I have taught at KU since 1987. My repertoire ranges from introduction to U.S. politics to graduate statistics and research methodology.

In the beginning, my research area in political science was pretty tightly focused on interest group politics. Since then, my interests have broadened to include electoral institutions and public opinion. My methods are, for the most part, formal and mathematical. Now I'm working several medium to large simulation modeling projects using Swarm, a "software toolkit" which was originated by Chris Langton and the Swarm Team at the Santa Fe Institute and has since moved on to become an open source community effort under the auspices of the Swarm Development Group.

Most of the stuff I do has lots of equations and formulae in it, and it is painfully difficult to explain to relatives what I do for a living. The simulation projects are making that easier, actually, because instead of explaining some complicated political model, I can say I worked on models about the stock market and ballet dancing.

Lately I've been doing some computer consulting in addition to my other activities. I did not have a strong interest in computing when I started here, but by necessity I have had to learn how to do a lot of things. And, because I'm a teacher by nature, I feel compelled to tell other people how they can do it too. My operating principle has been that, if we just tell people one way to make things work, and don't bother them at the outset with all kinds of complicated possibilities and details, then we will have happy computer users. I started showing people how to use the IBM mainframe with a program called CMS. Then I started helping people with Windows and winsock applications (remember the happy days of dial-up in Windows 3.1?). Then we got a Novell server in Blake Hall and I administered that and wrote some documentation for it. Then we got a Win2000 server. And that was the last straw for me. MS Windows is fundamentally bad, unstable, and explotiative. I started to tout the the Linux operating system, a unix-clone that runs on PCs.

My newest pass time is the development of user-interactive web sites and web programs. I want to enable users to put in their "content" without knowing a lot of web programming detail and without any special software. Two avenues for this are the WikiWiki Web philosophy (I've got TWiki driving the some documentation) and and database-backed CGI script for organizational roster and bibliography collection These are driven by various editions of the Vita Builder program that I've made available.)