As you may know, we are trying to schedule an interview for Alex Tartakovski 
in Houston this week.  I am copying everyone involved because i wont be able 
to coordinate this tomorrow.  we just brought our new daughter home today and 
my wife is yelling at me to get out of my office.

I just found out that Thursday & Friday are bad days for him, so Wednesday is 
the only day to do it this week.  he would come down tuesday night and fly 
out wednesday evening.  it's probably easiest for him to arrange his flight, 
but he will need a hotel and transportation from the airport.  i gave him 
donna's phone number for help. i assume the hyatt would be best.  his home 
number is 215-702-3705 and during the day his cellular is 267-981-5425.

by way of background, i plan to bring in 3 people from outside the company to 
fill in some of the "vacants" in my group's org chart.  the 3 areas of 
specialization that are needed to execute the business plan are (1) 
coordination of origination, (2) deal pricing and underwriting, and (3) 
modeling and portfolio management.  alex is the perfect person for #3.  he 
has the deepest knowledge of probability of anyone i know and is efficient at 
building analysis models, which will be a big job in this business because 
portfolio management needs to be redefined in real time due to the lumpiness 
of insurance contracts and the lack of any historical methods for evaluating 
these risks.  development of pricing models will be a joint effort between 
"my" group and the research dept because this will need to draw on the 
expertise in research as well as being a realtime activity as new deals are 
being structured.  i want to encourage joint work between vasant / amitava 
and alex because his background and expertise is compatible with research.  
over the past 2 years, alex and i spent a lot of time developing new 
electricity spot pricing methodology and this is one area where he excels.  i 
would expect that he would be a valuable resource in research as well, and so 
i would like for him to be able to meet with vince is possible.  (this could 
possibly be done when vince is in philadelphia next week if there is time - 
(?))  depending on what work needs to be done in the future, i could see him 
working both on pricing research and this specific business unit.

i have attached alex's resume.  i assume he would be manager level, but i'm 
not sure of this.  
this doesnt necessarily come across in the resume, but the skills that are 
useful to us are:
probability / statistical model development
development of theoretical pricing methodology
excellent computer programming skills
database development and data analysis
he has the best understanding of the NERC reliability data format outside of 
Mike Curley, the NERC data manager.
designed and wrote the code for the pricing model used by Ace Power Products 
for deal pricing and porfolio mgmt.
excellent understanding of options pricing methodology and its application to 
hedging insurance portfolios.
if you want to get into superconductor trading, he can design the standards.
can beat me at Atari Battlezone (as well as being able to navigate a real 
tank through a minefield).

one objective of this meeting in houston is to make him feel comfortable with 
the organization (with which you did such a good job for me) and to give him 
confidence that he will be able to do state-of-the-art pricing research in 
the most innovative company in the world.  he is also interviewing for a job 
in morgan stanley's equity dept.

we will also arrange a meeting with Per in NY, but i would like to be in the 
office for that, so we can do that next week.

please call me @610-996-2522 if there are any questions.  i may not pick up 
but i will reply to voicemail promptly. i'm up 24 hours this week anyway.

thanks,

-- Dave