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Word cloud of my LinkedIn recommendations

I like word cloud, and have always wanted to make a word cloud that can describe myself. Recently I got laid off from Caterpillar. As normally done by many people, I updated my LinkedIn profile to reflect my most up-to-date work history. I also thought of asking recommendation from people (also like many people did). I noticed that most people would ask for their past bosses or managers, probably people think that those recommendations would carry more weight. For me, I don’t really want to know just what the managers think of me. Frankly, I had managers that either not...

R package install good practice

I came across this page when trying to find ways to do text mining and word cloud in R. I like the best practice to check if packages have been installed and loaded using the following piece of codes, which I advise to add at the beginning of any codes: Needed <- c(“tm”, “SnowballCC”, “RColorBrewer”, “ggplot2”, “wordcloud”, “biclust”, “cluster”, “igraph”, “fpc”) Needed install.packages(Needed, dependencies=TRUE) install.packages(“Rcampdf”, repos = “http://datacube.wu.ac.at/”, type = “source”) This may not be new to any programmers, but I think it is still very useful to note.

Mechanical engineering and data science?

I’m a mechanical engineer, and I’m trying to get into data science. Naturally, I did a Google search, and see what is out there. I found an article, which is very well framing a very traditional questions – “majority of what you learned in the college will not be applicable in your job, why do you need a college degree then?” Here is the answer that was quite well done: “What does mechanical engineering have to do with data science?”  

Leadership

“The ultimate test for a leader is not whether he or she makes smart decisions and takes decisive action, but whether he or she teaches others to be leaders and builds an organization that can sustain its success even when he or she is not around.”

Who controls the world?

This is one of the best talks I’ve heard from TED – about science. Indeed, so much work has done around interaction controls, but no one thought about looking into who really controls the world. Great abstraction of simple interaction controls in the real economic world!

The oil price story

Just watched this short summary video from Bloomberg, I think it is probably one of the best explanation of gas prices situation today. As we all know, gas prices affects the stories from the supply side and the demand side significantly. From the demand side, we see consumers being able to reduce expenses on gas. The saving actually helped other industries like the automotive industry itself – consumer can shift the fund to buying more expensive cars! From the supply side, the oil producers are suffering. Layoffs, cost cutting, etc., and the dependent industries also suffers. Unfortunately Caterpillar, the company...

Panera Bread Lunch – Now Order Kiosk is Available!

   It’s been quite a while since we visited Panera Bread last time. We didn’t bring lunch today (due to my laziness), and we decided to visit today, partially due to the Bank of America 10% cashback deal given to me. Glad to have Tad to join us as well. Panera finally deployed the self service kiosks. I think it makes a lot of sense since every time I visit there, the line is long, and there are probably only one or two counters opened. I think the line is long also partially due to the complicated menu offers. People...

2016 CIE Leadership Assessment and Mentoring Program

One of the greatest thing living in a big metroplex is that there is always opportunity to listen to a great talk in person. I’ve been active in CIE many years and I’ve never disappointed with the quality speakers recruited in various events. This year’s LAMP is no difference (and better!). The keynote speaker was the Assistant Vice President at BNSF, Muru Murugappam. He is an Indian decedent. One thing that he taught the audience the most is to keep learning and work hard – and one day you may end up being in the “corner office”. Well, my goal is...

Simple Weekend Lunch – Bak Kut Teh

I’m not really a chef, but I do like to cook simple yet nutritious meals to ensure the well being of my wife and myself. A lot of the times, it doesn’t have to be very complicated, and we just have to have some fundamentals, it would be a great meal. Here is a Bak Kut Teh meal that I cooked for one of the weekends. Bak Kut Teh is a Malaysian style soup that consists of strong herbs with pork and some ingredients. For this specific meal, I added lotus roots, Chinese yam, cloud ear fungus and some mushrooms. And, yes, they...