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Small change in mean can result in big change in extremes
We have witnessed the recent extreme heat in the US Pacific Northwest. The city of Seattle (one of my favorite cities!) set a new record for the highest temperature ever recorded: 108 degrees. Incidentally the previous record high of 105 degrees was only 11 years ago in 2009. Why do we see extreme weathers more often? I think…
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How to Know If You Have Made the Right Decision: Insights from Academic Research
Recently I was presented with a very interesting and promising career opportunity. After deliberating for a long time, I decided to turn it down with profuse gratitude. After the decision was made, I cannot help but wonder: Did I make the right decision? So I decided to ask ChatGPT. What I got was surprisingly better…
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The real threat to American prosperity
Given that I just wrote about the dominant status of US on the global economy, it seems strange that I now write about the downfall of the US. Well, while the US is still ahead, I am also convinced that the danger is real. Financial Times recently published a long article by Daron Acemoglu titled…
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Why the US is still the engine of the world economy
Recently I listened to a podcast between its host Barry Ritholtz and Torsten Slack, chief economist at Apollo, which gave me some fresh insights on why the US economy is firing on all cylinders despite the political turmoil going on. Also, he shed lights on why China is not going to be able to a…
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What is AI good for? (Feb 2025)
We know AI can do a lot of things, but not many things well (yet). Nevertheless, people including me are using more and more AI, so it is useful to think about what it can do and do well in the real world. Recently I read a WSJ article that summarizes reasonably well the status…
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Is DeepSeek a hoax?
Today (Jan 27 2025) is a historical day for the AI-related stocks. NVADIA dropped 17% in one day. Broadcom dropped also dropped 17%, Google 4.2%, Microsoft 2.1%. All because of a Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek. We will know more as time goes on, but my initial reaction is skeptism. From what I know about…
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Visualize the AI Ecosystem
AI is all the rage these days. But few people have a clear picture of what the AI ecosystem looks like. I have been thinking about it for some time, and feel that a supply chain perspective can do the job. Not long ago, I had the good fortune of listening to one of Barry…
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A bold vision of AI Education
Recently I read about an article by Dimitri Bertsimas, who is the Vice Provost of MIT Opening Learning, that describes a vision of what he calls Universal AI: “Universal AI is a platform that involves a horizontal collection of modules covering the fundamentals of AI with an application-oriented process. “ He further details what are…
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Khanmigo Offers A Glimpse of what AI can do to help future education
I am a fan of Sal Kahn, the person who not only founded Kahn Academy, but also have been working tirelessly to help better education for the past twenty years. The fact that he does not seek a monetary profit is enough for me to respect him. And the fact that he cares for and…
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2025: A Year of Uncertainty(?) and Growth(!)
It is 2025. What will it bring? It is fair to say that I have no idea. Looking back, who would have thought that the stock market would be one of the best years? I did not. The S&P 500 soared 24%, making 2023-2024 the best 2 consecutive years since 1990s. I remember one year…
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100% focus = Joy
I stumbled upon this idea while listening to “People I mostly admire”, one of favorite podcasts, where its host Steve Levitt interviewed Dan Gilbert, the famed psychologist professor at Harvard. You can read its transcripts here, and listen to the podcast below: Dan raised this idea that if you turn work into play, then you…
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The American Civil War was a War on Supply Chains
I love to look at the Early Modern Period and the Modern Age through a capitalist lense. I see the significance of capitalism in almost every turn of historical events when I read the excellent book “Americana: A 400-year history of American Capitalism” by Bhu Srinivasan. After I read the chapter on the American Civil…
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The Transportation sector is much larger than the entertainment industry… but why do people think the other way?
This is a simple post about building the right perspective on sizes of different industries. I was listening to one of favorite supply chain management podcasts “Freightvine“, hosted by Dr. Chris Caplice at MIT, where he mentioned an interesting fact that the trucking industry is about 10 times larger than the music industry, which we…
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How the consulting world screwed up the ‘Lean’ Idea
The lean idea was started by Toyota in the war-torn Japan in the 1950s, almost by necessity. It turns to be very effective and helped Toyota grow and even dominate the world auto market towards the end of the 20th century. It also fundamental influenced the industrial world. Now almost all the large corporations are…
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Excel trick: Search for multiple keywords from a list
Recently I was given a large spreadsheet with people’s expertise written in long phrases, and I had to identify those people who have AI-related expertise. The issue here is that people can enter a variety of phrases such as “machine learning”, or “large language model”. How do I quickly identify those people? Fortunately we can…
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Sometimes change is good just for change’s sake
“If you move a tree, it will likely not survive. But if you move a man, he will most likely thrive.” It is an old Chinese saying. And over the years I came to firmly believe in the profound wisdom of that. Looking back at my life, I have benefited from every major change I…
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Google Colab is an awesome Python programming tool for AI and data analysis
Picture credit: Microsoft Bing Co-Pilot Image Generator One of the problems associated with learning to code is that the initial hurdle of just getting your first line of code to run is pretty high. You need to get comfortable with a command-line driven interface. You need to install multiple packages depending on your particular needs,…
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An successful entrepreneur is a technician, manager and entrepreneur in one
A lot of people start their own businesses because they like doing a particular thing (baking, cooking, designing, selling), but very often they realize there are so many things beyond doing that one thing – like book keeping, sales and marketing, customer service – that they are quick overwhelmed. That is also the reason a…
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Shakespear in Business
Photo credit: Bookstore at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 2019 “ We at the height are ready to decline.There is a tide in the affairs of menWhich, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;Omitted, all the voyage of their lifeIs bound in shallows and in miseries.On such a full sea are we now afloat,And we must…
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Google NotebookLM is a great tool
AI is all the rage lately. As a person of curiosity, I have found AI to be a very good assistant. It is not an ever reliable assistant, but it can do a lot of things human beings have difficulty to do. Google NotebookLM is such an example. I recently read a very interesting book…
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Why China’s Economy is in Trouble
This is a short post reflecting on how exactly China’s economy is doing. There are a lot of statistics floating around such as GDP or export. But recently I watched a few videos which drew me to a single measure: Labor share of GDP. Labor’s role in GDP is important for several key reasons: Labor…
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