The Systems Engineer Scholar
Where Academia meets Reality
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
The Cloud: Why should we care?
"Telling consumers their data is in the cloud is like telling a kid his dog has gone to doggie heaven."
Best Quote from Cloud Control June 20, 2011 Time Magazine Vol. 177 No. 25 Article
What is this cloud thing? Is it another new fangled fad fleeting about in the firmament only to burn out as more people discover it's just a fancy figment of some marketers imagination? AI and TQM come to mind as fads that faded because the promises where greater than reality. But a lot of serious technologist feel it's a concept that is here to stay.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
When Models and Metaphors are Dangerous
I just finished watching the documentary "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis. The entire series of three 1 hour shows is a real challenge. I say this because of the way Mr. Curtis makes such seemly tenuous connections between people and the flow of their ideas across modern history. His assertion is that these ideas together have forged our present day perception of reality. False perception is more like it.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
SEs as Creative Leaders
Image from NY Times by Margaret Riegel |
Friday, February 24, 2012
Solving Systems Engineering problems on the Back of a Napkin
Paul Martin's artifact from a Dan Roam seminar, a napkin depicting the "visual thinking codex" |
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Predicting or Creating the Future?
In the Jan-Feb 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST is Thomas Frey's "Eight Grand Challenges for Human Advancement." He proposes several very science fictiony things. All the challenges push past beyond our knowledge of physics. That's a good thing because I don't believe we're even close to understanding how the universe works. But what if they did come to pass? They would have some very far reaching consequences.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Can Systems Engineering account for a corrupt heart?
I was reading a Washington Post editorial a few weeks back, dealing with the tragic events around the July 23rd train accident in China. What got me was the line:
"the government was forced to admit that a design flaw was partly to blame for the accident, and not only a lightning strike"Looking into this further I found another article which details more issues:
"workers on duty were inadequately trained and had failed to notice or fix the malfunction."What concerns me is the idea that these design flaws and training failures could be caused by "corruption accusations against high-ranking railway officials."
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Style vs Substance?
Where's the fight?
Every now and then I get an invitation in the mail to partake in a one day seminar for Edward Tufte's “Presentation Data & Information.” I've never been able to go but the invitation I receive has a wonderful reproduction of an 1869 information map by Charles Joseph Minard. On one graphic, Minard depicts multiple variables: size of the Napoleon's army, temperature, location, time in months and direction of army’s movement on a map. It really is a well thought out graphic and it inspires me to create better and more informative graphics.
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