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Do you really need a Power button for an electric car?
I just got my second EV, and it is a Nissan Leaf. It is a good-looking car, especially with its signature “Scarlet Ember” exterior. It drives smoothly, and rides comfortably. In fact, everyone who rode in the car told me they do not feel the difference between this and my Tesla. And I agree with…
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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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A Fascinating Recount of the US Semiconductor History
I recently read a book titled “The Microchip Revolution: A Brief History” authored by Luc Oliver Bauer & E. Marshall Wilder. It has lots of interesting technical details as well as personal anecdotes. A wonderful read. I flipped to the chapter on Intel once I got my hands on the book, because it was the…
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A Small Innovation, A Big Saving for the Environment
Just a couple of days, I received my new iPhone shipped from Apple. What I was impressed with was not the phone – the phone was good by all means but it was the clever packaging that I was impressed with. You see, in order to create proper cushion for the items shipped in a…
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Things I learned When Lighting a Fire
It is getting cold, and I started to use my beloved wood stove on a daily basis. I am not a novice, but I have not been lighting a fire for quite a few years because we have been moving about. After a few failed attempts trying to light a fire – mostly trying to…
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Zillow’s Failure in Housing Flipping is a Classic Example of Ignoring Bottlenecks and Variabilities
By now, we have all heard the story of Zillow losing more than $550 million doing house-flipping. Its CEO blamed it on its forecasting model that produced house-buying prices there were too high, saying that “We’ve determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated and continuing to scale Zillow Offers would…
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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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What is the Supply Chains of the Future?
At the risk of sounding overly ambitious and pompous, I propose to think about a big topic: What should the supply chain of the future look like? This is such a big topic and I thought I would start by throwing a few adjectives to get the conversation going: Digital Automated Agile/Adaptive/Aligned Sustainable Among all…
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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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Port of LA: Storage Space is the culprit?
Recently I read about the saga at the Port of LA. According to Ryan Petersen, the chief executive of logistics company Flexport, the real bottleneck at the Port of LA was actually storage space. The article reported: “In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than…
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Why Additive Manufacturing (or 3D Printing)?
[Header image credit: Wikipedia] I have been interested in 3D printing (the technical name should be “Additive Manufacturing”) for the last 10 years, but why can it be a real alternative to the traditional manufacturing, at least to some industries? Just from a pure physics perspective, AM can make products that other methods cannot. For…
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Why Supply Chain Delays are Multi-faceted: A Mathematical Explanations (Without the Heavy Math)
Paul Krugman recently penned an excellent article explaining why we see the supply chain snarls in New York Times. It mentioned a number of factors: The US consumers are buying a lot more stuff than before, as a partial substitutions to experiences because of the COVID; The processing capacities at docks and hubs have not…
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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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Understanding CO2 Emissions for different freight transport modes (renewable as well as non-renewable)
One of the most important questions to ask in transitioning to renewable modes of transport is simply: How much less CO2 are we going to emit by switching to renewables? The other important question is: How much does it cost? I have been researching on that question quite a bit. And I found quite a…
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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…
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