Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Is it okay to not be the person in charge? I am nearing the end of my professional working career. Maybe I will retire in a year or ten. Regardless of the retirement date, I have worked many more years than I will work, i.e., the past is bigger than the future. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Many of today’s data scientists are similar to man of the web designers of the 1990s. I think this is a good thing. A recent conversation with a colleague helped me to realized something about data science in today’s world. I thought data scientists were computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who knew […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When the terrain and the map differ, believe the terrain. It is there in front of us. We ignore this at our peril. We have a telephone (at least I still do in my home) and a smartphone. We call both of them “phones.” Their names are the same. How we represent […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We don’t need an expert in this or that to build better systems. We need a desire to learn and a desire to please. We don’t need a User Experience (UX) person on the team. We don’t need a Customer Experience (CX) expert on the team. We don’t need an XX (fill-in-the-blank […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A phrase to add to every assignment or action item or anything that goes on a “to do” list. Years ago, author and consultant Jerry Weinberg gave an assignment to attendees of his writing seminar. It was something like: Think of what you should write today. Write that. Do that tomorrow, too. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Things are the way they are because… Fine. That is one explanation. Let’s have at least three more. Few things are as difficult as explaining why something is the way it is. We see more brown leaves on trees this year than we have in the past. Well, the reason is… Really? […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The skill we should be teaching and learning and using more than any other today is question asking. We live in a world where all the questions have answers. We just have to find the answers. We have the facts, the data, the everything online in front of us. It is there. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The words we use most often provide some indication of our selves. Try some experiments. Learn. Adjust. Try this: right now, write ten words on whatever is in front of you. Napkin. Table cloth. Back of your hand. How many of those ten are nouns? How many are verbs? This one is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some things are so obvious that we all miss them for a long time. Moving from experiment lab to the real world requires some expertise. To do artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, etc. you do computing. This means a lot of software work. Though not as old as physics and chemistry, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Fail fast, fair early is a mantra in today’s knowledge work. Sometimes, however, we are confused about what is a failure. Fail fast, fail early! (Some persons say it the other way around and mean the same thing.) The idea is simple: Try something Learn something Adjust Go back to step 1. […]

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