Hi! I'm the principal of new science Interactive. Here is some information about my background.

I've been a full-time independent computer consultant since the beginning of 1987.
Prior to that, I spent from 1982 to 1987 doing research in implantable biodegradable orthopedic devices at U.M.D.N.J. in Newark, NJ., with a brief stop doing research on SIDS at Columbia -Presbyterian. Concurrently with this work, fro 1982 through 1990 I was studying atmospheric and planetary physics in the Department of Applied Science at N.Y.U., looking towards a dissertation on aspects of planetary accretion models. Still would like to do that work....

Long rambling free form history:

This apparently confused career path, some might think, stems from a long (1973-1981) and glorious (well, I thought so!) undergraduate career at Reed College, in the Great Pacific Northwest. During my tenure there, I covered the bases, initially as a devoted physics student, determined, as were most of my classmates, to be a part of the great adventure of our generation, the exploration of the solar system. Discussions of whether we would be done with our Ph.D.'s in time for the first Mars mission (expected in around 1980...hee-hee!) actually occurred. Little did we know that the confluence of the Viet Nam war and Watergate were going to gut the United States, or at least it's interest in huge, costly, faintly imperialistic government efforts. As the '70's unfurled, I realized that the odds of playing about in microgravity, which were iniitially pretty slim, were becoming vanishingly small for anyone. The novelty of all those interesting classmates, smart, independent, and with something to say, was also a distraction. After a brief foray into a literature major, I spent a large portion of my time studying history, leaning heavily towards Cold War diplomatic history. But I could not stay away, and waffled back into the sciences as a biologist, focusing first on population biology and evolutionary theory, but finishing my undergraduate thesis in neuroanatomy. By this time, I was paying for school out of my own pocket, and was loathe to spend my hard earned (tree surgery) dollars on puff courses, so most of my final year was spent taking more physics classes.

The flip side of this tawdry tale is that I have been playing with computers since 1968, at prep school, and throughout college, graduate school, and my work life (well, not during the excursions into tree surgery or cooking). Reed had no computer science classes, but it was assumed, in many departments, that you would be using them. There was a total lack of hand-holding, as was the case with everything at Reed. This resulted in most people learning a tremendous amount about computers, at afairly deep level. Consequently, I have found our alumni represented in very disproportionate numbers in the computer field.

Concise, work related history:

Having been involved with computers since 1968, I have worked on everything from ancient timeshared teletypes, Wang desktops where you hand punched one card at a time, and fed it to the computer one at a time, up through the early implementations of UNIX in the mid to late '70's, Apple ]['s, PC's and Mac's in the '80's, through high end desktops and workstations, predominantly in multimedia, in the late '80's and '90's. While much of my early work was on graphics and issues of device control and data acquisition, most of the past ten years have been devoted to educational software, either for traditional educational venues or for marketing. If I have a specialty, it is using multimedia to explain complex technical or scientific issues to an audience, whether it is an AIDS kiosk or on-line survey, or a demo diskette for an innovative new network switching device, a kiosk for new digital hearing aid tehnologies, or a CD-ROM or Web site for ATM switches.

Whether using Director, SuperCard, HyperCard, Java, or HTML, my aim is to get people to understand.

The desire to have people understand is one reason why new science InterActive still provides more mundane network consulting services. I hate it when people don't know how to use their machines, and I try to solve that whenever I can.

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