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.