Believability

Evidently, there are some types of engineering that map well through the phases from conception through production where the products get out to the market quickly. Many, who strive for the new and human-less (green field, lights out, ...), want this. Okay, it has been shown to reduce touch labor, if things work.

Think quickly, though; how many of these types of things are hugely complicated in either type or aggregation across the set of sub-entities? How many have serious mission requirements that must be met?

Somehow, one sees that success of this type requires human talent, not easily obtained in many cases, meaning, of course, that it takes years of experience to 'get the arms' around some of these problems.

Ever wonder why the younger successes get their rewards in the 'virtual' world; that is, what do we have involved there but concepts mapping to a phenomenal experience that is ghostly at best (so, it can persist across sessions and the ether space - what substance is there?)? What we see here is that the new generation applies some bunch of tricks recently learned, many times academically, in a situation that is ripe for these tricks, is it not? The older folks could learn much of this, to boot, given the chance.

So many of the 'virtual' successes may appear to have some type of serious foundation, yet in actuality they are not that well founded; it's just that we've allowed opportunism to be rewarded (a whole set of analysis possible there). Oh, we like to put 'entrepreneurship' as a label to cover what is really going on (gosh, do we ever like to coat things platitudinally).

Let's see, so we can have the computer being used to make a large schedule dealing with oodles of activity steps across an enormous period of time and somehow the issues of feedback, analysis, course correction, etc. are overlooked. Well, is it people or the computer that drive a process?

Too, we see the computational put into the place of real experiments. Mind you, this is where we ought to be putting our attention; yet, the issues of quasi-empiricism have to be addressed and are essentially being ignored.

Then, we have the talking PR events.

Where or how does one find the way through the morass? Is there something about this that might point back to a world view (and its associated wet-ware wiring) that is heavily influenced by computer gaming?

Remarks:

12/17/2010 -- These types of issues are continually there for our resolution.

09/02/2009 -- Lets face it, folks, undecidability needs to be discussed and adopted in any complex situational setting, especially if computers are involved. Only hubris pushes us to make loud exclamations about what we're going to do in the future.

05/18/2009 -- Testing in flight is within sight.

11/01/2008 -- One has to ask what is the parallel in engineering, and program management, to the fiduciary duty of finance. In regard to the 787 project, much has happened with regard to the schedule, the suppliers, and more. Boeing announced some insights about its 787 planning. Before that, the idiocy of a truncated (abbreviated) test cycle was changed.

01/11/2008 -- One has to wonder what amount of forethought can make a process successful the first time through. Is it not our experience that a least one pass is required in order to prove the process (somewhat indicating that proof is not in the abstraction rather it is in the realization)?

Even highly trained and capable personnel, such as this medical article discusses, require a check-list to help guide a process through all the variations of a situation. ...

Oh yes, using a checklist from seemingly similar processes can be a good starting point; yet, we have to ask the question, do we not still need a run through? For a plane OEM, does this not involve several things such as flying, working the production issues, and more?

Modified: 12/17/2010