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Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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Entries from April 2021

Clarifying the Message (do we want to do that?)

April 29th, 2021 · No Comments

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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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). […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Tags: Adults · Conversation · Ideas · Internet · Respect · Talk · Trust · Vocabulary