Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes it is worth the effort to identify the noun and the adjective. This is an educated guess. The word “guess” is a noun. The word “educated” is an adjective. Nouns are usually facts (a tree is a tree). Adjectives are usually chosen by a person and are subjective (what is a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is often best to leave the conversations of another profession to those other professionals. I am an engineer. There, got that out of the way. And I have a Doctor of Philosophy or PhD in engineering. I have not idea why they call the degree by that name. Oh well, got […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Back to a basic: write with nouns and verbs. It brings us closer to brevity and clarity. Those are pretty good places to be. I was reminded of this short and powerful writing tip this past week. And yes, it was from Strunk and White. They used the title of the post […]

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by Dwayne Phillips BYOD or Bring Your Own Data is a big deal. It has been in computing since the start of computing. Nothing new here folks, but it is still important. Everyone is a data scientist (sort of). Everyone works for a data-centric organization (sort of). Data is the new oil (sort of). Data […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The old ways of doing AI are still better than some of the new ways in some cases. The answer, of course, is to combine the best of all to do something better. Feed the following into a chatbot: “The cow jumped” The chatbot will finish with “over the moon.” That is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips People in distant lands use the same words differently. Time and generations create distant lands. I was fascinated by this story about younger folks putting things on TikTok et al. Then older folks who admit people to college and hire them for jobs noticed those things. The younger folks spoke in the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If someone asks a question in English, please answer in English. Please avoid some other private language. In recent conversations, I asked, “Your research, how far ahead in time are you working? Your work may become reality in 1, 5, 10 years?” The answer was, “TRL 4.” (see this for a translation) […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Any topic and just about any situation. Please provide three pages that contain a thousand words and several figures. Right or wrong, we reach a point in life and history that we need information on this or that. What format? Try the title of this post. On three pieces of standard-size paper […]

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by Dwayne Phillips As a writer and just about anyone else, we must be flexible in a rigid manner. The same is true for almost every adjective and its antonym. A writer must be flexible. Except when the writer must be rigid. Except when exceptions arise. The same goes for just about any adjective and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips “Machine Learning” is one of the biggest misuses of the English language I have seen. The machine isn’t learning. Let’s try to remember what is happening. Data science is a big deal these days. Well, it is until you read the fine print in the Help Wanted ads about data science jobs. […]

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