The Art Of Doing Science And Engineering

1. giving formal presentations,

2. producing written reports,

3. master the art of informal presentations as they happen to occur.

As an example related to the "luck" aspect, when I first came to Bell Telephone Laboratories I shared an office with Claude Shannon. At about the same time he created Information Theory and I created Coding Theory. They were "in the air" you can say, and you are right.

is one thing, but if you have a herd of 1000 and add 3 it is quite another thing—hence the additivity of the number in the herd is not always the proper measure to use. In this case the percentage change might be more informative.

In the distant past to combat this inbreeding most Mathematics Departments (a topic I am more familiar with than for other Departments) had a general rule they did not employ their own graduates.

department shudders! This is not a trivial point, the recruiting of one generation determines the organization's next generation.

It should be obvious if I know the class then I can get almost any distribution I want. Usually, at the final exam time I am most worried about the pass-fail dividing point, and design the exam so I will have little doubt as to how to act, as well as have the hard evidence in case of a complaint.

The closer you meet specifications the worse the performance will be when overloaded.

Part of systems engineering design is to prepare for changes so they can be gracefully made and still not degrade the other parts.

Definitions have a habit of changing over time without any formal statement of this fact.

an example I found for myself, there was a time, not too long ago, when the tax rules for reporting inventory holdings were changed, and as a result many companies changed their methods of inventory reporting to take advantage of the new reporting rules, meaning they now could show smaller inventory and hence get less tax. I watched in vain in the Wall Street Journal to see if this point was ever mentioned. No, it never was that I saw! Yet the in‍