Author: SK

Why Twitter is like Times Now

One reason I stopped watching news television about a decade back is because of its evolution into a “one issue channel”. On each day, a channel basically picks a “topic of the day”, and most discussion on that day is regarding that particular topic.

In that sense, these “news channels” hardly provide news (unless you bother to follow the tickers at the bottom) – they only provide more and more discussion about the topic du jour (ok I’m feeling all pseud about using French on my blog!). If you’re interested in that topic, and willing to consume endless content about it, great for you. If not, you better look for your news elsewhere (like the <whatever> o’clock news on the government-owned channel which at least makes a pretence of covering all relevant stuff).

One thing that made Twitter attractive soon after I joined it in 2008 was the diversity of discussions. Maybe it was the nature of the early users, but the people I followed provoked thought and provided content on a wide array of topics, at least some of which I would find interesting. And that made spending time on twitter worthwhile.

It’s still true on a lot of days nowadays, but I find that Twitter is increasingly becoming like a modern news channel such as Times Now. When there are certain events, especially of a political nature, it effectively becomes a one-topic channel, with most of the timeline getting filled with news and opinion about the event. And if it is either an event you don’t care about, or if you’ve moved on from the event, Twitter effectively becomes unusable on such days.

In fact, a few of my twitter breaks in the last 2-3 years have followed such periods when Twitter has turned into a “one issue channel”. And on each of these occasions, when I’ve joined back, I’ve responded by unfollowing many of these “one-issue tweeters” (like this guy who I don’t follow any more because he has a compulsive need to livetweet any game that Arsenal is playing).

That Twitter becomes a one-topic channel occasionally is not surprising. Basically it goes like this – there are people who are deeply passionate or involved in the topic, and they show their passion by putting out lots of tweets on the topic. And when the topic is a current event, it means that several people on your timeline might feel passionately about it.

People not interested in the topic will continue to tweet at their “usual rate”, but that gets effectively drowned out in the din of the passionate tweeters. And when you look at your linear timeline, you only see the passion, and not the diverse content that you use Twitter for.

Some people might suggest a curated algorithmic feed (rather than a linear feed) as a solution for this – where a smart algorithm learns that you’re not interested in the topic people are so passionate about and shows you less of that stuff. I have a simpler solution.

Basically the reason I’m loathe to unfollow these passionate tweeters is that outside of their temporary passions, they are terrific people and tweet about interesting stuff (else I wouldn’t follow them in the first place). The cost of this, however, is that I have to endure their passions, which I frequently have no interest in.

The simple solution is that you should be able to “temporarily unfollow” people (Twitter itself doesn’t need to allow this option – a third party client that you use can offer this at a higher layer). This is like WhatsApp where you can mute groups for just a day, or a week. So you can unfollow these passionate people for a day, by which time their passion will subside, and you can see their interesting selves tomorrow!

Of course it’s possible to manually implement this, but I know that if I unfollow them today I might forget to follow them back tomorrow. And there are countless examples of people in that category – who I unfollowed when they were passionate and have thus missed out on their awesomeness.

 

The nature of the professional services firm

This is yet another rejected section from my soon-t0-be-published book Between the buyer and the seller. 

In 2006, having just graduated from business school, I started my career working for a leading management consulting firm. This firm had been one of the most sought after employers for students at my school, and the salary they offered to pay me was among the highest offers for India-based jobs in my school in my year of graduation.

The elation of being paid better than my peers didn’t last too long, though. In what was my second or third week at the firm, I was asked to help a partner prepare a “pitch deck” – a document trying to convince a potential client to hire my firm for a piece of work. A standard feature in any pitch deck is costing, and the cost sheet of the document I was working on told me that the rate my firm was planning to bill its client for my services was a healthy multiple of what I was being paid.

While I left the job a few months later (for reasons that had nothing to do with my pay), I would return to the management consulting industry in 2012. This time, however, I didn’t join a firm – I chose to freelance instead. Once again I had to prepare pitch decks to win businesses, and quote a professional fee as part of it. This time, though, the entire billing went straight to my personal top line, barring some odd administrative expenses.

The idea that firms exist in order to take advantage of saving in transaction costs was first proposed by Ronald Coase in what has come to be a seminal paper in 1937. In “The Nature of the Firm”, Coase writes:?

