Quarter 10 - Week of Exams

The storm clouds are rumbling above. As the batch sits for its last set of exams, it begins to get dark. Come on, it's GOT to mean SOMETHING atleast... hunh, hunnnnh? All we needed was an orchestra in the background doling out some music that sounds like impending doom. People scratched their heads for the last time. They had a frown on their face, replete with pursed lips, for the last time. They took one last sneaky look at a neighbour's paper.. for the last time.

Business Data Mining & Decision Making

Ok, so I haven't started yet on this take-home paper. The prof is either extremely confident that we won't copy from one another, or he knows it won't help anyway. No, I'm not talking about 'It doesnt help in life if we copy now', I mean 'What the hell are you going to copy, and are you sure it's right in the first place?' I like to think profs have their minds filled with little cherubs when they think of us.. dreamy little angel-faces. BUT.. enough of the profs. I have atleast done SOME reading of the questions, and they look do-able. So I'll sit on them for a while.

Strategic Thinking & Decision Making

The last time around, the prof had come up with a bunch of questions that required us to use a fair amount of analogy-tical (Is that a word? Analogous doesn't sound right... it seems... continuous!) thinking. This time though, if the answer was X, the question typically were like 'blah-blah-interesting-blah-blah. Does XYZ apply to this? How, which and why?' It's almost like a trick, to make us look up all three article sets, read them in the exam and figure out which applies! But in any case, it didn't seem too heavy, was just right, and it's one of the few times I came out of the exam without worrying about whether or not I was atleast in the same ballpark as the actual answer.

Soon after the exam, the zombie-faces around the block gave way to enlightenment. College was done (for most of us)! After some hanging around, people decided to move over to their favourite addas outside of college for one last meetup. In a flash, the block was empty. In hindsight, all this probably caused a sudden depression in the area. The rains could not have come at a more appropriate time.

Quarter 10 - Week 10

As is typically the tradition in the last week of classes, people are frantically running around bleary-eyed, cursing the printers, yawning every two minutes and punching in a few words into their reports every time the prof turns towards the board to write something. And yet, most of the seniors had this spark in their eyes. I wonder why.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

The class presentations were split across the two sessions, where each group came over to describe what they pulled out of their raw data. Quite a few of the teams seemed to use the C5.0 classification model to do their analysis. There were a few teams that played with clustering and market basket analysis. Personally though, I liked the text analytics ideas. There wasn't much detail provided on how the algorithms worked, or any non-intuitive observations like the diapers and beer sales (Trust me, every group was gunning for some kickass insight like this!), but the very fact that this requires the analysis of grammar and spoken words lends some grandeur to it.

Strategic Thinking & Decision Making

The first session gets completely wrapped up in a case. It was a good one, it combined aspects of Prospect Theory with ethical decision making. There were so many aspects to look at, though the choices were reasonably obvious. I say reasonably obvious since a person could go on and on describing why other options are also equally valid, but for some reason, this one tends to hold itself out.

The second session revolved around the concepts of planned rational decision making, and naturalistic intuitive decision making. The funda's pretty simple - in times of great stress, you'll be damned if you sit and weigh all the options, and decide which one's rationally best for you. Emotion plays a part, time plays a part, so you tend to be a lot quicker in decision making. You would think up one option, and then intuitively accept or discard it, then think of another solution, and repeat the same process. Therefore, the prof asks, if you're anyway going to go back to your old ways when your decision counts the most, what's the point of all this learning?

Practice. The whole point is practice. You can't stop yourselves from making quick intuitive decisions, but you can train your mind to intuitively find the closest possible good option. There's a lot of good info surrounding how other people do it, and what we can learn from it.

And so endeth the last class of the last official quarter.

In a fit of nostalgia, and sudden recognition that we need to capture these moments for a lifetime, a whole bunch of people were running around class taking photos of one another, the classroom, the benches, themselves, the attendance monitoring device and the profs. Sure enough, after all the classes were over, a horde of people move all around, to the area behind the audi to take a few pics, and then to the amphitheatre to take more pics.

Saturday, the 19th of November 2011, was a special day.

