Book Review: Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy

A good book makes vacation time even better. My choice this year was particularly good as I took a copy of The Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy with me. it combined two of my favorite topics of history and analytics in a very exciting way. It explains how the tide of WW2 has been turned in Allied Forces favor in the period 1942-1944.

Friday Laughs: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a nice networking platform for professionals. However, some things are wrong with it. I like to share some thoughts on that.

The Neglected Basics

We often start developing models forgetting or neglecting the questions about the underlying assumptions for these models or take them for granted. Unfortunately it is not always the case and pay with time and efforts for that. 

Where Should We Focus The Analytical Efforts?

It is the least to say that analytics today is more popular than ever before. It is cheap, affordable and organizations push towards greater application of its methods. It is all good and pays the mortgage of quite a few of us but my mind lately has been occupied with the focus and scale of the analytical efforts. It seems on numerous occasions the mighty power of modern analytical tools and methods have been applied on wrong problem. People have been trying to solve the wrong problems for ages. Analyzing a problem deeper and deeper, applying tools and methods that make the buzz words today and being in the trend could lead us astray. We could focus on the tree and forget it is part of a forest.

Some Issues In Modeling Life-Cycle Component Of Markets

Some markets have strong component coming from products that need to be replaced because of burn-outs, breaks , wearing off or changes in properties that render them dangerous or useless. Automotive market is a good example for such market - tires wear off, the oil, spark-plugs and other components loos properties and so on. Another example for this type of market is the lighting market - the lamps burn out and need to be replaced. Modeling this type of market is eased because of the "mechanical" relations between entities. However the challenges the modeler faces are not negligible and could seriously damage the model quality.