The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of ‘organising’ production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are.

In other words, if an employer and employee or two divisions of a firm were to negotiate each time the price of goods or services being exchanged, the cost of such negotiations (the transaction cost) would far outstrip the benefit of using the price mechanism in such a case. Coase’s paper goes on to develop a framework to explain why firms aren’t larger than they were. He says,

Naturally, a point must be reached where the costs of organising an extra transaction within the firm are equal to the costs involved in carrying out the transaction in the open market.

While Coase’s theories have since been widely studied and quoted, and apply to all kinds of firms, it is still worth asking the question as to why professional services firms such as the management consulting firm I used to work for are as ubiquitous as they are. It is also worth asking why such firms manage to charge from their clients fees that are far in excess of what they pay their own employees, thus making a fat spread.

The defining feature of professional services firms is that they are mostly formed by the coming together of a large number of employees all of whom do similar work for an external client. While sometimes some of these employees might work in teams, there is seldom any service in such firms (barring administrative tasks) that are delivered to someone within the firm – most services are delivered to an external client. Examples of such firms include law firms, accounting firms and management consulting firms such as the one I used to work for (it is tempting to include information technology services firms under this banner but they tend to work in larger teams implying a higher contribution from teamwork).

One of my main challenges as a freelance consultant is to manage my so-called “pipeline”. Given that I’m a lone consultant, there is a limit on the amount of work I can take on at any point in time, affecting my marketing. I have had to, on multiple occasions, respectfully decline assignments because I was already tied up delivering another assignment at the same point in time. On the other hand, there have been times (sometimes lasting months together) where I’ve had little billable work, resulting in low revenues for those times.

If I were to form a partnership or join a larger professional services firm (with other professionals similar to me), both my work and my cash flows would be structured quite differently. Given that the firm would have a reasonable number of professionals working together, it would be easier to manage the pipeline – the chances of all professionals being occupied at any point in time is low, and the incoming work could be assigned to one of the free professionals. The same process would also mean that gaps in workflow would be low – if my marketing is going bad, marketing of one of my busy colleagues might result in work I might end up doing.

What is more interesting is the way in which cash flows would change. I would no longer have to wait for the periods when I was doing billable work in order to get paid – my firm would instead pay me a regular salary. On the other hand, when I did win business and get paid, the proceeds would entirely go to my firm. The fees that my firm would charge its clients would be significantly higher than what the firm paid me, like it happened with my employer in 2006.

There would be multiple reasons for this discrepancy in fees, the most straightforward being administrative costs (though that is unlikely to account for too much of the fee gap). There would be a further discount on account of the firm paying me a regular salary while I only worked intermittently. That, too, would be insufficient to explain the difference. Most of the difference would be explained by the economic value that the firm would add by means of its structure.

The problem with being a freelance professional is that times when potential clients might demand your services need not coincide with the times when you are willing to provide such services. Looking at it another way, the amount of services you supply at any point in time might not match the amount of services demanded at that point in time, with deviations going either way (sometimes you might be willing to supply much more than what is demanded, and vice versa).

Freelance professionals have another problem finding clients – as individual professionals, it is hard for them to advertise and let all possible potential clients know about their existence and the kind of services they may provide. Potential clients have the same problem too – when they want a piece of work done by a freelance professional, it is hard for them to identify and contact all possible professionals who might be able and willing to carry out that piece of work. In other words, the market for services of freelance professionals is highly illiquid.

Professional services firms help solve this illiquidity problem through a series of measures. Firstly, they acquire the time of professionals by promising to pay them a regular income. Secondly, as a firm, they are able to advertise and market the services of these professionals to potential clients. When these potential clients respond in the affirmative, the professional services firms sell them the time of professionals that they had earlier acquired.

These activities suggest that professional services firms can be considered to be market makers in the market for professional services. Firstly, they satisfy the conditions for market making – they actually buy and take on to their books the time of the professionals they hire, giving them a virtual “inventory” which they try to sign on. Secondly, they match demand and supply that might occur at different points in time – recruitment of employees occurs asynchronously with the sale of business to clients. In other words, they take both sides of the market – buying employees’ time from employees and selling this employees’ time to clients! Apart from this, firms also use their marketing and promotional activities that their size affords them to attract both employees and clients, thus improving liquidity in the market.

