Ryan Holiday

A good place to start for fundamental principles is Geoffrey West and biological scaling laws, which generalize to other systems as well, such as cities.

Check out his book.

He's also done a podcast with Sean Carroll.

>I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences on prepping elementary kids for intelligence tests

Do you have friends that speak Chinese? Get them to bring you every kind of "exercise booklets" in English. They are usually very very widely available and very cheap.

I wouldn't bother with the expensive stuff. Get past exams, sample questions for whatever school he/she is testing for. Befriend parents with kids already there. Study, drill, do it until it's second nature and there is no nervousness with the problems. Keep bugging the school staff for the kinds of tests they use, obtain tests, and drill.

Intelligence is a skill that's learned; repetition, drilling, perfect practice and prep will get your kid in any school.

source: raised though the gifted programs and cut-throat Asian education system. You didn't ask for my thoughts, but I'll give it to you anyway: don't.

Did you know Amazon will donate a portion of every purchase if you shop by going to smile.amazon.com instead? Over $50,000,000 has been raised for charity - all you need to do is change the URL!

Here are your smile-ified links:

https://smile.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

---

^^i'm ^^a ^^friendly bot

• The Goal - Eliyahu Goldratt - you'll probably read this in an operations class, but it's one I refer to often in my day to day.
  
• Moneyball - Michael Lewis - taking advantage of market inefficiencies to compete with a much smaller budget, I found it to be a business book as a baseball one.
  
• Decisive - Chip and Dan Heath - not necessarily business specific, but having an approach to decision making applies to business decisions as well.
  

I hope things are going better for you. My son had a lot of similar behaviors when he came home, but almost two years have passed and he's like a different child (still we see some of the maladaptive behaviors but not as frequently). Trust Based Relational Intervention was a game changer for us. Check out The Connected Child. https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001

the lean product playbook is excellent, (no this is not an affiliate link, nor am I the author) https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Product-Playbook-Innovate-Products/dp/1118960874/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549985813&sr=8-1&keywords=lean+product+playbook

Nah people said this about every technology sector ever.

BUT! OP, you'll have to talk with hundreds (read again, 100s) of potential pilot customers before you even start to have a clue about what might be useful. Read this: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Excel is a program/tool that should service our sense of design and aesthetics; that is, we shouldn't constrict ourselves to it. Here are my recommendations on learning how to better graph information:

• Tufte is routinely recommended, and I find that he provides comprehensive, practical advice
  
• Another book recommendation but by Few
  
  If you were to post how your graphs currently look along with the data (scrubbed, of course), I'd give a crack at showing you what I'd do.

Have you read Superforecasting? It's all about predicting the future, and how some people do it well. Interestingly, they tend to use very little actual math.

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0984521402

Tools

Protovis (JS)

Axis (Flex)

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools


Blogs

Flowing Data

Infosthetics

Information is Beautiful

Visual Complexity

Cool Infographics

Infographics Showcase

Data Pointed

http://www.datavisualisation.co.uk/


Books

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics

Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis

Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts

Other areas of work have this too. In engineering, it is not unheard of to have no assignments between projects. Engineers use that time to play with their own ideas or take a vacation. (Play usually. Most engineers I know have about 3 months of vacation just sitting on the books and their management is yelling at them about it.)

Under the "theory of constraints" in a Production / Manufacturing environment, there is an idea to plan to have a percentage of your workforce remain idle during a certain period in order to have the excess capacity needed to meet unexpectedly large orders. In other words, if you've planned your workforce to work at maximum capacity, what do you do if your customer places a huge order?

I really enjoyed "Kanban" by David J Anderson. https://www.amazon.com/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary-Technology-Business/dp/0984521402

"The Art of Strategy" by Dixit and Nalebuff presents a very accessible approach to game theory. (http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Strategy-Theorists-Business/dp/0393337170)

"Economic Fables" by Rubinstein is a combined memoir and text on game theory methodology that's a fun read. (http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Fables-Ariel-Rubinstein/dp/1906924775/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412805443&sr=1-1&keywords=economic+fables)

He wrote a book a few years ago (2002) thats a fun read although not particularly informative. It largely focusses on social ngineering.

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Controlling-Element-Security/dp/0471237124

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Intrusion-Exploits-Intruders-Deceivers/dp/0471782661/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b/105-3743895-7466022 also in 2005.

