|| "Green" at the Reston Fireworks

56. "Green" at the Reston Firework

Reston town center had a most exhilarating concert performance last night with Plena Libre, which is a Puerto Rican Latin dance band.  The audience seemed to have transformed themselves into the South American culture, festive and cheering.  Some carried the PR flags and have been floating around through the pavilion space.  There was 10 times the clapping, cheering, the music was fast beat, variations of the beat, pounding the heart and there were many dance moves from the audience.

Then changing scene, went through very light traffic, and we stayed at the Lake Fairfax for the Reston fireworks.  The crowd was more than half less than last year, and it was mostly the neighborhood families, walking on foot into the field.  The firework also seems to be one third less than last year.  There was a new firework format, one that I loved, with a bunch of yellow tracks like a bouquet then coming down in the super long tails till the very end.

We celebrate being green at this year of the fireworks.  A year ago, we had different identities, and we changed in this past year.  This could be the biggest achievements for people who come from a different background, and it had taken a long time.  I want to thank the many people who had helped, collecting documents, putting the time etc.  But once we are there, there is little that changes, is there a sense of security, or is there a sense of life goes on.

The past week had been extremely disappointing otherwise.  I met people, some are good and some are not that good, but it does not feel good to be at someone's mercy.

Keep working and there will be answers.  Until then, I feel frustrated.

|| Design Thinking Fantasy

55. Design Thinking Fantasy

Spent a day in the design thinking training, a complete waste of time.  But it says something about design thinking in the first place, it's probably just common sense thinking.

• human-centered
• quadrant
• customer know the need, solution unknown - "ask what do you need, what makes you happy"
• customer doesn't know the need, solution unknown - "empathy interview"
• customer know the need, solution know - make to learn
• customer doesn't know the need, solution unknown - "explore ideas"
• the visual wall is better
• idea blogging, noodling
• fluster then focus, "targeted customer and objectives"

|| Saturday afternoon statistics

54. Saturday afternoon statistics

• statistics is the study of how to collect, organize, analyze and interpret numerical information and data
• nominal - can't be ordered; ordinal - can be ordered but the differences may not be meaningful
• population parameter vs sample statistics
• sampling frame, sampling error (sample of mean, not that of the population)
• random sampling, stratified sampling (cluster then simple random sampling), systematic sampling (ordering then pick the kth), cluster sampling (in a particular geographical situation, pick cluster/area then all the people in that area), convenience sampling and multi-stage sampling
• steps of sampling
• state a hypothesis
• identify the individuals of interest
• specify the variables to measure
• determine to use the entire population or sampling, and sampling method
• ethical concerns before data collection, eg. privacy
• collect the data
• use descriptive or inferential statistics to answer your hypothesis
• note concerns of the data collection, analysis, and future recommendation
• randomization
• is used to assign individuals to treatment groups, helps prevent bias in selecting members of each group
• the placebo effect, psychologically affecting
• frequency histogram, distribution (stem and leaf)
• histogram reveals the distribution of the data; relative frequency (%) histogram can include the various samples on the same chart
• normal, left skewed (where it's light, so here the left is light), right skewed, uniform, bimodal distribution (meaning two high points, like camel with two humps)
• outlier, very different from the other measurements
• cumulative frequency, ogive
• time series
• same variable over time
• bar charts
• can be vertical or horizontal
• pareto charts, frequency of events and in decreasing order
• pie charts
• circle graphs
• mutually exclusively, only fallen into one category
• frequency class
• the same width, the width can be using empirically
• median and mean (5% trimmed mean)
• central tendency, mean, mode, median positions can tell normal vs left vs right-skewed distribution
• variation from the central tendency, evaluate your dataset
• the range is the distance between the top (max) and bottom (min)
• CV, coefficient of variation
• standard deviation / mean of sample * 100 %
• compare two different ways of measuring a lab value
• measures the spread of the data over the average of the data
• the higher, the less stable, moves around a lot
• Chebyshev and intervals
• take 2s to the average, can cover 75% of x are between that
• 3s, 88.9%
• 4s, 93.8%
• percentiles
• boxer and whisker plots
• r correlation
• 0.4 week correlation
• 0.4-0.7 moderate correlation
• 0.7 strong correlation
• coefficient of determination is r squared
• to normal distribution, 68%, 95%, 99.7%
• z score

Probability

• P (A or B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A&B)
• 
  

|| New Card Is Being Produced

53. New Card Is Being Produced

Days, weeks, months and years of work seem to be giving this one line of hope as I searched the case status with my receipt numbers.  8885, no change, 8884, no change, 8883, New Card Is Being Produced.

This should be an ecstatic celebration.  This was a 10-year delay on the journey of having freedom of choices of where I stay and where I go.

