I do a lot of traveling for work these days. I’m on a plane at least 5 times a month and have long stay overs at least once a month. I’m not complaining because this allows me to rack up those airline miles and other points as I work. I have to use my credit card because I don’t have an expense account, so I make sure to use the best credit cards for me to get airline miles and hotel points. I wanted to share with you two credit cards that I use mainly for work. ...

I’ve written about this countless times but I’m a big fan of passive investing in the markets. By doing less, I actually gain a lot more in returns. That’s all great and wonderful but currently it’s not ideal for me. What I really want to do is turn that passive investing into passive income. So even in their golden years, they have to budget carefully. Passive Investing != Passive Income What’s the deal with passive investing and what is passive income? Passive investing, or active investing, is just taking a pile of money and putting into some ‘investment vehicle.’ The hope is that this vehicle will appreciate in value in the future so when you sell it, you’ll get your original investment back PLUS more money! It’s considered a good investment that, after adjusting for inflation, your ‘investment’ made a lot of more money for you that just hiding it under your mattress. ...

Back when I started blogging in 2005-ish, I had a few blogs that destructed due to bad software or databases. My Sixth World News and Commentary site just stopped working one day and I couldn’t recover any posts. I was a tech newbie so I didn’t know how to do SQL dumps and try to save over a years worth of work. Wordpress came along and changed all that by making blogging more robust and fun. Then the blog explosion happened. We had Blog Carnivals, blog circle links, many new blogs popping up every week. Over time I made many online friends with many bloggers. I had found my tribe. I posted about the markets, Forex, investing, and machine learning. Suddenly my blog took off because of my RapidMiner tutorials and the rest is history. ...

I found this short 8 minute video from H2O World about Machine Learning Interpretability (MLI). It’s given by Patrick Hall, the lead for building these capabilities in Driverless AI. My notes from the video are below: ML as an opaque black box is no longer the case Cracking the black box with LIME and Shapley Values Shapley Values won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012 After Driverless AI model runs, a dashboard is created Shows the complex feature engineered and the original features Global Shapley Values is like Feature Importance and includes negative and positive contributions Quickly identify what are the important features in the dataset Then go to Partial Dependence Plots, which are the average prediction of the model across different values of the feature Row by Row analysis of each feature can be done to understand interactions and generate reason codes Shapley is accurate for feature contribution, LIME is an approximation Done via stacked ensemble model Can be deployed via Python Scoring pipeline

I’ve been a long term shareholder of MSFT and I’ve been rewarded quite well. Under the leadership of CEO Nadella, Microsoft has become and AI powerhouse, and I believe he’ll win the cloud computing wars. Right now Amazon is the dominant player but based on what I see in Azure’s development, I think both companies will be ’neck to neck’ in a few short years. Investors have rewarded the stock with new highs and crossing (before retracing just below) a $1 Trillion dollar valuation. Sure Apple did it first and then Amazon, but the one who wins is the one with staying power. ...

The family and I took a cruise over Spring Break and had a blast. Even though I feel a bit out of place in these situations I still had fun. I was quite impressed by the quality of food, drink, and entertainment on these massive ships that S and I will consider doing another in the future, just sans kids. The kids had an OK time but the oldest spent all of her time drawing and my youngest spent his time in the arcade or between the kid’s pool and the general population pool. ...

Now this is something I can get behind, using machine learning to make Pesto tastier! The article is really about growing Basil with higher concentrations of volatile compounds that affect the taste, which in turn is the key ingredient in Pesto. The researchers behind the AI-optimized basil used machine learning to determine the growing conditions that would maximize the concentration of the volatile compounds responsible for basil’s flavor. The study appears in the journal PLOS One today. ...

Understanding how adults and children learn is something I’ve been interested in ever since I became a Dad. My wife and I stay heavily invested in our children’s learning and we always strive to cultivate curiosity, not just for our children but for ourselves too. I came across this great TED talk by Gever Tulley about 5 Dangerous things you should let your kids do. As a parent you want to always protect your child from harm, but that might not be the best thing for them. They have to ’learn’ boundaries, evaluate hazards, and figure out how to get out ‘messes’ they create. These are all important life lessons for young children and necessary for navigating the world when they are older. ...

I found this interesting article on Pocket about writing. The gist of it is that successful writing is about rituals. Every writer is different and the rituals are different, it’s all about finding out what works best for you. Location and physical environment also play a role in maintaining a sustained and productive workflow. Bob Dylan, for instance, extolled the virtues of being able to “put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind.” Reviewing the research, Kellogg echoes Faulkner’s memorable assertion that “the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost” and notes that writers’ dedicated workspaces tend to involve solitude and quiet, although “during the apprenticeship phase of a writer’s career, almost any environment is workable” — most likely a hybrid function of youth’s high tolerance for distraction and the necessity of sharing space earlier in life when the luxury of privacy is unaffordable. via Pocket ...

The r/investing sub cracks me up sometimes. This guy has had enough of the sub because all it spews is how great Buffet is and dollar cost averaging. If you ask me, all the things he complains about are good. ETF’s are good, low cost(ish), and easy to get in and out of. Dollar cost averaging has really helped me build a good size 401k nest egg but it required consistency and time. If you add water with consistency and time, you get the Grand Canyon! ...