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…
This year on Spotify
I’m rather disappointed with my end-of-year Spotify report this year. I mean, I know it’s automated analytics, and no human has really verified it, etc. but there are some basics that the algorithm failed to cover. The first few slides of my “annual report” told me that my listening changed by seasons. That in January…
Yet another “big data whisky”
A long time back I had used a primitive version of my Single Malt recommendation app to determine that I’d like Ardbeg. Presently, the wife was travelling to India from abroad, and she got me a bottle. We loved it. And so I had screenshots from my app stored on my phone all the time,…
Telling stories with data
I’m about 20% through with The Verdict by Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala. It’s a fascinating book, except for one annoyance – it is full of tables that serve no purpose but to break the flow of text. I must mention that I’m reading the book on the Kindle, which means that the tables can pose…
The (missing) Desk Quants of Main Street
A long time ago, I’d written about my experience as a Quant at an investment bank, and about how banks like mine were sitting on a pile of risk that could blow up any time soon. There were two problems as I had documented then. Firstly, most quants I interacted with seemed to be solving…
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…
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…
Exponential increase
“Increasing exponentially” is a common phrase used by analysts and commentators to describe a certain kind of growth. However, more often than not, this phrase is misused and any fast growth is termed as “exponential”. If f(x) is a function of x, f(x) is said to be exponential if and only if it can be…