Paul Graham on Google : Their hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least, all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win. All the other stuff—which includes all the stuff that business schools think business consists of—you can figure out along the way.

**A Random sample of my thoughts ** If Nifty falls / Nifty rises , does the implied vol move in the same direction of the underlying or does it move the opposite direction. This becomes a very important question in the context of choosing a local volatility idea or chucking such an idea ? Local vol models assume that underlying and smiles move in different directions!! As there is a short sale restriction on stocks, what exactly is a tradable underlying for Nifty option, for valuation purposes ?

Handling large amounts of data in R is tricky as R typically loads the entire dataset in to RAM. While this means that computations are going to be very fast, it also means that dataset that can be used for analysis is dependent on your RAM. One solution which I stumbled on was Filehash which seemed to offer me a solution than the usual way that I was going about. I was getting the entire stuff in postgreSQL and then doing computations using R.

Jay Walker @ TED shows evidence of the english mania. This year, China is going to be the country with the largest number of english speaking people. Mass chanting of english sentences is something which I have never heard of, till date! But in China… [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5TUpNZqjM8&hl=en&fs=1&&w=560&h=340]

As we all know, every kind of work involves a definite amount of tedious, unpleasant,low-mid IQ work.I don’t subscribe to these labels though. In the life of a data analyst, the data preparation and data cleansing is something which has to be done before he/she can even think of doing any sane analysis. So, how does one approach data prep and data cleansing? Is it something to be looked down upon ?