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…
Astrology and Data Science
The discussion goes back some 6 years, when I’d first started setting up my data and management consultancy practice. Since I’d freshly quit my job to set up the said practice, I had plenty of time on my hands, and the wife suggested that I spend some of that time learning astrology. Considering that I’ve…
Scott Adams, careers and correlation
I’ve written here earlier about how much I’ve been influenced by Scott Adams’s career advice about “being in top quartile of two or more things“. To recap, this is what Adams wrote nearly ten years back: If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to…
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…
The Signficicance of Statistical Significance
Last year, an aunt was diagnosed with extremely low bone density. She had been complaining of back pain and weakness, and a few tests later, her orthopedic confirmed that bone density was the problem. She was put on a course of medication, and then was given by shots. A year later, she got her bone…
Standard deviation is over
I first learnt about the concept of Standard Deviation sometime in 1999, when we were being taught introductory statistics in class 12. It was classified under the topic of “measures of dispersion”, and after having learnt the concepts of “mean deviation from median” (and learning that “mean deviation from mean” is identically zero) and “mean…
Time for bragging
So the Karnataka polls are done and dusted. The Congress will form the next government here and hopefully they won’t mess up. This post, however, is not about that. This is to stake claim on some personal bragging rights. 1. Back in March, after the results of the Urban Local Body polls came out, I…
In search of uncertainty
Back when I was in school, I was a math stud. At least people around me thought so. I knew I wanted to pursue a career in science, and that in part led me to taking science in class XI, and subsequently writing JEE which led to the path I ultimately took. Around the same…
Addition to the Model Makers Oath
Paul Wilmott and Emanuel Derman, in an article in Business Week a couple of years back (at the height of the financial crisis) came up with a model-makers oath. It goes: • I will remember that I didn’t make the world and that it doesn’t satisfy my equations. • Though I will use models boldly…
The Trouble With Analyst Reports
The only time I watch CNBC is in the morning when I’m at the gym. For reasons not known to me, my floor in office lacks televisions (every other floor has them) and the last thing I want to do when I’m home is to watch TV, that too a business channel, hence the reservation…
Kabaddi and Jesus Navas
I’ve always talked about the Kabaddi style of solving a problem. In Kabaddi, when you are defending, six out of the seven players in the team form a chain in order to encircle the attacker. The seventh defender, however, strikes it alone, in a different direction, trying to draw the attacker into a position where…
Orange Juice and Petrol
So I was reading this article by Ajay Shah about administered pricing for petroleum. He does an excellent (though it gets a bit technical in terms of statistics) analysis about what could go wrong if the government were to free pricing of petroleum products. He mostly argues in favour of deregulation, and that is a…
A Balance Sheet View of Life
The basic idea of this post is that interpersonal relationships (not necessarily romantic) need to be treated as balance sheets and not as P&L statements, i.e. one should always judge based on the overall all-time aggregate rather than the last incremental change in situation. Just to give you a quick overview of accounting, the annual…
Randomizing advertisements
This 7.5 minute break in the middle of an IPL innings is a bad idea. The biggest problem is that everyone knows the exact length of the break, and can use it to do stuff – like cook, or clean, or crap, or fag, or maybe watch the Everton-Man U shootout. 7.5 minutes is a…
Taleb’s Recipe
No, unlike the previous post, this has nothing to do about food. It is about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent op-ed in the Financial Times where he gives his “recipe” for saving the global financial system. Two of my favourite bloggers Arnold Kling and Felix Salmon have responded to it, but I didn’t like either so…
Work
Work is not just something you do for money. Yes, what you do working from seven (in the morning) to eleven in the night counts as work. But that is not the only thing that counts as work. Broadly defined, work is anything that you need to do at a particular given time. It doesn’t…
The difference between Taleb and McKenzie
A few minutes back I finished reading Richard McKenzie’s Why popcorn costs so much at the movies and other pricing puzzles. Since the book is not available in India, I managed to procure an online pirated version through a friend. And since the book isn’t released in India, I didn’t feel guilty about reading the…
Oily predictions
I propose a new business model. Make a seemingly outrageous long-range prediction. It could just be anything, but you might want to stick to the financial world. Once you have decided on the prediction to make, think up of about six possible reasons why this prediction could come true. Given that the prediction in itself…
The met department and randomness
Ok. Nothing unusual about the title of this post. There is intuitively a lot of randomness where the met department is concerned. This post is about an editorial in the Business Standard. Now, the Indian Met department used a new process for forecasting the monsoons last year. Now, this process yielded good results in the…
Now it’s the turn of the economists
To fear the engineers that is. It seems like TCA Srinivasa Raghavan had an extremely tight deadline with respect to his analysis of the Raghuram Rajan Report. So, instead of taking on the report, he decides to go after the chief author instead. And he doesn’t even do a good job of this. He goes…