Pertinent Observations

Afghanistan

While reading the book Solstice at Panipat by Uday Kulkrani over the last few days, I came across an interesting factoid – Afghanistan as a nation didn’t exist until around 1750, which was when the Persian Shah Nadir Shah was assassinated and the Afghan tribal chiefs got together in a “Loya Jirga” (Grand Assembly), where with the recommendation of a Pir, Ahmad Shah Abdali was made king, and given the title Durr-e-durrani (pearl of pearls).

Even during Abdali’s rule, Afghanistan was not particularly united but was only a loose federation of small tribal states. The country wouldn’t become “united” until the 19th Century when both the Russians and the British sought to develop it as a buffer state as part of the great game.

Given this background, it is no surprise that it has been virtually impossible to impose a National Government in Afghanistan without the support of foreign powers. Will be interesting to see what happens to the country after the US withdraws next year.

Vegetables in Indian vegetarian food

A number of my long-time meat eating friends have told me about the lack of vegetables in the traditional Indian vegetarian diet. Back then I wasn’t so sure, as we used to get plenty of vegetables at home, and use them in every meal. However, lunch yesterday suggested that there might be some truth to this statement.

We had lunch at Nandhini, part of a chain of Andhra-style restaurants in Bangalore. The wife had “meals” while I had a biryani. Apart from this we ordered a chicken starter. What struck me as we ate was that neither of us was eating any vegetables.

The biryani, since it contained meat, didn’t have any vegetables, save the odd onion. The raita accompnaying it had onion and cucumber. The “meals” consisted of rice, dal, chutneys, gunpowder, rasam, curd and a sweet (none of which have vegetables – notice). Then there was sambar (whcih had the odd vegetable piece floating about) and a dry curry with an over-boiled vegetable. Hardly enough vegetable for a meal!

Considering that what we had yesterday is representative of the typical Andhra meal, there is perhaps some truth to the statement that Indian vegetarian food doesn’t have much vegetable.

Identifying Groups of Death

The Guardian has an interesting set of graphics trying to identify the “Group of Death” at the forthcoming (2014) football World Cup. They have basically ordered groups and teams on three counts – something called as “strength of schedule” (how it is calculated is not explained), average strength of each group (mean rating points) and the strength of each match (sum total of rating points of the teams playing). They don’t actually go on to identify which the groups of death are.

Another piece in the same paper gives a history of the concept of the Group of Death, and tries to explain why some groups can be classified so while others cannot. So in this post we will focus on precisely that – once a draw has been made, how do we identify groups of death? Without loss of generality, let us restrict our analysis to groups of four teams from which two qualify for the next round following a round robin (the format the World Cup uses). We will also restrict ourselves to analyzing the group stage and ignore chances of “death” in the knockout stages.

A “group of death” traditionally refers to a group where at least one “favourite” team gets knocked out. Assuming that a team with higher odds of winning the tournament is likely to beat one with lower odds, a group of death is necessarily one that contains at least three teams that are “favourites” to win the tournament.

From this, one way to measure groups of death is to order teams in decreasing order of odds of winning based on a reputed bookie’s odds, and then see how closely the top three teams of a group are clustered. The closer three teams are to each other, the closer the group is. We can use a distance metric to measure this.

Another simpler method is to see the odds of the third team in a group winning the world cup. The groups where the third best odds of winning are the groups of death! Again this is a relative metric since if each group has two “strong teams” and two “weak teams” there is effectively no group of death (hence the earlier metric trumps this one).

Another way to identify how deadly the groups are is to use bilateral odds for each match, and to identify the odds that the two “seeded teams” in a group both don’t qualify. For example, Group B has Spain, Netherlands, Australia and Chile, with the first two being the “seeded teams” (given their ranking). Now, we can calculate the probability that at least one of Spain and Netherlands doesn’t qualify. That gives the “death rating” for this group. The group for which this “death rating” is highest is the group of death.

As you can see, there are several ways for identifying the group of death. Unfortunately, none of the analysis that the Guardian has put out contributes to this. Let us now look at a couple of methods for ourselves. For the purpose of analysis I’m using the easiest available odds, which are from the Bleacher Report. Ideally, for this analysis we should be using odds before the draw was made – since the draw itself would have ended up adjusting odds. Nevertheless, since this is for illustrative (rather than predictive) purposes only, we’ll stick to the current odds.

