by Dwayne Phillips The ability to read a product catalog does not make a person an engineer or an architect or someone who can think and reason. I have encountered this for 30 years. It is as if someone had a cue card in their hand. They spew product names. Things like: Kafka HDFS TensorFlow […]
Reading a Product Catalog Does NOT an Engineer Make
December 8th, 2022 · No Comments
Tags: Clarity · Concepts · Design · Engineering · Ideas · Systems
When Text Became Number Crunching
September 5th, 2022 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips The number crunchers now rule the world. How did that happen? Many years ago I was a number cruncher. I did then what people still call “digital signal processing.” We took analog signals, magically made them numbers in computers via gadgets called analog-to-digital converters or A/D converters, and happily applied digital approximations […]
Tags: Analysis · Approximation · Artificial Intelligence · Computing · Engineering · History · Machine Learning · Process
Augmented Reality in 1980
February 21st, 2022 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Forty years ago I saw what Augmented Reality could do. I’m still waiting for it. Back in 1980, I spent much of my workdays repairing electronic equipment (yes, I am that old). Pull a piece of equipment out of the rack, put it on the workbench, remove the cover, and trace through […]
Tags: Concepts · Engineering · Help · Information · Knowledge · Technology
Data Science is the New Web Design
February 10th, 2022 · No Comments
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 […]
Tags: Data Science · Engineering · Experiment · Expertise · Mathematics · Science · Systems · Technology · Tools · Web 2.0
Does it Have a USB Port?
September 20th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Every generation has a default question that hearkens backwards. These can be quite irritating, but return the evolutionary thinker to earth. And that is needed. Way back in the 1990s, the world was crawling out of one generation of computing into another. No matter what great new thing there was, there was […]
Tags: Choose · Design · Engineering · General Systems Thinking · Questions
Words per Sentence
May 13th, 2021 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips This is perhaps the once piece of writing advice that has more return per ounce of effort there is. How many words do you have in a sentence? Here is an example of the first sentence of an article in a nationally famous newspaper (The Washington Post, 1 April 2021, and it […]
Tags: Engineering · Journal · Mathematics · Writing
The Mundane Necessity of Computing (Professionals)
December 17th, 2020 · No Comments
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, […]
Tags: Computing · Engineering · Experiment · Programming · Reality · Systems
Fail Fast, Fail Early (at what?)
September 21st, 2020 · No Comments
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. […]
Tags: Engineering · Experiment · Failure · General Systems Thinking · Improvement · Learning · Practice
No Systems Engineering? One Result
September 30th, 2019 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Systems engineering consumes resources. It isn’t “real engineering.” It, however, is usually necessary. Systems engineering—one part of it—enables us to record what everything is and what everything does. But we already know that, duh! Or do we? Consider an organization with three or 33 software systems. What does #1 do? #2?…#33? How […]
Tags: Engineering · Problems · Systems
Systems Engineering and Social Media
November 23rd, 2017 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips The recent rash of misuse and abuse of social media reminds us of that old, boring practice called systems engineering and limiting systems to do only what they are supposed to do. Recent news reports point to all sorts of “misuse” and “abuse” of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These […]
Tags: Engineering · General Systems Thinking · Requirements · Systems