For my week 6 assignment, I needed to examine derivatives in real life.
As our professor said in his lecture, "derivatives are essentially the instantaneous rate of change of a function."
When translating this in my mind, I'm thinking the following: a derivative is the measure of something that is changing. I think that is as simple as it gets. Key word: change.
Currently at work, there are tons of examples of derivatives that are fitting for this discussion.
Since I'm working at an apparel company and we have internal staff and external companies that make our clothes, we can look into the rate at which production costs change based on how much fabric we use when we produce our garments. Of course this all depends on what type of fabric and if we're making regular tees or actual jeans.
So, in this example we can look at C = f(x) dollars.
The derivative, f'(x) is the change in C over the change in x.
Example:
As our professor said in his lecture, "derivatives are essentially the instantaneous rate of change of a function."
When translating this in my mind, I'm thinking the following: a derivative is the measure of something that is changing. I think that is as simple as it gets. Key word: change.
Currently at work, there are tons of examples of derivatives that are fitting for this discussion.
Since I'm working at an apparel company and we have internal staff and external companies that make our clothes, we can look into the rate at which production costs change based on how much fabric we use when we produce our garments. Of course this all depends on what type of fabric and if we're making regular tees or actual jeans.
So, in this example we can look at C = f(x) dollars.
The derivative, f'(x) is the change in C over the change in x.
Example:
So, if I say, f'(5000) = 10, this would mean that after 5000 yards of fabric used, the rate at which the production cost is increasing is $10/yard.
* As a warning -- I don't know exactly how much fabric is used to make some True Religion jeans so these numbers are all made up :)
And just for kicks -- if I look at derivatives from an HR perspective, one key example is when we look at compensation data for promotions and transfers. If we're looking at an internal employee who has been with a company for awhile, we should see plenty of changes in their compensation history. From annual merit increases (0-5%) to spikes of (15-25%) for promotions.