Let us start with the easiest method, which is the odds of victory of the third best team in the group. Based on the Bleacher odds, the third best teams in each group are likely to be :

A Mexico 150/1
B Chile 33/1
C Japan 150/1
D England 28/1
E Ecuador 150/1
F Nigeria 250/1
G United States 150/1
H South Korea 150/1

Two teams stand out – Chile at 33/1 and England at 28/1. Based on this metric, the group of death is Group D (Italy, England, Uruguay, Costa Rica). The Guardian might say that Australia, Ghana or the United States might have the toughest draw, but the odds of each of them winning is so low that it doesn’t matter that they have tough draws!

Let us now use another metric – the difference between the odds of the second and third placed teams in each group. One metric of the group of death might be where this difference is the minimum (this metric has the problem of classifying groups with one clear winner as groups of death, while they technically are not).

And this metric identifies Group F (Bosnia, Nigeria) and Group A (Croatia, Mexico) as groups of death. You might notice that these are Argentina and Brazil’s groups respectively and those two teams are expected to sail through, so this is not a good metric.

Next, let us involve the top three teams of each group (to prevent the above anomaly) and look at the sum of the absolute difference in odds. For example, if the odds of the top three teams in a group are o1, o2, o3, we will measure each group by (|o1-o2| + |o2-o3| + |o3-o1|). The smaller this sum is, the more likely a group is a “group of death”.

The results from this metric are below:

A 42% Brazil, Croatia, Mexico
B 16% Spain, Netherlands, Chile
C 7% Colombia, Japan, Greece
D 0.7% Uruguay, Italy, England
E 7% Switzerland, France, Ecuador
F 27% Argentina, Bosnia, Nigeria
G 23% Germany, Portugal, United States
H 10% Belgium, Russia, South Korea.

From this metric, it is absolutely clear which the most competitive group is – it is group D, with Uruguay, Italy and England. Based on this metric, it is unambiguous that Group D is the group of death. Groups C and E come next according to this measure, followed by Group H.

Zen and the art of shooting

So I was at this resort near Nandi Hills for a day-long workshop on Saturday (actually it was a three-day workshop but my session was only on Saturday so I went there only for one day). One of my colleagues and fellow-teachers had brought along an air gun and at a time when students were busy doing some homework we had given them, we went off for some shooting practice.

First we used cardboard pieces and drew targets on them. I remember taking some four or five rounds at it. First three times I shot way to the right of the target. The following time I decided to correct for this bias and aimed a little left of the target. However, it turned out I had overcompensated and I ended up shooting left.

This was the first time ever in my life that I was shooting (barring toy guns when I was a kid). The first couple of shots I was just getting use to the feel of the gun, the posture, etc. What I found tricky was that there were two viewfinders through which you had to look through simultaneously (genius design – to eliminate parallax error). And then you had to concentrate, focus and shoot.

My first few shots I figured that I thought too much about shooting. I took aim, and then held the position for a while till I was convinced that I was aiming right. Then I would get distracted (damn you, ADHD) and then I would have to try and concentrate again. This would happen a few times until I would go impatient and shoot randomly, and thus miss the target.

After a few rounds of shooting at the cardboard, we moved on to shooting a fruit. Four of us took two cracks each at the fruit, and I was the only one who didn’t manage to hit the fruit at all. On both shots I missed by a long way. I had that sinking feeling I always have when I’m trying to learn something as part of a group and end up being clearly the worst in the group. That’s a frequent feeling for me nowadays.

So for the last round where we used an empty Bacardi carton as our target (the aim was to hit the face of the Bat logo on the carton), I decided to adopt what one of my friends called the “Zen method”. “The first time you take aim, just shoot. Don’t over think”, he said. I had some reputation to salvage.

We all took two shots each at the carton. I did what I was told. As soon as I had taken aim, I shot. I ended up hitting the bat logo once on the tail and once on one of its legs. Here is a photo taken as soon as I had shot the tail (red circle; the other shot on the bat is a colleague’s). The Zen method worked!

