A few people who I’ve spoken to as part of my job hunt have asked to see some “detailed descriptions” of work that I’ve done. The other day, I put together an email with some of these descriptions. I thought it might make sense to “document” it in one place (and for me, the “obvious…
Core quants and desk quants on main street
The more perceptive of you might have realised that I’m in the job market. After nine wonderful years, I've decided to shut down my strategy and data consulting business. Will start looking for a job soon. Leads and recommendations welcome (preferably email/message me off twitter) — Karthik (@karthiks) October 9, 2020 Over the last one…
More on Covid-19 prevalence in Karnataka
As the old song went, “when the giver gives, he tears the roof and gives”. Last week the Government of Karnataka released its report on the covid-19 serosurvey done in the state. You might recall that it had concluded that the number of cases had been undercounted by a factor of 40, but then some…
Communicating binary forecasts
One silver lining in the madness of the US Presidential election counting is that there are some interesting analyses floating around regarding polling and surveying and probabilities and visualisation. Take this post from Andrew Gelman’s blog, for example: Suppose our forecast in a certain state is that candidate X will win 0.52 of the two-party…
How do bored investors invest?
Earlier this year, the inimitable Matt Levine (currently on paternity leave) came up with the “boredom markets hypothesis” ($, Bloomberg). If you like eating at restaurants or bowling or going to movies or going out dancing, now you can’t. If you like watching sports, there are no sports. If you like casinos, they are closed.…
Covid-19 Prevalence in Karnataka
Finally, many months after other Indian states had conducted a similar exercise, Karnataka released the results of its first “covid-19 sero survey” earlier this week. The headline number being put out is that about 27% of the state has already suffered from the infection, and has antibodies to show for it. From the press release:…
Election Counting Day
At the outset I must say that I’m deeply disappointed (based on the sources I’ve seen, mostly based on googling) with the reporting around the US presidential elections. For example, if I google, I get something like “Biden leads Trump 225-213”. At the outset, that seems like useful information. However, the “massive discretisation” of the…
Opinion polling in India and the US
(Relative) old-time readers of this blog might recall that in 2013-14 I wrote a column called “Election Metrics” for Mint, where I used data to analyse elections and everything else related to that. This being the election where Narendra Modi suddenly emerged as a spectacular winner, the hype was high. And I think a lot…
Scrabble
I’ve forgotten which stage of lockdown or “unlock” e-commerce for “non-essential goods” reopened, but among the first things we ordered was a Scrabble board. It was an impulse decision. We were on Amazon ordering puzzles for the daughter, and she had just about started putting together “sounds” to make words, so we thought “scrabble tiles…
Covid-19 superspreaders in Karnataka
Through a combination of luck and competence, my home state of Karnataka has handled the Covid-19 crisis rather well. While the total number of cases detected in the state edged past 2000 recently, the number of locally transmitted cases detected each day has hovered in the 20-25 range. It might make news that Karnataka has…
Meetings from home
For the last eight years, I’ve worked from home with occasional travel to clients’ offices. How occasional this travel has been has mostly depended on how far away the client is, and how insistent they are on seeing my face. Nevertheless, I’ve always made it a point to visit them for any important meetings, and…
Placing data labels in bar graphs
If you think you’re a data visualisation junkie, it’s likely that you’ve read Edward Tufte’s Visual Display Of Quantitative Information. If you are only a casual observer of the topic, you are likely to have come across these gifs that show you how to clean up a bar graph and a data table. And if…
Tests per positive case
I seem to be becoming a sort of “testing expert”, though the so-called “testing mafia” (ok I only called them that) may disagree. Nothing external happened since the last time I wrote about this topic, but here is more “expertise” from my end. As some of you might be aware, I’ve now created a script…
More on covid testing
There has been a massive jump in the number of covid-19 positive cases in Karnataka over the last couple of days. Today, there were 44 new cases discovered, and yesterday there were 36. This is a big jump from the average of about 15 cases per day in the preceding 4-5 days. The good news…
Simulating Covid-19 Scenarios
I must warn that this is a super long post. Also I wonder if I should put this on medium in order to get more footage. Most models of disease spread use what is known as a “SIR” framework. This Numberphile video gives a good primer into this framework. The problem with the framework is…
The future of work, and cities
Ok this is the sort of speculative predictive post that I don’t usually indulge in. However, I think my blog is at the right level of obscurity that makes it conducive for making speculative predictions. It is not popular enough that enough people will remember this prediction in case this doesn’t come through. And it’s…
Range of possibilities
After I wrote about “love and arranged jobs” last week, an old friend got back saying he quite appreciates the concept and he’s seen it in his career as well. He’s fundamentally a researcher, with a PhD, who then made a transition to corporate jobs. He told me that back in his research days, he…
Love and arranged jobs
When I first entered the arranged marriage market in early 2009, I had done so with the expectation that I would use it as a sort of dating agency. Remember this was well before the likes of OKCupid or Tinder or TrulyMadly were around, and for whatever reason I had assumed that I could “find…
Distribution of political values
Through Baal on Twitter I found this “Political Compass” survey. I took it, and it said this is my “political compass”. Now, I’m not happy with the result. I mean, I’m okay with the average value where the red dot has been put for me, and I think that represents my political leanings rather well.…
Two steps back, one step forward
In his excellent piece on Everton’s failed recruitment strategy (paywalled), Oliver Kay of the Athletic makes an interesting point – that players seldom do well when they move from a bigger club to a smaller club. During his time in charge at Arsenal, George Graham used to say that the key to building a team was…
Statistical analysis revisited – machine learning edition
Over ten years ago, I wrote this blog post that I had termed as a “lazy post” – it was an email that I’d written to a mailing list, which I’d then copied onto the blog. It was triggered by someone on the group making an off-hand comment of “doing regression analysis”, and I had…