Daily Coping 5 Aug 2022

Posted on August 5, 2022 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to be a realistic optimist. Focus on what could go right.

I find a lot of people think ahead and get concerned about the downsides. What could go wrong? They find reasons to not do something.

Of course, there are others that a few that leap first and worry about issues later.

I tend to be in the first group, though I’ve learned to recognize when I’m not being optimistic, when I am letting fear drive me. That has helped me to have confidence in most things going right.

Which they do. Most of the time things work out fairly well.

I’m trying to do this with SQL Saturday. I’m hopeful for the future and events, and understanding when people are hesitant. However, I am confident that more organizers will run events and more people will want to come to live in-person events.

I’m being optimistic, knowing that this doesn’t apply to everyone and I have empathy for the reality.

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Daily Coping 4 Aug 2022

Posted on August 4, 2022 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to write down three things you are grateful for today.

I’m grateful for a lot of things, but the things that stand out today.

1. My kids are happy with us parents. They are all at home this summer, though the older two are living with us for the foreseeable future. We love that, and love having them around for dinner, movies, or just some conversation. They seem to enjoy being around us, which at 23 and 30 is not something I see often with others.

2. My health. I’ve had a couple minor things with health, but fairly minor. Those issues have prevented me from much gym/yoga/walking time for a couple months. I appreciate more and more my health and the things I can do (and I’m looking forward to).

3. The Tesla. I’m lucky that I can afford a car like this. Every time I drive it, it’s a fun experience. I can cruise easily, or I can make my stomach jump by pushing hard on the acceleration.

Lots more, but those are on the forefront of my mind today.

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Solar Production After 5 Months in Power BI

Posted on August 3, 2022 by way0utwest

I’ve been tracking my usage and comparing that with the estimates for my solar power system. I wrote about the database design and tracking the usage and some of the estimates.

In this post, I want to look at the reporting in Power BI. Here is my refreshed comparison report as of Jul 31.

2022-08-01 10_17_38-SolarProduction - Power BI Desktop

I have 3 sections here. At the bottom right is a table with a range setting that shows raw data. I need to write about the import process for this data, but that’s for another day.

At the top, I have the running total of production (light blue) and estimated production (dark blue). The first month or so we were close to the estimate, but we started to outperform the estimate regularly, which is good news. The Tesla wasn’t in the model or estimate, and it uses some power, so it’s good the system is ahead.

The bottom left is the month by month comparison, which you can see is a fairly steady overproduction each month.

The configuration is fairly simple for this report. For the line chart, I’ve set the x-axis as the date. My Y-Axis has the sum of both of the raw production numbers. This gives me a running total across time.

2022-08-01 10_32_02-SolarProduction - Power BI Desktop

The lower left month by month bar chart is similar, but I’ve added the month, which separate this into buckets.  This lets me see if a particular month’s comparison is hidden in the line chart by the long term running total.

2022-08-01 10_36_16-SolarProduction - Power BI Desktop

I can’t change much, but this does help me to look for anomalies and possible production issues. Perhaps a panel isn’t performing or there is another issue. By glancing at this every few days, I can decide if I need to look at more detail on the system.

Hopefully the company doing monitoring would detect issues, but this is a good double check for me and it also gives me long term data backup in case they have issues.

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Digging into an AI Algorithm

Posted on August 3, 2022 by way0utwest

One of the more successful uses of AI (artificial intelligence) has been in the medical field. It seems that there is a tremendous amount of data, high variability in some aspects of the target of the data (the patient), and a need to constantly review very tedious volumes of data. A place where AI might, and has, made a difference to help humans, not replace them.

There’s a neat article that dives into a bit of how a medical algorithm works for detecting sepsis. As you scroll, the article tries to explain in layman’s terms what the AI system(s) are doing. It goes through the necessity of regular data, which I think is a good design to push humans to gather data. It then talks about a variety of neural networks being used to analyze data, based on previous training from humans and past results.

It’s interesting to think of multiple nodes coming to their own conclusions are different times of the day and then later nodes looking at the results of previous nodes. That’s what a human would often do, looking back at recent history and giving that some weight. The system comes up with a number that a human can use to consider in their diagnosis.

It is interesting that the article talks about the need for humans to better communicate to use this system. I think that’s often a key with any computer assistance. The humans still need to use the computer as a tool and not as the final decision maker. However, at least in this instance, the tool seems to be helping reduce deaths in the hospital. I would hope that this is because the algorithm is detecting some patterns that are easy for a doctor to miss. It could be because the new system is focusing people’s attention better, and possibly this is a combination of both of these possibilities.

I do think that AI systems can be very helpful in assisting humans in many tasks, and medicine might be one of the places where AI will be most useful. The sheer volumes of data, the complexity of the cases, and the load placed on medical workers to monitor many people can overwhelm any one doctor or nurse. Having a system that might remind them of a small detail will hopefully save lives.

Steve Jones

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