Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

In the Maven Crash Course " Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes ", Chris Dutton walks through a hypothetical business case while showcasing the power of modern Excel tools like Power Query, Power Pivot and DAX. Power Query is used to extract, transform, and load data from external sources like SQL databases, PDF and CSV files. A relational model is created to join the tables without writing a single formula. Exploratory analysis is done using Power Pivot and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). Data Analysis Expressions is the language that we can use to define new calculated columns and measures to enhance our Data Model instead of the traditional cell formulas that we'd typically use if our data was stored in worksheets. Pivot Charts and slicers are used to design a simple interactive report that the sales managers can use to analyze revenue trends and product performance.

Grok-2 is the latest AI model from Elon Musk's xAI company. This jack-of-all-trades model has impressive capabilities in chat, coding, and image generation. Unlike the more restrained AI models out there, Grok-2 seems to operate with fewer ethical guardrails. This has some folks worried, as the ease with which it can create convincing fake images and potentially misleading content is pretty alarming.  In an age where telling fact from fiction online is already a challenge, tools like Grok-2 could exacerbate the spread of misinformation and further divide us as a society. This approach is classic Musk - innovative, controversial, and sure to keep the tech world talking.  Image: X Grok-2 is currently available to X (formerly Twitter) Premium subscribers, so you'll need to upgrade that account if you want to play around with this AI wild child. Just be warned - it has a bit of a cheeky, "edgy" personality that some might find incredibly cringeworthy. Grok-2's API

 

This Week I Learned -  *  The Turing Way is an online handbook – and global community – dedicated to fostering gold-standard reproducible research. It’s a cultural movement with the potential to transform data science *  Binder is a service that takes a GitHub repository containing Jupyter Notebooks and spins up a cloud-based server to run them. You can start experimenting with the code without having to install anything on your machine. Mybinder.org is a public service. It can only access public repositories.  How it works  - BinderHub (the backend of Binder) fetches your repo from GitHub.  Analyses the contents Builds a Docker image based on your repo Launches that Docker image in the cloud Connects you to it via your browser *  jupyter-repo2docker is a tool to build, run, and push Docker images from source code repositories. repo2docker fetches a repository (from GitHub, GitLab, Zenodo, Figshare, Dataverse installations, a Git repository or a local directory) and builds a contain