Quarter 10 - Week 9

My classmates are really restless... it's two weeks to freedom for most of them, and the tension in the air is palpable. Some of the guys are tearing out whatever hair they have left, despite everyone telling them to chill... only two weeks left. Some of the others are wear blank expressions, head in one hand, the day's case study in the other, and people come by saying "Hold on man, just another two weeks!". The combination of rushing around for project work, and knowing freedom's this close is tearing our people apart. Stay the course, people... just hold on... the end is nigh.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models
We got a little deeper this week, with sessions on text mining and web mining. The first was taken by a guest speaker, who discussed what his company does, and how they use their mined information (collected from various sources like blogs, social networks etc.) to identify what people are saying about a brand or organization. Now text mining isn't very simple, as the word 'Care' has a very different meaning from 'Dont care'. So it's the string of words that actually has more meaning than a single word itself. A lot more hullabaloo about how the summary is being done, and after some examples of actual customer projects where they've worked, it 'kinda' got clear as to how text mining is done.

The second session, being about web mining, was easier to understand. Easier since the prof talks about stuff like how you move from one page in the site to the other, how you understand when the usage on the site peaks, what are users more interested in etc. All the more fun when you consider the example he takes - of a matrimonial website. So he goes on to explain what percentage of people actually make a purchase/payment on the site, and what are the most popular pages etc. One of the strange findings was that traffic peaked around 4 AM in the morning, and the prof wonders why the vast majority is logging in that early in the morning in the first place. Then comes enlightenment - the time's according to US time, and there's an audible signal of understanding across the class. Fun stuff!

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making
We're still on the emotion bit... why we decide what we do. Today started off with understanding how our brain functions, and how we make decisions. Apparently, two parts of our brain help to make the decision - one is more dependent on our primal instincts, the other tends to reason. So, the fact that people tend to wait instead of jumping to conclusions show that they rely on the second part, as against people who react immediately and impulsively. The prof goes on to show us some images, and asks us what sort of emotions they incite in us... and based on that, he claims why certain emotions are more likely to cause larger effects than others.

We then go on to the concept of ethics, and personally, it was a rehash of what we studied in EBM in Quarter 8, so just a few new nuggets there. Oddly chilled out class this time, it's getting frighteningly calm. We know what that means...

Quarter 10 - Week 8

Last week was a brilliant break from the typical rigour (*cough*) that we face on the weekends, on account of Diwali. Now, any sane person would think that you have a holiday so that you can relax... but obviously that sane person hasn't done the PGSEM, much less prepared for a project that was due to be given in three weeks! Three weeks? That's a lot of time, you'd say. And I'd agree, if it wasn't for the fact that WE'RE NOT GETTING ANYWHERE!! WE HAVE THE DATA AND THE DAMN THING ISN'T ALLOWING US TO MINE IN ANY REASONABLE WAY! WHO THE HELL INVENTED DATA MINING!! It's a good thing I'm taking this quite well, and not over-reacting.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

We had the research assistant take our class, and he typically does a good job. But he sort of over-estimated our concentration this time around. Our man is trying to take us through a practical demonstration of how people choose what liquid detergent to buy, based on brand, price, quantity etc. And how the effect of price can affect purchase decisions.

With all sorts of magical flourishes, he stands at the front of the class and with eyes glistening with the promise of the future, and no mic, explains some fundas which I couldn't hear. But they must have been good, as the front benchers weren't looking all around. Some of the guys out at the back are straining their ears, hunched forward, staring pointedly in the hopes that they can lipread. Some others are poring in a concentrated manner on the news of the day. In a nutshell, either the speaker should get a mic in future, or give us our handouts so we can run the experiment. Now all we have to do is get that message across.

The second session was a lot more chilled out (for most people). It was a interim casual report of where we've reached in our projects, and where are we stuck. So that actually passed by like a breeze since a lot of people had some very interesting projects.

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making

This week had quite a bit going for it in terms of a proper case discussion. We ACTUALLY read the news article/case! Well, atleast most of it, and most of us... enough to discuss! The topic was about the Challenger disaster, and what could have been the potential decision failures in the system. We go on to discuss how our biases tend to play a role in our decision making, and how we need to be aware of them. We also did a small experiment on assumptions. The prof puts up a slide, and makes us all write atleast 10 assumptions. And then he goes on to explain, how our assumptions affect our final decisions. Being the kind of people we are, we tend to abstract away and assume stuff... because apparently if we DON'T make assumptions, then we get stuck in some sort of analysis-paralysis.

So the next time you go around assuming stuff, remember... you're moving forward.