Category: data
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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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EV has come a long way but US is falling behind
I came across the data of EV stock at the country level from the IEA website. While it is informative, it does not have any map visualization, which is quite easy to do with Excel. So I just did that. The above is the one on EV stock in percentages by country as of 2022.…
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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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India has the potential to overtake China as the world’s manufacturing hub, even though it may take a while
Photo: Building material in Home Depot, 2022. It was reported in the WSJ today that “China Finally Has a Rival as the World’s Factory Floor“. While some of the claims in the article are a bit ahead of themselves, I largely agree with the central message. To be sure, China is not going away from…
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EV Charging Networks: The Top 8
In the EV book that I co-wrote and co-edited (with Peter Fox-Penner and David Jermain) in 2019, we documented the status of EV charging infrastructure in cities around the world such as Los Angeles, Oslo, and Beijing. Since then, EV adoption has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. In this post, I intend to…
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EV prices 2022 (I): The Distribution
How much more expensive are electric cars these days, compared to gasoline cars? Most articles are this topic compare the averages, and some look at the box plots. But I would argue that the best way to compare is to look at the entire statistical distribution of the two. I looked around on the Internet,…
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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 (II): Total cost
We have discussed the cost of using different types of fuel. Now let’s step back and talk about what are the total cost involved in marine shipping. For marine shipping, the following costs are relevant: Fuel cost, including initial purchase, energy conversion, distribution, operations and maintenance cost. Ship building/retrofit cost: How much does it cost…
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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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The Multiplier Effect of Manufacturing: Where Jobs Come From
These days whenever we talk about manufacturing, the number 1 thing that came to people’s mind is that it is shrinking. And that it is a small pie of an economy. The truth is that according to the US government definition of manufacturing, it has been been sitting steady at around 12% of Real GDP…
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How large is the supply chain economy? The answer may surprise you
Recently I have been working on a book about the “supplychainification” of economies around the world – If you have never heard about the word “supplychainification”, no worry. I have not either. My collaborators and I invented it, and I will explain it in a separate article. In here, I answer a even simpler (but…
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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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EV in 2022 and Beyond: More Good News, but Uncertainties Too
Recently I was asked to reflect a little on the recent EV movement, so I dug a bit on the latest statistics. 2022 is not over yet, so the latest number we have is from 2021. I was encouraged to find that while everyone was focusing on the COVID in 2021, EV sales actually nearly…
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If Facebook (Meta) disappeared 3 years from today (in 2025), I will not be surprised
Warren Buffet famously said that “Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.” So, do not treat this as a forecast. Just treat me as a bad forecaster. But really, I am trying to apply a theory about clockspeed into this specific case. Many years ago…
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Are we still ignoring data in making covid-related decisions?
From the early days of Covid, I have been questioning the wisdom of lockdown. In a post I wrote in December 2020, I said the following: “For one, I question the wisdom of economy-wide lockdown. […] the majority of the labor force (people under 45) have a lower mortality risk (less than 5%). Because many…
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How to think about the user cases for Blockchains: A whole spectrum of access control
These days I have been reading and thinking a lot about where to apply blockchain technology that makes most sense. That is, what are some of the user cases where it is natural, or better, to use blockchain instead of the traditional databases? I have argued that supply chains are great places to deploy blockchains,…