Chen Liang's Blog

Photo by  Greg Rakozy  on  Unsplash Babylon's Ashes is the sixth book in The Expanse book series. It continues the story arch in the last book -- Nemesis Games . I think this is the weakest book in the series so far. While it’s still a good book, the story was rushed. The end gives a hopeful message but very generic storywise. This is a review of the book’s written style. I will not post any spoilers.

Photo by  Christian Wiediger  on  Unsplash This is the last part of my "Understanding Marketing" series. Perception is the process of developing an interpretation of a stimulus, or in other words, deciding what a stimulus means. It is perhaps the most crucial process in customer behavior for two reasons: What customers perceive is what affects their actions. What is perceived is not necessarily what is “true”.

Photo by  Henry & Co.  on  Unsplash This is the fourth part of my "Understanding Marketing" series. It deals with how to price your product . What effects the price of a product.I recommend Confessions of the Pricing Man: How Price Affects Everything by  Hermann Simon

Photo by  Susan Yin  on  Unsplash This is the third part of my "Understanding Marketing" series. It deals with the online-offline interactions and how to find lead users and facilitate influence and contagion. I recommend The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson.

Photo by  Robert Bye  on  Unsplash This post is the second part of my "Understanding Marketing" series. It deals with customer centricity. There are two schools of marketing--production centric thinking and customer centricity. While production centric thinking still serves well for many companies, customer centric thinking has become the favourable choice. I’ll present why in this post.

I'm starting on a five part series on understanding marketing. The goal is to give brief notes on the various elements used in Marketing. So people who are new to marketing won’t get lost completely. It's not my goal to create an entire course on teaching marketing. The five part consist of Branding, Customer Centricity, Facilitate Influence, Pricing and Communication Strategies. In the first part of the series, I'm focusing on marketing strategy and branding positioning.

The increasing numbers of electric vehicles (EV) increases the demand for new EV charging stations. This presents a huge problem for city planners. They need to identify the most suitable place (e.g. few spaces with many businesses around). This project uses the clustering method in Machine Learning to identify new locations for EV charging stations.

Leviathan Wakes was the first novel of the The Expanse novel series. It sets in the future where humans have mastered space travel. Mars had been colonised, and asteroids were modified to fit human life. Wars broke out between people on Mars and people on Earth. The people in the asteroid belt were caught in between the fights. While a fragile peace is currently in pace, no one knows how long it will last. A mysterious item was discovered that will change the course of history.

  I started to track my finances recently, and I needed an accounting software that tracks multi-currency stock investments in addition to tracking my incomes and expenses. There are two software solutions that suit my need -- GnuCash and Moneydance. Both are excellent solutions. I’m using them both at the moment. I’ll write a blog post to explain why.