And like good market makers, firms make their money on the spread between what clients pay them and what they pay their employees. Earlier on in this chapter, we had mentioned that market making is risky business thanks to its inventory led model. It is clear to see that professional services firms are also risky operations, given that it is possible that they may either not be able to find professionals to execute on contracts won from clients, or not be able to find enough clients to provide sufficient work for all their employees.

In other words, when a professional joins a professional services firm, the spread they are letting go of (between what clients of their firms pay the firms, and what professionals draw as salaries) can be largely explained in terms of market making fees. It is the same case for a client who has pays a firm much more than what could have been paid had the professional been engaged directly – the extra fees is for the market making services that the firm is providing.

From the point of view of a professional, joining a firm might result in lower average long-term income compared to being freelance, but that more than compensates for the non-monetary volatility of not being able to find business in an otherwise illiquid market. For a potential client of such services also, the premium paid to the firm is a monetisation of the risk of being unable to find a professional in an illiquid market.

You might wonder, then, as to why I continue to be a freelance professional rather than taking a discount for my risks and joining a firm. For the answer, we have to turn back to Coase – I consider the costs of transacting in the open market, including the risk and uncertainty of transactions, far lower than the cost of entering into a long-term transaction with a firm!

Old preface

So my book will be released on the 8th of September. You can pre-order here. In the next 10 days leading up to the book’s release I thought I’ll publish some bootleg stuff here. This is basically chapters or sections that were in one of the earlier drafts but didn’t make it to the final cut.

What this means, of course, is that in the eyes of me and my publishers, what I’ll be putting here is inferior to what has actually gone into the book. So this post (and the ones I’ll put in subsequent days) put a floor on the quality of my book.

We’ll start with what was supposed to be the preface of my book. This was written back in November 2014, when I had little clue of what would finally go into the book. But I sat down one chilly evening on the outskirts of Bangalore and wrote this off in one stretch. Pasting it here verbatim without editing.

Continue reading “Old preface”

Football transfer markets

So the 2017 “summer transfer window” is going to close in three days’ time. It’s been an unusual market, with oddly inflated valuations – such as Neymar going for ~ €200 million from Barcelona to PSG, and Manchester City paying in excess of £50 million each for a pair of full backs (Kyle Walker and Benjamin Mendy).

Meanwhile, transfers are on in the NBA as well. Given that American sporting leagues have a rather socialist structure, there is no money exchanged. Instead, you have complicated structures such as this one between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics:

 by trading Kyrie Irving (pictured, left), their star point guard, to the Boston Celtics. In exchange, Mr Altman received a package of three players headlined by Isaiah Thomas (right), plus a pick in the 2018 entry draft

A week back, renowned blogger Amit Varma interviewed me for his The Seen and the unseen podcast. The topic was football transfers, something that I talk about in the first chapter of my soon-to-be-published book. In that, he asked me what the football transfer market might look like in the absence of price. And I mentioned that PSG might have had to give up their entire team in order to buy Neymar in that situation.

Anyway, listen to the entire podcast episode here.

Oh, and I don’t know if I mentioned it here before, but my book is ready now and will be released on the 8th of September. It’s being published by the Takshashila Institution.

You can pre-order the book on Amazon. For some reason, the Kindle India store doesn’t have a facility to pre-order, so if you live in India and want to read the book on Kindle, you’ll have to wait until the 8th of September. Kindle stores elsewhere already allow you to pre-order. Follow the link above.

On cultural appropriation

Over the last few months, I’ve come across this concept of “cultural appropriation” several times. I don’t claim to get it completely, but I think I understand it enough to comment about it.

Going by Wikipedia, cultural appropriation

is the adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture. Cultural appropriation, often framed as cultural misappropriation, is sometimes portrayed as harmful and is claimed to be a violation of the collective intellectual property rights of the originating culture

The list of celebrities who’ve been accused of cultural appropriation runs way too long to list here, but it’s basically a popular topic of outrage among the modern left, commonly described by their detractors as “social justice warriors” (SJW).

