Graduate Rhapsody [closed]

Mesmerised as they light the flame

2010-01-19T12:18:00.001+13:00

This blog is now closed.

In May, when I graduate, I'll probably post something about that. In the event of my doing further study in the future, I'll consider writing about it here. Otherwise, all my posting is now over at litblog.

Thanks for reading.

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road

2009-12-31T10:00:00.004+13:00

And so I find myself leaving Victoria University of Wellington, probably for ever. I've been there for six years, and in that time a lot of things have changed - not always for the better. When I was a first year at Vic...

It was 2004.
Labour was in government.
Stuart McCutcheon was the Vice-Chancellor at Victoria (he's now at Auckland, and Victoria has Pat Walsh instead).
ITS was known as SCS (for student computing services), and when you told them about something broken, it was fixed within a week.
There was no university wireless network. (There was the excellent student-run SWANS, of course, and it's still more reliable than the official network, but with very limited coverage).
The math department was allowed to hand back its 500 or so weekly assignments via open boxes, so students could - gasp! - see each other's marks as they searched for their own assignments. This was changed to written-agreement-only during my second year, and by third year the open boxes were abolished altogether, leaving the long-suffering admin staff to hand back 500 assignments every week.
The School of Economics and Finance had enough staff to teach all its courses, including more than two specialists in each of macroeconomics and econometrics.
There was no myVictoria - access to the various online services was via a link repository called studentVUW, and you had to login separately to each one.
Student email wasn't administered by Microsoft, and your student email address expired after you finished your study.
There was no Faculty of Engineering.
There was a School of Mathematics and Computer Science. Then there was a School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science. Now there is a School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, and a separate School of Computer Science.
Gender and women's studies was, I'm pretty sure, not part of the Faculty of Education.
In fact, there was no Faculty of Education - the Wellington Teachers' College was still an independent institution.
I don't think there was a New Zealand School of Music either.
All areas of the library were signposted as silent study areas, and none of them actually were. (Now there are some where talking and eating are allowed, but it's not clear whether this has led to more respect for silence elsewhere.)
The Rec was... kinda scodie. It was refurbished in about my third year.
The library had carrells. They were good for sleeping in. Now the sides have been removed to make them into ordinary desks.
Relations between VUWSA and the university were very bad, owing to the university's apparent seizure of several student-owned buildings in payment of VUWSA debts. (The buildings seem to be further from student control than ever now, but relations have thawed somewhat.)
The Union, the administrative body for the seized property (made of a bunch of university employees and one member of VUWSA), was still called the Student Union.
Galleria sold Wholly Bagels bagels, and had a medium takeaway coffee size.
O-week events were well attended. (Is there even still such thing as O Week?)
VUWSA tended to have the money to fund them, rather than being constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.
The Pipitea campus was still partly under construction.
The Quad pizza place didn't sell curry, nor roast veges.
Salient contained a rather good comic called Man. I think 2004 may also have been the year of the genius Being Blind.
The cafe next to the Overbridge was called the Ilott. It had an awesome mural on the ceiling, with aliens and planets and spaceships, and it sold filter coffee for $1.10, and fruit-flavoured hot chocolate, and used china ornaments as table markers. I don't know what it's called now, and nor do I care, because it has none of those things any more.
There was no Unistop.
There was a campus pharmacy.
There were no Snapper cards. (I still don't know what VUWSA have done about the free bus ticket scheme, with the introduction of Snapper meaning they can no longer give out ten trip tickets.)
The library's collection of books was somewhat bigger than it is now, the controversial Collection Appraisal Project having reduced the collection by 10% in, I think, 2006.
There was no Westpac ATM on campus.
The EdCom computer store on Cotton Street was smaller, darker and less funky-looking.
There was only one table in Cotton Street, in front of what was known as "the good sofa". Now there are many tables, and lots of chairs too.
Cotton Street had rather icky greyish carpet with greenish stripes, instead of the current green carpet/grey vinyl combo.
Cotton Street was full of posters showcasing the work of Science grad students. These stuck out at right angles to the eastern wall and reduced the visual width of the Street.
There was no direct wheelchair access to Cotton from the eastern parking lot.
There was direct access from Cotton to Laby, with no other building in between.
There was furious controversy over the newly-completed entrance to the Easterfield building, which was hugely expensive but inaccessible after the doors were locked at 6pm each evening. Critics protested that this voided its stated purpose of making it safer for students to leave campus late at night.
There was no Te Puni Village.
The Mount Street Bar was called Eastside, The Mount Street Cafe was called Vicky's, and neither of them sucked anywhere near as hard as their modern counterparts do.

