Saturday, March 21, 2009

Psychometrics Today

Patrick is telling his success story around Python. He and two company geeks went to Pycon last year, on my recommendation, and managed to get a green light from his Chicago-based company for using Python in-house.

Thanks to slip-ups in IT, Patrick surged forward within his company, developing a psychometrics tool (a "buzz bot"), starting with screen scraping, ending in scoring.

This is what a lot of shops are moving towards: using the Internet as a meme pool for marketing purposes, once key questions of methodology are answered.

He's hyping "Kirby" (me) as a critical teacher in all this. So I maybe earned that invoice eh (still outstanding)? Seriously, I'm happy for the recommendations.

Patrick is now getting some 30-40K URLs to drive his graphs of public comments on vaccination safety. The Supreme Court has made some relevant rulings recently.

He's pitching his project to the Army Surgeon General next week, hoping to save the government a boat load of money.

I followed up by reviewing my Chicago slides again, taking questions from Buzz and Patrick especially.

There's some consensus that my arguments are logically strong, but does my presentation alienate more people than it needs to i.e. are my remarks good politics? Will the unions prove receptive? Inquiring minds want to know.

I had my answers, but really, only time will tell.

Don punctuated our equilibrium with a Youtube spiritual.

In the evening, Keith Lofstrom appeared, all prepared to deliver a presentation on his dinner plate sized satellites -- something he'd pitched at the entrepreneurs' event I missed. Barry, a former banker, told stories about breaking into a vault that time (something about setting the clocks wrong -- maximum wind: 144 hours).

Followup: Thx Patrick, for paying S182042: "Assist with diagnose and treatment: ghost python processes clogging interprocess communications (cite killall -9 python)." A pleasure working with ya.