by Dwayne Phillips There is a risk to clarifying the message relative to an idea. We many learn that the idea is a bad one. I have an idea. I have a message. My message is fuzzy, not good. I want to clarify my message. Really? If my idea is a bad one, clarifying the […]
Entries from April 2021
Clarifying the Message (do we want to do that?)
April 29th, 2021 · No Comments
Tags: Clarity · Communication · Ideas
Jotted Thoughts
April 26th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Is a thought expressed a complete, accurate, well considered thought or merely thinking out loud? Lots of folks express thoughts in social media these days. I define “social media” as anything that is published in any form without exhaustive peer review. Lots of folks are massacred because of some of these thoughts […]
Tags: Communication · Listening · Thinking
Agile Nation(?)
April 22nd, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Agile thought: do, learn, change, do learn, repeat. Great stuff in some situations. Not great in national policy. Someone recently noted that the Agile Manifesto was 20 years old. This was a fancy way of stating the obvious when it comes to experiments: do a little, learn a little, do a little, […]
Tags: Agility · Change · Learning · Thinking
Anonymity in the Masked Society
April 19th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips All this mask wearing allows me to not recognize and not talk to people when I’d rather just keep doing things I’d rather just keep doing. The year of the virus has brought us many changes. Let’s consider one that I discovered recently and like (on those occasions when I like it). […]
Tags: Alternatives · Appearances · Conversation · Reaction · Virus
Why We Can’t Hire Enough Data Scientists
April 15th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Another variation of Lewis Carroll’s “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” This time we apply it to hiring data scientists. “We can’t hire enough data scientists.” At least I read that almost everyday out there on the Internet. Well, why can’t we? Here are […]
Tags: Agreement · Certification · Data Science · Jobs · Mathematics · Thinking · Word
The Tidal Decision-Making Technique
April 12th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes decisions just sort of drift in and out with the tides. The tide comes in; the tide goes out. Sometimes we find something that drifted in with the tide and remains on the beach. The next day, the next cycle or two of tides, and that something is gone. It was […]
Tags: Choose · Decide · Judgment · Lifecycle · Management
The Technology Imperative, Part II
April 8th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips We just cannot resist applying the latest technology to something. This is the second in my series on the “Technology Imperative.” (I have learned that there are books and papers with this title elsewhere.) The first part in the “series” was blogged in the year 2010. Oooops, not much continuity, but here […]
Tags: General Systems Thinking · Government · Technology
A Fundamental Problem with Machine Learning
April 5th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Despite all the promise and all the already fulfilled promise, there is a fundamental problem with machine learning. Machine learning is that part of artificial intelligence that time and technology favors. We have the stuff needed to make machine learning work right now. Machine learning “works” because you feed in a million […]
Tags: Data Science · Ethics · General Systems Thinking · Neural Network · Pattern Classification · Systems · Technology
Internet Discussion Chaos and Semi-Public Groups
April 1st, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Where will we go for discourse on the Internet? Semi-public groups for forums work. I like Seth Godin’s recent short essay on trust and how folks use the Internet. Godin described the early (1970s) online interaction as, “Because each of these groups were high-trust communities, it was easy to conclude that the […]
Tags: Adults · Conversation · Ideas · Internet · Respect · Talk · Trust · Vocabulary