I'm a-singin' you the song, but I can't sing enough

2009-12-06T22:57:00.000+13:00

Until now I've kept my lecturers' full names out of this blog, and during Honours, where the lecturer pool is so small, I've even suppressed their first names. Today I break that rule for the first and only time. Today I honour the special lecturers who really made a difference to me during my six years at university.

These people are from many different disciplines; I encountered each of them at very different stages of my studies; they all taught me completely different things about my disciplines, about study and about life. With some of them I never spoke a word one-on-one; others had to suffer me visiting them every other day. Each of them, during my short time in their classes, changed my life in a definite and often terrifying way. I will always remember our encounters fondly.

To Geoff Whittle, Colin Bailey, Philip Rhodes-Robinson and Chris Atkin; to Peter November, Mike Hill and Chamsy el-Ojeili; to Geoff Bertram, Viv Hall, Vladimir Petkov and Jack Robles; to John McDermott, John Randal and Pian Chen; and to Don Trow: thanks!

There are two paths you can go by

2009-12-02T23:09:00.000+13:00

Got my First. Phew.

In principle, I could now complete a Masters in one year at Vic, enter directly into a PhD program at any New Zealand university, or start grad school from scratch in the USA (after passing the GRE, of course). Note that I'm not saying any of these is a good idea. They're just what the rules would allow me to do.

The alternative is to take up a permanent position at a well-respected New Zealand economic institution, continue my education informally, be productive, get paid, and take some control of my life.

Just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine

2009-11-26T16:08:00.000+13:00

Here are my grades for the year. To work out which ones are from this half, ignore all the A+ grades except that belonging to ECON 405. The ones you're not ignoring are my second trimester grades.

I hereby award myself the Inconsistency Prize for the oddest-looking grade spread ever.

Specific comments:

The Modelling grade is a slight disappointment. After getting an A+ in the 25% essay and having a good exam, I thought I'd get an A+ in the course too. Oh well.
The Metrics grade is a small miracle. My midterm was so bad I would have had to get 84% in the exam to make an A on numbers alone. Maybe we've been scaled.
The Micro grade is a relief - the exam didn't go so hot, really.
The Macro grade is purely a result of ballsing up the exam. It's not unexpected, but that doesn't keep it from hurting. I knew what I was doing, and I still messed it all up. Dammit, fibby, when will you learn?

Now the lecturers will all get together in a big meeting to determine what "class" of Honours we should each receive. My grade point average should ensure me a First, but the Honours grading process is so arcane that there's no certainty until the results are actually out. That could be as much as a month away.

2009-11-15T15:07:00.002+13:00

That's funny, it looks as if I never got around to posting this when I wrote it in early November...

After my midyear exams I summarised, for each course, the expected number of students answering each possible set of exam questions, given by the quotient of the number of students and the number of possible exams in that course.

Here's the corresponding summary for my finals. This time I'm including detail about the question choices, because it helps make more sense of the value of $E(x)$.

Course	Students	Choice of	From	E(x)
Macro	14	1	2	7
Modelling	7	3	6	0.35
Micro	8	2, 1 and 1	4, 2 and 2	0.8
Metrics	7	3	4	1.75

Vitriolic, patriotic stand, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched

2009-11-13T11:57:00.001+13:00

The Metrics exam was good. Prof Metrics had obviously learned from our variously abysmal performance on the midterm, and he gave us a nice present for our last exam - math problems instead of essays! I had fun, except for where I forgot everything I knew about Dickey-Fuller tests, but that bit was only worth around 10%.

Well, wouldya look at that:

What do I do now? Where am I supposed to be? Who am I? Suddenly no one is expecting anything of me. How shall I react to this?

There's still time to change the road you're on

2009-11-12T21:30:00.001+13:00

Today was the last day I will ever have to spend studying for Honours. The last day of pacing the house alone, trying to force myself to work. The last day of reading and writing, reading and writing, until my brain feels like a revolving door for information.

