Blog Readers- Thank You

 736,060 is the number of views of this blog till date, since I began blogging, around 12 years ago. 

Very flattering numbers, even if you discount some tricks played by bots which plant some comments on behalf of strange clients in the comments.

I don't have a specific topic or theme that I blog about. It's sometimes a journal or diary, sometimes an opinion piece, or creative humour, satire etc. Also included are occasional book reviews and film reviews.

Over the years, I have managed about 150 posts a year on an average, with a viewership of about 50-100 on most days. 

Thank you, readers who are regular or irregular, and commenters (genuine human ones). You are a great motivation to continue.

Blographics

This is the reported readership of this blog since it began ( I plead guilty to having started it all). I found it very interesting, assuming these are real readers. Earlier, I did have a revelation of sorts that there were statistics probably misreported due to servers being located in various non-English speaking nations that seemingly read my blog.

Anyway, accounting or discounting for trawling that idly sends anonymous comments to me fairly regularly, one may assume that there is some increase in readership of the said blog. I also have to thank some authors whose books I happened to review (not paid ones) for the spike in my blog viewership.

Interesting, and a graph of the sort that most sales companies would like to see. Thanks to the genuine readers. If you are reading this in spite of IPL (at least in India).

Blog Analytics

Some interesting weekly stats for my blog- Pageviews by country. I am impressed!

India

73

United States

43

Germany

40

Thailand

21

Ukraine

21

United Kingdom

13

France

7

Canada

5

Bulgaria

3

Denmark

2

SPSS Workshop at Chennai

IMT is doing a workshop at Chennai for faculty and research scholars, of which I will be a part. On April 6th, 7th and 8th. That is, later this week. This is a skill I picked up while I was getting a Ph.D. in the US of A at Clemson. It has served me well since, and I find its actual use (correct use, if I might add) remains rare in India even today. Mostly, it is because faculty trained in using it are not many. And therefore their research scholars face a handicap.

We have tried to contribute our mite by doing these workshops from the point of view of practitioners/Ph.D. scholars rather than mathematicians- we aren't mathematicians to begin with, anyway. But the user needs to know his needs and some really basic statistics to be able to use this statistical package for his analysis needs. So that is what we try to provide, a little background of what is needed, and some hands-on experience so that the user starts using it, and learns by himself after a while. Tried this at IIM Kozhikode and IFIM Bangalore too, and it was well-received.

Why Chennai? Well, why not? There is demand everywhere, so we'll go wherever the market is. Plan to collaborate with other B schools in future, wherever they might be.

Guide to Management Core Subjects-Statistics

It's one of the most misunderstood subjects in the world. Usually because (pardon me teachers) it is taught badly. With no appreciation that it can do wonders for you, if you don't seek perfection from it (like with most things in life, I might add).

Statistics is the art or science of estimating things, and sometimes calling these predictions- they are still estimates, and can be wrong to varying degrees. But within its limitations, you can estimate a lot of things using simple statistics. For instance, people visiting a store on a given day, or time of the day, can be observed, mapped, and used to determine how many staff would be needed, for example, at what times.

Or, you can look at purchase patterns and send out promotional offers to customers most likely to buy. Online marketers seem to have cottoned on to this, coz I am flooded with pop up ads for air tickets, if I have just browsed for a particular sector on yatra, without buying the ticket.

The trouble is, teaching starts at the wrong end- the theory, which is worse than nuclear physics, and hardly anyone understands it. Practice or application might be the place to start, and present a practical problem, and then go back to how statistics could help solve it (with a margin of error, naturally). And the discussion of errors of all kinds (Type 1, Type 2 are the least of them) goes on and on, that by the time you are done listing all of them you forget what problem it was you were trying to solve.

The other extreme is trying to fit a problem to a technique. As in, I want to use Regression (or Multidimensional Scaling, or whatever). How do I use it in my research? Or, after a questionnaire for a survey has been filled up, saying I want to use x,y,z, technique for analysis. That is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, surely? The scale of measurement determines what analysis can be performed. QED.

I will not even talk about probability, until I have understood how to make it better understood.