Quarter 10 - Week 4

It's about that time of the quarter when people suddenly realize that they're supposed to settle down on a project topic, and then heated debates rise on what to study. The debates essentially come down to convenience vs. interest... 'my topic is easy', 'yes, well, mine is easier!' or the 'Man, let's study social networks!', 'Are you crazy?! Let's do a system that can rival S & P's credit ratings of countries!' to the ever glorious 'The prof doesn't understand your topic, we'll get less marks', 'The prof doesn't understand my topic, we'll get more marks!'

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

This week was supposed to be about pruning/cleaning data. It might come as a shocker to you, but people aren't collecting stats on their companies/divisions/teams so that data analysts can come and do one click with their mice with a magical flourish and charge them a bomb. Everyone wants to make everyone else work, so they deviously collect some data in one form, some related data in the other, jumble the two up and generously offer the analyst some tossed salad. If that weren't enough, they will specifically allow users to half-enter their data (in response to surveys etc.) and submit it, without offering the 'Fill everything, or you dont go further!' clause. Hence, the analyst has the mind-numbing job of having to sift through the data, find out what goes where... neatly order it, find some intellectual way of filling the missing data.... and THEN he clicks the magic button. The prof takes us through multiple examples where given a subset of data, how would one go about gleaning enough to complete the dataset. Appeared to be fun, will know for sure when we start.

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making

We had a quiz worth 20 percent of the overall count, so we justifiably had a reason not to go through the readings for the day. The prof enters the class, and is eagerly getting ready to talk of the Cuban missile crisis, and describe the various mechanics at game theory at work! And he asks 'What do you guys think??'... Pin-drop silence. Even the crickets that typically make an appearance here and answer in an unknown 'crik-crik's were silent, presumably since they were studying for the quiz as well. The prof fumes on how we've got to catch up, this is nothing, the readings are tiny compared to what we'll get later... and I'm guessing he doesn't realize that it is not really a motivating line to begin with.

In any case, we continue discussions around game theory, about how the Cuban missile crisis was an example of how the two most publicly powerful people at the time signalled their intentions to each other and how the world was at the brink of a nuclear war. Then, for the first time there was a little addition of emotion to rationality. The prof makes us play a few games, and then he questions why we don't behave rationally... and then brings in a sense of fair-play etc. to the table. Apparently, if I was offered a 100 bucks, on the condition that I share it with someone... I could come to you and say here's 10 bucks, I'll keep 90 and you're likely to show me the finger, maybe give me two rupees due to my apparently dismal state. What you don't realize is that if you don't accept the 10 bucks, you get nothing anyway. So you have nothing to lose even if I were to give you ONE buck. By choosing to walk away, you show how you bring a sense of fairness to the game. You'd rather take no money than take a pittance or unequal share. And hence, we begin our descent into the nature of the human aspects of the decision making process.