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Penang's Semiconductor Crossroads

Navigating global trends and industrial upgrading

US-China Tensions and the Transformation of Penang's Tech Industry

First published in Penang Monthly (October 2024).

Pay for progress: do head of state governments' pay respond to performance?

Malaysiakini’s data journalism team just published this fascinating analysis about the salaries of states’ heads of government:

Penang's Evolving Schooling Preferences

Penang’s education scene is changing rapidly. While Malaysia’s private school enrollment remains modest compared to the region, it is seeing a concerning shift.

EPF Account 3: Flexibility or Erosion of Retirement Savings?

First published in Penang Monthly (June 2024).

Brain drain: not as big a problem as you think

First published on LinkedIn.

Temperatures 🌡️

Hello Julia

Not sure how I landed up browsing through Julia for Data Science and Julia Data Science this Saturday evening. Julia is a fascinating language, but I think the learning…

The Limited Local Benefits of Swiftonomics

This article was first published in the April 2024 issue of Penang Monthly.

My approach to Covid-19 in 2024

Four years into the pandemic, my refusal to align myself with the rest of society sleepwalking into a replay of 2019 norms of work and life has set me back for years…

When Less Is More Expensive: The Trend of Shrinkflation

First published in Penang Monthly (September 2023).

Seasonality in decarbonisation

or, perhaps, the carbon costs of returning to the office?

(Individual) tax rebates suck

One of my pet peeves is to see people advocate for tax rebates when they should know better.

Gradient boosting?

There’s no shortage of machine learning hot takes on how the XGBoost gradient boosting framework continues to defy the no-free-lunch theorem by being perhaps the most…

Nested cross-validation

In Why do cross-validation, I described cross-validation as a way of evaluating your modeling workflow from start to end to help you pick the appropriate model and avoid…

Why do cross-validation?

In short, we do cross-validation to pick the right model. But what does that mean for our ‘final model’?

WSL2 and R

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a great way to run Linux software on your computer without dual-booting or starting over. For certain reasons, you may want to run R in…

Charts can lie

Data visualization is something we use to understand our data. Sure, it has some aesthetic function, but its primary purpose is to communicate what’s in the data.