About Me Page


	Quick Overview:
	I am more of an introvert than an extrovert so talking about myself is not really a strong suit, but basically my life revolves around three things:

	My Family:
	Raising two children and a cat is not the easiest task on earth, but for the most part my wife and I have that enjoyable, but challenging task behind us. One of our "babies" (we still call them that!) is a nurse at Vanderbilt and working on her Nurse Practitioners License. The other is an attorney who has established his own law firm in a high-rise in downtown Nashville. We aren't quite empty-nesters yet, because my Aunt has moved in with us, but we are "... doing the best we can with what we have! On a sad note, our "baby" cat of 19 years passed away in July of '07 but we still "hear her" out on the porch and that wakes us up in the morning! Some things never go away and we miss her very much. There is a picture of her in the Photos section. My wife and I met on the tennis court and are both proud educators. She just completed her 32nd year in the Clarksville Montgomery County School System and I just completed my 23rd year at "The PEAY" and we both have seen many changed in the world of education. To quote an acquaintance of mine: "Whatevah!"

	My Work:
	I love teaching and loving what you do for a living is so important to happiness in life that you almost have to put it as a first priority! I also greatly enjoy the research that goes along with the teaching and can absolutely get interested in the slightest little thing! For example, as a Professional Engineer I do some consulting and one day I was working with a brake manufacturer and he was telling me about a problem he had with a little round axle that was supposed to go into a little round hole. The more formal name for a hole is a bore and that immediately sparked an idea that is evolving into a paper called "The Axle-Bore Distribution." This is a discrete upper-bounded distribution that no one knows anything about, except me and that's exciting! As another example, while sitting in on a statistics class (for the fun of it ... can you imagine!!) I was enticed with a question regarding the negative Binomial distribution which relates to the probability of having to sample a given population n times before you get x items with a certain characteristic ... like flipping a fair coin seven times before you get three heads. I added another constraint to the question and asked it this way: "What is the probability of having to sample from a given population n times before you get x items with a certain characteristic in a row?" Asked differently, "What's the probability of having to flip a fair coin seven times before you get three heads in a row?" The "in a row" constraint makes it a different problem and one that is very interesting. As it turns out the solution has a distribution that is related to the Fibonacci sequence and this whole study is evolving into a paper called "The Polynacci Distribution." This is also a discrete distribution, but one that is upper-unbounded rather than being upper-bounded as was "The Axle-Bore Distribution." As a final example, in my Production Operations Management Class I usually go over a topic called Simulation. Now, there is no way that I can do justice to the topic of Simulation in one or two lectures because there are entire text books written on the subject, but I do what I can. Anyway, within the topic of Simulation there is this concept of random number generation and one old method of generating random numbers is referred to as the "Mid-Four Square" method. With this method you randomly select a four-digit number (called the SEED value), square it to make an eight-digit number and take the middle four-digits as the next random number. (You add zeros to the left of the first squared number until you have an eight-digit number if you need to.) Anyway, after having shared this process with several POM classes over several years I noted that sometimes I would randomly pick a good SEED value and sometimes I wouldn't. I always wondered what the best SEED value was and what the worst SEED value was. I have answered the second question, but am still working on the answer to the first question. This all ties into a most interesting paper called "The Genealogy of the Mid-Four Square Random Number Generation Method." Well, it's interesting to those of us who find it interesting! Enough of that! Like I said I love teaching and the intellectual thinking that goes along with it, but it's the students that tie it all together and make it all worthwhile!

	My Hobbies:
	Raising two children and a cat has been an ongoing hobby of sorts, but I guess I do have some other interests. I play tennis and enjoy the camaraderie that goes along with that. A couple semesters ago I assigned a statistical experiment to two students who played on the APSU tennis team to see if I could get back more than 60% of their serves. For them it was a challenge to set up the hypothesis and do the unbiased random sampling; for me it was fun! It might come as a surprise to some of you, but I am a second-degree black belt in Karate. A good sweaty workout is always fun and helps to relieve the tension of the day. I also helped develop the Karate program in the Health and Human Performances department for the University and that was fun too. Many students have martial arts training and I think that it is a good idea. I like the Stock Market and do some interesting investment strategies that deal with options. That ties into the Forecasting Class that I teach as well. I love Classical Music and at one time wanted to be a director and a composer ... maybe next time, huh? In high school I took a French class and have been playing around with it ever since. I'm not fluent, but I can do "restaurant French" pretty well ... my latest language challenge is with Russian!!! Ugh, what a demanding language that one is!!! I am actually working on a Simulation program that generates French poetry, but am modifying it to generate Russian Poetry. How about that for being abstract? At one time I was into Watercolor Painting and would like to get back to that when I retire. That is really relaxing and rewarding! Well, enough of that for now. If we share any interests, feel free to talk with me about them. I am always looking for new insight.