Writings
I got the idea to write this article because someone shared a picture of the health benefits of a government job with me. It showed how government pays for the employees and their parent's health requirements. I quickly noted that such family insurance would cost ₹ 2000 per month. With five years of experience, one would earn a lot more working for a private company and easily afford the difference of ₹ 2000 per month. I had the urge to write my ideas on government jobs in a post.
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
In this short article, I test the validity of COVID-19 daily reported cases worldwide using Benford's Law.
This is a summary of my research work on forecasting the demand for Malaria vaccines for 78 countries for the next 38 years. For a preprint of the actual paper, click here. I have ignored all discussions on the mathematical part of modelling, focussing only on my approach and the results.
I have been using Spotify for two years now. I was always curious to know my listening trends, which is why I started using last.fm and other tools like that. Therefore, I looked up my listening data on Spotify (thank you, GDPR!) and then made some nice plots for inferences.
IPM, IIM Indore is an unconventional programme. In a country like India when most high school students think of engineering or medicine as the only possible career option, clearly an eclectic course like IPM will attract attention — and rightly so. Many aspirants of the programme have previously contacted me for "tips" to the entrance. Here's an anthology of preparation that I usually suggest.
Funding education is probably the most heavily debated topic in recent years, with both sides having equally strong views. Some say education is the state's duty and a citizen's right; others call it the individual's responsibility. I have another — in my opinion, a better — idea on how to fund college education.
Two days back I got curious about the Twitter API. I have worked with a few APIs (using R) in the past but had never chanced upon using Twitter data. Additionally, Twitter provided a rich source of "what people are talking about". I searched and found a very easy to use package for R called rTweet. This package's simplicity and easiness blew my mind.
A few months ago, I gave a presentation on R Shiny Apps to an FPM (PhDs) class. Although the session was quite brief in itself, we developed a small central limit theorem demonstrator. It's not feature-rich but serves the purpose of "seeing" the central limit theorem in action.
I was trying to understand why my institute deemed it fit to replace the one set of gleamy tiles with another set — an illogical investment in my opinion — instead of controlling the skyrocketing tuition fees.
When a new technology makes it to the headlines, it is vital to understand which of those are commercially viable and which of those are futile attempts of modernisation. Gartner hype cycle helps understand the evolution of technology and its use cases. Every year, Gartner releases multiple hype cycles – each focusing on some new technology. The hype cycle for Artificial Intelligence is one such tool (others being on emerging technology and marketing).
Apple, as you very well know, is facing falling iPhone sales - for various reasons. One primary cause is the increased life of phones and the long upgrade cycle. So, to maintain similar levels of profit, they either have to increase the margins; perhaps the reason for remarkably high prices for the current line. Or, they can learn a lesson on global expansion from the cigarettes industry.
You enter a place. Visit mini Japan. You’re offered Sencha, Mancha, Hojicha, and many other tea options. You are served in a Japanese hut, joined by a young woman in kimono telling you Shinto stories. The garden is decorated with Ikebana. Next, you go to mini Uzbekistan. Have some horse riding. You eat plov and manti in a restraint where shashmak songs play in the background.
At times in your life, you will arrive at a point when you need to decide between the two equally good sounding options. You will feel one of the choices is “right”. Other isn’t. One of the picks will result in instant gratification. The other will give you long term benefits. Arguments exist for both sides but you, probably like me, remain confused.
Prejudices are not something that comes out of the blues. More often than not, it is our childhood and upbringing that shapes us. Our upbringing shapes our thinking and in many ways rigs it inadvertently. As Daniel Kahneman says, people are risk-averse and thinking fast requires some preconceived notions about the subject matter. In my case, this is about nationality.
Competitions bring out the best in you. People compete and there is someone, who proves himself to be better than the rest and then takes away the coveted crown. It is the gruelling heat and friction of the competition that makes people do, what they just had plans for.
It was March 7, 2009, when papa woke me up to tell me that he has good news. The newspaper had the results of the All India Sainik School Entrance Exam (AISSEE, 2009). I was going to be admitted to an elite Military Academy as a kid.
I gave a presentation on LaTeX on 23rd November 2017 at IIM Indore – my home college. I claim to be no expert on the subject as this presentation was aimed at just kindling the spark amongst the students for them to start experimenting with it, and in more general sense, to encourage them to learn skills off the books.
Economic analysis is simple means to evaluate microeconomic and macroeconomic aspects of an economy, whereby analyzing its strength and weakness in various aspects of the economic well-being of a region/country. Economic analysis is a topic of interest to many. Using this tool, a government can take better-informed policy decisions, and companies can invest with greater assurance of profit (and thus lower risk).
Trading is one of the most elementary forms of businesses available from time immemorial. The profitability of a financial asset depends on its possibility of the rise in its value in the market in forthcoming years. Although the developed countries are highly specialized and predictable markets, developing countries and some other parts of the globe which can be easily considered to be part of emerging markets is quite unpredictable in this regard.