PS: I think this is the first time ever I’ve put up my photo on my blog. So all those of you who read this but don’t follow me on any other social medium – you finally know what I look like.

Is TripAdvisor killing Expedia?

The coming of the internet has led to one round of disintermediation in the travel market, and I hypothesize that review websites such as TripAdvisor are going to lead to another. Let me explain.

In the “good old days” if you wanted to travel there was no option but to reach out to the neighbourhood travel agent who would give you options of a few airlines and hotels. The best you could do to figure out if you were being taken for a ride was to check across multiple agents, but even then the only thing you could compare was price. It was impossible to compare hotels in terms of quality and you would take the word of the travel agent.

And then the internet happened.

Now, with sites such as Expedia or Travelocity, you got more transparency in pricing – especially when it came to airline ticketing. The travel agent could no longer take you for a ride when it came to the air fares – you could cross check online and bypass the agent if he wasn’t offering you a good deal (of course some things such as flexible schedules were best booked via agents, and they continue to hold sway in the corporate segment for that reason). Simultaneously airlines started selling tickets direct, via their own websites (this was led in part by “low cost carriers” who saw this as a good way of saving cost by cutting out agent fees).

This was the first round of disintermediation in the travel industry. Airlines selling tickets direct and customers being able to book directly online meant the overall business of travel agents reduced. Some of them were cut out completely while others were replaced by large-scale technology enabled agents such as Expedia or Travelocity. Those that survived either have corporate clients (who need flexible schedules and have little time to book online) or have resorted to packages – where they arrange for flights, accommodation and cars, and quote you a consolidated fee – in which there are margins to be made.

The move to large-scale technology-enabled agents meant that some of these agents were now large-scale aggregators. This gave them significant bargaining power vis-a-vis hotels and this allowed them to bargain for deep discounts. While earlier conventional wisdom was that “travel agents” could get you “good deals”, now these large online aggregators were the ones providing the “best deals”. Thus it made eminent sense to book via these aggregators.

Simultaneously most hotels also started direct booking on their own websites. However, the problem was that the hotels themselves did not have the technological capability to implement good revenue management practices on their own websites. They also did not have the technological capability to offer a seamless and smooth booking experience. Thus, large online agents such as booking.com and Agoda prospered.

There are two functions that a travel agent performs – helping customers discover hotels and then actually executing the booking. In the traditional model, agents don’t charge for the discovery process. That service is instead cross-subsidized by the fees they make on the actual booking process. The first level of disintermediation in the travel agency (which we’ve seen above) has chipped away at this model, however. What do I, a travel agent, have to gain if I put in painstaking research and find you a hotel, only for you to find that you can book it for a lower price online? Agents, however, have not figured out a way to charge for the discovery process.

However, it is unlikely that they need to. For you now have websites such as TripAdvisor which have user-generated reviews and ratings for a large number of hotels, and which rank hotels in each city by type and user ratings. TripAdvisor has become so ubiquitous for user-generated ratings for hotels that nowadays travel agents add links to TripAdvisor profiles of hotels that they are recommending. Thus, we can see that the hotel discovery process can exist independently of travel agents.

What of the bookings itself? Don’t we need travel agents for that? Note that irrespective of whether a travel agent is online or offline, the hotel has to pay them a commission for selling their inventory. In the past given their size, hotels (unlike airlines) were unable to effectively sell rooms on their own websites and thus resorted to paying travel agents. However, advances in technology now mean that it is easy for a hotel to adopt a third-party software to effectively manage their inventory and sell tickets on their own website, and at a fraction of the cost they need to pay travel agents.

So, if TripAdvisor helps you discover hotels and then you can book hotels directly through their own websites, who needs travel agents? For now, most large online aggregators have a price matching policy and thus match the prices that hotels quote on their own websites. However, in order to save booking fees (rumoured to be of the order of 17% of the total booking value) hotels are trying to innovate and add freebies to their offering.

For example, a hotel in Cambodia I stayed in last week offered a free massage to guests who had booked through their own website (unfortunately I booked via Agoda and couldn’t avail of this offer). The Bangkok hotel I stayed in last week offered a 10% discount on payments made via American Express on their own website (again we discovered this after we had booked on Agoda, using an AmEx. To their credit, Agoda gave us a refund to the extent of the discount we would have got on the hotel website).

