Category Archives: Administrative

PMean: A personal biography

I got in touch with a colleague from my days at Bowling Green State University. That was in the 1980s and my life had changed substantially since those days. While I have many professional biographies (such as this one from 2016), none of them covered the more personal aspects of my life. So here’s a brief biography for anyone who is interested in more than just where I worked. Continue reading

PMean: I am now a number in the ORCID database

Life in the world of research is complicated, but it gets worse when you have a relatively common last name like “Simon.” There are thousands of research publications written by a Simon, and narrowing it down to “Simon S” or even “Simon SD” doesn’t seem to help. So how do you quickly identify all the publications that you have written? One way is to apply for a unique identifier from ORCID, an “open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.” Continue reading

Resolutions for this blog for 2014

I took a couple of weeks off from everything work related, including this blog. I’m back today. My goal in 2014 is to try to post about 6 entries per week on this blog, with roughly 1/3 being original content and 2/3 being recommended resources. I may lower the average number of blog entries as the year progresses, but I want to be consistent in the number of entries from week to week (exlcuding vacations, of course).

I also have an email newsletter and I plan to send out monthly issues, except possibly in December, which is always way too busy. If you haven’t done so already, here’s the page you can go to so that you can subscribe to the newsletter.

I’ll be posting less on my web page, but might still put some longer items there or items that require regular updates. I plan to eventually (it may take several years) move all my content to this blog.