“His Northrop “commercial” work appears to be government contracting. His “Engineering” stint was clearly not as a professional engineer, but apparently as a manager.”
Lets see if I can help you guys unravel the mystery.
I entered Northwestern university as a Math and Physics major. in my 2nd year I switched to Philosophy and English and graduated top of my class with honors in both. I was accepted into UCLA on fellowship directly into the Phd program. My director was a former geology major and we shared a love of computers. At this time he and Vincent Dearing were two pioneers in applying computers in the humanities. For my dissertation I decided to write on Shannon information theory and Art.
This required me to audit statistics classes and programming classes.
The books that inspired me were
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Measurement_of_Meaning.html?id=qk5qAAAAMAAJ
and JR Pierce
if you want to find out what I was working on I believe I’ve discussed it at Lucia’s long ago. Essentially it was applying Shannon’s concept of Entropy as a measure of stylistic variability.
Needless to say this was far too “mathy” for most folks in the department.
But it seemed to me that I could marry up the math side of my abilitiies with the interest in art.
At the same time I was also interested in the mind/body problem specifically I started to look at ways of using the computer to automatically generate text. This is known as NLG or natural language generation.
One summer my buddy asked me to be a summer intern at Northrop.
My first job was as an operations researcher in air combat modelling.
The training Northrop provided was astounding. The combat model I first worked on was a force level model which is basically just modelling air combat as a markov process.
From there I went on to man in the loop simulation. My responsibilities were creating models for Electrically Scanned Array radars, IR missiles,
and automated threat forces.
An automated threat is basically a piece of AI that operates a plane as a human would. That became my specialty and later I joined a small aerospace outfit to build up their simulation capability.
Like this
https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/153186
the work at eidetics in simulation and 3D graphics ( and a patent) got me a technical marketing job at Kubota. Their biggest question was how could an engineer do marketing. Hmm, well thats just the other half of the brain.
Anyway from there I focused entirely on marketing until I decided it was time to go back and do some technical stuff around audio and voice recognition, primarily for Mp3 players. had a hard time getting that accepted into the development but Got an unrelated patent there on intelligent shuffling of playlists.
After that I decided to get into mobile phones and switch back to pure marketing.. after a few years of that I decided to switch back again and started to learn R and write packages on temperature analysis. All of this of course requires either self study or online courses. Its not hard if you have the basic skills.
Today my 9-5 is operations research with a focus on
failure/warrently analysis, pricing, and most recently demand modelling using historical weather and short term weather forecasts.
So ya.. 9-5 I get paid to do modelling, math and statistics.
Its not that hard. neither is understanding the stats of historical weather.
heck, even a philosophy major can do it. BUT you have to sit down, read study take some course ask for help and do your homework.
Same as school except you dont have to work at the slow pace of dummies.