Here's my recommendations for property management books I enjoyed that were factual and not a bunch of get-rich-quick BS:

https://www.amazon.com/Landlording-Handymanual-Scrupulous-Landladies-Themselves/dp/0932956378/

https://www.amazon.com/Every-Landlords-Legal-Marcia-Stewart/dp/1413322832/

https://www.amazon.com/Every-Landlords-Guide-Managing-Property/dp/1413322158/

https://www.amazon.com/Every-Landlords-Tax-Deduction-Guide/dp/1413322395/

https://www.amazon.com/Leases-Rental-Agreements-Marcia-Stewart/dp/1413321801/

It's a tad geared towards software and B2B SaaS, but it can apply to anyone: Four Steps to the Epiphany

It focuses on finding your customers and developing products for them. Reads like a textbook from college somewhat, but my #1 go-to business book by far.

That is the goal of pretty much all business startups. See The Innovator's Dilemma.

Well the first book details much of what you would need to know as a first year grad student in math and has recommendations for other books as well.

This book might also be something to try or perhaps Knuth's Concrete Math.

You could also try what this guy did, only with the MIT math curriculum on MIT OCW and without the time constraints.

how does the book exactly helpful?

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Things-Happen-Mastering-Management/dp/0596517718

Her work is featured in the book How Children Succeed. I highly recommend it.

Doing math is all about problem solving and this is a really terrific book for building your intuition and confidence in problem solving.

Again, that's your subjective and unsourced opinion about language, and I disagree with it. Like I said in my previous comment, it's actually kind of important that people understand exponential growth includes exponents less than two, even in everyday/layman language use. You can read a whole book about why it's important here.

Pens and post its work.


This book gives you hundreds of actionable opportunities based on the audience: https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Teams-Great/dp/0977616649

Read this book. Four Steps to the Epiphany. It focuses on customer development and making sure you build what customers want.

You should read Superforcasting. They specifically talk about people who make percent guesses down to the decimal point like this lol.

Like it says in the screen grab you get about one billion, like all mammals.

Title/Company: Rita Mulcahy's PMP Exam Prep, Eighth Edition

Type of Material: Book

Cost: $64.95 - $87.21

Learning Style:

Review: I've seen this mentioned several times in conversation, but I've not read it - can someone provide a review? It is rated 4.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon.

This is what the book Superforecasting is about. It's not just geopolitical events, it's general estimation and prediction ability. Here's a review and excerpts. There's also a Freakonomics podcast episode on the book.

TL;DR: Use Bayes' Theorem.

I'm so sad to hear this. He's not lazy, he's traumatized. He's not freezing up on purpose, he's dissociating under stress, a behavior kids learn to cope with abuse. It sounds like CPS didn't provide a class for parenting traumatized children, and that's a travesty. I highly recommend you check out this book. It might give you the information and tools you need to be able to safely and effectively parent this poor kid: https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001

ETA: It does sound like he needs a 504. It has nothing to do with being smart, it's about accommodations for a disability. Taking away recess is a terrible consequence for a kid having social difficulties. He needs support, not punishment.

• Read The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development.
  
• Meet and talk to as many prospects as you can.

Duuuuuuude have you read Superforecasting? This skill is literally an important part of the modern rationality movement.

Gawa kaya tayo ng subreddit para dito?

Well if you are looking for study material here are some links to books I suggest.

http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Project-Management-Body-Knowledge/dp/1935589679/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405382005&sr=8-1&keywords=pmbok


http://www.amazon.com/PMP-Exam-Prep-Eighth-Edition/dp/1932735658/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y

http://pmhigherlearning.com/project-management-exam-guide/

The Art of Deception Great book i learned about on "The Broken"

So I usually tell my MBA students to just read books, not textbooks. Here are a few of my general suggestions:

Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein

Misbehaving Thaler

Superforecasting Tetlock and Gardner

Zombie Economics Quiggin

If you need more suggestions or want to discuss any of the ideas in these books, don't hesitate to ask.

I'd say there are at least two sides to debugging: technical knowledge and mindset/approach. In many situations, technical knowledge is less important than your approach. This is a great book on how to debug anything, because it focuses on the approach:https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Indispensable-Software-Hardware-Problems/dp/0814474578/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1473264988&sr=8-1&keywords=debugging&linkCode=sl1&tag=makithecompsi-20&linkId=fff719e6c1338a3b9f9d763d7f5830a2

A really brief summary: Understand the system, reproduce the error, and think of ways to methodically test your hypotheses of what's wrong.

