Yantrakaal

Everybody wants to become a data scientist but given the huge number of tools and techniques that are available no one really seems to know where to start and how to go about acquiring the right skills. image taken from  http://www.rosebt.com In the process of teaching data science to students at the Praxis Business School I have realised that there is a huge amount of information that is freely available on the web and thanks to Google, one can find this information very easily. If one is motivated enough, one can learn data science on his own. In an earlier post I have given a very broad Introduction to Data Science but in this post, that I plan to update every now and then, I have tried to assemble a collection of tutorials, grouped by topic that will help anyone get a good grip on this subject by actually doing something practical. R : Statistical Programming Language Forget about SAS, SPSS and other proprietary languages that want to extort money from you and simply...

Ever since Mohandas G dreamt up the concept of civil disobedience, Indian politicians believe that bandhs, dharnas, rail-rokos, chakka-jams and other anarchic activities are the only tools available to do anything for the welfare of the people. Even educated people like Kejriwal and Jyoti Basu (may he NEVER rest in peace for the damage that he did to West Bengal ) have taken the easy way of out by creating a ruckus on the road to get their point of view across. Let us see if there is a sane way to fight corruption in this country. We all know that the basic rules of checks and balances are all there. Approvals, authorizations and the inevitable CAG audit followed by a CBI investigation should have been enough to stop corruption but when the "policeman is himself the thief" then all these checks and balances go right out of the window and are of no use anymore. So what else can be done ? "Sunlight is the best disinfectant," is a well known quote from the US Su...

In an earlier post, " First Look at a New Currency ",  I had written about my hesitant entrance into the world of the Bitcoin economy and today, the Economic Times has an article that shows that even the regulatory bodies in India have started to have a point of view on this strange and disruptive technology. Since then, many people have been asking me about this piece of technology so let me take a stab at trying to understanding this currency that has appreciated from just US$ 200 to US$1000 in the space of just one month. First question : What has caused this sudden jump in the value of Bitcoin ? Well the answer is that US Regulatory agencies have declared that there is nothing inherently wrong or illegal with the usage of this currency and the US cannot fall behind the rest of the world, and particularly China, in adopting this new technology. This has set off a flurry of trading activities that has resulted in this huge increase in the price. Second question : Is...

Many young and energetic graduates from our premier institutes of learning have of late decided to opt-out of the placement services that these institutes provide to become entrepreneurs and set up new businesses. A recent slideshow-report by the Economic Times, features 10 such cases where students of IITs, IIMs and BITS Pilani have created a string of successful businesses. Prima facie this is an excellent development and we wish that many more students create many such enterprises but a closer look reveals some disquieting trends that may be worth a little more discussion. Seven of the ten businesses featured -- and these include well known names like Flipkart and Redbus, were about a service delivered out of a website. This includes monitoring school kids, booking of taxis, buses and trips, selling of goods and services over the web. Two were focused on building a software that facilitate phone calls over the web and the tenth was about building a robot. In all of these busines...

A species evolves when some of its members acquire some characteristics that gives them an advantage in the competition for resources, a characteristic that makes them more "fit to survive" in a hostile and adverse environment. From this perspective, the appearance of language in the animal world was a watershed moment in the ascent of man.  It may not have happened overnight but the emergence of this unique ability   to capture fleeting perceptions and experiences as concepts and ideas in a matrix of grammar and vocabulary and then transmit them for debate and discussion gave such huge evolutionary advantage to those apes who acquired this ability that in effect a new society was born. Language was a very unique skill -- a skill that allowed one to acquire, modify, transmit and disseminate knowledge and information about other skills like hunting, cooking, farming and building shelters. It did not matter which skill was important for survival, a language to talk about...