Tidbits from Webinars this Month

Posted on June 1, 2020 by michelle

Over the past few weeks, I have attended many webinars through various organizations – Duke University, IEEE, Indiana University, and others.  All had various tidbits of knowledge that I thought I would share with you here.

IEEE Xplore – I listened to a talk about how to use the IEEE Xplore website.  This site appears to contain all IEEE publications for all societies that are part of IEEE.  An extraordinary library!  They talked about how to find information on various topics or from different companies or specific people.  I searched for my last name, and my IEEE book popped up along with a research paper that my husband was involved in over 25 years ago! 

Providing Feedback – I learned that there are many models for providing feedback – Ask-Tell-Ask, CAST model, SBI, and others.  This is an area that I’d like to delve into more because some of these models can help to diffuse a difficult situation and resolve conflict.  I’ll be digging into these models more over the next couple of months.

Grit & Resilience – Charlotte Westerhaus-Renfrow gave a vibrant talk on “How Grit and Resilience Can Make You a Better Negotiator”.  She talked about how you need the skillset to negotiate but you also need the mindset to negotiate.  And the mindset is the courage and resilience to stick with your strategy and plan and to “bounce back” from failed negotiations.  She talked about when to use bargaining techniques versus negotiating techniques and how to respond to conflict in negotiations.  She had a lot of great information to share. 

Innovation – Gus Gaynor from IEEE-TEMS gave an excellent talk on “INNOVATION: Bringing the Idea to Human Experience”.  He went through the broad steps of taking a Raw idea to the Proof of Concept to a Project.  He talked about the Idea pathway and Business pathway and that both need to be followed in tandem in order to be successful.  There are many, many steps along the way.  It can be done but it will take time, talent, cooperation, resources, and more to accomplish. 

Healthcare Innovation – Amrou Awaysheh from Indiana University talked about the changes in healthcare that are happening right now during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

  • Hospitals lost $500 billion in revenue in the 1st quarter of 2020 – and the pandemic was only a portion of the quarter.  It could be much worse for the 2nd quarter of 2020. 
  • It is estimated that 50% of hospitals will not survive.

Additionally, we have seen other changes occurring in healthcare over the years:

  • Costs of healthcare were 7% of GDP in 1970, but they were 17.9% of GDP in 2017
  • 50% of primary care physicians in the US are trained at non-US schools.

All of theses changes mean that we need to innovate.  He suggests that we use the principles of product design to solve the healthcare problem.  He also believes that we need a change in the Business Model.  We are currently setup as Solution Shops but need to consider other models such as Value-Adding Businesses and Facilitated Networks. 

The Job Market – The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University provided a panelist discussion about the current state of the workforce and how to navigate it during this time of COVID-19.  The panelists talked about having an exit strategy because you never know when the job market might change.  They discussed important skills to learn and gave some predictions of where jobs will be in the next year or so.  It was very informative!

Who Moved My Cheese? – Region 5 of IEEE hosted a webinar discussion about the famous book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson.  It has been a long time since I read it.  I think I may need to read it again!  There is also a sequel to the book entitled “Out of the Maze” which has also gotten good reviews. 

Contact Tracing – Johns Hopkins University offered a free course on Coursera about COVID-19 Contact Tracing.  It included the definition of contact tracing, the steps for using it, example contact tracing phone calls, problems that might arise in doing contact tracing, ethical implications, technologies used, and tips for performing contact tracing.  I enjoyed learning about the process and the complexities of it.  I now have a better understanding of its importance in containing a disease but also understanding the sheer volume of time and energy that goes into doing the tracing. 

Education – The leadership team at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University gave a webinar on the Future of Higher Education.  Kelley was one of the first schools to move a lot of their teaching online, and because of that, they were able to pivot to everything online MUCH easier when the pandemic hit.  They are looking at doing partial in-person and partial online courses for students in the fall and trying to figure out how to do so safely.  I have no doubt that they will figure it out and that they will be a leader in this new world we are moving into.

Self-Observation – Ray Luther from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University gave a talk entitled “Leading Yourself Through Challenging Times”.  It was one of the best presentations this month.  He introduced us to the Self-Observation Cycle and to the 5 H’s of the Modified Leadership Framework that works well for changing times.  He also mentioned the short video “Earthrise” where the first astronauts to see the Earth rise from the Moon talk about how that different perspective affected them.  I watched it after the webinar, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  My biggest takeaway from the talk was the need to stay in the present during this challenging time of COVID-19. 