For your situation, "understand the system" doesn't have to mean "understand the schematic". You can start with the basic blocks: physical construction, power supply, audio output, controls. The other posters have broken down what to look for in some of these cases.

For example, if you physically inspect the board and see a big blob of solder going across three different components, it's probably a waste of time to check whether the controls affect the output sound, because that blob of solder shouldn't be there. Next step, nothing works properly without proper power, so check the points where power is supposed to be supplied on the board and make sure the voltages are correct. Then, find the earliest point on the schematic where you should get an audio output (probably an oscillator out) and check that. And on and on.

To test audio outputs, an oscilloscope is super handy, but honestly I've done a ton of debugging with a small battery-powered speaker with a mono cable connected to it, probing test points in a circuit to see whether audio is present. However note that it IS possible to fry circuits with this approach by accidentally bridging traces, so be careful.

I'm going through this book now...highly recommended:

https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Teams-Great/dp/0977616649

Also, try using some liberating structures which you can learn about here: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ls/

This topic is well covered in the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996

Chapter One...
http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/christensen.htm

You don't necessarily need to study from the PMBOK. I think you really need an exam prep book.

https://www.amazon.com/PMP-Exam-Prep-Eighth-Edition/dp/1932735658

Formulas are important to memorize but I had less than 10 questions that required formula calculation. In order to pass, you really need to understand the knowledge and process areas. You need to be able to put yourself in a project manager's shoes from PMI's perspective. Most of the questions are situational, e.g. "What should the project manager do?"

I believe there is an audio version. But this hardcopy is what you want.

PMP Exam Prep, Eighth Edition - Updated https://www.amazon.com/dp/1932735658/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_.cbyzbC83DVFN

The Phoenix Project is probably the best book out there - I also recommend: https://smile.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Teams-Great/dp/0977616649/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520447802&sr=1-3&keywords=Agile+Retrospectives

Because retros are hard to do right and awful when done wrong.

It's difficult to make recommendations without being certain of what you actually know and what you imagine mathematics to be like. A lot of university-level mathematics is technical and requires familiarity of high-level concepts. This is in contrast to softer popular mathematics, which is more related to solving problems and contest questions. One of the things I've noted about pre-university students passionate about mathematics is that they assume that the subject is only about problem-solving and fail to take into mind the level of technical knowledge that must be learnt and memorized to be a mathematician.

If you're simply looking for problems to solve, try The Art and Craft of Problem Solving by Zeitz or Problem Solving Strategies by Engel. Generally any book geared to the Olympiad or regional competitions will be alright. Here, you're not looking for a specific body of knowledge, but rather an approach to thinking and persevering when handling tough problems.

But if you're looking to learn more about 'technical' mathematics, you'll need to know the basics of numbers and sets. Numbers & Proofs by Allenby is a good introduction, using an approach that gets you to actively solve problems. Once you get past that, then you can try your hand on analysis or group theory or linear algebra or even basic graph theory. But keep in mind that with 'technical' mathematics, all knowledge is built on understanding of previous fields, so don't rush through it or you'll get discouraged by any difficulty or unfamiliarity you'll encounter.

https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1540908169&sr=8-1&keywords=the+connected+child

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Strategy-Theorists-Success-Business/dp/0393337170

I read this. Haven't read much into Game Theory besides this book, but it's probably a more general overview of Game Theory with real life examples.

Meet my friend.

His book has a handful of insights into social engineering, but nothing you wouldn't be able to get elsewhere.

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem-Solving/dp/0471789011

Perhaps you're referring to Philip Tetlock's work. Those people were far from mundane though; it took a specific set of habits and personality traits.

He wrote a mainstream book about it.

Read this and you'll "get it" Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Debugging.

Read some work by Stephen Few and Edward Tufte on info viz. A lot of pointers and design claims/tips to be found there.

http://www.amazon.com/Now-You-See-Visualization-Quantitative/dp/0970601980

We used Kanban to sort out publishing production. It was not “agile” really it was “lean”.

Map your process and tasks flow through the process.

Read David Anderson’s book

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0984521402/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_IaJ-Bb394Y1FH

There is product development, and there is customer development. You get the second one. Read Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Geoffrey West talks about this kind of thing in “Scale”

Gino Wickman.

https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837

Let me explain it another way.

If you throw a dice, I'll give you a prediction of 83% chance that you won't roll 6.

If you roll 6, my prediction was still valid.

There is no "making up for it". You simply cannot tell by just one outcome.