This lifts just a little bit for what I have been going through, which feels like drips of everyday work and attention does not pay back for anything, personal or professional.

The new card is coming, I want a new life, does it come as well?

|| Numerous hours to conclude

52. Numerous hours to conclude ...

There have been numerous hours, unplanned, and pulled into the mid-year calibration.  Many representations are inflated to protect the associates on the team.  There were few winners and many losers in the process.

- the first mover to the below standard, you suck
- borderline at standard, be prepared it's doing down from here
- clusters of people but they may not want to think that they are the clusters
- a personal brand comes largely the first impression, and it never leaves you or at least for a very long time
- a personal brand is about consistently operating with a certain attitude, aptitude, emotional presence, and emotional intelligence
- network the heck of a life, up and down, left and right, but do not think that you actually know them or assume that you really know them
- surprise factor works when you want to extract the real motives behind people's actions.  there is always one, competing agenda with our own

It's dark, it's darker, and will only go down further.

This week also has an annual rich strategy session at the Eagles Arena.  TECH talk, on the cloud, on the platform, on the data and machine learning.  All of it.

|| Refreshing the statistical tools for business analytics

51. Refreshing the statistical tools for business analytics

• Kurtosis is really a measure of the outliers (tails) of the distribution. Kurtosis is really a measure of the outliers (tails) of the distribution. ... Low kurtosis, rather than being a measure of “flatness,” indicates a distribution that is less outlier-prone than is the normal distribution
• Standard deviation / variance to the mean
• 1 standard deviation is 68%
• 2 standard deviation is 95.5%
• 3 standard deviation is 97%
• Covariance measures the degree to which the two variables move together, eg. age and income
• Sum((X-mean X) (Y-mean Y)) / (n-1)
• R, the correlation coefficient measures the strength of the linear relationship between two variables
• Sum((X-mean X) (Y-mean Y)) / Square of ((Sum(X-mean X)^2 * Sum(Y-mean Y)^2)
• R close to zero, no correlation
• Regression analysis is a set of processes to estimate the relationships amongst variables
• Random error in linear regression after intercept and slope
• = Actual - estimated using the linear regression
• Types of regression
• linear regression, most common in business analysis
• logistic regression, most common in business analysis
• polynominal regression
• stepwise regression
• ridge regression
• lasso regression
• elastic net regression
• ANOVA, analysis of variance
• SST, total sum of squares, Sum (actual y - mean of y)^2
• SSE, total of sum of error, Sum (actual y - estimated y)^2
• SSR, total of sum of regression, Sum (estimated y - mean of y)^2
• SST = SSR + SSE
• Standard error of estimate SEE = square (MSE) = square (SSE / N-2)
• R squared = explained variation / total variation 
• F test measures how well the dependent variable is explained by the independent variables collectively 
• MSR, MSE, N (number of observations), K (number of independent variables)
• Decisioning rules
• reject null hypothesis if F statistics > critical value
• Weight of evidence
• Log (distribution of good/distribution of bad)
• Information value
• Sum ((DG-DB)*WOE)
• VIF, multiple variable

|| Dark Days with just a slice of light or lightening

50. Dark Days with just a slice of light or lightning

These are the dark days and I worry that the darker days are coming in the week.  These attacks go much deeper into personal pride.  Baiju said I should ask for the money, but money can't solve for the frustration and freedom of choices of my own is a higher ground of exit for what I can accept for my own sake.

The slice of light, although plenty of signs of "he is an interesting person, making a significant investment in managing, getting very involved ...", but this could be exactly what I need to learn as quickly as possible into a new brand.

Acquisition credit policy -

• Qualities of the applicants, from their questions, and answers, to infer product options, their behaviors (credit and spend) into multiple credit policy to determine the product A/D, line assignment, APR, valuations.  Also part of the customer authentication is KYC
• Do credit decisions in modulas and chunks
• Learn problem-solving in hypothesis, the tools, and the process to get into a recommendation
• Analyze rigorously the delta effect, the snapshots, the profile swaps, gut check intuition
• Low grounding is using intuition; high grounding is using foundation test

Project W - 

• quality of applicants
• volume, responses
• product amongst branded, upmarket - lower lines, mainstreet lower line
• downsell, private label, secured card
• trend and distribution against the benchmark
• assessing the decisions we've made
• PLCC max 35-40%
• assess FIW
• AMP tech implementation, minimum uniqueness on the branded

Skill - 

• coaching 
• credit analytics
• communication
• organizing works, efficiency, priority
• distill takeaways and insights
• decks and slides
• stakeholders, AMP, Legal and Compliance, CRM
• initiate what ought to be done or worked on, less established structure, less standard way of analyzing
• creativity, white space thinking, break down the problem, customer impacts, integrated central point of contact / dimensions
• be careful of data rabbit hols
• validate data, traps, biases