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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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Platform or Specialization? Maybe it is both
I have been pondering with a “barbell effect” in the ongoing economy. Take Amazon as an example. It is obviously dominating the e-commerce world, and it is continuously growing. But is it a winner-take-all situation? Actually no. We see a plethora of e-commerce platform thriving all at the same time, such as Pinterest, Shopify, Temu……
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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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He was rejected by 90% of the investors
How well do you deal with rejection and failure? You may have heard the story of Starbucks. It is hard to imagine it, but back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was unthinkable to set up a “coffee shop” just to sell cups of coffee. Who would buy that? Any yet that was exactly what…
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Why is Africa Poor? Social Intuitions
I have been doing research in the area of providing affordable and clean energy to Africa for years. During these years, I have always, in the back of mind, suspected that we need to look closely at the role of social institutions. My intuition was confirmed when I read the work of Daron Acemoglu and…
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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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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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The US Economy is Changing in its structure
Photo: Business Formation in Numbers 2006-2023 Recently I have been reading some papers that claim that COVID-19 kick-started entrepreneurship, as more and more people changed their perspective on old jobs and started their own businesses. I do not agree with such an assertion. My thesis is that such a trend has been brewing for quite…
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Democracy and Prosperity
Photo: Boston, January 2024 One of the longest debate that was going on in my mind is this question: Can you have economic prosperity without democracy? Can democracy lead to prosperity? This question has perplexed since my college years. Many people pointed to China and say “Look. Here is a country that has no democracy…
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Decarbonizing Last-mile Logistics: A quick summary
Recently I gave a short lecture over Zoom to a group of students at NYU on my thoughts of decarbonizing the last-mile in supply chains. The one-sentence summary? The decarbonizing magnitude is highly dependent on the configurations. If you have the patience, watch the 27-minute video below:
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EVs with 500+mile range? Maybe a hybrid with a large battery and small engine is better for the market
Photo: Milan, Città metropolitana di Milano, Italy, June 2023. I used to think that EVs do not really need a long range of, say, 300 miles, for the simple reason that we rarely drive that long. In a series of my earlier posts (here and here), I plotted the histogram of daily driving distance, and…
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Vacation is a state of mind
Photo: Ritz-Carlton, Orlando, Florida, USA, March 2023. It is winter here in New England, and we have been talking about where to go for the upcoming spring break. I am already late. Many couples or parents probably make spring break plans during the prior year. But we ran into an interesting problem. After checking out…
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You just have to hustle
Photo: TD Garden, Boston, Feb 2024. I am reading the book “Don’t Trust your Gut” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. I highly recommend it. There are so many great insights and nice stories that are actually helpful to someone who wants to be happy and successful. I paid particular attention on how to make yourself more likely…
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Why should we improve public transit?
Photo: Luxembourg Station. Recently a reported asked me: “How do you make a case that we should spend money on public transportation?” What a great question. It gives me an opportunity to systematically list all the arguments for that. I would put those into three buckets: (1) Economic benefit. There has been much research on…
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