The added hoops you have to go through can cost way more than the ticket itself In order to get some fresh air, we typically go for a walk up to a pathway across an extension of River Thames facing the London City Airport. Before the pandemic, the airport was…

A useful technique when dealing with multivariate Gaussian distributions This post assumes some familiarity with the Gaussian (also called Normal) distribution and matrix operations. In my article called Maths Behind Machine Learning, I briefly touched on the idea of Gaussian distributions. The famous Gaussian distribution is so ubiquitous in applications of statistics that having some tools to see how it shows its face in some…

Lessons from working as a call centre agent — “Thank you for calling. How may I help you?” This was the opening spiel of an agent receiving calls from clients of a financial firm. I spent more than 2 years receiving calls as my job. I logged clients’ requests partially on paper, partially electronically via a diskette. …

Learning to move forward Grief can be considered a universal emotion. Many mammals, including humans are known to feel this. Elephants have been recorded to visit the same spot where their matriarch died, orcas have been observed to mourn for their dead calf, and not surprisingly, our nearest relatives, primates…

Love is enough. Or is it really? Perhaps it is a product of growing older, but over the years, I realised some beliefs I have operated my life on especially in my younger years are not very sensible. …

There’s always a proportion of adults who have been pulled away from an opportunity of an education. This pandemic would likely increase it. In poor countries, the barrier to leaving a poverty-stricken life is already high. The pandemic combined with poor governance will drive this barrier even higher. During the…

Why the 2020 character is a bummer Imagine an Asian girl in the 1990’s who grew up in a patriarchal society, observing that gender roles are strongly embedded. …

Pros, Cons and In-betweens of Working From Home There is a part of the population whose jobs and company infrastructures have allowed them to work from home since the start of global lockdowns. I feel fortunate to be a part of this group as I have been working from home…

Survival is at stake In a previous article Poverty, Risk, and Happiness, I shared aspects about the poor and their management of risks in their day-to-day life. I follow this with my thoughts on resilience. In countries stricken by poverty, we hear of sentiments of being proud of the people’s…