In any case, my attention to the topic was drawn by a recent essay on the topic by philosopher Kenan Malik. In “In defence of cultural appropriation“, first published in the New York Times, Malik writes:

But who does the policing? Every society has its gatekeepers, whose role is to protect certain institutions, maintain the privileges of particular groups and cordon off some beliefs from challenge. Such gatekeepers protect not the marginalized but the powerful. Racism itself is a form of gatekeeping, a means of denying racialized groups equal rights, access and opportunities.

In minority communities, the gatekeepers are usually self-appointed guardians whose power rests on their ability to define what is acceptable and what is beyond the bounds. They appropriate for themselves the authority to license certain forms of cultural engagement, and in doing so, entrench their power.

In fact, reading the rather long essay, it was hard for me to disagree with him. In fact, it started to make me wonder why cultural appropriation is a matter of debate at all – controversial enough that at least three editors who defended it have lost their jobs (per Malik). In fact, Malik himself was victim of significant online abuse and trolling following his article.

So thinking about this topic during a work break the other day, I found compelling evidence about why the concept is bullshit – basically, it’s one-sided.

The whole concept of “cultural appropriation” hinges on there being a “superior community” and a “marginalised community”, with members of the former not allowed to adopt practices of the latter. This is a one-way street – if you turn the argument around and say that a person from a traditionally “marginalised community” should not adopt cultural practices of a “superior community”, you’re essentially being racist or casteist or whatever.

Consider this, for example – “Dalits should not recite the Vedas because by doing so, they are appropriating the culture of caste Hindus“.  It is unlikely that any self-respecting SJW would condone this statement. But turn the communities around, and the outrage on cultural appropriation become legit!

This makes the entire concept problematic, since it rests on a prior of certain communities being “marginalised”. In other words, it rests on a prior of a partial ordering of “communities”, with some considered more advanced than the other. Take away any such ordering or hierarchy, and the concept of cultural appropriation falls flat.

To me, the outrage about cultural appropriation smacks of a sort of “white man’s burden” among SJWs in an attempt to seemingly protect seemingly marginalised communities. All this achieves, as Kenan Malik mentions in his essay, is to empower the self-appointed leaders of these marginalised communities.

Once upon a time

Thanks to gifts from various sources (including the National Health Service, where we’d gone for a checkup), Berry has a few books now. Most of them have lots of pictures (the only book we’ve bought for her is simply a collection of animal pictures). Some have text as well. And it is that that is rather underwhelming.

I don’t know the target age group for most of these books, but the stories seem damn lame to Pinky and me. In my opinion, a good children’s book (or show) should not only be interesting for the child, but also for the parents – it is not often that the child uses the book or show alone. And from that perspective, a lot of these books Berry has got don’t pass the muster.

The books I had when I was a kid may not have been particularly optimised for a child. The illustrations weren’t great. The paper quality was underwhelming as well (one thing Berry can’t do with her books is to tear them! A useful quality for sure for children’s books). But the stories were fantastic. And things that I still remember.

Most of these stories came from the Panchatantra, which is a collection that “evolved” over time. This memetic evolution means that the stories that have come till today are “fit”, and fantastic. It’s similar with Aesop’s Fables – their age means that stories have evolved sufficiently to become damn interesting. And of course, this applies to the Ramayana and Mahabharata as well (and NOT to Christian myth, which didn’t get time to evolve and is thus rather boring).

Speaking of myth, I recently read Neil Gaiman’s book on Norse Mythology.  It’s a good book, and I’ll make Berry read it before she is five. But the stories themselves were all rather underwhelming and devoid of complexity. Considering it’s an ancient myth, which had sufficient time to evolve being written down, the simplicity of plots is rather surprising. Or maybe it’s the way Gaiman told the story.

I’m reminded of this “one Shloka Ramayana” that I’d been made to mug up as a kid (I still remember it “by heart”. Maybe Gaiman’s book is the Norse equivalent of this?

Poorvam Rama Thapovanadhi Gamanam
Hatva Mrigam Kanchanam
Vaidehi Haranam, Jataayu Maranam
Sugreeva Sambhashanam

Bali Nigrahanam, Samudra Tharanam
Lankapuri Dahanam,
Paschath Ravana Kumbhakarna Madanam
Ethat Ithi Ramayanam

In any case, considering the lack of plots in “modern” children’s books, we’re seriously exploring the idea of bringing back truckloads of Amar Chitra Katha when we visit India later this year.

