Companies and educational institutions, especially those that have a global footprint and a reputation to protect, make a big deal about diversity policies. It is almost impossible to sit through a recruitment or admissions talk by one such entity without a mention to their diversity policies, which they are proud of. And they have good…
Brainstorming
I was never a big fan of “brainstorming”. I’m referring to those meetings where everyone gets together and thinks aloud, in order to converge to a solution. In the past, when I’ve been involved in such exercises, they’ve mostly come to nothing, and mostly ended with a list of to-dos which got never done (this…
Airline delays in India
So DNA put out a news report proclaiming “Air India, IndiGo flyers worst hit by flight delays in January: DGCA“. The way the headline has been written, it appears as if Air India and Indigo are equally bad in terms of delayed flights. And an innumerate reader or journalist would actually believe that number, since…
Recommendations and rating systems
This is something that came out of my IIMB class this morning. We were discussing building recommendation systems, using the whisky database (check related blog posts here and here). One of the techniques of recommendation we were discussing was the “market basket analysis“, where you recommend products to people based on combinations of products that…
Rating systems need to be designed carefully
Different people use the same rating scale in different ways. Hence, nuance is required while aggregating ratings taking decisions based on them During the recent Times Lit Fest in Bangalore, I was talking to some acquaintances regarding the recent Uber rape case (where a car driver hired though the Uber app in Delhi allegedly raped…
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata principles
An army of monkeys can’t win you a complex war like the Mahabharata. For that you need a clever charioteer. A business development meeting didn’t go well. The potential client indicated his preference for a different kind of organisation to solve his problem. I was about to say “why would you go for an army of…
Selection bias and recommendation systems
Yesterday I was watching a video on youtube, and at the end of it it recommended another (the “top recommendation” at that point in time). This video floored me – it was a superb rendition of Endaro Mahaanubhaavulu by Mandolin U Shrinivas. Listen and enjoy as you read the rest of the post. I was…
Weak ties and job hunting
As the more perceptive of you would have figured out by now, the wife is in her first year of business school, and looking for an internship. I’m at a life stage where I have friends in most companies she is interested in who are in roles that are at a level where it is…
Startup salary survey
I think I’ve come up with what I think is a really cool metric to value the tradeoff between your salary at a startup and the equity stake that you are given. For lack of a better name, I call this “multiple of foregone income”: Let’s say that your “market salary” is $ 100,000 (pulling…
Categorisation and tagging
Tagging offers an efficient method to both searching and for identifying customer preferences on the axis most appropriate for the customer The traditional way to organise a retail catalogue is by means of hierarchical categorisation. If you’re selling clothes, for example, you first divide it into men’s and women’s, then into formal and casual, and…
Batch Parity
From several sources I’ve heard of this bizarre concept called “batch parity”, where you assume that everyone who joined a particular school or company in a particular year is identical. This leads to people passing up on opportunities because they are not given such parity. I’ve been hearing of this from way too many sources…
A/B testing with large samples
Out on Numbers Rule Your World, Kaiser Fung has a nice analysis on Andrew Gelman’s analysis of the Facebook controversy (where Facebook apparently “played with people’s emotions” by manipulating their news feeds. The money quote from Fung’s piece is here: Sadly, this type of thing happens in A/B testing a lot. On a website, it…
Meeting types
There are essentially three kinds of meetings – those that are entirely “in person”, those that are entirely “on call” and hybrids. I argue that the quality of conversation in the third kind of meeting is significantly inferior to that of the first two types. In person meetings are those where all participants are in…
Data Science is a Creative Profession
About a month or so back I had a long telephonic conversation with this guy who runs an offshored analytics/data science company in Bangalore. Like most other companies that are being built in the field of analytics, this follows the software services model – a large team in an offshored location, providing long-term standardised data…
Planning and drawing
Fifteen years ago I had a chemistry teacher called Jayanthi Swaminathan. By all accounts, she was an excellent teachers, and easily one of the best teachers in the school where she taught me. Unfortunately I don’t remember much of what she taught me, the only thing I remember being her constant refrain to “plan and…
Datapukes and Dashboards
Avinash Kaushik has put out an excellent, if long, blog post on building dashboards. A key point he makes is about the difference between dashboards and what he calls “datapukes” (while the name is quite self-explanatory and graphic, it basically refers to a report with a lot of data and little insight). He goes on…
The Risk of Overspecialization
A couple of months back i got an upgrade to my LinkedIn account that allows me to write essays there, which I occasionally use to spout management level gyaan. While it leads to fragmentation of my writing (there are already three blogs, including this one, and Mint), it helps create conversations on LinkedIn and in…
Marketing
I’m in a conversation with a friend on marketing my consulting services and he gave me a most genius piece of advice You can say you do supervised learning instead of saying regressions. Last month I was at this big data conference. Everyone I met said they were into big data or analytics or some…
Law of conservation of talent
For starters. there is no such law. However, there exists a belief in most people’s minds that everyone is equally talented, and it is only that talent in different people is spread across different dimensions. It starts when you are in school. If you are not good at maths, people tell you that you must…
Back to bachelorhood
Starting tonight I’ll be a bachelor once again. For the next nineteen months or so. No it’s not that I’m returning my post graduate diploma and hence getting this downgrade (it’s been a while since I cracked a bad joke here so I’m entitled). It’s that the wife is going away. To get herself an…
The most unique single malt
There might have been a time in life when you would’ve had some Single Malt whisky and thought that it “doesn’t taste like any other”. In fact, you might have noticed that some single malt whiskies are more distinct than others. It is possible you might want to go on a quest to find the…