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Three Books with Similar Lessons

Posted on May 4, 2020 by michelle

I recently read the following books:

After reading all three within the past few months, I found much overlap in their lessons.  They all discuss aspects of our intuition, our sixth sense.  Much of the time, it is something that we should pay attention to, listen to, and act on.  But there are also times when it betrays us.  All three books provide excellent examples of both scenarios, and all three books provide good reasons to work on honing our skill to identify when our intuition is right and wrong.  Fascinating!

Of all three, I enjoyed “The Gift of Fear” the most.  But I warn you… it can be a little uncomfortable to read at times.  Gavin de Becker regularly works with people who have experienced tragic circumstances and very frightening situations – including his own life experience.  I couldn’t read it all at once.  It was a book that I’d read some over a couple of weeks and then take a break for a couple of weeks.  But I greatly enjoyed the way he writes, and his examples all weaved into a bigger story of how fear can be a gift as long as we know how to use it. 

With Malcolm Gladwell’s books, I struggled a little at first to understand the direction that he was taking.  I read “Talking to Strangers” first, and I felt like each chapter were separate short stories with no transition from one to the other.  At the end of the book, he pulls it all together, and I finally understood how all of the chapters fit to each other.  With this new understanding of how he writes, I enjoyed “Blink” more.

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Life at Heart Mountain – Japanese internment camp

Posted on April 28, 2020 by michelle

On October 8, 2019, I attended a lecture by Sam Mihara at Laramie County Community College.  Sam is a Japanese American born in the United States prior to World War II.  He and his family were sent to live at Heart Mountain internment camp outside Cody, Wyoming, for over three years during the war.  He talked about his family and background, what it was like to live at Heart Mountain, what happened after returning to San Francisco after Heart Mountain, where some of the detainees are now, and what he is doing to make sure that America does not forget this period of history.  He even talked about what is happening now with current refugees at our borders.  Below are my notes from his talk. 

Sam’s grandfather was able to break out of the working class and send his son to a good school.  Sam’s father was then able to get a job in San Francisco as an editor.  Around the beginning of World War II, there was a movement of hatred toward Germans and Japanese.  Dr. Seuss even made cartoons against them, and there were hateful billboards around the country. 

On February 11, 1942, the US government gave authority to the military to remove whomever they chose.  No specifics were given.  There were three Lieutenant Generals over various parts of the United States:

  • Lt. General Drum was on the East Coast.  He did not remove any Japanese families. 
  • Lt. General DeWitt was on the West Coast.  He hated the Japanese.  Even if you were only 1/16 Japanese, then he considered you fully Japanese.
  • Lt General Emmons was in Hawaii.  40% of the population on the island was Japanese so he didn’t remove any of these families. 

Lt.  General DeWitt told Japanese families in his western area that they needed to pack one hand carry bag per person and report to the bus station on a certain date.  He didn’t tell them anything else like where they were going, for how long, or what to pack.  Japanese American soldiers who fought for the US had to say ‘goodbye’ to their families and had no idea where their families would be taken.  The families had to sell their homes fast and cheap or have a friend take care of them.  Fred Korematsu went to a surgeon to have his face turned white in order to avoid the internment camp.  (When Fred went to trial for avoiding the camp, the Supreme Court ruled against him because “protection against espionage more important than justice”.)

While the families waited for the designated day to arrive, they did not know that ten internment camps were being built around the West.  It took three months for 2,000 workers to build the camps.  Sam believes there are three reasons for these camps: Prejudice, Hysteria, and Failure of leadership.

On their designated day, Sam and his family boarded the bus.  It took three days and nights to travel from San Francisco to the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming.  When they arrived at the camp, they found 450 barracks to hold 27 people per barrack.  (That’s about 12,000 people in the Heart Mountain camp.)  Sam, his brother, and his parents had one room to live in that was 20-feet x 20-feet.  It had 4 cots and a coal burning stove.  There was no insulation and gaps in the siding.  Remember… this is Wyoming.  It gets COLD in Wyoming in the winter, and they were not prepared for the cold weather – nor did they have warm clothes for the winter.  In that first winter, it got down to -28 degrees.