The econometrics exam is in 12 hours. The fact that I have to sit an exam is dwarfed in my mind by the fact that it's my last exam. When I consider it, I'm fairly unconcerned - mostly because this particular exam is without precedent, so I have no idea what to be specifically worried about.

In his armchair, you can feel his disease

2009-11-11T16:40:00.000+13:00

Another good exam in Micro. It wasn't as great as Modelling, but it was perfectly fine. I ran out of time to do all of the low-marks part for which I hadn't prepared so well, but I'm very confident in my work on the high-marks parts.

After the exam we all stood around and sort of looked at each other. It was as if none of us wanted to admit the course is over (for most of the class, this also means the year is over). I guess I'm not alone in loving Micro.

I asked the exam supervisor why they're still having to take away our question papers after the exam. Apparently the official reason is still swine flu. I don't understand. If the question papers get germs on from a coughing class member, won't our pens and things then have germs as well? How does confiscating only the papers prevent the spread of disease? And what happens to the papers now? Unless they're destroyed immediately, they'll still be effective transmission vectors regardless of whether students take them home or not.

Now Metrics, Friday, and that's it!

Flicker from the opposite loft

2009-11-10T21:30:00.002+13:00

The Micro exam is in 12 hours. As usual with Micro, I'm incredibly relaxed. Notice how I haven't made any wanting posts about Micro; that's because I never had that sensation of just not wanting to read about it.

And in 14 hours, Micro will be over forever and ever. OMG... I'm going to miss Micro.

Pink, brown, yellow, orange, and blue

2009-11-07T17:47:00.001+13:00

Back on form. Yeee-ah.

The Modelling exam was great; of the six questions (choice of three), there were five I could have done pretty well. I chose the three questions which related to the two Reserve Bank models we studied. All went well, I wrote lots and didn't run out of time in any dramatic way. Naturally I was mid-sentence, nay, mid-word when the examiners called time; you don't stop writing with time to spare just because you've finished the core of what you wanted to say. Hopefully Prof Modelling will be able to decipher what I meant by "a combination of fan charts and traditional multiple proj".

As for those 65 INFO 102 students, by the end of the exam only three were left in the room. Must have been an easy exam for them. Yeah... I remember first year.

The Furies breathing down your neck

2009-11-06T21:30:00.002+13:00

Exam in 12 hours. Strangely hopeful. You know the deal. Except this time, I feel as if there may be some justification for being hopeful; I've spent the day cuddled up with the KITT paper (yes, it's big enough to cuddle) and have actually been enjoying it. Bizarre, I know. But probably a good omen for the Modelling exam.

The second time that I followed you

2009-11-05T12:16:00.000+13:00

Gah, I don't want to read about KITT today, I want to do the exercises from Mathematics in Civilization by H. L. Resnikoff and R. O. Wells. I've had this book lying on my shelf untouched for over four years, and last night I happened to pick it up and read a short section about real numbers, and suddenly I'm burning to spend more time with it.

Still frames in your mind

2009-11-04T09:36:00.002+13:00

Actually, I do kinda want to read about FPS today. But I also want to download all the old photos which are still on my camera, sort out which ones need to be preserved as replacements for the ones which got corrupted on my old hard drive, and then delete the rest. It'll be a half-day's work.

Business continues below

2009-11-03T11:28:00.001+13:00

The marks for the last Micro assignment were finally posted on Sunday (Dr A Micro had an accident which delayed his marking a bit). I got 92%, which is fine with me. Someone got 96%. That's fine too.

The next exam is Modelling, on Saturday. The seven of us are in with 65 INFO 102 students. The other 117 of them are split across three other exam rooms (yeah, I remember undergrad). We'll probably have to sit in the front two rows of our room so the examiners can distinguish us from the first years; I don't mind so much, as long as the little tykes are quiet.

I will let you down

2009-11-01T17:18:00.001+13:00

The Macro exam was almost exactly the exam I had prepared for, with no questions on unexpected topics, but a time management fail led to me doing only about two-thirds of the paper. I kept thinking I'd shortly unstick the bit I was stuck on, and then suddenly there was no more time. Fail. I probably will not get that A-.

You cannot reach me now

2009-10-30T21:30:00.002+13:00

The Macro exam is in 12 hours. I feel oddly hopeful. There's really no reason to feel this way.

I need 68% to get an A-, so I probably won't disgrace myself. But I probably won't do myself proud, either.

