Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips I encounter this situation often when reading the Help Wanted ads (the kind we have today online). The job description and requirements are far too specific. I have experience being unemployed and trying to find a new job. I don’t like the experience, but I learn a few things now and then. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We often have the choice of learning now or later. Often we don’t have the time to learn now, so we put it off until it really hurts. Gosh, we are in a hurry so much of the time. We just can’t pause to think, reflect, and learn at this moment. Some […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is a tried and true method of gathering requirements and specifying systems. Imagine you had a thousand assistants. There are various methods of gathering requirements and specifying systems. A basic one is to imagine a thousands assistants awaiting your request. If you had a thousand assistants, what would you have them […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We can have too many people in the room to discuss something. We can also become locked in an inner circle where no one else understands what we are doing. There should be a balance. There are too many people in the room: Twenty people (pick a number) is too many. There […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the system we really use is not the system we tell people we use. “This system won’t work,” said the person whose job it was to analyze a system. But, the system works, i.e., the group of persons using the system that won’t work seem to get along just fine. In […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Take caution with negative statements as they often contradict themselves. “There is no crying in baseball,” is a famous line from the movie A League of Their Own. (My wife says that is a movie about sisters. I say it is a movie about baseball.) That is a self-contradictory statement. One person […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Stretching the mind is generally a good thing. There are many ways to do this, so just do it. Over the years, I have spent hours playing the guitar. If I spend half-an-hour a day playing day after day, what I play starts to resemble jazz. I have some sort of lifetime […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have yet another problem with machine learning. This one, however, has an easy solution. Several years ago I wrote of a fundamental problem with machine learning. I guess we have yet another problem being called “poisoned” machine learning. With poisoning, someone knows that I am about to “learn the machine” something […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we fight against something with all our might only to discover that are foe is ourselves and what we do everyday. As I write this, there is a writer’s strike in Hollywood. Note, I am not in Hollywood writing this as a writer who is on a writer’s strike. Now that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Look at the world. Those countries with seemingly unsolvable problems were under communist rule the longest. This post is a bit different as I delve into some political science and recent world history. It appears that the countries on earth that accepted communism the longest are the biggest messes. Russia is a […]

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