The camp had no grammar school and one high school.  There were 15 toilets in a single room – with no partitions – for 300 people.  They were fed powdered milk, pickled vegetables, and potatoes.  After some time, they convinced the government to allow them to grow their own food.  They had a hospital in the camp, but the only doctors and nurses came from the detainee ranks.  During the 3+ years, there were 550 babies born.  Sam’s father became blind due to glaucoma.  Sam’s grandfather died in the camp due to colon cancer.  (They only had laxatives to treat him.)  The detainees also built a school to teach the children in the camp.  Guards with guns were placed around the perimeter to ensure that no one escaped because the people in Cody and Powell (towns in Wyoming near Heart Mountain) were not happy about the Japanese camps so near to them.  They were scared the detainees may escape and hurt them and their families.  There were hate signs all through the town. 

During the war, 800 detainees volunteered or were drafted to fight in the war for the Americans.  67 of them refused the draft and were sent to federal prison.  (They were later pardoned by President Truman.) 

James Purcell (attorney) filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mitsuye Endo (a Japanese American detainee at another camp).  When the lawsuit was won, the government let everyone leave the camps.  When the detainees returned home, they found that many homes had been damaged or items had been stolen from them.  Many people could not find jobs, and many committed suicide because of the shame in not being able to care for their families. 

After the camps closed, the government tried to hide them by selling off the barracks.  They also hid the many, many photos taken by Dorothy Lange (photographer) during this time.  But the detainees would not let the government forget.  They demanded redress for many, many years, and they finally got it when Reagan was President. 

Some of the people who were held in camps during this time include:

  • Willie Ito who worked for Disney and made “Lady and the Tramp”.  (He was also a friend of Sam’s at the camp.)
  • Norm Mineta who was Transportation Secretary from 2001 to 2006.
  • Judge Lance Ito who is known for the OJ Simpson trial.  (His father was one of the detainees who ended up committing suicide.) 
  • Sam himself was a rocket engineer at Boeing.
  • Helene Mihara – one of the poster girls in Dorothy’s photos who became Sam’s wife!

When Sam finally returned to Wyoming 50 years later, he noticed that the anti-Japanese signs that had been in Cody and the surrounding areas when he had been detained there had been replaced by signs saying, “Welcome Japanese Americans”. 

In addition to helping setup a museum at Heart Mountain to share the stories of these detainees and this time in our history, he has visited many of the detention centers that are now big news in our country.  He said that the families are separated in these detention centers, and he said that at least for him, he was with his parents during his detention.  He said that eighteen people are piled together to sleep on floors with leaking roofs.  And 1800 children have been assaulted.  It’s shameful.  He also had a warning… this could happen to anyone or any group of people.  He was a US citizen and was still detained for over three years. 

If you are interested in more about Sam and Heart Mountain, Sam has written a book entitled “Blindsided” which is available for sale on his website at: http://sammihara.com/.

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“How to Start a Drone Business” Workshop

Posted on June 3, 2018 by michelle

A few weeks ago, I attended the “How to Start a Drone Business” workshop presented by Probyn Thompson from Air Probe UAV and hosted by the North Carolina Small Business Center Network and Pitt Community College.  The workshop discussed the vast drone market and rules for operating a drone business along with hands-on operation of a drone.  It also included tips and networks for obtaining more information.  This blog post includes what I learned.

Did you know that there were 6.4 billion connected devices in the world as of 2016?  These include all connected devices such as phones, computers, and all of the IoT (Internet of Things) devices that many of us use daily.  The number of these devices is expected to increase to 50 billion by 2020. 

·        The market for wearables is expected to be $53 billion by 2019.

·        The smart home market is expected to hit $60 billion by 2020.

·        The drone market is currently a $127 billion business. 

There are many areas of opportunity for drone businesses: Infrastructure, Agriculture, Transportation, Security, Media, Insurance, Telecom, Mining, and more.  To make money in the drone business currently, it’s recommended that you operate in at least five of these areas. 

To become a licensed drone operator, you must first obtain your FAA Part 107 license.  You’ll also want to get some experience.  Volunteering as a Safety Operator for another licensed operator allows you to log time and gain experience.  Also, you’ll want to start a company – LLC, corporation, etc.  (It’s not a good idea to launch as a sole proprietor because the liability is significant.)  Speaking of liability, make sure that you have liability insurance.  Verifly offers drone liability insurance.

