Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips There is time later for thinking deep thoughts. Now, however, is the time to accomplish the work, now. “We could do this better”—said me, many times. I know, I know, boy, do I know. We could do this better. “Let’s do better,” is a phrase I often use at the end of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the product of research. There seems to be a misunderstanding about the product of research. I saw this article about risk in research. The idea is that researchers are often risky. Huh? Risk management asks, “What could possibly go wrong?” That is something we […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Wait. Stop. Someone grab that person. That person is about to fall into the pit of endless details. Oh no. It’s too late! I know it’s about to happen. I should be able to do something to stop it. Oh no. It happened too fast. There is nothing I can do. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To be effective in one way or another, gather resources. resourceful: adjective, having the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. Hmm. That is not the definition I expected, but that is what comes from Google’s English dictionary provided by Oxford Languages. You know, that place in England where […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It must be difficult running a college and deciding what departments to create and what degrees to offer. It seems only yesterday that colleges started offering degrees in Data Science. Data Science was the sexiest job of the century or so said an article in Harvard Business Review. I guess they missed […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Influencing behavior via modeling instead of coating with chocolate syrup. I recently read an article written by a mother describing how she had her children eat vegetables. The answer applies to all behaviors that are distasteful to some persons. There is an old joke about a farmer who fed his dogs spinach. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A simple question can start a meaningful conversation that prevents bad things from happening. As I write this post, our elected representatives ended a partial shutdown of our Federal government a couple of days ago. Such shutdown set some type of record and brought lots of grief to thousands of people. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems that when we stop doing something, we forget how to do it, sort of. I recently read reports of AI causing “deskilling.” (pronounced de-skilling, not des-killing) It seems that some folks were using AI tools to do something they used to do all the time. After a few months, one […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We do everything according to our documented documents—except when we don’t. Mr. Zuckerburg at Meta has created a superintelligence group to do something wonderful in AI. He is using the tried-and-true documented management practice of the skunk works. The skunk works is a special place where you put some really smart folks […]

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by Dwayne Phillips AI has upended large parts of the education system. What to do? Back to basics. Decide what is important to learn and teach that. Teachers give an assignment. Students use one of these chattering bots to write the answer. Task done. No learning, but the task is done so move on. This […]

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