Working Up

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 There are many good reasons for starting small. One is that it allows room for growth, and growth brings with it optimism, hope, and other good tidings. Start small. There are good reasons to start small. If I do it all wrong, I have only invested small resources like time, money, equipment, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The prolonged year of the virus is slowly moving towards an end. It will never end, but I hope we have learned a few things that we can all do. The pandemic is declining. It is like a math function that tends to but never reaches zero. The limit as time approaches […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A simple method for writing a short story (I mean really simple). I like to write short stories. Perhaps that is because I think I have so much to tell, but not enough persons to sit and listen. Anyways, here is one method to writing a short story: Remember an event in […]

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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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by Dwayne Phillips The path to solution is often found in the next (logical) question. Person A: How much will this cost? Person B: I don’t know? Person A: When will you know? Person B: Uh, I don’t know that either? Person A: What will you need to do so that you know? Person B: […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The “winner” will be declared by fallible persons with prejudices and favorites (just like us). Surely we can do better than this. Right? Surely, all us smart people can put our heads together and create a better community, a better consensus. Alas, not this year. We’re all working from home, at least […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I am pretty good at standing on the shoulders of others. Can I learn to stand on my own shoulders? I am pretty good at standing on the shoulders of others’. 1 Someone else works, works, and works to arrive at something. Whew. They are exhausted. 2 I read it. Aha! How […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When teaching and demonstrating systems, it is better if there are errors. Teaching how to use a system is better when there are errors. No, that prior sentence is not a typo. I want errors to appear when I am showing a person how to use a system—anything from software to a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It sure is hard to understand fill-in-the-blank. Or is it hard to understand what someone wrote about it? I recently experimented with Jekyll. Good grief! That’s complicated! I also experimented with Git and GitHub. Good grief! Those things are complicated! And then I read several textbooks on machine learning and convolutional neural […]

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