Author: admin

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rePost-Advice to A Friend-Brian Jacob Takes Home the David Kershaw Prize – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog

I sent the excepted blog post to a friend. I think that we must never discount how much we could contribute to research. We must not think of ourselves us unfit to comment, unfit to dream. Hope the friend gets wat i’m tring to say.
Backstory: I’ve been telling this friend to write, she has a lot of interest in economics, and almost had a double major economics and stat.  She has this mistaken sense that she doesn’t have the pre requisite eminence to comment on the issues she has an interest in. I told her to just write. Eminence be damned.

At a time when technical prowess and fancy techniques are increasingly fancied in this profession, Brian gives hope to all the budding economists out there who have great ideas, common sense, and the patience to do careful empirical research. His papers are not very technical or complicated; they just find credible answers to questions that people care about.
Brian Jacob Takes Home the David Kershaw Prize – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

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EEE Education

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in response to this statement from jaafgie:

The fact that less than 20% of the initial block makes it to grad day means that there’s either something wrong with the selection process, the curriculum, or the quality of education and teaching.

Probably the problem is with selection and the program.
I read somewhere that in Harvard they had a projected grade that few people deviate from. You probably had to be someone who couldn’t take the pressure and ultimately failed or someone like bill gates who just had to conquer the world (In a way.)
In another interview I read that the head of an Ivy League institution alumni fund raising head probably Princeton or Yale commissioned a research  on donors. He wanted to know what were the profiles of the students who donated money later on.
What they found out was very interesting, it wasn’t the ones with the highest grades or the best in everything that were the most likely to donate 20 million later on in life. The people who donated the most were the were jst good enough to get through the selection wall and had other skills. They were the ones who were presiednt of an organization, already doing nonprofit volunteer work, people who had what they call soft skills (leadership, management, communication).
The thing is if you graduate from eee of up, you went through a very challenging set of hoops, and (specifically for someone) you are one of the smartest people anyone of us would probably know personally. The problem is that I feel that the “future donors to the department” are somewhat being turned away because the hoops are more apt to produce college professors (Nothing wrong with this i love my professors) rather than future stewards of industry. Think of it this way, circuit and erg consistently place at the top 6 of the freshman orientation rankings, and those two organizations are not pushovers in the engineering week overall championships. We have some of the best if not the best students in our department, but we seem to not let them fly. We burden them with stuff that they probably would be forgetting a semester removed. I read something from a professor I think a canadian school, he said “Joy First Theory Second”. And forgive me for saying this but in eee its, “Theory First, Your lucky if you find Joy”
If I were to regret something, it was that if I graduated on time I would probably never have found the time to love science, engineering , technology and research. If i graduated on time I would have been lacking most of the soft skill that I believe I now possess. The course was hard enough to really limit interactions and joy of work.
The thing is Ideally I shouldn’t have had to graduate 2 years later than expected to just have a full college experience.

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rePost: -Advice for Teachers- Knowing and Doing: September 2008 Archives

I so long to be a teacher. and when the time finally arrives. Hell I’m going to be one hell of a teacher.  hope I do become one and I’m going to be using this as a criterion.  Do I change the people that I teach?

Successful designs shape those for whom they are designed. In designing structures for people, we design them, their possibilities.
I wonder how often we who make software think this sobering thought. How often do we simply string characters together without considering that our product might — should?! — change the lives of its users? My experience with software written by small, independent developers for the Mac leads me to think that at least a few programmers believe they are doing something more than “just” cutting code to make a buck.
I have had similar feelings about tools built for the agile world. Even if Ward and Kent were only scratching their own itches when they built their first unit-testing framework in Smalltalk, something tells me they knew they were doing more than “making a tool”; they were changing how they could write Smalltalk. And I believe that Kent and Erich knew that JUnit would redefine the world of the developers who adopted it.
What about educators? I wonder how often we who “design curriculum” think this sobering thought. Our students should become new people after taking even one of our courses. If they don’t, then the course wasn’t part of their education; it’s just a line on their transcripts. How sad. After four years in a degree programs, our students should see and want possibilities that were beyond their ken at the start.
Knowing and Doing: September 2008 Archives.

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rePost: — Ten Commandments for a Responsible Pet Owner as dictated by the pet from Unfogged

I feel that this is good advice for friends/lovers/families too.
read the whole thing from here: Unfogged

Ten Commandments for a Responsible Pet Owner as dictated by the pet.
4. Don’t be angry with me for long and don’t lock me up as punishment. You have your work, your friends, your entertainments. But I have only you.
5. Talk to me. Even if I don’t understand your words, I do understand your voice when speaking to me.
9. Please take care of me when I grow old. You too will grow old.
10. On the difficult journey, on the ultimate difficult journey, go with me please. Never say you can’t bear to watch. Don’t make me face this alone. Everything is easier for me if you are there. Because I love you so.
Unfogged.