He's right, but I lose my will

2009-10-29T11:17:00.002+13:00

I don't want to read about real business cycle theory today, I want to learn Sage.

No, really. Any material on RBC theory includes a mention of the Hodrick-Prescott filter, and every time I see that I'm seized by a wild desire to implement it myself, because it looks so invitingly simple:

\[ \min_{y_{t}^{g}} \; \sum_{t=1}^{\infty} \left[ \left( y_t - y_{t}^{g} \right)^2 + \lambda \left[ \left( y_{t+1}^{g}-y_{t}^{g} \right) - \left( y_{t}^{g} - y_{t-1}^{g} \right) \right]^2 \right] \]

Where $y_t$ is the data point of series $y$ at time $t$, and $y_{t}^{g}$ is the data point of the trend series $y^g$ at time $t$ (the output of the filter). The above optimisation penalises for volatility in the estimated trend as well as deviations from the actual data. $\lambda$ is just a weighting parameter.

Anyway, I'm just burning to code this up in GAUSS (I'd have to do the calculus by hand, but GAUSS would love the minimisation part). However, soon my academic career will be over and I will no longer be able to rely on university licenses for analytical engines. For hobby projects, it's best if I start relying on something open, like Sage; the HP filter seems like a good experimental project for learning with when I switch to my new open engine. But I want to do it now.

The work for somebody else's dream

2009-10-28T09:05:00.000+13:00

Oh man, I particularly don't want to read about rational expectations today.

I want to go have a picnic somewhere. Then get ice cream from Kaffee Eis and wander along the waterfront with it. Then cook something exquisite and time-consuming for dinner.

The most hated on

2009-10-26T19:53:00.001+13:00

I hate studying for exams. One of my greatest strengths is my ability to assimilate a large amount of information in a very short time; I've developed this as a result of six years of hating studying for exams. (Edit: I should clarify that I'm not particularly proud of this skill. It lets me get away with being uncommonly lazy.)

Just because I can do it, though, doesn't mean I have to enjoy it. I'd much rather be doing problems, or even writing summaries, than just pouring information into myself. As a happy medium, my favourite method of exam preparation is working through old exams.

Two of my four exams this trimester are utterly without precedent. Metrics this year is being taught by a different person, and in quite a different way, from previous years. As a result, last year's exam is not a very good guide to this year's. All we have to go on is the structure of the midterm and the content of the problem sets. This is not too bad; it's not that difficult to generalise from one to the other.

Macro has undergone a serious change in structure this year. Although the content covered seems to be broadly similar, the exam format we've been told to expect is totally different from last year's exam. We have two sections of two questions each, and a choice only on section B. Last year had six questions with a simple choice of three. We have, apparently, "a mix of essays and problem solving". Last year's questions were all essay questions.

In addition to the decrease in choice - we get to leave out one, whereas last year's lot got to leave out three, lucky bastards - we're also suffering badly from a lack of precedent on content. In a course with problem sets, it's generally safe to assume that the exam will be at a similar level to the problem sets. This course has had only one problem set, and that related only to the second half of the course.

As we are given to expect "a mix of essays and problem solving" in both sections, we'll probably be faced with at least one analytical exam question based on the first half of the course (which we won't have an option to skip). Although we've been given analytical material in spades in the assigned reading, it's not clear at all whether we're expected to have learned this in much detail. Do we need to practice only techniques which were demonstrated in class, or do we need to understand all the hard-out math in the academic papers we've covered? Are we going to be asked to prove known results or derive unexpected ones? Will we be given the assumptions or asked to lay down our own? Will there be calculus?

Asking Dr Macro any of these questions draws a response along the lines of "all the course material is examinable". Yep. That's... so helpful.

That's okay, my will is good

2009-10-25T09:10:00.000+13:00

I don't want to read about investment theory today, I want to walk the Skyline Walkway.

Good day to be alive, he said

2009-10-23T10:02:00.000+13:00

I don't want to read about unit roots today, I want to make Vienna bread.

Most of what I know

2009-10-21T15:17:00.003+13:00

After a day of agonising in terror about collecting my marked Modelling essay, I finally picked it up to find that it got an A+. This was a shock. You may recall that I didn't much enjoy the process of writing this essay, so I assumed that Prof Modelling wouldn't much enjoy reading it, either. Well, maybe he didn't, but apparently he thought it was okay nonetheless.

