One of my friends sent me a paper titled, “Path to Purchase: A Mutually Exciting Point Process Model for Online Advertising and Conversion”. Not knowing most of the marketing jargon in the paper, I had to read it slowly. After going through the paper, I have realized that it is a superb application of point processes to measuring effectiveness of online advertising. In finance, there are tons of papers published that use Hawke’s process for modeling.

This book is written by Amit, a self-proclaimed witness to Mother Divine!. In his current incarnation, he calls himself Om Swami and runs a website – www.omswami.com. This book talks about his journey from a successful tech entrepreneur(again a self-claimed one) to a spiritual guru. I found the book to be total crap. This guy decides to take a spiritual path in 2009, renounces everything and heads to Varanasi, then to Himalayas and ends up meditating in a cave for over 150 days.

I have enjoyed reading Nicholas Carr’s previous book titled “The Shallows”, that discusses at length various ways in which Internet impacts our brain. In this book, the author takes “automation” as the subject and explores its human consequences. In this blog post, I will summarize the main points of various chapters. Alert for Operators This chapter opens with a terse notice issued by Federal Aviation Administration on Jan 2013. This note was addressed to all the US.

In the last few decades, enormous computational speed has become accessible to many. Modern day desktop has good enough memory and processing speed that enables a data analyst to compute probabilities and perform statistical inference by writing computer programs. In such a context, this book can serve as a starting point to anyone who wishes to explore the subject of computational probability. This book has 21 puzzles that can be solved via simulation.

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” - Confucius