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rePost: -Last War Syndrome-Is 2008 our 1929?

From brad delong: I dub thee THE LAST WAR SYNDROME: ‘Everyones fighting the last war!’

Is 2008 Our 1929?
No. It is not. The most important reason it is not is that Bernanke and Paulson are both focused like laser beams on not making the same mistakes as were made in 1929.
They are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes made by Arthur Burns in the 1970s.
And they are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes the Bank of Japan made in the 1990s.
They want to make their own, original, mistakes…
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong.

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rePost: -The Right Question-Greg Mankiw's Blog: The Problem with Audience Participation

What Paul Should have asked was, who would trade your health system with ours??
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The Problem with Audience Participation
James Taranto reports this recent interchange, during which economist Paul Krugman tries to make the case for a Canadian-style national health care system:
Krugman: –and I wanted to ask, actually two questions, to the audience. First, how many Canadians, would Canadians in the room please raise your hands. [One person applauds, laughter]
Donvan: We have about seven hands going up—
Krugman: OK, not as many as I thought. OK, of those of you who are not on the panel who are Canadians, how many of you think you have a terrible health care system. [pause] One, two–
Donvan: We see—almost all of the same hands going up. [laughter]
Krugman: Bad move on my part.
Greg Mankiw’s Blog: The Problem with Audience Participation.

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Thinking the bailout through – Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog

September 21, 2008, 11:12 am
Thinking the bailout through
What is this bailout supposed to do? Will it actually serve the purpose? What should we be doing instead? Let’s talk.
First, a capsule analysis of the crisis.
1. It all starts with the bursting of the housing bubble. This has led to sharply increased rates of default and foreclosure, which has led to large losses on mortgage-backed securities.
2. The losses in MBS, in turn, have left the financial system undercapitalized — doubly so, because levels of leverage that were previously considered acceptable are no longer OK.
3. The financial system, in its efforts to deleverage, is contracting credit, placing everyone who depends on credit under strain.
4. There’s also, to some extent, a vicious circle of deleveraging: as financial firms try to contract their balance sheets, they drive down the prices of assets, further reducing capital and forcing more deleveraging.
So where in this process does the Temporary Asset Relief Plan offer any, well, relief? The answer is that it possibly offers some respite in stage 4: the Treasury steps in to buy assets that the financial system is trying to sell, thereby hopefully mitigating the downward spiral of asset prices.
But the more I think about this, the more skeptical I get about the extent to which it’s a solution. Problems:
(a) Although the problem starts with mortgage-backed securities, the range of assets whose prices are being driven down by deleveraging is much broader than MBS. So this only cuts off, at most, part of the vicious circle.
(b) Anyway, the vicious circle aspect is only part of the larger problem, and arguably not the most important part. Even without panic asset selling, the financial system would be seriously undercapitalized, causing a credit crunch — and this plan does nothing to address that.
Or I should say, the plan does nothing to address the lack of capital unless the Treasury overpays for assets. And if that’s the real plan, Congress has every right to balk.
So what should be done? Well, let’s think about how, until Paulson hit the panic button, the private sector was supposed to work this out: financial firms were supposed to recapitalize, bringing in outside investors to bulk up their capital base. That is, the private sector was supposed to cut off the problem at stage 2.
It now appears that isn’t happening, and public intervention is needed. But in that case, shouldn’t the public intervention also be at stage 2 — that is, shouldn’t it take the form of public injections of capital, in return for a stake in the upside?
Let’s not be railroaded into accepting an enormously expensive plan that doesn’t seem to address the real problem.
Thinking the bailout through – Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog.

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rePost: The end of global deregulatory reform — Crooked Timber

Need to read this book and it seems that I have something to occupy my mind with during the hour long commutes.
This was strangely invigorating for me. Ok maybe not so strangely.

Mark Blyth’s book, Great Transformations has a theory of the relationship between economic crises and economic ideas. Very roughly speaking, when a crisis occurs that is difficult or impossible for the prevailing wisdom to explain or deal with, intellectual entrepreneurs have an opportunity to create a new (partly self-reinforcing) collective wisdom. We’re most likely in just such a crisis now. Which set of intellectual entrepreneurs are going to succeed in reshaping a new collective wisdom – economic nationalists like Sarkozy and Putin, social democratic globalizers like Dani Rodrik, or some other crowd entirely – I have no idea.
The end of global deregulatory reform — Crooked Timber.