Acknowledgements

Thanks to all my friends and family who have voiced support for this site: in particular my wife and daughter, who tolerate large amounts of web noodling devoted to updating things here. My mother was a constant inspiration to and supporter of my career as a scientist and educator.

Thanks to Pratt Institute colleagues who make my work environment exciting, inspiring, and nurturing. Our chair, Carole Sirovich, has allowed me to spread my scientific wings and fly into a great variety of pursuits. My fellow faculty in the Department of Mathematics & Science (including Damon Chaky, Daniel Wright, Cindie Kehlet, Ágnes Mócsy) provide both inspiration and a departmental family. I am also deeply indebted to our department secretary Margaret Dy-So, who has helped me on more occasions than I could ever count. I am grateful for the diverse perspectives of my School of Liberal Arts & Sciences colleagues past and present, including B. Ric Brown, Eric Godoy, Francis Bradley, and Peter Nekola. Former Dean Toni Oliviero, who presided over my first four years at Pratt, provided a lot of support to foster my early growth. I am proud to be member of the Pratt Faculty Union (UFCT Local 1460), and thank President Kye Carbone and Vice President Emily Beall for their tireless effort to raise the status and support of our faculty.

Barbara Charton and Damon Chaky provided valuable suggestions for improving the research resources listed on my For Students page.

I am grateful to Pratt’s Information Technology division for support in maintaining and developing my technological resources. This includes the Service Desk (especially Toby Howard), which has helped keep my computer and class learning management system sites running smoothly, and the Faculty Technology Studios, which has provided inspiration and support for my use of technology in my classroom.

This site has been improved by the comments and suggestions of my scientific colleagues including Damon Chaky, Jennifer Verdolin, and Artem Kaznatcheev.

Ben Knight [1, 2] has provided unbelievable support and enthusiasm for the site. Conversations with Richard Gilman-Opalsky have provoked and informed much of the content here.

I cannot forget where I came from, and predominantly I owe my scientific chops to those who educated me. My graduate advisor, Lev Ginzburg, provided me with a goldmine of ideas that I am still exploring as well as the theoretical chops to tread my own path. I am grateful for all the teaching and advising I received from past and current Stony Brook University professors including Daniel Dykhuizen, Jessica Gurevitch, Charlie Janson, Massimo Pigliucci, R. Geeta, Rob Armstrong, Stephan Munch, Jim Rohlf, John True, Walt Eanes, Mike Bell, and Doug Futuyma. A huge part of the education I received at Stony Brook came from my fellow graduate students, including Jennifer Verdolin, Toni Lyn Morelli, Sybil Gotsch, Melissa Mark, Chris Noto, Adam Ehmer, Annie Green, J. Matt Hoch, Andre Levy, Dan Stoebel, Dusty Brisson, Leone Brown, Dan Moen, Jessica Stanton, Jonathan Hickman, Eliza Woo, and Ramona Walls. I also received significant mentoring and guidance from Leo S. Luckinbill, who served as my outside committee member.

I am — for better or worse — one of those people who only avails himself of technology once it becomes relatively easy to use. I tried unsuccessfully for several years to engineer my own site before discovering the amazing resources offered by the WordPress Foundation [1, 2]. My ability to provide you with content is inextricably linked to the profound efforts of the many developers who produce WordPress. This includes not just the WordPress team but also the many plugin authors who enable cool features to be added to a WordPress site. Currently on this site I am using the following plugins:

• Akismet is a phenomenal anti-spam filter that completely solves a pernicious WordPress problem: spam comments.
• Broken Link Checker assures that my site will never be filled with dead links to nowhere.
• Collapsible Archive Widget makes the cool little blog post archive on the bottom right of my site.
• Easy Flash Embed allows me to put my flash teaching tools right into their respective pages.
• Exclude Pages from Navigation is a handy little plugin that allows me to create all the ‘mystery’ invisible pages that lurk in the background of my site (how intriguing!).
• Contact Form 7 is a great contact form generator that helps keep my email address out of the hands of the forces of evil (i.e. spammers).
• FeedBurner FeedSmith makes it possible for me to offer all my WordPress feeds at Feedburner.
• Google XML Sitemaps runs in the background and (I hope) makes finding my site using web browsers more likely.
• Jetpack by WordPress.com is an amazing package that gives me access to my hit statistics and allows me to embed sharing tools.
• NextGEN Gallery is an amazing tool for maintaining easily-browsable photo galleries.
• Plus One Button empowers me to empower you to “+1” my posts and pages, even if neither of us understand what Google +1 is about.
• Site Table of Contents allows me to have a really nice complete index of all my blogs by category.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags allows me to easily embed video from major video aggregator sites.

I try to not just acknowledge these altruistic developers-for-the-people, but also drop a little something in their PayPal accounts at the end of the year.

This site is hosted by A Small Orange, whose technical support representatives have bailed out my WordPress install on several occasions. They also offset their server impact by purchasing wind power credits!

QR-Codes that I use for this site are generated thanks to Kaywa.