If you find yourself putting things off, the culprit may be a weak sense of identity rather than a weak will.

When you put off tasks that are important for the betterment of your business, do you beat yourself up for having a weak will?

It may feel like your inability to push yourself to do the unpleasant but unnecessary is to blame when you procrastinate, but psychology suggests there actually may be another culprit: your identity… or lack thereof.

Timothy A. Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Canada's Carleton University, has written on Psychology Today, that identity is "knowledge of who we are. Knowledge that is hard won through a real 'exploration' of possible selves (perhaps those crazy teen years or campus life in your 20's) and finally crystallized with a 'commitment.'"

What does identity have to do with procrastination? According to research done by one of Pychyl's grad students Matthew Shanahan having a less firm sense of the one leads to more of the other.

"Ego identity development was negatively correlated with procrastination. That means, the more achieved the identity, the more the participants knew who they were, the lower their scores on the measures of procrastination," Pychyl explains.

The moral of the story for Pychyl is that "we all have to 'grow up' a bit to decrease our procrastination." That's good news for frustrated parents of teens and deadline-challenged college students, but what does that have to do with business owners? You are, after all, not some teenager currently experimenting with a new goth look or vegan diet.

But while your fundamental identity as a person in general may long since have been sealed, if you're relatively new to entrepreneurship, your sense of yourself as a genuine business owner could still be tentative. When embarking on a new career path, it's common to feel like you're somehow faking it—that you don't really have the right to the identity you're claiming.

This discomfort with your new identity, at least in mild doses, isn't something to worry about, according to the New York Times, but it just might make you more prone to procrastination. The good news: as you get more comfortable with your identity and commit fully to seeing yourself as a business owner, your tendency to put things off should fade.

Conclusion: it's time to start believing in your identity as a business owner.

Does this connection between identity and procrastination make intuitive sense to you?

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Analytics for Cancer Survival Time

Dr. Shujia Zhou and Ran Qi
CSEE Department, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00 pm Friday, 15 February 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

With advent of new medical technologies, more and more prognostic factors are discovered and used in predicting cancer survival time. Consequently, the number of cancer patient types increase significantly. However, there are limited therapies available for cancer patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop accurate algorithms in grouping cancer patients so that a doctor can choose the optimal therapy for a cancer patient. In this talk we will introduce current grouping algorithms, discuss new approaches in improving their efficiencies, and present a prototype of prognostic system for cancer patients.

Dr. Shujia Zhou is a research associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC. He received a Ph.D. from Washington University at St. Louis in 1993. He held a Director’s-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and became a LANL technical staff member in 1996. At LANL, his researches in large-scale molecular dynamics simulations were published in the Journal of Science and reported in the journals of both Science and Nature. In 2000, he joined Northrop Grumman Corporation and worked on NASA Computation Technology Projects. He is a pioneer in accelerating climate and weather applications with multi-core processors such as,IBM’s Cell B.E. processor. His current research interests are big data analytics, in particular in finance and health.

Ran Qi received her M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Lamar University in 2009 and started her Ph.D program in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2010. In 2011, she worked on train monitoring system development at Norfolk Southern for 4 months as a co-op intern. In January 2012, she worked on personalized medicine in IBM Toronto Lab for 3 weeks. Her current Ph.D research focus is data mining in health analytics and personal medicine including cancer survival analysis and developing a cancer prognostic system.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer publicly said that she constantly thinks of who should replace her top execs. Cold blooded?

During the recent Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer said something that raised my eyebrows.

According to Business Insider, Mayer said she "constantly thinks about who could do a better job" on her management team. "I think about who could be a better COO. I think about who could be a better CFO."

Since coming to Yahoo in July of last year, Mayer has replaced much of the company's senior management team with her own, having brought in Henrique De Castro as COO and Ken Goldman as CFO, among others.

Goldman was apparently in the audience when Mayer made her remarks, which she then followed up with, "Sorry Ken, it's just a thought experiment I do."

Now, I'm not going to say that kind of thing doesn't happen all the time in the boardrooms of corporate America. It does. I've had far worse things hurled at me by a CEO or two when I was a senior executive in the tech industry. But always in a private conference room; never in a public forum. Never like that.

A board director once told me a story about a well-known high-tech chief executive. He said the guy would sit in his executive staff meetings and imagine each of his top execs with their compensation emblazoned on their forehead and ask himself if they were worth it or not.

Sure, that's cold-blooded, but he kept it to himself, which is no big deal.

What is telling is that the kind of behavior Mayer exhibited at the Goldman conference reportedly was often on display when she worked for Google. I believe that.

In any case, Mayer's comments at the conference were probably humiliating for the executives in question. They don't reflect well on her or on her potential for retaining executive talent at Yahoo.

When I was discussing this with a colleague, she said, "I sure hope those guys are paid plenty to put up with that kind of crap." Indeed, they probably are.

Still, that's no way to treat employees. I don't care how much they make.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is the founder and CEO of Real Life E Time Coaching & Training and the author of The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment. You can find Elizabeth on Twitter @RealLifeE and at ScheduleMakeover.com.