Essentially hotels have figured that with the growing popularity of platforms such as TripAdvisor, they don’t really need travel agents, small or large. As TripAdvisor gets more popular and third party hotel booking softwares gain traction, we are likely to see the decline of large travel aggregators such as Expedia, Travelocity and Agoda.

In essence, the growth of TripAdvisor is going to lead to the partial downfall of its erstwhile parent Expedia.

Understanding different kinds of art

There are some kinds of art that I intuitively understand – like an elegant mathematical proof, or a beautiful combination in a game of chess; a Sachin Tendulkar straight drive, or a long-distance beautifully threaded pass by Xabi Alonso. I can easily appreciate a well-done-up home when I see it. Some music makes me go delirious, and there have been times when I’ve actually started rolling on the floor in ecstasy after listening to certain songs.

But there is art that I simply don’t get. Poetry – for example – I’ve never got what is the big deal with that. To me it just looks like a bunch of sentences broken up in random ways, which is supposed to make it sound nice. In fact, I’ve argued earlier that poetry is a vestige of the pre-writing era.

It is the same with “literature”. Some people read books or articles because they are just “written beautifully”. I absolutely fail to appreciate that phrase. As long as something is explained simply and intuitively, it is enough for me. In fact, when a writer tries to get too cute and makes a conscious effort to “write beautifully” it puts me off, for it makes the reading less intuitive. As a consequence, there’s hardly any fiction I’ve read in the last 5-6 years.

I was thinking of this last evening when I went to watch this dance show called “Prayog 4” here in Bangalore. I think it was good – the three performances looked extremely well choreographed and well-coordinated, and the dancers seemed to have put in considerable effort into the production. They were all supremely fit and were literally doing gymnastics during the course of the performance. But my appreciation of the performance ended there.

After one of the performances, the wife exclaimed “you know, this dance so represents your and my lives!”. I just couldn’t understand what she was hinting at. All I could see was this one guy dancing round and round in circles, and doing gymnastics on a rope! As I mentioned earlier, his movements were extremely graceful and aesthetically pleasing but I just couldn’t get anything more out of it.

Later last night, my wife asked me what I understood from the first performance (yesterday’s show essentially had three separate performances). “A bunch of chicks doing extremely graceful gymnastics on a bunch of parallel bars”, I replied. “Didn’t you notice how beautifully they represented different emotions during the course of the dance”, she asked. I admitted to recognizing nothing of the sort. Instead, I was sitting there, wondering what the big deal was, and trying to construct this blog post in my head.

“Art” is not unidimensional, and “appreciating art” is too broad a statement. After my experience yesterday I don’t know if there are people who can appreciate all kinds of art. For a moment I thought I was a philistine for I couldn’t appreciate yesterday’s performance, but then I remembered the pieces of art I mentioned in the beginning of this blog post that I truly appreciate. So, no – I’m not a philistine. It’s just that there are certain art forms I get and ones I don’t.

Have you felt similarly sometimes? Are there some art forms you “get” easily, and others that you absolutely fail to get? Or do you consider yourself to be the types that gets all kinds of art, and you argue that the ones you don’t get is simply not art? Or do you fail to get any art at all? Do leave a comment.

ATMs and their security

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and proponent of the Volcker Rule following the financial crisis of 2008 once remarked that the only useful financial innovation in the last twenty years is the ATM. The biggest advantage of the ATM is that because you can get money at any point of time on demand, you don’t need to keep too much of an “emergency stash” at home. For example, you are now extremely unlikely to find more than five thousand rupees in hard currency in my house at any point of time (including my wife’s and my wallets, and our “emergency stash”). In the pre-ATM era, when we would have to wait to visit a bank branch to withdraw money, we would have to keep a much larger sum at home as an emergency fund.

So how does this help the economy? Lesser cash in people’s homes and wallets means more cash in the banking system. Which means that at any given point in time, the banks have more money to lend out, and so the supply of credit is higher, reducing the cost of credit. Reduction in the cost of credit improves investment and thus leads to higher economic growth – which is good for everybody. The ATM is thus pareto-positive in stimulating economic growth.

