Will Schenk is a world traveller, pilot, electronic tinkerer, amateur photographer and software hacker. He’s worked at the Java Development Center at Sun Microsystems, we worked on projects ranging from e-commerce sites in New York City to health care information systems for the Ministry of Health in Malaysia. He was not-so-recently the Director of Software Engineering at Jones Apparel Group. Before that he spent time volunteering putting that technology knowledge to work at a large hospital in southern India. The last 2 years have traveling through Italy and studying what catches his fancy, which has been a combination of electronics, large scale database systems, data mining, and piloting. He currently has way too many books. He blogs at sublimeguile.com
No Dilettantes: When Actions have Consequences
We all make decisions everyday that effect our health; going to the gym or not, eating enough vegetables, getting enough rest, having that second drink. You know that these are bad for you in some vague way, but what’s the real penalty? Being hung-over at work doesn’t fundamentally matter. What happens if it did matter? What happens if the penalty were death? We’ll talk a little bit about the process that pilots, flight instructors, and the FAA use to cope with the limits of human physiology and psychology, how wisdom is captured from mistakes in a systematic way, and how to cope with such complicated systems.