I highly recommend this book to read up more on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718

Oh, and btw, so that nobody thinks I'm biased. I personally hate Augur :)

What an odd coincidence... I just started reading this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

the art of deception by kevin mitnik
http://www.amazon.ca/The-Art-Deception-Controlling-Security/dp/0471237124

Not exactly what you want, but this book talks about complex systems and how we are really bad at trying to replicate them. It talks about cities, the economy and biology. Kinda why I find it hard to think any planned economy would work as well as letting it mostly handle itself and fixing it when required.

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582

I actually read this book a while back, so I understood the concept of a Nash Equilibrium in general, just not the example you gave. I'll admit that most of it didn't stick since I skimmed over much of the math. I think it was just the way you worded it. I thought you meant steal wasn't a dominant strategy at all, but you meant it was weakly dominant.

I can't answer your question directly since I haven't fully read CTCI, but I'm going to throw another recommendation out there. I started doing Codility problems but wasn't happy with my ability solve them.

I could arrive at the correct solutions, but it took me a long time and always felt messy, like I was going in circles or down more dead ends than I should be. Maybe you don't have that problem. Anyway, finally I found this book, The Art and Craft of Problem Solving. It's aimed a little more at mathematics, but, damn was it helpful for me. The difference in my solutions before and after reading this book is huge.

This passage appears to come from page 72, problem section 3.1, of The Art and Craft of Problem Solving by Paul Zeitz, which does not claim to be a rigorous book; most descriptions of elementary symmetric polynomials do specify that the terms are products of distinct factors, while this book just lists the three-variable and four-variable elementary symmetric polynomials and then describes some of their characteristics.

Scrum doesn't have failed stories, anything that doesn't get accepted by the PO is not counted against velocity, especially if it's been abandoned entirely. I've used TFS for scrum, but based on your type of work, the fact that you are running 1-week sprints (rarely recommended) and that you are tracking velocity/capacity per person rather than your team (also very rarely recommended) I would make the switch to Kanban, specifically operational Kanban detailed in David Anderson's Kanban bluebook:

​

https://www.amazon.com/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary-Technology-Business/dp/0984521402/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3R9PO4NATTFZT

​

You will then change what you are tracking to concentrate on flow control (with cycle times per class of service, etc.) rather than worrying about velocity.

Your comments on the insiders not wanting to cut an existing source of revenue is the entire subject of a book by Clayton Christensen called the Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen chronicles the hard drive industry and shows how firms continuously refined their products in incremental ways and did everything right according to management and shareholders, only to be crushed by new disruptive technologies.

That's one item that I got from my worthless (50k) MBA.

Le problème, c'est qu'aucun expert n'est capable de prédire le devenir d'un système politique. Un extrait du bouquin "Thinking fast and slow" de D. Kahneman (prix nobel d'économie pour ses travaux sur la psychologie de la prise de décision):

"Tetlock interviewed 284 people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them to assess the probabilities that certain events would occur in the not too distant future, both in areas of the world in which they specialized and in regions about which they had less knowledge. Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Which country would become the next big emerging market? In all, Tetlock gathered more than 80,000 predictions. He also asked the experts how they reached their conclusions, how they reacted when proved wrong, and how they evaluated evidence that did not support their positions. Respondents were asked to rate the probabilities of three alternative outcomes in every case: the persistence of the status quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of that thing.

The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists. Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. (...) Tetlock also found that experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large collection of excuses: they had been wrong only in their timing, an unforeseeable event had intervened, or they had been wrong but for the right reasons."

L'expert est incapable de prédire ce que va devenir le système: il sait faire du diagnostic (identifier un pb quand il s'est produit), pas du pronostic (prédire le pb). Et comme le montrent les travaux de Tetlock, il n'admet pas cette incompétence. L'expert n'en sachant pas plus sur l'avenir que le citoyen de base, la défiance envers les experts s'explique alors très bien.

Après, la pertinence du raisonnement du citoyen de base, c'est une autre question...

Edit: apparemment, Tetlock aurait sorti un bouquin récemment sur le thème: https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718

À lire?

Book recommendation: Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems


Swift anecdote: I had a crash that only affected 32bit devices, because the code used Int, but ran out of bits in rare cases. The original code assumed that it was a int64. Changing the type from Int to Int64 fixed the problem. It was difficult to debug since the original bug report mentioned no device type, nor specific numbers that was causing problems. Gathering much more data helped identifying the problem.

Tell us more about your setup.