Category: analytics
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Dissecting a Coal Mine Exploration Target Report… using a Podcast?
There are many ways to use AI to analyze a technical report, but… with a Podcast? I recently tried this feature with Google NotebookLM, and the result is quite impressive. I recently received a Rare Earth Element (REE) exploration report from a mining company. The company essentially drilled hundreds of test holes and measured the…
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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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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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Will Robots kill human jobs? Yes and No
I have been long perplexed by this question of whether automation and robots will replace human workers. My intuition is that while they will no doubt replace many jobs, they will also create more jobs in other areas. That intuition was confirmed after I read a paper by Acemoglu, Koster and Ozgen (2023), but the…
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Should I Buy or Lease a Tesla Part 6: The Saga Continues
Photo: A rainy day in Cambridge, MA, Summer 2022. Last year, I wrote a series of articles about the uncertainty around the decision of buying vs leasing a Tesla model Y. In particular, I cautioned in one of the posts that Tesla cars’ depreciation rates may be better than other brands, but there are still…
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Choosing the right fuel (III): Whose perspective?
In this post, I will try to flesh out the perspective of a shipping company whose goal is to reduce its carbon footprint. Let us say there a shipping company that owns and operates deep sea bulk carriers. The following areas are of concern, from the greatest to the least: Fuel-related cost (FC): purchase, distribution,…
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Choosing the right fuel (I): fuel and carbon cost
This is a series of post on my work in the field of green marine fuel. First of all, for marine companies that are considering switching greener fuel, choosing the right marine fuel is no easy task. To me, there are two major hurdles. First, there are many possible pathways. Here is a partial list:…
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Steps to calculate the carbon footprint of a supply chain
The steps of calculating the carbon footprint of a supply chain is straightforward: 1- You need to map out your supply chain. This also defines the boundary of your calculation. 2- Collect activity data at each level of your supply chain. For example, an oil company may start at the exploration and drilling stage, and…
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How much do you pay charging an EV on a monthly basis?
I always knew it is a bit cheaper to drive an EV as opposed to a gasoline car (not the owning part, which deserve a separate calculation, but just the day-to-day cost of using it) in New England where I live, but I never bothered to quantify that saving. That is, until today. As you…
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Excel Trick: Import Data From a Picture!
Have you ever looked at a table in a PDF file (or a picture) and wanted to import it into Excel? This video tells you how! As shown in the short video, this function is not perfect – but its usefulness far exceeds its imperfections! You may still need to edit the imported table a…
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Clustered bar chart and stacked barcharts, switch rows/columns, overlap and customize shapes
Bar charts are one of the most frequently used charts. To use them effectively to generate on-the-point graphs that deliver exactly the right message, however, requires some deeper understanding as well as a few tricks to make them more appealing. I made a quick video that talks about: 1- The basic difference between clustered bar…
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Tesla Lease Mileage Limit and the Central Limit Theorem
I am onto my second Tesla car leases now, so I think I can define another form of range anxiety with my leased cars: Driving over the lease limit. It was actually quite interesting. When I was leasing my first Tesla, I did a rough calculation of my daily driving, and figured that 10,000 miles…
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Daniel Pink’s “When” is an Illuminating Book Towards High Productivity and Better Living
I stumbled upon the book “When” during a trip to my local library. What a pleasant surprise – I have been pondering about the same question: Why does our mood change somewhat predictably during the day? It turns out there have been tons and tons research on this. But what Dan Pink is great at…
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SHOULD I BUY OR LEASE A TESLA? PART 4: It all comes down to your apetities towards risk
Having used multiple spreadsheets to illustrate the dollars and cents around the leasing vs buying option, let me conclude. It depends on how you view uncertainty. As I said earlier, one big advantage of leasing is its clarity and certainty. You know how much you are going to pay, and that is how much it…
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SHOULD I BUY OR LEASE A TESLA? PART 3: It is not black-and-white (because we do not know the future)
In my last post, I showed that the total cost of buying a Tesla with a loan (or cash) is easy to figure out. However the final value is critically dependent upon one thing: the depreciation of the car when the owner sells it. Unfortunately that quantity is uncertain, because it has not happened yet…
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SHOULD I BUY OR LEASE A TESLA? PART 2: Total loan cost (when you are sure about the depreciation)
In a previous post, I calculated the total cost of leasing a Tesla, using my own experience as an example. Before we move on to the buying option, let me mention one important feature of leasing: It has more certainty in terms of total cost. You know what you pay, and you do not worry…
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Should I Buy or Lease a Tesla? Part 1: Leasing Cost
Recently I read quite a bit of discussion on “Should I buy or lease a Tesla?”. I do not want to weigh in on which side I take, as I know it is not just about numbers. People value things differently. So here I would just focus on the monetary cost side. When it comes…
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How to draw ranking data properly
A slight problem with drawing data on ranking is how we normally think about ranking. We normally associate “#1” as the best, and “#10” as worse compared to “#1”. But Excel chart typically shows a bigger number in a higher vertical position, and a smaller number in a lower position, as is shown in the…
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Simulation: Is demand equal to sales? (Part I)
Consider the following problem: Suppose at a retail store the annual demand for a toy is a random variable with a normal distribution of N(600, 100), i.e., with mean of 600 and standard deviation of 100. Simulate the distribution of sales if 700 units of such a toy is ordered. What is the expected sales?…
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Simulation: It all starts with a coin toss
There are many sophisticated tools dedicated to Monte Carlo simulation, but Excel is powerful enough to handle a variety of simulation needs. Here are the basic steps of simulation in Excel. First the users build a decision model in a spreadsheet and specify what are the sources of uncertainty. Excel can then generate random numbers…