User:Pat Palmer

In my current day job (at the Patrick Center, Academy of Natural Sciences, I go a lot of database and C# programming, and also quite a bit of system administration. I have masters degrees in computer science (Univ. of Tenn., 1983) and public sector management (Fels Center, Univ. of Penn., 1992) and many years work experience in the software industry, especially telecom. My academic background includes public sector management, computer science, and the liberal arts (linguistics and literature).

During much of 2007, I worked as a free-lance trainer. From 2002-2006, I taught computer architecture, software engineering and programming in the MCIT program at the University of Pennsylvania in a non-tenure position. Before that, I consulted on software systems within pharmaceutical and insurance companies. My early computer career included several years’ experience developing telecommunications software at Bell Laboratories, originally part of AT&T and then part of Lucent.

My first academic effort was in linguistics. I spent three years doing graduate study in Germanic linguistics (specialization: semantic change in Middle High German) at the Univ. of Tenn but switched over to computer science without quite completing a linguistics degree (I was working on a Ph. D.). During that time, I read Old High German, Old Norse, Icelandic, Middle High German, Afrikaans, Pennsylvania Dutch, Yiddish, various regional German dialects, and also studied Spanish, Latin, and Russian. My undergraduate degree was liberal arts with a concentration in English literature and German (which I speak fluently). I also took a lot of physics, math and science, and that enabled me to move into computer science afterwards.

One odd bit in my past is that I spent a couple of years as a telephone switching technician, working for GTE in Virginia in the late 1970's. During that time, I worked on some of the last Strowger switching offices remaining in the United States. I also worked on some electromechanical switches, made by Leich, that had so-called common control units for call routing--in effect, a fully electromechanical, special-purpose computer. I could see numbers being stored in registers as people dialed. This is where my interest in computing really grew strong, and I moved into the field on computer science afterwards.

I've had quite a bit of musical training and play piano and mandolin. I also like to garden, watch birds, and read. More on that is [here].

As part of getting to know Citizendium, I first worked on CZ:The_Big_Cleanup, and that led me all over the place. Here is what else I've been working on in Citizendium. I am a Computers author and editor, and am currently serving also on the Citizendium Executive Committee.

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