To be refreshed, renewed, to enjoy and even live a healthy life we need to take intentional actions every day, every moment.

Our lungs, Breathing: We are refreshed by air
Our body, Energy: We are refreshed by food, water and sleep
Our mind, Thinking: We read, explore, and ponder

What about Our heart? What refreshes our heart? After a long day or year of taking care of others, helping out where we can, being available when needed. Do any of the above refresh our heart? No

The heart needs love. True, unfailing, unconditional love. But there are different sources of love, just like air and reading

Our lungs, are destroyed by smoking
Our body, is whittled away by lack of sleep and weakened by bad eating habits
Our mind, corrupted by falsities or dulled by entertainment

What about Our Heart? What types of love can impact us? Seeking love from the wrong places fails to refresh us as well.

Think about it. Are you refreshed? Where is your source of love? Other people's love of you, who respect and admire you? Fleeting at best, a bad mood, a crooked glance wipes away this type of support.

Where does true, unfailing, unconditional love come from?

Be filled with that love, and you will be refreshed. You will find "Peace beyond understanding" 

- Keith B. Carter

So... here's an NFT(click here) I created. Its a special place in Singapore, can you guess where?

What are NFTs?
NFTs are a new breed of digital asset that exist outside of traditional financial systems. They are not regulated by governments and their value is not guaranteed by any central authority. This makes them risky, but it also means they can potentially offer much higher returns than traditional investments.

How do you buy them? NFTs are bought and sold on specialised exchanges, just like regular cryptocurrencies. To buy them, you first need to create a wallet to store them in. This is a bit like setting up a bank account and usually involves entering your email address and creating a password. Once you have a wallet, you can buy NFTs by transferring regular cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or ethereum into it.

What can you do with them? NFTs are still in their early days and there isn't yet a clear answer to this question. Some people are treating them as digital collectables, similar to baseball cards or comic books. Others see them as investment vehicles, hoping to make big profits by trading them at the right time.

How secure are they? NFTs are stored on blockchains, which are famously secure due to their use of cryptography. However, this security comes at a price – blockchain networks are often very slow and expensive to use.

NFTs are a new type of digital asset that is being developed by the Ethereum network. NFTs are essentially digital tokens that can represent any object or property. They can be used to buy and sell goods and services, or to secure ownership rights over assets. NFTs are unique because they are not backed by any physical assets. This means that they can be traded on a decentralized network without the risk of fraud or theft. NFTs could have a major impact on the way the world economy works. They could allow for the development of new forms of commerce that are not possible with traditional forms of money.

For manufacturers, they could answer the age old problem of connecting directly with retail customer where manufacturers can create a community of loyal users both online, offline and in the metaverse (a new form of online).
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"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart"
ac·tiv·i·ty - /akˈtivədē/ "a thing that a person or group does or has done" - Oxford Dictionary

I teach about Know, Decide, Act: Know new things, Decide what will be good to do and then take action. Well, there's been talk about "activity"; phrases like "we shouldn't do activities". The only living things that aren't active, are dead. (let that sink in)  But it is true, we shouldn't do aimless, pointless, mindless activities. Is it so simple, who is to judge? 
Let's give a thought to washing dishes as an activity:

For some reason, we have to wash the dishes every day. Well, the reason is simple, if you want to eat on clean plates with clean utensils, someone needs to wash.

So an activity itself is neither bad nor good. We have to wash the dishes, wash the car. You have to go over to your office. You have to prepare report. You may also read the Bible, maybe pray, and worship sometimes... These are all activities, but the notion of what makes a difference is the heart of the person performing the activity. Are we rushing through the Program  of Life aimlessly?  pro·gram - /ˈprōˌɡram/ "a set of related measures or activities with a particular long-term aim" - Oxford Dictionary    



Let's take washing dishes further.

This evening, I had to go and wash the dishes as usual. This could be a chore, drudgery or the way my heart normally is; I love to have clean plates, and forks, and knives.

Activity as a Joy: I love to be able to go over and pick up a plate, and just go ahead and eat. So that means that when I wash the dishes, I want to make them spotless and squeaky clean:
- Know : I get ready, I want a good clean sponge. I want great soap that works.
- Decide: Organize before I start to clean. What gets cleaned first, think about how to optimize soap and water usage... etc.
- Act: As I clean, I enjoy looking outside. So I like to clean a little bit earlier in the evening before dark, so I can still see a nice view, maybe the sun setting, maybe the clouds, a bird or two going along. I clean with joy in my heart.

