GB at DKIB put together an absolutely fantastic Excel interface for our analytics. A lot of the functionality is probably industry standard at this point, but the quality of GB’s tools was absolutely fantastic, and there were aesthetic touches that really made it a pleasure to use. One tool that I hadn’t seen before but have [...]
Author Archive for Uzair
London Marathon 2010
26Apr10It’s over. And I’m aching. Given the background, and how nearly I didn’t run, I’m very happy with how yesterday’s marathon went, even though my finishing time (over 5 hours) is more than half an hour outside what I expected. The first thirteen miles were incredible: my knee (which I was trying to protect by running on [...]
What happens next?
15Oct09Everyone seems to agree that the recovery’s going to be slow (except maybe in Asia), and many actually doubt it can be sustained at all. And yet the markets keep rallying. Faced with the choice of nominal gains or no gains at all, investors have opted for the former, in the hope that they’ll come out [...]
On American Exceptionalism
28Jul09I saw this recently: The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. - Benjamin Franklin I don’t claim to know what Mr. Franklin was thinking, but I find it telling that the quote works equally well if you leave out the second sentence. That, my friends, [...]
Moaning about +/-
26Apr09Game 4 between Utah and L.A. last night provides an interesting data point in considering the usefulness of +/- as a basketball stat. We’ve all seen instances where a player who contributes very little statistically ends up with a phenomenally high +/- rating, while the team’s stars are rated as having played poorly. Occasionally, this [...]
Statistics and basketball
28Mar09I hate how people are trying to apply statistics to basketball, like it’s some voodoo that could potentially unlock all sorts of answers and reduce the sport to a science. It’s a ridiculous, depressing and self-defeating (for sports fans, anyway) thing to do. The pompous proponents of this mentality are correct in arguing that there [...]
The cynic in me…
18Mar09…smirks that while we celebrate the birth of real democracy in Pakistan, the Pakistani people are already so thoroughly drenched in the gooey residue of their success that they don’t recognise the CJP is already installed in their minds as the next in the long line of saviours to whom we periodically hand over our [...]
Yo Dawg, blogging is hard work…
01Feb09Dang yo, I haven’t been blogging regularly. I might have mentioned this before, but the biggest reason I don’t blog is because I decide I want to edit something before I publish it; a few days later, I’ve lost my train of thought and the draft never makes it to the blog. There’s certainly a lot [...]
Dean Kamen on Innovators
13Jan09Something worth hanging on to for rainy days: Kamen … said every entrepreneurial innovator he’s ever seen shares a few characteristics. “It’s not that they’re brilliant or well-educated,” Kamen said. “They work all the time. They don’t let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, [...]
Corruption and Development
23Nov08I was quite excited to find this blog post but now that I’ve read it, I’m a little disappointed. It’s a bit wishy washy in the way academic articles can be and doesn’t really get much further than defining corruption and categorising it as high-level and low-level. The reason for that is probably the extreme complexity [...]
Un Ke Dekhe Se – Mirza Ghalib
13Nov08Un ke dekhe se jo aa jati hai mun par ronaq, Woh samajhtey hain keh beemar ka haal accha hai. Dekhiye paate hain usshaq buton se kya faiz, Ek brahman ne kaha hai keh yeh saal accha hai. Hum ko maaloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat laikin, Dil kay khush rakhnay ko Ghalib yeh khayal accha hai. And here’s the wonderful Jagjit [...]
That heading describes a problem I hope you never have to tackle. We’ve got a full-fledged exotics trading system (call it XX) built in Excel with all sorts of fancy bells and whistles. For some reason that escapes me, XX has never been split into a thin front-end sheet backed by an XLA containing all [...]
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