Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we find a small shiny object that we R E A L L Y want. Then we go about finding problems that it will solve. Yikes. Here is the traditional or accepted way to solve a problem: State the problem State several solutions to the problem Pick the “best” solution Go […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Are we making a product or making a product that allows others to make a product. Are we making a product that will allow us to make a product, but we spend so much time on the first that we never make a product? I see this often. People aren’t building products. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Once again, someone creates all sorts of fancy explanations for what was simply a bad idea poorly conducted. There seems to be a lot of “bias” in the machine learning area of artificial intelligence research and practice. Or can we explain the problems without using such fancy terms like “bias?” What were […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All organizations have management processes. Do they matter? All organizations have management processes. Some organizations codify them, teach them, spread them, proclaim them, and even sometimes use them. Do things management processes, i.e., “the way we do things around here,” matter? Of course they do. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the personnel, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Everyone claims agreement. Great. Let’s just test that statement with a blank sheet of paper. “We all agree on what we are to do!” claimed a person full of hope and anxious to get to work. “Wow, great,” said a second person who likes to hear good news, but is skeptical when […]

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by Dwayne Phillips One of the ultimate compliments at work is, “We’ll do fine without you.” If you want to be indispensable, do a really bad job. It may seem backwards, but we can do without our best employees. Of course, this all depends on the definition we use for “best” and “good.” Our best […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Change can be a nuisance—even change that leads to “better” things. Stuck in traffic. Hate it. And I have to stay further behind some annoying vehicles for fear of having a rock crack my windshield. Dump trucks. Everywhere I drove this week there were dump trucks. Up and down the roads. They […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When assessing a system, remember the correct order of tasks, and always remember that persons are involved in any system that matters. When assessing a system, proceed to: Observe Learn Converse Please, do these tasks in this order. This is especially recommended when persons are part of that system, and persons are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips First you work on a small problem set. Once you learn from that, you expand the problem set. Google recently started hiring speakers with accents to help train its speech recognition software systems. Why didn’t they do this sooner? Why did they only use middle-America, white-bread Americans, or some other Johnny Carson, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If we work hard enough and smart enough to the solution, we often find the solution collapses to something small and simple. At the end of all the work, we find the solution. The solution is messy, but it is a solution. Then we go home. Then we come back to work […]

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