Category Archives: AestheticHoliday.com

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The COMplete growth PLAN

English: USDA MyPlate nutritional guide icon
Image via Wikipedia
Just as we welcome Dr Prasad’s Laddoos, our TV advertisements also give us several “medically (in)correct” information. Today I saw one ad while watching a malayalam movie. A group of mothers go to a nutrition research centre to find the truth about a children’s dietary supplement. The doctor explains to them that he has been conducting research on kids consuming the COMplete PLAN and show kids in bright yellow T shirts. The others not taking the drink are in dull grey outfit and look visibly depressed. I was impressed by the doctor’s claim that consuming the drink makes the kids grow twice as fast. But my excitement was short lived. Another drink promised to boost the stamina three times! They had none other than Dhoni and Sachin to vouch for them. I am sure tomorrow’s world will be full of giants with huge stamina! 
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The Story of D

English: Cain and Abel
Image via Wikipedia

Sorry guys! I am bored of Dr Prasad and his laddoos. So let me put him on the back burner for now and continue my discussion on diabetes. But I may return to this topic later, especially if I receive any comments on my previous posts.

Let me start off today with a reference to a book and its sequel, both of which are popular. The book is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and the sequel is ‘The story of B‘.

If you have not read the book, see if you can find it in your library. Anyway the core messages are the following.

  • Takers as people often referred to as “civilized” represented by the agriculturists.
  • Eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree from the book of genesis would not actually give humans divine knowledge but would only make humans believe they had been given it, and that the Tree represents the choice to bear the responsibility of deciding which species live and which die.  
  • Abel’s extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites’ losing in their conflict with agriculturalists. 
  • In the story of B he proposes that the people of our culture established a style of agriculture that B labels “totalitarian agriculture”. “Prehistoric” hunters and gatherers operated according to a worldview that promoted coexistence and limited competition between predator and prey. However, the totalitarian agriculturist operates with the worldview that the world is theirs to control and all the food in the world is theirs to produce and eat.

You may not see any immediate relation to diabetes, but that’s what I am coming to!


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Profiling a potential client

Recently someone asked me a reasonably straight forward question. How do we profile potential clients based on the input from a simple web form? I gave some suggestions to improve the form so that our intuitive profiling becomes a lot better. The person asked me if there is any way to automate this process at least partially. Well…May be!

Customer profiling has become extremely important in today’s customer-oriented business environment and is a well characterised specialty. Various statistical techniques like clustering, neural network algorithms and logistic regressions have been used for customer profiling. But in this case the problem is even more complicated as we are talking about profiling of potential customers.

Still a neural network predictive model based on past experience may still be the right answer even in this case. But how much data we can collect from a simple web form? Not much.

Is it better to include open ended questions so that we can collect as much data as possible? Open ended questions may not be amenable for model creation.

It may also be important to collect and analyse all the information available during the HTTP request, that the client did not enter personally. Like the IP (and hence the location and sometimes the employer), browser type, OS, referring URL etc.

Is there any way to analyse free form or open ended form data? More on this next time.