And this is not all. The presence of the ATM has meant that one of the basic activities for which people would visit bank branches – to withdraw money – has now declined massively. Thus, it is possible for banks to run with much leaner branch infrastructure and this again pays back to the general public in the form of a lower “spread” between the cost of a deposit and the cost of a loan. I read on twitter yesterday (unable to find link now) that the average cost of servicing a customer at a teller counter is Rs. 176 while at an ATM it is Rs. 6. This order of magnitude difference is hard to ignore.

And we are not done yet, for we haven’t yet factored in the ease of drawing money now in the age of the ATM. Ten years back I remember having to wait at the bank branch at IIT for about twenty minutes to withdraw cash. I would have to fill up and submit a form, collect a token and wait till my number was called before I was handed my money. The transaction cost (for the customer) of withdrawing money was way too much. And one had to go during the branch timings. It is all so different now!

Now that we have established that ATMs have a socially and economically useful purpose, let us get to their security. On Tuesday this week in Bangalore a woman was mugged at an ATM when she had gone to withdraw money. The assaulter threatened her with a pistol and a machete, and assaulted her anyway and decamped with her money. The event was caught on the CCTV camera at the ATM and the footage was played out on national television.

http://www.timesnow.tv/India/Woman-attacked-inside-ATM-in-Bangalore/videoshow/4441948.cms

Following this incident the Home Minister of Karnataka has given a directive that banks appoint security guards at ATMs or shut down the ATMs. Initially he gave an ultimatum of three days to implement this rule, but then the impracticality of the suggestion dawned on him and the deadline has now been extended. The question, however, arises on who is responsible for safety of the ATM.

There are two components to safety at an ATM – safety of the cash and safety of the customers who visit it. The cash at the ATM is the bank’s private property, and the bank has chosen to put the cash there (and not somewhere else), so it can be argued that security of the cash inside the ATM machine is the bank’s responsibility. I don’t think there needs to be too much debate on this.

What is debatable, however, is the responsibility of security of people visiting the ATM. The question is if it is the responsibility of the bank or as a public good it is the responsibility of the government. Let us draw an analogy. Let’s say you are visiting my house, and at exactly the same time a robber happens to pay a visit. In the course of the robbery you get injured. Can the state hold me liable for your injury for not securing my house enough against the robbers? Isn’t it the state’s responsibility in the first place that the robbers were on the prowl and they just happened to rob my house when you were visiting?

Public safety is a public good. To get technical, it is non-rival (by keeping the streets safe for you, the streets are also kept safe for me) and non-excludable (having kept the streets safe, you cannot exclude me from enjoying the safe streets). And it being a public good, it is the responsibility of the state to provide it. It also means that it is the responsibility of the state to provide public safety everywhere – be it private or public places. Arguing that the ATM, since it belongs to the bank, is not a public space and hence the state is not responsibility for security there is thus wrong. So the state has no right to demand that banks employ private security guards to guard the ATMs.

So if it is the state’s responsibility to keep ATMs safe does it mean that police be appointed to guard the ATMs? Of course not, for the police’s job is not to guard private property that is the ATM – their job is to ensure public safety. Effective policing would mean that the thug who attacked the woman at the ATM wouldn’t be in business at all, and that he wouldn’t have thought of committing this crime.

So if we don’t have private security guards or cops guarding the ATMs how are we going to keep them safe? I argue that it is a matter of design. If you were to watch the video above, you will notice that the first thing the thug does on entering the ATM behind the victim is to pull down the shutters – thus the happenings of the ATM is shielded from the public eye. If ATMs are by definition perennially open what is the purpose of the shutter? You might also notice in the video that the thug pulled down the shutter once again while exiting. Consequently the victim was found only three hours later and that might have had serious consequences in terms of her health. Would the ATM not be better off without that shutter?

Then, there is the question of whether we need a room at all to house the ATM. Here in India, everywhere except in malls, ATMs have their own rooms, and it was in one such room that the mugging happened on Tuesday. On my few visits abroad, however, I’ve noticed that ATMs there never have their own rooms – they are simply holes in walls on the street from which you can get cash. That automatically puts the ATM in a public space and makes them safer (especially if they are on busy streets). The ATM rooms only provide a false sense of security and can prove counterproductive like in the case we just saw.

