SDS 354: Negative Coefficients

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. Super excited to have you back here on board. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about something that I didn’t know how to call, so I called it ‘negative coefficients’. And this is not actually a mathematical concept. This is a philosophical concept that I learned in my life just recently in the past couple of weeks. It was a mind blowing thing, a mind blowing realization, a very painful learning, but at the same time, very insightful. I wanted to share it with you, see maybe that can apply in your life to something, and maybe you’ll save yourself the trouble of going through that learning yourself. 

So here is the story. Before, in December, as you know, if I’ve been talking on and on about this, that I’ve been recording this Tableau massive course on the Certified Associate in Tableau. And I’ve passed my exam, very excited about that, and about to pass my certified professional exam. I’ll take it, hopefully I’ll pass as well. And I’ve been recording this course since December, so it’s been three months I’ve been recording it. I went away for a little bit, so in December, I was recording in Brisbane, Australia. And then I went away for a little bit in January for a little bit of a break for a few weeks. Then I came back, and I needed to move all my equipment to Gold Coast because I was staying in Gold Coast. That’s where I am right now. 

And I got this place. I rented a small office here, put my equipment and set up my audio microphone. My brother recommended this Røde lovely microphone. If you’re recording stuff, let me tell you what it’s called. It’s called an NT-USB 2, very good microphone if you ever need one. And set everything up and started recording. And this was at the start of February. And I noticed the sound is a little bit like I’m sitting in a barrel. I’m sitting in a very hollow room, or a well, or a box, or something like that. And I thought, “Well, it must be the room.” Right? Something must be wrong with the room, so I started buying this audio foam. It’s kind of like this little, I don’t know, 30 by 30 centimeter piece of material, which is very soft. It has these triangle shapes. You’ve probably seen something like that somewhere, it’s like these triangles that are sticking out at you, and you stick it on the wall. 

It’s quite cheap and that covers the wall and basically prevents the sound from bouncing around, so there’s no echo, so there’s less echo. And so I put quite a bit of it on the wall, and the sound got worse. And I thought, “Okay. What’s going on?” Then I put even more on the wall, so I ordered another box, put more on the wall, on the front, on the side, on the left, right, almost on the roof, on the ceiling. Putting it all over the place, the sound was getting worse and worse and worse every single time. And then I’m like, “Okay. What else can I do?” I brought all these pillows from home and I built a fort of pillows around myself to just absorb that sound to prevent it from bouncing around and making this terrible noise. That got worse. 

So then I brought a blanket. I hung up a blanket right behind me so that even less sound would bounce around. And things were getting worse and worse and worse every time. And I was just like, “This must be okay. I’m doing everything right. Everything must be all right.” Then I asked different people, “How does this sound? How does this sound to you?” Our audio team is doing all they can with the editing to make sure it sounds fantastic. At the same time, I’m recording this massive course. I’m recording all these podcasts and the audio’s just sounding worse and worse and worse. And some people are saying, “Well, no, it sounds okay.” Others are like, “No, something doesn’t sound right here.” 

And I feel that something doesn’t sound right, but I know that I seem to be doing everything right, everything by the book, adding all this audio foam, investing into it. And I’m like, “No, I’ve got to power through. I’ve got all this stuff to record. And I’m super excited about the course. I’m creating the course, recording, and recording a podcast and so on. So a whole month passes of that. And I record I think, I don’t know, dozens of tutorials like that, maybe 50 or more, maybe more, like 70 tutorials like that. And it’s not like it’s the end of the world bad sound. I think it still sounds very good. Many people have asked. It sounds very good. But I just know that before it sounded even better. It sounded crystal clear. 

So on one hand, I’m thinking maybe I’m just trying to be a perfectionist. Maybe everything’s fine. And then a whole month passes and I realize. I decide to investigate and I call up the microphone shop and I say, “Something’s wrong with my microphone. What could it be?” And they say, “Well, it’s got this little golden dot that should be facing you when you’re recording. Which way is it facing?” And I look at the golden dot. It’s actually facing away from me. And in that moment, I had the biggest realization that the whole month, I was recording with this microphone the wrong way. And because it’s a studio microphone, it’s actually only one, in one direction. I don’t remember what the correct term for that is, but it just records in one direction. Doesn’t record the other way. 

So I’ll give you a feel for what it sounds if I record in the opposite way. Check this out. I’m going to turn it. All right. So this is me talking into the microphone from the other side. Yeah, so this is what it would sound like talking to the other side. How crazy is that? Now I’m going to turn it back. So there you go. That’s me talking normal into the microphone. And when I realized that I … Can you imagine how painful that was? A whole month of my best work, of my most passionate, dedicated, committed work, and all being recorded into the opposite side of the microphone. And more of what happens, if since the microphone can only record from one side, so when it’s facing the wrong way, it’s only able to record the sound that is bouncing off the wall that is directly in front of me. And the more audio foam I put, the less sound is bouncing back into the microphone. The more pillows, the more blankets I put, the less sound is bouncing back into the microphone, so that’s why the audio was getting worse. 

