Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Is this person who and what they claim? Is this person authentic? The term “authenticity” is being tossed about much recently. I once worked in a job where determining the authenticity of a person was important. I struggled to understand what that meant. Here is some of what I learned. Is this […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems the world has redefined what it means to be an engineer. A recent story on the web discussed how Twitter will change the appearance of its home page. Involved in the story is Twitter’s Vice President of Engineering. I am an engineer; I have been an engineer for several decades. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I read the FCC’s document on Net Neutrality (“Report and order,” 2015) and provide my comments. The FCC recently released the full text of their document on the Open Internet (the full document is available in PDF here). I read all 400 pages of document and assenting and dissenting views of the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We try to relearn this again: people have to use technology in some “smart” way. Money goes to big data projects, but not much comes back. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes, it was with fill-in-the-blank-with-one-of-those-new-technologies-that-was-going-to-change-the-world-by-itself. People use technology. Well, sometimes we use it, and sometimes we use it in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Mankind is searching for that self-applying information so we can life the good life. Perhaps this is a silly fantasy, perhaps it is a dystopian future. Is this the singularity? Is this beyond the singularity? Consider this future. The computer mines information and doesn’t present it to a person, but uses it […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Tech companies use photo recognition algorithms to learn about you. They sell this information to advertisers, and the rest is history. It is with humble apologies to the professors who ushered me into research in computer vision and image processing that I present this post. Google and others are constantly improving their […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The success of many endeavors should lead to dissolving the endeavor. It is unfortunate, however, that the result is often bureaucracy. I have seen it many times. Let’s start an association: to improve the performance of X, to increase the awareness of Y, to teach the practice of Z, or some such […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To gain approval for an endeavor, you must “sell” it to those who decide such things. Then, as work progresses, you must continue to engage those who decide and keep the project “sold.” I hate this topic. That is because one of my worst experiences in my career was due to my […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some of today’s more efficient technologies are efficient because we are lazy. FORTRAN is an efficient programming language. The executable files are small. The programs execute quickly. There is a simple reasons why FORTRAN is an efficient programming language: the compilers were created at a time when computing resources were much less […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The application of augment reality glasses remains the same as it always has been. The trouble is that application isn’t fashionable or cool. Google Glass is up and down these days. I can’t follow the story, so I don’t know if it is dead or reborn or something. The application of augmented […]

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