Hill Climbing in real life

Fifteen years back, I enrolled for a course on Artificial Intelligence as part of my B.Tech. programme at IIT Madras. It was well before stuff like “machine learning” and “data science” became big, and the course was mostly devoted to heuristics. Incidentally, that term, we had to pick between this course and one on Artificial Neural Networks (I guess nowadays that one is more popular given the hype about Deep Learning?), which meant that I didn’t learn about neural networks until last year or so.

A little googling tells me that Deepak Khemani, who taught us AI in 2002, has put up his lectures online, as part of the NPTEL programme. The first one is here:

In fact, the whole course is available here.

Anyways, one of the classes of problems we dealt with in the course was “search”. Basically, how does a computer “search” for the solution to a problem within a large “search space”?

One of the simplest heuristic is what has come to be known as “hill climbing” (too lazy to look through all of Khemani’s lectures and find where he’s spoken about this). I love computer science because a lot of computer scientists like to describe ideas in terms of intuitive metaphors. Hill climbing is definitely one such!

Let me explain it from the point of view of my weekend vacation in Edinburgh. One of my friends who had lived there a long time back recommended that I hike up this volcanic hill in the city called “Arthur’s Peak“.

On Saturday evening, I left my wife and daughter and wife’s parents (who I had travelled with) in our AirBnB and walked across town (some 3-4 km) to reach Holyrood Palace, from where Arthur’s Seat became visible. This is what I saw: 

Basically, what you see is the side of a hill, and if you see closely, there are people walking up the sides. So what you guess is that you need to make your way to the bottom of the hill and then just climb.

But then you make your way to the base of the hill and see several paths leading up. Which one do you take? You take the path that seems steepest, believing that’s the one that will take you to the top quickest. And so you take a step along that path. And then see which direction to go to climb up steepest. Take another step. Rinse. Repeat. Until you reach a point where you can no longer find a way up. Hopefully that’s the peak.

Most of the time, you are likely to end up on the top of a smaller rock. In any case, this is the hill climbing algorithm.

So back to my story. I reached the base of the hill and set off on the steepest marked path.

I puffed and panted, but I kept going. It was rather windy that day, and it was threatening to rain. I held my folded umbrella and camera tight, and went on. I got beautiful views of Edinburgh city, and captured some of them on camera. And after a while, I got tired, and decided to call my wife using Facetime.

In any case, it appeared that I had a long way to go, given the rocks that went upwards just to my left (I was using a modified version of hill climbing in that I used only marked paths. As I was to rediscover the following day, I have a fear of heights). And I told that to my wife. And then suddenly the climb got easier. And before I knew it I was descending. And soon enough I was at the bottom all over again!

And then I saw the peak. Basically what I had been climbing all along was not the main hill at all! It was a “side hill”, which I later learnt is called the “Salisbury Crags”. I got down to the middle of the two hills, and stared at the valley there. I realised that was a “saddle point”, and hungry and tired and not wanting to get soaked in rain, I made my way out, hailed a cab and went home.

I wasn’t done yet. Determined to climb the “real peak”, I returned the next morning. Again I walked all the way to the base of the hill, and started my climb at the saddle point. It was a tough climb – while there were rough steps in some places, in others there was none. I kept climbing a few steps at a time, taking short breaks.

One such break happened to be too long, though, and gave me enough time to look down and feel scared. For a long time now I’ve had a massive fear of heights. Panic hit. I was afraid of going too close to the edge and falling off the hill. I decided to play it safe and turn back.

I came down and walked across the valley you see in the last picture above. Energised, I had another go. From what was possibly a relatively easier direction. But I was too tired. And I had to get back to the apartment and check out that morning. So I gave up once again.

I still have unfinished business in Edinburgh!

 

Shorting private markets

This is one of those things I’ll file in the “why didn’t I think of it before?” category.

The basic idea is that if you think there is a startup bubble, and that private companies (as a class) are being overvalued by investors, there exists a rather simple way to short the market – basically start your own company and sell equity to these investors!

