Or: Part of my learning journey as regards Artificial Intelligence. I cannot imagine that there is anyone capable of using a computer and the internet who has not been subjected to some Artificial Intelligence add-on. It is definitely a worthwhile endeavor to spend some time and play with AI tools – Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, CoPilot, […]
I am getting increasingly irritated with the “enshittification” of so many things tech – closely linked to the subscription model – of everything. Very tiring. With that inspiration, I am taking a cautious, and deeper, dip into the world of free and open source software. This month that meant purchasing a second hand computer (Dell […]
It is official, after a few months of sitting on the sidelines to see what would or would not happen, I decided to accept the so-called Deferred Resignation Program 2.0. This means that I am now effectively retired. As a consequence, I will now devote this blog to mostly my ruminations on intersection of project […]
Data, Data Analytics, ML, NLP, AI, and Efficiency Data, Data Analytics, ML, NLP, AI, and Efficiency Self-Directed Learning Author Omar Hopkins Published December 18, 2024 I recently changed my focus from water supply and sanitation to digital development projects. This is an exciting change for me, not so much because I am expert in this […]
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Super-Efficiency
Word of the day. Super-efficiency: Is a methodology to allow the relative evaluation of efficient DMUs. This is done by first using the full data set to determine efficient DMUs, then removing the DMU of interest recalculating the efficiencies and then calculating the target DMUs efficiency which will yield a result of greater than one […]
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For all that you do …
https://www.gocomics.com/brewsterrockit/2023/01/01 The link above (which I suspect I cannot legally post on this site) is a funny take from the comic Brewster Rocket on performance reviews. Worth a click through. Whatever you did, you could have done more. me, paraphrasing I have a sense that in the post COVID world many employees are not willing […]
Wrapping up a super intense week of interviewing candidate fellows this week – I think we had nearly 30 in total. This is definitely an annual highlight in my calendar. A lot of upfront planning, coordinating with those units within the agency that have already had fellows and are looking for more and outreach to […]
A very interesting article in Nature that was picked up the WaPo earlier this month on how “Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving.“ So true, both at the individual and institutional level. I am reminded of a story of someone’s mother who was taken to the hospital on death’s door. It turns out […]
The 2022 World Water theme is groundwater. Water, but especially groundwater, is scarce and getting scarcer in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. I recently reflected on some articles I stumbled across about the marshes in Iraq. I don’t know whether to be pessimistic, or not, but given our ability to address other […]
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Groundwater Crisis and Scarcity
More on the California water crisis. What I find particularly interesting is the intersection of absolute scarcity and water rights – in effect the right-to-water versus rights-over-water. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/10/drought-california-water-levels/ This is especially interesting to me in the context of a project I worked on in Tunisia that also involved groundwater. A fabulously wicked problem – and […]