As we saw in the first part of this piece, ATMs perform a socially valuable function and it is in the interest of banks to encourage customers to use them. That, however, doesn’t mean that banks appoint guards to all ATMs – there might be an alternate solution that might be cheaper and easier to implement, and it is for the banks to find it. It is NOT the state’s business to mandate how the banks get customers to use their ATMs – the state has to concentrate on maintaining public safety.

In June last year the Reserve Bank of India allowed non-bank entities to run “white label ATMs” – cash dispensing machines that are not affiliated to any banks. The first such ATM came up earlier this year. I’m hopeful that some of these ATM companies will gain enough scale that they can solve the ATM design issue and make them safer and more customer friendly.

Missed opportunities in cross-selling

Talk to any analytics or “business intelligence” provider – be it a large commoditized outsourcing firm or a rather niche consultant – and one thing they all claim to advise their clients on is strategies for “cross sell”. However, my personal experience suggests that implementation of cross-sell strategies among retailers I encounter is extremely poor. I will illustrate two such examples in this post here.

Jet Airways and American Express together have come up with this “Jet Airways American Express Platinum Credit Card”. Like any other co-branded credit card, it offers you additional benefits on Jet Airways flights booked with this card (in terms of higher points) as well as some other benefits such as lounge access for economy travel. Given that I’m a consultant and travel frequently, this is something I think is good to have, and have attempted to purchase it a few times. And got discouraged by the purchase process each time and backed out.

Now, I’m a customer of both Jet Airways and American Express. I hold an American Express Gold Card (perhaps one of the few people to have an individual AmEx card), and have a Jet Privilege account. Yet, neither Jet or Amex seems remotely interested in selling to me. I once remember applying for this card through the Amex call centre. The person at the other end of the line wanted me to fill up the entire form once again – despite me being already a cardholder. This I would ascribe to messed up incentive structures where the salesperson at the other end gets higher benefits for acquiring a new customer rather than upgrading an existing one. I’ve mentioned I want this card to the Amex call centre several times, yet no one has called me back.

However, these are not the missed cross-sell opportunities I’m talking about in this post. Three times in the last three months (maybe more, but I cannot recollect) I’ve booked an air ticket to fly on Jet airways from the Jet Airways website having logged into my Jet Privilege account and paying with my American Express card. Each time I’ve waited hopefully that some system at either the Jet or the Amex end will make the connection and offer me this Platinum card, but so far there has been response. It is perhaps the case that for some reason they do not want to upgrade existing customers to this card (in which case the entire discussion is moot) but not offering me a card here is simply a case of a blatant missed opportunity – in cricketing terms you can think of this as an easy dropped catch.

The other case has to do with banking. I’m in the process of purchasing a house, and over the last few months have been transferring large amounts of money to the seller in order to make my down payments (which I’m meeting through my savings). Now, I’ve had my account with Citibank for over seven years and have never withdrew such large amounts – except maybe to make some fixed deposits. One time, I got a call from the bank’s call centre, confirming if it was indeed I who had made the transfer. Why did the bank not think of finding out (in a discreet manner) why all of a sudden so much money had moved out of my account, and if I was up to purchasing something and if the bank could help? Of course, later, during a visit to the Citibank local branch recently I found I wouldn’t have got a loan from them anyway since they don’t finance apartments built by no-name builders that are still under construction (which fits the bill of the property I’m purchasing). Nevertheless – the large money transferred out of my account could have been for buying a property that the bank could have financed. Missed opportunity there?

My understanding of the situation is that in several “analytics” offerings there is a disconnect between the tech and the business sides. Somewhere along the chain of implementation there is one hand-off where one party knows only the business aspects and the other knows only technology, and thus the two are unable to converse, leading to suboptimal decisions. One kind of value I offer (hint! hint!!) is that I understand both tech and business, and I can ensure a much smoother hand-off between the technical and business aspects, thus leading to superior solution design.

