Tag: R

Cord Ministries Donation Income Investigation Tool

Cord Ministries International is a not-for-profit organization that handles the “back office” tasks for about 100 people and projects. These people and projects are located Czech Republic, Honduras, Israel, Africa, USA, and mostly in Thailand. One of our main jobs is to maximize the donation throughput to the people and projects we serve.

One of our main concerns is balancing the trade-offs between the many small donations and the few large donations that we process as we consider how to charge our administrative fee.

Number of Donations vs. Total Donation Amount by Account Number

If we charge a fixed cost against each donation, say simply the total expenses of providing our services divided by the total number of donations, then a huge percentage of each of these small gifts gets eaten by the administrative charges and the large gifts have only a tiny percent going for the administrative expenses. Small gifts subsidize large gifts – that doesn’t seem right. Continue reading “Cord Ministries Donation Income Investigation Tool”

Amazon Retail Arbitrage Heatmap

My nephew runs a medium-sized Amazon Retail Arbitrage business and asked me to put some Big Data analysis to some of his sales data.

He hypothesized that his internet business was reaching out to people who lived inconveniently far from a “Big Box Store” and if he could find a way to optimize his advertising to them he could increase his sales.

He asked me to Geo-Map his sales based on his Amazon sales report data so he could look at it to test his hypothesis.

There is more analysis that could be done – but he’d have to pay for that and the business isn’t that big yet. But, after looking at the map, he’s rejected his hypothesis and is working on a new theory.

Unfortunately, this “R” Language software is proprietary so all I can show is one of the output maps that zoomed out too far to be useful…

Quick Analysis of Selected Project Reports to Determine Project Reporting “Quality”

Working as a Project Manager for multiple for-profit and not-for-profit organizations I have seen a lot, I mean a lot, of project reports. Some of the places I’ve had the opportunity to work for are really in to project reporting, some not so much.

Learning Big Data tools I’ve often had questions of my own that I’ve asked myself. One was, can I get a measure of project report “quality” without actually reading the report? Can I look at all the reports in the organization and find good project report writers? Can I find projects that consistently produce good project reports? Bad project reports? How do my own project reports stack up to others? How does the “quality” of the project reports change over time? Does project report “quality” have any relationship to project “quality”? Continue reading “Quick Analysis of Selected Project Reports to Determine Project Reporting “Quality””

Michigan Road Bike Points of Interest

Michigan Road Bike Points of Interest

We are back home for a while working from Northern Michigan. Our little town is Johannesburg which is a really fun international big city name for a quiet place in the country.

Riding in Michigan is great and this little “R” language application is a great example of what can easily be done integrating Google Sheets, mapping, and live data.

Click on a marked location to see a description and photo of that spot.

The data is sourced from a Google Sheet that anyone can view.

Thailand Road Bike Points of Interest

Thailand Road Bike Points of Interest

The WordPress server is supposed to be working and I have been able to upload a couple photos. That means I can post another simple mapping project to show off the great places to go on a road bike around Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Click on a marked location to see a description and photo of that spot.

The data is sourced from a Google Sheet that anyone can view.