Who We Are

Continuous Behavior, Inc., consists of two people at the moment, and for the foreseeable future.

Me: Tom Donaldson

I'm a computer programmer with not quite thirty years experience. I once trained in the area of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, but departed without getting my Ph. D. when I fell completely under the thrall of computing.

For the past few years I have been working on a variety of applications with a wide variety of tools, mostly looking for inspiration. I think I found it with the intersection of software development, behavior analysis, and very cool mobile devices.

My Partner: Kay Jones

Kay is a teacher with around thirty years experience as a teacher, mostly as a Special Education teacher working with adolescents. She is currently teaching at SWOCC, the community college here in Brookings, Oregon.

Kay is not actively working with me on any projects at the moment, but is interested in working with me to develop a Positive Behavior Support application. She has developed paper-based systems in the past.

What is "Continuous Behavior"

The Name

The name "Continuous Behavior" is something of an accident prompted by coincidences.

  1. Once upon a time, Kay and I were RV fulltimers. Our official street address for Oregon DMV purposes was "continuous traveler".
  2. I had an RV park finder app sold under the company name, ContinuousTraveler.com, Inc.
  3. When I changed focus of the company to behavior analysis software, versus RV travel software, I needed to change the name of the company.
  4. My old grad school buddy, Cloyd Hyten, and I used to have long discussions regarding behavioral continua with our advisor, Don Hake. I tend to see continua everywhere, the others did not.
  5. Hmmm, continuous traveling; behavioral continua; behavior analytic software. Hey! Why not do a "mashup" of terms: Continuous Behavior.

Satisfying name.

The Idea

Responding really is always continuous. Stimuli are continuous. Responses may also be stimuli and stimuli may be also responses. We just chop them all up into discrete units for our convenience in studying them and talking about them. And therein lies the source of many problems in dealing with behavior: where to draw the dividing lines.

Yup. It is much like trying to digitalize an inherently analog world. We do it all the time, but seem to forget that we are doing it. We unitize continuous behavior for our convenience, but the behavior is still continuous and multidimensional. Control is likewise multidimensional, multidirectional, and multiplex.