Category: video
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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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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 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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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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Value Investing is about learning about everything
I had not paid much attention to the concept of value investing, as I thought I know everything there is to it: Do not chase fads. Invest in companies with solid money-making capabilities. Invest in the long-term. It turns out that it was wrong. There is so much more to value investing, if one wants…
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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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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,…
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The fundamental problem of governance with DApps (Distributed apps)
I have been studying DApps (Distributed apps) lately. They turn out to be super interesting. First, I am amazed by the grand vision behind the design of the Ethereum ecosystems where dApps are built in, as well as that of the so-called Web3: The key idea is that DApps are “Distributed”, i.e., without a central…
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A Great Discussion on International Trade and Blockchain
I have always been intrigued by this question – How to use the blockchain technology in international trade? One of my most trusted information source is MIT’s OCW, but I never expected to find the following fascinating discussion on this topic: What is more, this lecture was delivered by none other than Gary Gensler, the…
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How to Revive the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry in the US
Before we talk about the “How”, we need to first understand why we need to revive the semiconductor manufacturing in the US. First of all, it is the foundation of a modern digitized society. If we accept that our society is heading to a digital one where almost all things will depend on information technology,…
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A Tale of Two Chains: Supply Chain and Blockchain
I cannot believe that I have not written a post on blockchain, until now. The matter of fact is that I have been teaching blockchain for a number of years, and I do think blockchain holds great promises in the digital future of supply chain management. But first let’s back up for a second. Why…
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Green Ammonia is a promising renewable marine fuel
It was in the news that “Amazon’s new net-zero carbon pledge is focused on the oceans, as shipping giants pursue alternative fuels“. That is absolutely the right move. Ships emit about 2% of the total GHG a year, compared to 12% in road transportation (see detailed numbers in my early article), but in absolute volume…
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EV is not just about making cars. It is about the Supply Chain.
JB Straubel, Tesla co-founder and its former chief technology officer, recently gave an interview, where he warned that some auto manufacturers may have not thought through when they announced that they were going to switch to 100% EV by a certain date. Indeed, if you look at how a car is made, whether EV or gasoline ones,…
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The One and Only Michael Dell
I have seen Michael Dell in person once (that was in Boston), and I have read about him and taught about him and his company many many times. Even though I knew his story by heart, I was nevertheless very pleasantly surprised to see a very relaxed Michael Dell talk about his life story (the…
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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…