I find the classification of people into introverts and extroverts to be rather simplistic. While it is bad enough that people are commonly classified into one of these, you also have metrics such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) that formalise this classification, with top consulting firms actively using such classifications in their day-to-day work.…
How power(law)ful is your job?
A long time back I’d written about how different jobs are sigmoidal to different extents – the most fighter jobs, I’d argued, have linear curves – the amount you achieve is proportional to the amount of effort you put in. And similarly I’d argued that the studdest jobs have a near vertical line in the…
Newsletter!
So after much deliberation and procrastination, I’ve finally started a newsletter. I call it “the art of data science” and the title should be self-explanatory. It’s pure unbridled opinion (the kind of which usually goes on this blog), except that I only write about one topic there. I intend to have three sections and then…
High dimension and low dimension data science
I’ve observed that there are two broad approaches that people take to getting information out of data. One approach is to simply throw a kitchen sink full of analytical techniques at the data. Without really trying to understand what the data looks like, and what the relationships may be, the analyst simply uses one method…
Slavedriver sandwich
Something that happened at home earlier today reminded me of my very first full-time job, which I had ended up literally running away from barely two months after I’d started. I like to call this the “slavedriver sandwich”. The basic problem is this – you need to get someone you normally have no influence over…
When a two-by-two ruins a scatterplot
The BBC has some very good analysis of the Brexit vote (how long back was that?), using voting data at the local authority level, and correlating it with factors such as ethnicity and educational attainment. In terms of educational attainment, there is a really nice chart, that shows the proportion of voters who voted to…
Scott Adams’s advice and career options
Some five years back, I took a piece of advice from Dilbert creator Scott Adams. A few years earlier, he had blogged that there are two ways in which one can be successful in a career – But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2.…
Medium stats
So Medium sends me this email: Congratulations! You are among the top 10% of readers and writers on Medium this year. As a small thank you, we’ve put together some highlights from your 2016. Now, I hardly use Medium. I’ve maybe written one post there (a long time ago) and read only a little bit (blogs…
Banks starting to eat FinTech’s lunch?
I’ve long maintained that the “winner” in the “battle” for payments will be the conventional banking system, rather than one of the new “wallet” or “payment service providers”. This view is driven by the advances being made by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) which is owned by a consortium of banks. First there…
On writing a book
While I look for publishers for the manuscript that I’ve just finished (it’s in “alpha testing” now), I think it’s a good time to write about what it was like to write the book. Now, I should ideally be writing this after it has been published and declared a grand success. But there are two…
The problem with Slack, and why it’s inferior to DBabble
When two of the organisations I’m associated with introduced me to the chatting app Slack, it reminded me of the chatting app DBabble (known to us in IIMB as BRacket) that was popular back when I was in college. There were two primary reasons because of which Slack reminded me of DBabble. The first was the presence of…
Matt Levine describes my business idea
When I was leaving the big bank I was working for (I keep forgetting whether this blog is anonymous or not, but considering that I’ve now mentioned it on my LinkedIn profile (and had people congratulate me “on the new job”), I suppose it’s not anonymous any more) in 2011, I didn’t bother looking for…
Letters to my wife
As I turned Thirty Three yesterday, my wife dug up some letters (emails to be precise) I’d written to her over the years and compiled them for me, urging me to create at “Project Thirty Four” (on the lines of my Project Thirty). What is pleasantly surprising is that I’ve actually managed to make a…
The Chamrajpet model of leadership
When you are doing a group assignment (assuming you’re in college) and you get assigned your share of the work, the assumption is that the allocation of work across team members has been fair. Good group leaders try to ensure this, and also to split work according to the relative interests and strengths of different…
Quantifying life
During a casual conversation on Monday, the wife remarked that given my interests and my profession (where I mostly try to derive insights from data), she was really surprised that I had never tried using data to optimise my own life. This is a problem I’ve had in the past – I can look at clients’…
Restaurants, deliveries and data
Delivery aggregators are moving customer data away from the retailer, who now has less knowledge about his customer. Ever since data collection and analysis became cheap (with cloud-based on-demand web servers and MapReduce), there have been attempts to collect as much data as possible and use it to do better business. I must admit to…
On Uppi2’s top rating
So it appears that my former neighbour Upendra’s new magnum opus Uppi2 is currently the top rated movie on IMDB, with a rating of 9.7/10.0. The Times of India is so surprised that it has done an entire story about it, which I’ve screenshot here: The story also mentions that another Kannada movie RangiTaranga (which…
Using all available information
In “real-life” problems, it is not necessary to use all the given data. My mind goes back eleven years, to the first exam in the Quantitative Methods course at IIMB. The exam contained a monster probability problem. It was so monstrous that only some two or three out of my batch of 180 could solve…
Means, medians and power laws
Following the disbursement of Rs. 10 lakh by the Andhra Pradesh government for the family of each victim killed in the stampede on the Godavari last week, we did a small exercise to put a value on the life of an average Indian. The exercise itself is rather simple – you divide India’s GDP by its…
Genetic Algorithms
I first learnt about Genetic Algorithms almost exactly thirteen years ago, when it was taught to me by Prof. Deepak Khemani as part of a course on “artificial intelligence”. I remember liking the course a fair bit, and took a liking to the heuristics and “approximate solutions” after the mathematically intensive algorithms course of the…
The Art of Drawing Spectacular Graphs
Bloomberg Business has a feature on the decline of the Euro after the Greek “No” vote last night. As you might expect, the feature is accompanied by a graphic which shows a “precipitous fall” in the European currency. I’m in two minds of whether to screenshot the graphic (so that any further changes are not…