Not only is it interesting to find and clean out those deep rooted spots that sometimes occur when you're cooking. but it's also a rewarding feeling.
- Set a Goal: Seeing everything has been cleaned up. Put away. Nice, neat and getting dried. I know that in the morning, I am going to pick up a clean bowl or plate for breakfast, and I'm not going to have to reinspect it.

- Follow-through and Improve: I know it'll be clean, so I can just go ahead and eat, but if it's not clean, I'm pretty disappointed that I could have done even better. And so I'm gonna take a closer look the next night, have some more fun playing a game with myself. "Is that prong on the fork really clean?"

Activity as a Chore: Now, another way to consider cleaning dishes is that it's a chore. Oh, boy. Here are the dirty dishes again. My goodness, how did these get so dirty? How come they're so many? Isn't anyone gonna help? Why am I the one who has to clean the dishes?

This is boring. Oh, it's dirty. Always oily. Oh, I don't like it. Let me just hurry up and get it done. I have other things I need to do quickly. Let's go sponges. Okay, so clean enough, let's just get it washed up and put away if it looks clean... It is clean.

Now that might not be exactly the right attitude. In the morning, maybe it's clean. Maybe, it's not... Forks? Well, those are the toughest to clean. Maybe they're gonna be done or maybe not. And so it depends on your heart and activity is different only because of the heart of the person doing the activity

In conclusion, it's not that you can stop doing activities so you can say well I'm not gonna ever clean the dishes. No clean dishes means you are not gonna have a clean dish to eat off of, you're gonna be using your hands and the table pretty soon and that's gonna be a mess.

Well, instead, Whatever activity you do, seek the Lord to have a heart of joy.
- Plan the activity
- Resource, the activity,
- Seek God's help to have a joyful heart for the activity that you do and then follow up, make sure that the activity was wonderful and that you had lots of fun.

And ultimately then that you did your best, you did your best for God.

Collaboration: We work together as a family on this, everything is clean before dinner so that cooking is easier. Key supplies are replenished, soap, sponges, rags. Infrastructure updated like drying racks, kitchenshelves. Much thanks to all my family members for the efforts that make this one part of our whole daily family meal routine, activity with heart, supporting our Program  of Life as we run the race set out before us. 

- Colossians 3:23-24 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, 24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
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Use the SWAT Framework (Strategic questions, Wrangle data, Analyze, and Take action) This will be "business led analytics" where the questions are developed first. Then sponsors think about how they will Take action and the value of the intelligence is tracked. Finally the Wrangling of data and Analysis is done. Because its intelligence, it is fast! It needs to be, customers and ships can't wait... 

The team structure enables the right delivery. Since intelligence is always "optional" so you need a rapid response business team under the Business Answer Lead and a enterprise operational team with the Data Lead in charge who enables standardization. Business and IT need to work very carefully together. Too often, "data scientists" are hoisted with the entire job, but they lack business acumen/credibility, and don't enjoy data pipelining, so caught in between the leave. An entire organization has the right structure. This structure has been used by the best intelligence operators in the world. Verses the pure data scientist teams we are seeing today which were suggested by vendors/consultants with less stake in sustained business value as an outcome.

​"Sometimes we need to see to feel."

A SanKey diagram shows the flows of data from one state to another. Customers, represented by data can be shown how they move from webpage to webpage or channel to products, the best outcomes of increased engagement or worst outcomes of drop or lost customer.

Purists will say machine learning starts with code and equations. Business leaders need to move fast and typically are highly visual. Rapidminer brings these camps together. For fast POCs(Proof of Concepts) Rapidminer lets you drag and drop Gradient Boosted Trees (a more robust and highly descriptive M/L) and it lets the programmers go behind the scenes to implement R or Python. 
Try it out! If you are in my class... its free! (Click Here)

Using Neural Networks, computers can "see", match complex patterns. As kids, we learn, we are handed shapes and are taught their name. Computers are being taught the same way.

This picture by Professor Andrew Ng, says it all. The colors on the door handle are simply numbers to the computer. Learning is hard, but with math, and decent processing power, its now possible.

Play around with Neural Net Vision here: 

Each cloud platform has its strengths. In these "early days" try them all! Each has a free trial, so you have everything to gain.

Check out this tensorflow playground! Great way to visualize how neural networks handle classification problems.