The Prof questioned my use of the word "robustify", which gave me an odd sort of satisfaction - I was right to remove it from the other essay I wrote for this professor. He also questioned my word count. I'm not sure whether he means that he suspects I've broken the word limit, or that he'd wanted me to include an estimate of the word count. If the former, he was right, of course.

As for the grade, I can only quote myself: "I have a record of highly inaccurate estimations of the quality of my own essays."

As this essay was worth 25% of the course, I'm now on a high A (low A+, if you prefer) going into the exam, undoubtedly a good position to be in.

Like damn, we just swapped

2009-10-20T23:56:00.007+13:00

This weekend I did my last ever Micro assignment. I made it the best I possibly could, which coming from a perfectionist like me, means it's something of a tour de force (hopefully). It goes on and fricking on. Every base is covered, every possible interpretation, special case and side issue discussed. And at the end of it all, the entirety of all the conclusions are summed up like this:

My last ever assignment and I've finally learned how to draw pictures in $\LaTeX$! How cool is that?

Technically I shouldn't post that until after the assignment due date (Friday), but if any of my classmates do happen to read this (unlikely), they'll already know that it's meaningless without any derivation. And that took five pages.

The experiment which was in this paragraph failed epically and has been removed.

The dawning of the rest of our lives

2009-10-16T16:17:00.001+13:00

Day off today. Returned my failed external hard drive to the retailer. Got my Pixar fix by seeing Up in 2D. Tried the new Grand Angus McDonald's burger (it almost lives up to the hype). Got 100% in the Macro problem set.

Mr Macro, marking my problem set, seemed a little confused by the following statement about the polynomial $1-\alpha L - \beta \gamma L^{2}$ in $L$:

If both roots are complex ($\alpha^{2}+4\beta\gamma < 0$; note this can only occur if $\beta \gamma < 0$), the real and imaginary parts of the roots are \[ \Re = \frac{\alpha}{-2\beta\gamma} \qquad \Im = \pm \frac{\sqrt{- \left( \alpha^{2} + 4\beta\gamma \right)}}{-2 \beta\gamma} \]

He circled the negative sign inside the square root in the expression for the imaginary part, wrote a long comment, then crossed it out and gave me full marks. I know my handling of complex numbers is always a little idiosyncratic (due to self-teaching), but I didn't think it was that odd.

We offer prayers for your long-lost souls

2009-10-15T16:52:00.000+13:00

And that was the last day. Bye bye, lectures - possibly for the last time. Hello, exams - hopefully for the last time.

This morning, to celebrate the last day, I wreaked bloody vengeance upon the management/marketing students (the consensus is unclear on their exact major) who stole MY multiplug and extension lead in the Honours room back in March. Not content with rearranging the room so only a few people at a time could use it, they then strewed their property all over the desks to ensure that those few people were always themselves. At the same time, they moved the lead and multiplug which I had set up in such a way that four people could use it at a time, and relocated it to a single desk so that only one or two people could use it at a time. Needless to say, these were always the same two people, also.

Today I got to the Honours room before anyone else and removed my extension lead from their setup. I couldn't find my multiplug, but by god, I took back my lead. And then left the room. Hastily.

Dance beneath the diamond sky

2009-10-13T16:26:00.001+13:00

Since the Madness of Modelling last week I've done a Metrics problem set (late, because I had to make my code MOAR AWSUM), been to the last lecture for two of my courses, and spoken to next year's prospective Honours students (I don't think they were impresed).

Today the research we've been studying in draft form in Modelling was published. Just in time for the exam!

I'm in the dreamy state of semi-depressed terror which is unique to the dying days of any major project. My university education is the biggest project I've ever undertaken, so the dreaminess is very intense. As is the terror.

Can't stop my brain

2009-10-08T16:59:00.000+13:00

I'm so tired I'm even finding Salient funny.

On his shoulder a Siamese cat

2009-10-06T22:05:00.000+13:00

The Modelling essay I handed in today was my last university essay ever. Barring further study, of course :-P

It was neither the best nor the worst essay I've ever written. It sort of made the point I wanted it to make, and it was long enough. Beyond that I have a record of highly inaccurate estimations of the quality of my own essays.

