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...