Landmark mismanagement

Yesterday’s Landmark Quiz in Bangalore was a major waste of time. No, I’m not talking about the quality the quiz here – the prelims was among the better Landmark Quiz prelims I’ve sat through, and given that we just missed out on qualification for the finals (AJMd, as we say here in Bangalore) I didn’t sit through the finals though I was told the questions there too were pretty good.

I’m talking about the transaction costs of attending the quiz. The overall management of the event left much to be desired. First of all, we had to show up at the venue at 11:45 for a quiz that was supposed to start at 1:45 pm. Teams with confirmed seats were let in at around 12:30 and only around 1 o’clock were us “waitlisted” teams let in. There too, the organizers did a major show of letting in waitlisted teams, calling them in order and taking over half an hour to let everyone in.

The point is that even after all the waitlisted teams had been let in, there was plenty of room in the auditorium. This makes me wonder about the wisdom of waitlisting so many teams, and then making such a big show of letting people in. Given that the total turnout was much smaller than the hall capacity, things would have been much simpler if people had been simply left in, with volunteers only ensuring that the seating was efficient (without leaving gaps).

Before the quiz yesterday i started writing a blog post on how the quiz registration process was itself flawed, and gave incentive to people to register zombie teams because the option of registering a team came free. So while the hall had been theoretically filled up many days ago, most of these registrations were zombie registrations thus leading to a long wait list and thus calling people early. Given that the quiz doesn’t have an entry fee, I can’t currently think of a good way to price this option.

But reaching the venue early was not the only waste of time. The written prelims of the quiz finished around 3 pm, including calling out the correct answers. The results, however, weren’t announced till close to 6 o’clock. In the interim time period there was the finals for school students, but that still doesn’t explain why they had to wait until 6 o’clock to announce the results of the senior quiz.

The way I see it, it was sheer disrespect on the part of the organizers of the time of the participants. Yes, Landmark might be a much sought after quiz, rated among the best in the country. Yes, most people come there for the questions and not just to win – and so stay on to watch the finals even when they haven’t qualified (it is indeed commendable that Landmark quizzes have managed to be great spectator events while not dropping quality). Yes, many participants have traveled from other cities and so having traveled the cost of their time might be “cheap” – in that they have little else to do in the rest of the day.

Even taking into account all these, the wastage of 5 hours of each quizzer’s time (2 hours for early reporting; 3 hours gap between prelims and results announcement; 4 if you consider that watching the Junior finals wasn’t a waste of time) is not a done thing. Given the quiz’s unparalleled reputation it is unlikely that market forces are going to tell the organizers that they are wasting people’s time, but the message has to go through.

The Problem With Pie Charts

People don’t seem to get that pie charts are awful. The basic point is that the human eye cannot measure areas as well as it can measure lengths. In order to show this I’ve done some exercises in my workshops – I drew a pie chart and a bar chart and asked the class to estimate the number associated with a particular sector of the pie / particular bar of the bar graph, and (luckily I must point out, since the class was small) the error in measurement from the class for the pie was more than that of the bar, so I could convince them.

At yet another class I was teaching last weekend, I got another idea to show why pie charts aren’t particularly useful and I thought I’ll share that here.

Check out this pie chart. Let’s say this represents the quantities of various fruits I’ve consumed in the last one year (numbers pulled out of thin air, using the rand() function in Excel). Look at this chart and tell me which fruit I’ve consumed the most and which the least.

You might say that adding data labels might help solve this problem, but my question is if you must add data labels, why have a visualization at all in the first place? Also note the other problem with the pie chart – you need to keep referring to the legend (at least in the default version that Excel offers. I haven’t been able to figure out how to put the category labels next to the pies itself).

How would you better represent this data? Consider this bar chart, in that case, again made using Excel (with a few tweaks to reduce the “ink”). Here, you can clearly see the relative sizes of the quantities of consumption of various fruits, and easily figure out for yourself that my favourite fruit is Orange and least favourite is Grape.

The basic idea I’m trying to explain is this – there is little that a pie chart can show (apart from proportions, maybe) that a bar chart cannot. And even if you want to show proportions, you can do one additional step of calculating proportions and plotting that in a bar, instead of putting it in a pie.