For All the World to Hear brings the Civil Rights Movement to our ears.

In the 1950�s, Woodrow �Woody� B. Grant, Jr. sat in his Virginia Union University classroom mesmerized by the guest speaker. The magnetic young minister tapped into the deep longings of the African-American college students in the audience, showing how passive resistance could be used to change their plight. The young leader who spoke that day was, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and hearing him changed Grant�s life.

Following the speech, Grant immediately became a �foot soldier� for freedom and dedicated his life to fighting for civil rights. He was joined in that work by his wife, Janice Grant, a strong force in her own right as a civil rights activist and leader. The Grants are among ten individuals sharing their stories through For All the World to Hear: Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights, an oral-history performance project led by UMBC�s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC). The group of storytellers met every week in Baltimore�s Druid Hill Park, from September through December, to develop performances that capture their experiences growing up during a time of Jim Crow Laws and recreate their participation in the civil rights movement.

For All the World the Hear debuted at UMBC in November and returns to campus for a performance on Friday, February 15, as part of a tour throughout the Baltimore area. The storytellers bring to life the personal sacrifices, risks and humiliations endured at that time � realities that escape many young people and adults, today. Most of us don�t know what it�s like to not be able to eat at any restaurant we choose. We can all swim or play tennis in public parks and drink from any water fountain.

For All the World to Hear brings to life a different, but not distant, time � and it asks how far we�ve actually come. Organized by Sandra Abbott, curator of collections and outreach for the CADVC, in collaboration with oral historian, dramaturg and director of the performance, Harriet Lynn, For All the World to Hear is an outreach project inspired by the exhibition For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, on display in the CADVC�s gallery through March 10, 2013.

In addition to live performances, the project will include digital stories available through foralltheworldtohear.org, stories.umbc.edu and iTunesU. The entire project will culminate in a documentary film produced by Abbott with the help of UMBC students who have also participated as facilitators throughout the project.

See For All the World to Hear: Stories From the Struggle for Civil Rights Friday, February 15, at 10:30 a.m. in the Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission to this event is free and open to the public. For information on other performances, please visit foralltheworldtohear.org.

This project was made possible by a grant from the Maryland Humanities Council, through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Maryland Humanities Council.

(2/12/13)

© 2012 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

Sometimes you learn from Codecademy; sometimes you learn from real-life experience. Yesterday, Codecademy was offline for almost 24 hours. We want to apologize and explain what happened.

Currently we have restored all user progress — courses, points and streaks — from before 2/6/13. We are doing all we can to restore user progress from 2/6/13 to 2/13/13 at 1:09 PM EST. Despite our best efforts we cannot guarantee that all work from that one week period will be recovered. If you have been affected, please let us know.

What happened?

At 1:09AM EST on Wednesday 2/13, we took Codecademy down to deal with a database migration issue we were facing. We tweeted about it at 1:30. Then we spent the next 24 hours behind the scenes to iron out the issue.

How did it happen?

Like most web applications, Codecademy stores its information — everything from your submissions in exercises to new accounts — in a database. We use a technology called MongoDB (by our friends at 10gen) to do this. Our databases have hundreds of millions of items in them and are growing larger by the second. We've been working to change the configuration of our databases so that we can migrate our data to new database structures, laying a solid foundation for future developments and features.

Around 1:30 PM yesterday we became aware of an issue: one of our local environments was not set up correctly, and was causing a database malfunction. The whole team dropped what they were working on and focused on restoring the site as quickly as possible.

Soon after we made the decision to keep the site down until we were 100% sure we could restore the majority of the data. Working with our external service providers, we matched up the data they had with the data we had internally from backups. We verified the integrity of certain data and began piecing back together our databases before bringing the site back online.

After pulling together backups of submissions from Amazon S3, course progress from our backup, and emails from our email database and userfox, we tested things internally to verify we hadn't lost much. Then, finally, we brought the site back up.

What does this mean for me?

We have minimized the number of people affected by pulling from our backups, but we were not able to restore everything.

**Currently we have restored all user progress — courses, points and streaks — from before 2/6/13. We are doing all we can to restore user progress from 2/6/13 to 2/13/13 at 1:09 PM EST. Despite our best efforts we cannot guarantee that all work from that one week period will be recovered. If you have been affected, please let us know.**

There are also certain data types that we were not able to retrieve for some users.

Anyone who created a new account from 2/6 - 2/13

Profile pictures will be missing and connection to social media accounts will need to be restored. We will be sending you a link to get set up again.

Anyone who created or joined a new group from 2/6 - 2/13

A small number of users and beta testers have access to our groups feature. If you created a group in the past week you will need to recreate it. If you joined a group in the past week you will need to rejoin.

What Now?

This event underscored the importance of frequent backups. We have created a new plan based on what we have learned to better recover from potential database migration issues in the future.

We will also be extending everyone's streaks today. We know that you are committed to learning to code. We are committed to helping you get there. If our site goes down, your learning does too. This is the least we can do.

I wrote this post so that you would have confidence that we take downtime very seriously; we learn from each and every event; and we are committed to building the strongest community for learning how to program. Thank you to all our users for your patience.