To learn more and make connections with other licensed drone operators, check out these networks and tradeshows:

·        Sky Eye Network

·        Academy of Model Aeronautics

·        Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International

·        Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association

·        InterDrone – annual conference and tradeshow

Thank you to Probyn, NCSMCN and PCC for offering this informative workshop!

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Accommodating Subjective Preference in Engineering Design

Posted on February 27, 2016 by michelle

On February 25, 2016, the Eastern North Carolina chapter of PENC (Professional Engineers of North Carolina) held a joint event with engineering students at ECU (East Carolina University).  Brian Sylcott (Assistant Professor at ECU) spoke on “Accommodating Subjective Preference in Engineering Design”.  As engineers, we have traditionally focused on function when designing products but it’s becoming increasingly a balance between form and function.

His talk had three different parts:

  1. Representation: In his research, he looked at how we make product decisions based on sketches, CAD drawings, and plastic models.  Our decisions tend to vary based on how products are presented to us.
  2. Form and Function: Some products are primarily purchased on function (e.g. folding chair, shopping cart).  Others are purchased primarily for form (e.g. watches, door knobs).  But many of the products we purchase are a mix of the two, and we balance form and function in many of those decisions.  He has done several surveys presenting different automobile options to individuals and seeing how those individuals balance the form and function of each.
  3. Cognitive Research: He has recently started using fMRI to see exactly what is going on inside the brain when we make such form vs. function decisions.  He’s found a few locations that are activated during the process of weighing options and making a decision.  More research to come!

It was a very interesting talk, and I’ll be interested to see where his research goes from here.  I suspect that many product development companies will be interested as well.  If it’s known how we make decisions, companies can potentially use that activation to affect those decisions!

Thank you to PENC and ECU for hosting this event!

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FDLI Enforcement, Litigation, and Compliance Conference

Posted on December 27, 2014 by michelle

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI) Enforcement, Litigation, and Compliance Conference in Washington, DC.  There were several interesting topics in a variety of sessions:

  • The “Enforcement Basics” session included discussions surrounding 11 potential situations involving the FDA and how to handle them.
  • The session on “cGMP Enforcement Issues” included discussion on handling various situations before, during, and after an FDA inspection.  There were also questions and discussion regarding recent FDA guidance on investigators taking photos during an investigation, how to respond to warning letters, and how and when to communicate with the FDA.
  • I personally found the “Interagency Enforcement Action: An Inside Look” session quite interesting as the panelists discussed how the FTC, DOJ, CPSC, FDA Office of the General Counsel, and FDA Import Operations work together in various capacities and where one jurisdiction ends and another begins.  They also discussed their most recent collaborations regarding football helmets, homeopathic substances, HCG diet products, health apps, labelling and advertising on the internet, and decorative contact lenses.
  • The session on “Criminal and Civil Enforcement: Domestic and International Developments” had mini presentations by the four panelists.  The most interesting to me was Eugene Thirolf’s talk entitled “Too Hard to Jail” where he described the expense and difficulties in trying complicated cases where the companies are diffuse and top executives are well-insulated.
  • Two of the panelists of the “Clinical Trial Data Integrity” session discussed the top 483 observations and data falsification and fabrication.  The third panelist discussed the Site Specific Research Organization (SSRO) model and how it provides data integrity by overlaying GMP principles at the investigative site.  (Disclaimer: I work with the third panelist, Dr. Anton Usala, at CTMG as part of the SSRO model.)

I enjoyed my time at the conference and hope to attend the FDLI Annual Conference in April.

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ENC Entrepreneurship Summit 2014

Posted on November 22, 2014 by michelle

Though I arrived late and had to leave a few minutes early, I thoroughly enjoyed the Eastern North Carolina Entrepreneurship Summit last Monday.  I arrived just in time for the Top 3 business plan presentations.

Johnny Grimes with Broadside Software, Inc. (3rd place) presented information on his company’s database management system.  It was frightening to hear that only 6% of companies who experience unexpected downtime will survive.  He’s been working on this system for many years and has made it customizable for businesses.

Mona Amin from Freshspire, Inc. (2nd place) started her company with four high school classmates.  (She’s only a freshman in college now!)  Grocery stores throw out approximately $2300 worth of food every day.  Freshspire helps grocery stores sell their less-than-optimal food to people on a budget or with a desire to save big.