The basic problem with shorting a market such as those for shares of privately held startups is that the shares are owned by a small set of investors, none of whom are likely to lend you stock that you can sell and buy back later. More importantly, markets in privately held stock can be incredibly illiquid, and it may take a long time indeed before the stocks move to what you think is their “right” level.

So what do you do? I’ll simply let the always excellent Matt Levine to provide the answer here:

We have talked a few times in the past about the difficulty of shorting unicorns: Investors can buy shares in the big venture-backed private tech companies, but they can’t sell those shares short, which arguably leads to those shares being overvalued as enthusiasts join in but skeptics are excluded. As I once said, though, “the way to profit from a bubble is by selling into it, and that people sometimes focus too narrowly on short-selling into it”: If you think that unicorns as a category are overvalued, the way to profit from that is not so much by shorting Uber as it is by founding your own dumb startup, raising a lot of money from overenthusiastic venture capitalists, paying yourself a big salary, and walking away whistling when the bubble collapses.

Same here! If you are skeptical of the ICO trend, the right thing to do is not to short all the new tokens that are coming to market. It’s to build your own token, do an initial coin offering, and walk off with the proceeds. For the sake of your own conscience, you can just go ahead and say that that’s what you’re doing, right in the ICO white paper. No one seems to mind.

Seriously! Why didn’t I think of this?

Scott Adams, careers and correlation

I’ve written here earlier about how much I’ve been influenced by Scott Adams’s career advice about “being in top quartile of two or more things“.  To recap, this is what Adams wrote nearly ten years back:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

Having implemented this to various degrees of success over the last 5-6 years, I propose a small correction – basically to follow the second strategy that Adams has mentioned, you need to take correlation into account.

Basically there’s no joy in becoming very good (top 25%) at two or more correlated things. For example, if you think you’re in the top 25% in terms of “maths and physics” or “maths and computer science” there’s not so much joy because these are correlated skills. Lots of people who are very good at maths are also very good at physics or computer science. So there is nothing special in being very good at such a combination.

Why Adams succeeded was that he was very good at 2-3 things that are largely uncorrelated – drawing, telling jokes and understanding corporate politics are not very correlated to each other. So the combination of these three skills of his was rather unique to find, and their combination resulted in the wildly successful Dilbert.

So the key is this – in order to be wildly successful, you need to be very good (top 25%) at two or three things that are not positively correlated with each other (either orthogonal or negative correlation works). That ensures that if you can put them together, you can offer something that very few others can offer.

Then again, the problem there is that the market for this combination of skills will be highly illiquid – low supply means people who might demand such combinations would have adapted to make do with some easier to find substitute, so demand is lower, and so on. So in that sense, again, it’s a massive hit-or-miss!

Maths, machine learning, brute force and elegance

Back when I was at the International Maths Olympiad Training Camp in Mumbai in 1999, the biggest insult one could hurl at a peer was to describe the latter’s solution to a problem as being a “brute force solution”. Brute force solutions, which were often ungainly, laboured and unintuitive were supposed to be the last resort, to be used only if one were thoroughly unable to implement an “elegant solution” to the problem.

Mathematicians love and value elegance. While they might be comfortable with esoteric formulae and the Greek alphabet, they are always on the lookout for solutions that are, at least to the trained eye, intuitive to perceive and understand. Among other things, it is the belief that it is much easier to get an intuitive understanding for an elegant solution.

When all the parts of the solution seem to fit so well into each other, with no loose ends, it is far easier to accept the solution as being correct (even if you don’t understand it fully). Brute force solutions, on the other hand, inevitably leave loose ends and appreciating them can be a fairly massive task, even to trained mathematicians.

In the conventional view, though, non-mathematicians don’t have much fondness for elegance. A solution is a solution, and a problem solved is a problem solved.

With the coming of big data and increased computational power, however, the tables are getting turned. In this case, the more mathematical people, who are more likely to appreciate “machine learning” algorithms recommend “leaving it to the system” – to unleash the brute force of computational power at the problem so that the “best model” can be found, and later implemented.

And in this case, it is the “half-blood mathematicians” like me, who are aware of complex algorithms but are unsure of letting the system take over stuff end-to-end, who bat for elegance – to look at data, massage it, analyse it and then find that one simple method or transformation that can throw immense light on the problem, effectively solving it!

The world moves in strange ways.