Monthly Archives: June 2016

On southwestern fringe, China’s Silk Road ambitions face obstacles

Here is an example of the difficulty of building a major infrastructure improvement, in this case, a rail line from China to Thailand and thence to Singapore.  Who’s got the money?

The answer is no one; and so they can’t agree on terms that advantage all of them fairly.  One interesting factor is land use rights.  Thailand and Laos will not give the Chinese land development rights on each side of the rail line.  Those were expected to help the Chinese pay for the route.  I think those countries are right to retain their sovereignty over the land.

screenshot-www.reuters.com 2016-06-07 08-17-27    Source: On southwestern fringe, China’s Silk Road ambitions face obstacles | Reuters

A Complete Tutorial to learn Data Science in R from Scratch

A straightforward introduction to the R statistical and programming language, emphasizing its power in predictive analytics and machine learning.

screenshot-www.analyticsvidhya.com 2016-06-05 09-55-18  Introduction R is a powerful language used widely for data analysis and statistical computing. It was developed in early 90s. Since then, endless efforts have been made to improve R’s user interface. The journey of R language from a rudimentary text editor to interactive R Studio and more recently Jupyter Notebooks has engaged many data science communities

Source: A Complete Tutorial to learn Data Science in R from Scratch

Logistics Cuts Food Waste in Colombia

Food supply chains probably have more waste than any others.  When I was farming, I always observed the waste, and worried about it.  And a trip behind any market in America will reveal lots of wasted produce that was ruined for display by handling issues or appearance problems.   Better logistics can certainly help; incentives are useful as well.  Retailers should be encouraged financially to donate, and to think about how they handle even the food they do not want to display.  And we have not even started on restaurants.

I am glad to see MIT researchers working on this problem in Colombia.

supply-chain-mit-logo1

Source: Using Logistics to Cut Food Waste in Colombia