Project deadline extended by 24 hours

Hi all,

Notes on Project expectations:
Had a conversation with a couple of folks. Here's to set someproject related expectations straight.

• The max slide limit is now down to 25 from 30.
• This doesn't mean you have to fill-up 25 slides. It just says don't exceed 25 slides. If you are able to fit in a good story within 15 or 20 slides, that's perfectly OK.
• Use at least 2 tools from our MKTR toolkit. You don't have to use everything we covered. Any 2 tools - say, text mining + p-maps or regression modeling + p-maps or surveys + secondary data etc is good enough

Guidance on R resources:
People asked for some good R links which they could work off directly from. I think an excellent resource (whose format I borrowed for the blog R code) is quick-r (from UCLA, I think). here's a link for factor analysis in R.

• In the above Quick-R link, look at the pane on the left for links to most functions you have worked with in MKTR. And the format is similar to what we are used to on the blog.
• As an example, here's Quick-R on cluster analysis. As you can see we only used a subset of these functions in our course. Down the line you can explore more of this functionality for your purposes.
• Why restrict ourselves to just the tools we did in MKTR? Here's ready to run R code for time series analysis, courtesy Quick-R, of course. Here's stuff on Generalized linear (regression) models from Quick-R.
• More generally, R's own help functions are quite useful. If you want to see the syntax and/or description for any function in R (say, mclust) than simply type "?mclust" (without the quotes) and hit enter. It opens a HTML page with explanations.
• I must mention a special thanks to Mr Mohd. Nizam who was kind enough to give me all the R packages we have used in the course in binary form. I plan to upload it on LMS for term 6 Mohali so that students can directly download and install all the required packages at the start itself.
• I will continue to be available over phone and email even when in Mohali should further queries on R arise beyond this short course. I'd prefer the blog for communication - to reinforce its value as a platform for our MKTR on R ideas.
• Oh, in case you needed a little more selling-to regarding R's extensibility, here's a short list of lists of what all R can do at present. I hope you'll find it useful to convince others (and yourself, if necessary) that it may be worthwhile investing effort in R.

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Received this communication from Shouri.

For the future, it'll ease our burden a bit if you have only one channel of communication - maybe, have everything on the blog and nothing on LMS/mail (except for urgent notifications). Also, the course is understandably assignment-heavy to get our hands dirty with data - may be one of these components could be eliminated then: group project or end term to make the course load manageable. in my opinion, the course was a lot of work. thank you.

My response:

Thanks for the feedback, Shouri.

Points noted and in fact, based also on other feedback I have received, I intend to act on it for the Term 6 MKTR course in Mohali.

(1) I'll drop the course project and re-allocate its points among CP, HWs and exam.
(2) I make the blog the one-point of contact for all course related announcements. LMS will only be for file up/down loads.
Yes, I'm keen on the course being known as not overly burdensome. I'm happy to make efforts to lighten the workload as far as feasible, to that end.

Sudhir

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I hope the exam wasn't overly bothersome. Received this email from Abhishek:

Dear Professor,

Request you to please postpone the submission of project to next Wednesday. A lot of people have exams and would also need the much awaited break.
Would really appreciate if you give it a thought. Thanks!

Best Regards
Abhishek

and my response is here:

Hi Abhishek,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm happy to do as you say but there's a problem - I shouldn't impose term 5 work once term 6 has started.

Hence, as a compromise, I shall extend the deadline till Monday midnight, an extension of some 24 hours, for whatever that is worth.

Ideally, I'd rather folks submitted their work prior to that itself. <25 slides and nothing very fancy expected - just evidence that you have understood the context and formulated the problem well. The rest -> data collection and analysis -> follow accordingly. Additional material can go into the annexes which can be referred to directly from within the main PPT. However, anything really important should go into the main PPTs. There's no guarantee annexes will be seen or evaluated.

Sreenath and Chandana, kindly set the dropbox deadline accordingly.

Regards,

Last but not least...

Sudhir