Counting since 6.11.2005
<http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~ts/personal.html>
Copyright © 1995-2011 by Prof. Timo Salmi
Last modified Thu 1-Sep-2011 10:00:43

Timo Salmi, personal

Answers to some frequently asked personal questions

Q: I would like to ask you some personal questions and/or know more about Finland and Vaasa. What kind of weather do you have over there? What is your field? How come you are interested in programming? What are the main fields of University of Vaasa, and so on?

A: It is very nice of you to ask. I hope that you understand that for practical workload reasons it is difficult for me to reply individually to these friendly questions. Instead, I have to refer you to canned material like my WWW home page , its many links such as my curriculum vitae , my hobbies , my photo collections of Vaasa and Finland, and to some material available in Garbo program archive's /pc/ts/ directory. The file vaasainf.txt will give you some general information back from 1997 about Finland, Vaasa, the University of Vaasa, our faculty , and our department . The Citizen’s MapSite service will show you in more detail where Vaasa is located on a map of Finland.

A2: If you wish to ask questions about Finland, the Finnish language or the Finnish culture, Finnish tourism and traveling services, please post your question to the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.nordic. Even if I very much like to communicate, and try to be of help, unfortunately I am usually far too pressed for time to answer to emailed questions on these subjects. If the Finnish weather is of particular interest to you, please see my weather links . If you wish to know more about Finnish accounting first click for some general material about Finnish Accounting in English .

A3: If you have used any of my several assorted programs you might have been wondering how come a professor of accounting and business finance is so much interested in programming and mathematics. (Perhaps this sounds less strange in the States than it does in Scandinavia). No great secret. I started business economics studies back in 1966 at the age of 21. At that time when I studied for my M.Sc.(econ.) degree I had business mathematics as my major and seriously considered a career in computer applications. Although I liked the idea very much I thought that taking computers as a profession might make me too stereotyped (even more than what I am now :-) exactly because it interested me so much. So, after graduating in 1970 I rather decided for a research career , and wrote a doctoral dissertation in operations research back in 1975. In doing this I naturally could utilize computers quite a bit.

But now came the big hitch. In the 1970's operations research was in the middle of what I call the OR applications crisis. Surveys with managers had shown that although operations research models were developed further and further in the academic journals, they really were not much used in real life except for very routine-like applications. (I mean on a grand scale. Individual OR business applications do exist.) Looking at the situation, and at my university career, I came to the conclusion that this really was getting me nowhere. I decided to look for a more relevant discipline. Now operations research has some nice methods, but the operations research problems stated in the academic field have little practical relevance. On the other hand the problems and the subject of accounting certainly is relevant, but the methods employed are unsophisticated and even naive. So I decided to move over to accounting, and take the methodology with me. This is a decision I have never regretted since, even if it is true that it was particularly difficult to get a tenured professorship in the chronically inbreeding Finnish accounting society. Fortunately, when I first came to Vaasa, I had a like-minded, very good accounting colleague professor (now emeritus) Reijo Ruuhela at the University of Vaasa. But the interest towards computers and programming has stayed with me trough all these stages, although I am foremost a researcher of accounting and business finance at heart. My current interests in research are in modern financial statement analysis .

More personal information, as seen by others, is available in in Acta Wasaensia 143.

I have also put in writing some of my thoughts on programming in the item on typevade.exe in tsgmeb.inf in my tsgmeb17.zip games package. You also might be interested in the history of the Garbo program archives . Additionally, some items in the Garbo information files /pc/pd2/tspost*.zip (* = 01,02,...) might be of interest you. The file tspost.idx in tspost00.zip gives the index.

A pointer to other miscellaneous questions, information and comments about Timo's programs etc.