Gregg Givens from WebHearing, Inc. (1st place) is an audiologist and described how 8 million Americans have no access to hearing healthcare.  He and his partner (an electrical engineer) have designed a way to test hearing for people in rural areas.  Very cool!

The keynote address was to be Melanie Bergeron (Chair of Two Men and a Truck).  Unfortunately, due to travel delays, she was not able to make it.  However, two other entrepreneurs stepped in.  The first was a franchisee of Two Men and a Truck, and he talked about the company and how his business has grown.  The second was Inez Ribustello from On the Square restaurant in Tarboro, NC.  She talked about becoming a sommelier, her time in NYC up until 9/11, and starting up On the Square.  She also talked about the brewery that they will be opening in the spring.

A big thanks to all who made this event happen.  I look forward to next year!

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“Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation”

Posted on May 23, 2014 by michelle

Paul Nunes and Larry Downes recently wrote a book entitled “Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation” and hosted a webinar through Harvard Business Review about their book.  I haven’t read the book – yet – but the webinar gave a good synopsis of what to expect.

Before I write about what they said, I need to give a little background information about business disruptions.  In the late 1990s, Clayton Christensen developed the concept of Disruptive Innovation where new companies would get a foothold in an industry by creating cheaper, not-as-good-as-the-original versions of an existing product to appeal to the bottom end of a market.  Then they would make subsequent improvements that surpassed current products, thus disrupting an industry.  The computing industry is a great example of this concept.  When computers were first made, they were large and very expensive.  Only big companies could afford them.  Then the personal computer was developed.  It wasn’t as fast or as good but an individual could buy one.  The mainframe companies were happy to let the entrants serve the individual consumer and didn’t see the personal computer companies as a threat.  Over time, the personal computer companies improved their products to the point that mainframes became obsolete.

Nunes and Downes position their research and book as the new wave of disruption that doesn’t require starting with a cheaper, not-as-good-as-the-original version.  In fact, they argue that disruptions nowadays are with products that are not only cheaper but also better and contain “customer intimacy”.  And they also happen very, very quickly.  For example, the smartphone disrupted the standalone GPS market with this Big Bang Disruption idea.  Standalone GPS units 1) cost money, 2) aren’t updated in real-time, and 3) contain no integration with the individual customer.  The smartphone changed all of that overnight.  GPS software on smartphones was 1) free, 2) updated in real-time to even reflect current traffic patterns, and 3) integrated the users’ phonebooks to quickly find the users’ intended destinations.  Many companies illustrate this concept of cheaper and better with customer intimacy: AirBNB, PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, Priceline, Uber, Coursera, Yelp, Waze, and the list goes on.

They also went so far as to graph a new Market Adoption curve for the Big Bang Disruption.  The traditional Market Adoption curve has five phases of adoption by users: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards.  The Market Adoption curve for a Big Bang Disruption has two: Trial Users and Everybody Else.  Due to this new curve, the timeframe for a Big Bang Disruption has also been squished into four stages:

1)      Singularity – This is the stage where you are experimenting with your product and getting a little traction for it.  This is the “Trial Users” phase.

2)      Big Bang – This is the scale-as-fast-as-you-can phase as Everybody Else adopts your product quickly as it goes viral through social media.

3)      Big Crunch – This is the de-scaling phase where a new product might be on the horizon or everyone who was going to get your product already has it.  In this stage, you reduce inventories and shed assets in preparation for the next stage….

4)      Entropy – This is the stage where you can become components for another company or create a new singularity.  It’s the endgame.

I really enjoyed the webinar and look forward to reading the book.  Have you read the book?  What did you think?  Has your company experienced – or instigated – Big Bang Disruptions?

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Economic Development of Biotechnology in Eastern North Carolina

Posted on May 18, 2014 by michelle

On May 15, 2014, the Triangle/Eastern chapter of the British-American Business Council of North Carolina (BABCNC) hosted a Healthcare/Biomedical Forum at the East Carolina Heart Institute in Greenville, NC.  Co-sponsors included NC East Alliance, NC Biotechnology Center (Eastern Office), East Carolina University, Pitt County Development Commission, and the City of Greenville.  The speakers were impressive enough but the presentations themselves and the information behind them were truly remarkable.

