General announcements & miscell stuff

Hi all,

A few quick announcements:

1. So it turns out that even the esurveyspro.com free account no longer honors SKIP logic (it did perfectly last year) AND that our LRC has discontinued their surveymoneky.com professional subscription. The school has since migrated to another websurvey package called qualtrics. I've spoken with IT and they say you can make your own account with your ISB email ID. Kindly do so and program your survey there - I suspect it should be pretty much akin to surveymonkey.com/ esurveyspro.com only.

This also means that the *final* questionnaire I'll make will be in qualtrics only, and phase II will be administered in qualtrics.

This is the email IT sent me:

Dear Professor,


Please find the link below for registering  to  Qualtrics survey.

Students can register to  the same using their ISB email id.


isb.qualtrics.com


please let me know for any  further help


Regards

Vijaya Lakshmi
Executive - IT Applications

Hope that helps. Once you have the word doc questionnaire ready, programming into qualtrics shouldn't be too much time or trouble, hopefully.

2. Was asked in class how to subscribe to blog feed for post alerts etc. Vignesh of sec 'D' has been kind enough to share one procedure with the class. I'm posting his email in full.

For both Outlook 2007 and 2010, the process is fairly simple –


1.       Copy the RSS feed link from the blog – in the case of Marketing Yogi, the RSS feed is at http://marketing-yogi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. Please note that this is a feed for only the posts on the blog.

2.       In Outlook 2007/2010, right click on RSS Feeds in the left navigation bar, select Add a New RSS Feed and enter the feed address from above.

3.       Click Advanced and select the option to download enclosures (any images in the feed for example) as well as the option to download the full article as an .html attachment.

4.       Click OK, then Yes on the previous window and you’re done.


Thanks,

Best,

Vignesh.

3. Kindly ensure JMP is up and running in your laptops for lecture 6. Might as well try to refresh JMP usage while we are at work on the car survey raw data. Pls also ensure Excel analysis toolpak (that contains Excel's regression function) is up and loaded in your machines.

4. Well, came across this splendid article the other day. IMO, its worthwhile sharing with the class.

On Trading and Markets

I'd say the entire article, based on a speech made last week Thursday in NYC is a good read, but to save time, let me excerpt the course relevant bits here...

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ben Davies ...
 

Economics has sought to blend epistemology, physics, mathematics, and behavioral science to try to measure uncertainty. They aim to try to predict when we might have an economic collapse, but no model has been created that manages this with much confidence, if any at all. How do you measure a risk that is unmeasurable?
No, there is nothing certain about economic predictions. Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. defense secretary, unwittingly declared it so at a NATO press conference in 2002, when he responded to a question on intelligence gathering:

"It's not the certainties that make life interesting; it's the uncertainties. There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the things we don't know we don't know."

"Unknown unknowns" -- at the time this was ridiculed as a piece of deliberate and meaningless obfuscation. Rumsfeld even won an award from the British Plain English Campaign for the most nonsensical remark made by a public figure. I would add that he narrowly pipped California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who commented, "I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman."

Ridicule aside, I do think it was brilliant piece of polemic, irrespective of one's political persuasion. Without knowing it, Rumsfeld could actually be the poster child for a new line of economic thought that tries to draw parallels from physics -- the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

In quantum physics this principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high accuracy.

And herein lies the issue with macroeconomics. One cannot be deterministic. Events are not causally determined by previous events alone. A known event does not predict a known outcome.

Although much can be learned from this theory, this is where the analogy ends. The act of experimenting with the electron and measuring position did not alter the outcome. In a human system the very act of forecasting or predicting an outcome actually influences that very outcome. This we call the feedback mechanism. It is encompassed in a theory many will know as "reflexivity."

Well, nice to see the 'unknown-unknown' find its origin, form and function out there, eh?

5. Was on the panel for an ITC case contest yesterday. In my interactions with the ITC brass, I told them I teach MKTR and I asked for their thoughts on the current output at B-schools, they said and let me quote as much verbatim as I can:

"You chaps train people to be Marketing vice-presidents, not territory sales managers or brand managers. Many recent MBAs don't know the basic of the craft. How to evaluate the effectiveness of an ad campaign, commission what type of market research with which agency or analyze a Nielsen sales report.  You teach the concept but not the craft of marketing unlike engineers or chartered accountants who learn the craft first."

Or some such flow. Well, I told them my students can do all that and more (or should be able to by the end of lec 10). And yes, it did feel like sweet vindication, external validation if you will - we're doing the practical stuff, the useful stuff. Good. The other day, one Mr, Nithin Vyakarnam, an entrepreneur alum from '06, who sits in on the class with section C also mentioned similar things - that very few MBA folks out in the real world know how to handle pivots or run models. So, we are doing something good after all. Hopefully. Time will tell, I guess.

6. There are folks who come up with good, relevant questions etc after class or in the break and when I ask them to post the same as comments on the blog so that I can reply and the entire class can share, they miraculously disappear. IMHO, positive contributions on the blog should merit some credit - if only as incentive to be a little more open and share thoughts with the entire class.

Sudhir