A class with Edward Tufte

Me and couple of my colleagues from the office had been to Arlington,VA for a day's class with Edward Tufte. It was a fun trip and great experience. Coincidently I had started reading Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

I liked most of the class but there were parts which I definitely did not agree with. May be I am not mature enough to grasp the points. Some of the highlights of the class were.

* While presenting quantitative information, data is more important than design. Show data, hide design.
* Present data such that it enables the user's cognitive process instead of hindering it.
* Show comparisons, show causality.
* Show multivariate data, that is data showing relationships between two or more variables.
* Integrate words and diagrams. Tufte illustrated this by showing how Galileo displayed the rings around the planet Saturn integrated along with the words in his text.
* Present all of the information available, do not cherry pick data that makes you look good. In case you don't have information that seems interesting, try harder and work towards getting better numbers.
* In case the numbers that you are presenting are small in quantity (like 40 - 80), present them directly (may be using a table) rather than using graphs.
* Refer to distinguished newspaper and tech journals to see how they present data using tables etc. May be you will be able to get ideas from those. Remember "Smart guys imitate, while geniuses copy"
* The consumers of your information aren't stupid people. They are smart to deal with numbers and graphs. Don't most of the people read the tables the in the sports section or the stock section of the newspaper?
* Also when presenting information, it important to include a title, measurement scales, cite the sources, name the authors as well as any other relevant information in text form.

Also an important lesson that I learned from the trip was that I have some great colleagues that I work with. The overall experience of the trip proved that we are a great team together.

Personal Finance 101

Found the following good articles related to personal finance.

1) Understanding APR
2) Bankrate.com and Indexcreditcards.com
3) Mortgage Calculators

"Creative ideas" by Murray Gell-Mann

I have been listening to a talk given by Murray Gell-Mann on how to come up with creative ideas and some of the highlights of his talk were
* Don't play by the rules, rather play with the rules. As an example he illustrated Einstein who proposed in his special theory of relativity that space and time are not absolute and depend on the frame of inertia of the observer. No one could imagine this idea since space and time were assumed to be absolute as per Newtonian physics.
* Problem formulation is much harder than problem solution . I couldn't agree more with this statement. The only place where problems are clearly defined is school.
* It is possible to build new creative ideas, by being more serious about the existing ones. To put it another words, it is possible to build new ideas by looking at the existing ideas through a different angle. Now since Murray is Physicist the idea he illustrated is that of Einstein using Max Plank's concept of Quantum to explain the photoelectric effect for which he won the noble prize.
* Random thinking helps in coming up a new idea as well.

Cingular - liquidated damages

I recently renewed my cingular plan via Amazon. I basically did this to get the Sony Ericsson W810i phone free. However when I checked my bill this month apart from the upgrade fees, I was charged an additional $30 as the "Liquidated Damages" charges. I called up the Cingular representative and asked her about it. She said that it was mistake on their part because I upgraded the plan via Amazon. However she did agree to credit the money back to my account. I would have definitely lost those $30 if I wouldn't have checked my bill in detail. I now just want to spread the word around so that people are aware of this problem.

Busy life...

Have been really busy lately, mostly with office work. Can't believe I have been putting some many hours everyday but have been working on really very interesting stuff and am sort of addicted to it. Hopefully the addiction should die out soon so that I start working for sane number of hours.

Besides work had being Kayaking, have been running regularly, done some cooking (not as much as I want though), went out with my office colleagues and have being spending weekends with Tanu.

Not stressed out but very busy...Hopefully will do something good for the coming long weekend..I really hope to camp somewhere in mountains by a lake...