The first speaker was Dr. Randolph Chitwood, Director of the East Carolina Heart Institute (ECHI).  He is the first cardiothoracic surgeon to perform robotic heart valve surgery, and he has now done over 3,000 mitral valve surgeries.  As a pioneer of robotic surgery, he has trained over 350 physicians all over the world.  He gave an overview of the work and research being done at ECHI.

Dr. Wiley Nifong is also a pioneer of robotic surgery and has worked with Dr. Chitwood on the clinical trials for all models of the da Vinci robotics system.  He discussed how the Minimally Invasive and Robotic Training Center at East Carolina University (ECU) has trained over 1,400 physicians and medical staff from all over the world on robotics surgery.  Physicians and staff come to Greenville for a few days of training, return home to perform a few cases in their own hospitals, and then return to Greenville for a few days of advanced training.

Dr. Ron Mitchelson’s presentation was a series of PowerPoint slides where each one packed a “bang” describing the research and work that is being done at ECU.  With every slide, my jaw dropped more and more to see the exciting things that are being done.  From Telemedicine to multiple projects for the Military to Coastal Studies to new degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, the list goes on and on and on as to what ECU is doing.  Truly phenomenal.  As the new interim provost to ECU, it will be exciting to see what’s next for him and for the university.

Dr. Darrell Neufer also described the exciting research and projects performed at the ECU Diabetes and Obesity Institute.  A new 37,000 square-foot research facility has just opened and attracted exceptional PhD talent.  They are studying the triggers that cause obese people to develop diabetes and working to reduce childhood obesity.  The Human Performance Lab is bringing together all groups whose research and work touch on metabolic issues so that the collaborations can bring solutions faster.  He’s also working on developing a new business model for contracted research to be performed at ECU.

John Chaffee from the NC East Alliance discussed the wide variety of industries in eastern North Carolina.  Who knew that eastern North Carolina had a large workforce in Aerospace – specifically 12,000 people?  And the Military accounts for over 80,000.  He also talked about wages and how wages in the area average $42,000 which is higher than other parts of the state.

Melissa Flanagan from RTI Surgical gave us an example of a biotechnology company that manufactures medical products right there in Greenville, NC.  She discussed the history of the company that started in Greenville (Pioneer Surgical) and the products that are made.

The Honorable Norris Tolson ended the event as keynote speaker giving lots of interesting statistics on North Carolina as a place of business.  For example, there are over 600 biotech/life science companies in the state and for every biotech job, there are at least four other jobs created for support companies.  The vaccine for the pandemic flu is made by Medicago from tobacco leaves here in North Carolina.  The defense industry is a $38 billion industry in North Carolina, and there are more generals in this state than there are anywhere else in the country (except the Pentagon).  The NC Biotechnology Center has provided funding to over 40 small businesses, and with $22 million provided in loans to startups, the return has been $2.7 billion.

The entire event was very inspirational and made me excited about my move to North Carolina!

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Stanford’s Free Online Classes = Great Marketing

Posted on March 21, 2014 by michelle

I was skeptical when I heard that Stanford would be offering its courses online for free.  Why would a prestigious university like Stanford give away its product?  Well, I recently audited its Technology Entrepreneurship I course with Professor Chuck Eesley to see for myself.  It was a well-designed course – very inspirational, full of usable nuggets of wisdom and experience, and engaging lectures and guest speakers.  I looked forward to the release of each new batch of videos and found myself wanting to read more on the subject-of-the-week.  For those students who chose to participate in the course by completing assignments and projects, he had a way for them to post their work for collaborative review.  In one of the videos, it was mentioned that about 37,000 people were taking the course from around the world.  Very impressive!

While taking this course, I also “dropped in” on other Stanford online courses over the past couple of months, specifically programming and cryptography courses.  They have all had great speakers and have made each topic easier to understand while also making the subjects very interesting.

These courses gave me the opportunity to see inside this prestigious university.  I can see now why it is always ranked high on every educational metric.  As a marketing tool, these courses give potential students a chance to see what Stanford would be like.  It also expands recognition of the Stanford brand worldwide.  I’m glad that Stanford is offering its classes to the public, and I look forward to the next one.  Are you planning to take any classes this year?  If so, which are you interested in?

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