Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

The next time you have a chance, pull a client aside and ask specific questions related to how you're doing. As someone who markets entertainment experiences--meaning I get to watch audiences react in real time--I find the power of human expression and poignant feedback is often far more meaningful than spreadsheet data. That's why I say that the next time you have the chance (and it should be as soon as today), you should pull a client aside and ask specific questions related to how you're doing.

"Science is messy. And the bigger the claims, the more intense the criticism." This is how Brian Vashtag opened his Washington Post article chronicling the publication of NASA's arsenic bacteria paper along seven critical comments and a follow-up response. It describes the situation - and science - well, but it's not the story that those outside of science usually hear.

This past December Jim Weatherall and I wrote " A Geometric Theory of Everything " for Scientific American , describing progress on unified geometric theories of gravitation and the Standard Model of particle physics. My personal contribution to this progress, a developing model called E8 Theory, was introduced three years ago in a paper titled " An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything ." Almost immediately after this paper appeared, physicists and the interested public began a lengthy process of considering and discussing this new theory's merits and faults. Not surprisingly, the initial response was largely critical, with most commenters encountering some unfamiliar mathematical structures in the paper and responding with appropriate skepticism