And I was so, I don’t know, I was so surprised. But at the same time, I was so happy that I figured it out finally, that now I can turn around, fix everything. So I’ve already fixed up all the podcasts because I had a backup recording for the time when I’m recording with a guest, so that was not a problem. You may have heard occasionally some error issues with the audio, and I apologize for that. But most of them, I fixed them up. I fixed up the intros and outros and everything else. Now I just have to go through the courses and just fix up those specific audios. And I’m on top of that. 

But the thing is, the main thing is that I was really happy that I learned that, that I fixed the problem. But the other thing I learned is that I should’ve done that long ago. I’ve had that in my life. And have you had that in your life when you know something’s wrong? You know something is wrong, whether it’s in a hobby or in a project you’re doing. In this case, I knew I felt something was wrong. Probably the correct word is you feel something’s wrong, and you don’t want to face the issue. You kind of do everything by the book. You think you’re doing everything right. You don’t want to really dig into it because it’s going to take some time. It’s going to take you maybe a day for you to figure it out. For me, it might’ve taken a day or two to figure out this microphone thing. And I thought, “I don’t have the time. I’ve got to record these videos and audios and so on.” 

And so I choose to ignore, to disregard that issue, to put it aside, and just keep pushing. And have you ever had that? I think we all have had that. And what it results in is that this issue, the presence of this issue, it actually creates a negative coefficient, so all your efforts you’re putting in, they are not only useful as they could be, but they’re actually either zeroed, completely destroyed, zeroed out, so you’re going to have to throw away the whole project at the end. Or they’re actually negative, they’re detrimental. For instance, me adding this audio foam was making things worse. Right? It had a negative because the microphone was turned the wrong way. There was a negative coefficient to what I was doing. 

And that’s a very interesting phenomenon to consider that sometimes in life, if we have the wrong setup, if we didn’t set ourselves up for success from the start, we might be operating under a negative coefficient. So I’ll give you an example, for instance from data science. If you do your data preparation, and you skim over it, or there’s some part that you think might be wrong. How come there’s 998 rows in this data set when there should be 1000? Or how come the value in this column, how come there’s a negative dollar value in column B, not in the profit column, but in the revenue column? How can there be a negative revenue? Well, that’s just like negative one of them is only negative, and there’s only minus 10 cents, or something. You skim over something that you really should be investigating, or you don’t even get to it. You don’t even notice it because you don’t pay enough attention to your data preparation, which we know should take about 70% to 80% of your time.

And then in the end, you do all the insights, you do all the analytics. So what could happen? Right? If it wasn’t an issue, if it was just really wasn’t … There was no issue, then everything’s fine. Yeah, best case scenario. Another scenario is if there really was an issue, and then your manager picks it up, or the executive picks it up, or you pick it up at the end of the project, bam, all your insights out the window, down the drain, in the bin. You have to do it all again, so you wasted all your time. So that’s a zero coefficient. 

But worst case scenario is you get a negative coefficient. And that is, nobody picks it up. They are wrong insights. Your manager doesn’t pick it up. You don’t pick it up. Your executive doesn’t pick it up. And your executive makes a business decision based on your incorrect insights. Guess what happens next, business loses money. Business goes in the wrong direction. Business might even fail. So all the effort you are putting in, the more you’re putting in effort, the better your insights, the more convincing you made your insights, the worse it was for the business because there was more of the, the higher the likelihood that the executive or the business was going to follow those incorrect insights, and so that ultimately led to failure, ultimately led to a big disaster. So basically, all your efforts, best intention efforts, the better they were, the stronger, the more effort you were putting in, the more detrimental the end result. 

And think about that. Right? Think about that in your data science projects. But also think about that in terms of your personal life. Have we ever had situations? I’ve had situations where you feel something’s wrong in a relationship. You feel something’s wrong in your interpersonal connection with somebody, or in where you live, or what hobbies you’re doing, or whatever else. And you choose to ignore that. You choose to power through and put in effort, put in effort all the time. Well, guess what, if the foundation is wrong, there’s always just three scenarios. You can either have a positive coefficient, might be high, might be low, might be moderate. Right? So your foundational setup will affect that. It could be zero, when you’ll have to throw all of your efforts into the bin. And basically, unless there’s a lot of useful learnings there, a lot of that will be wasted time. 

Or you could be a negative coefficient, where the more efforts you put in, the more detrimental the results. So it’s something to think about that setup at any point in the journey, whether it’s a work journey, or a personal journey, professional, or I don’t know, any other kind of journey, is very important. Your original setup and also the checkpoints, where things could go wrong, or where you need to readjust. That is always very important. And try to avoid, or aim to avoid negative coefficients. And often, your gut will tell you. This is a part where you could listen to your gut, or your gut feel, and be like, “I feel something’s wrong here,” whether it’s in a project, or personal life, or whatever else. Something might be wrong here. Listen to that and investigate. Don’t be afraid to put in a bit of time in there because at the end of the day, it can pay off. You want to be working in positive coefficients. You want to lead your life full of positive coefficients. 

So there you go, that’s my little story. If you’re taking the Tableau Certified Associate course, don’t worry about it. I’ll fix it all up. It’s going to be amazing. But other than that, just watch out for negative coefficients in your life. Hope you enjoyed that, and hopefully that’ll give you some maybe useful insights into avoiding some mistakes in your own life. And I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.