The Modelling lecture today was the most interesting, and also the last presented by Prof Modelling (the final class next week will be presented by a guest lecturer). We're studying stuff so new that the definitive research on it is not published yet; our study is based around a draft copy obtained by Prof Modelling. It's a genuine draft, full of errors and omissions, and occasionally the class and the Prof are united in confusion over the meaning of a section. We've managed to develop a way of moving towards mutual consensus when this happens. It's been fun.

As I've also finished the Macro problem set, the only thing I have left to worry about this week is the Metrics problem set. I shouldn't be feeling so relaxed; it's due in 36 hours. But I haven't yet handed in a Metrics problem set on time this trimester, and I'd hate to disturb the universe by starting now.

Sometimes you gotta suffer a little in your youth

2009-10-05T16:39:00.000+13:00

Dr A Micro: "Let me tell you about the exam. You'll have to choose two essay questions and two numerical questions."

Class: "Will they all be worth the same?"

Dr A Micro: "No, the numerical questions are worth 35 marks each, but the essays are 15 marks each. So I would do the numerical questions first."

Class: "How long will the essays be?"

Dr A Micro: "About a page each. Basically just regurgitate the lecture notes."

Class: "… and the papers?"

Dr A Micro: "No. I only expect you to have read my lecture notes. Mentioning the papers might get you bonus points, but… no."

OMG

I LOVE MICRO

Too young, too smart, too dumb

2009-10-02T12:03:00.000+13:00

Yes, I'm aware that it's been a while since I actually mentioned my study. This is because I've been having a terrible time, and as you know, when I'm having a terrible time I don't blog.

At the moment I'm writing a Modelling essay due Tuesday. There are two problem sets due Thursday, then a long break before the final Micro assignment... and that's it, apart from exams.

Where time gets fast but everything gets slow

2009-09-28T17:21:00.003+13:00

For complicated reasons relating to the failure of neoMac last week, I spent half of today up at Kelburn. Cotton Street, scene of some of my best hours at university, has changed a lot. The floor covering has changed, the noticeboards are mostly gone, the long sofas have been replaced with short ones, little soft stools have appeared all over the show, and there are even a few tables and chairs. The chairs are comfy; I tried them. I was under the impression that comfy chairs in student spaces were a breach of university policy.

Edit: The research posters are gone, too. As they used to hang perpendicular to the wall, the effect is that the street feels a lot wider and lighter.

The new design smelled of paint today, so I didn't like it much. It may be more likeable when it doesn't smell of paint.

When there's a journey, you follow a star

2009-09-23T16:51:00.000+12:00

First I was miserable because of my Metrics test mark. Then I was miserable because I couldn't work out how to determine the stability of a dynamic system with two lags. Then I was miserable because my Mac failed while I was working on that problem.

Now I have a courtesy Mac while my other is off for diagnostics, and I've solved my problem, so I'm not miserable any more.

I'm astounded that Steve Jobs hasn't yet managed to acquire the copyright for boyfriends. They'd be a perfect fit for the Mac brand - they're aesthetically pleasing, status-enhancing, fun to use, solve all your problems and smell nice out of the box. Admittedly they don't always JustWork^TM, but then, neither do Macs always JustWork^TM if we're perfectly honest about it. If Lord Jobs doesn't move soon on this one, Google will acquire the BoyFriend copyright instead, and then where will we be?

Ain't no use jiving, ain't no use jokin'

2009-09-17T12:24:00.002+12:00

I got ~~77.67%~~ 76.67% in the Metrics midterm. Sigh.

It's still an A-, so if I do better in the final exam, I will still get an A. But I am definitely not getting any prizes at the end of the year. Classmates, please stop asking me if I'm going to get any prizes, cos I'm not.

Observation: the midterm was on September 11. The final is on Friday 13 November. Logic dictates that the unluckiness of these two dates should cancel out, but I'm not so sure now.

The wine don't come to the top of your cup

2009-09-15T15:48:00.000+12:00

The Macro class as a whole was fairly unhappy with the referee report grades. It would seem that Dr Macro has had so many visits from unhappy Macro students, she decided to post an explanation of the marking on Blackboard (rather than explain it to everyone individually, I guess). Unfortunately, the explanation doesn't do much to help matters, because it goes rather beyond the scope of your average marking guide and also points out that we all did everything wrong, and are stupid. Not in those words. But it's not really what you'd call a constructive piece of criticism.

The moment I saw Dr Macro's comments on my report I knew that fishing for more feedback would be a hopeless task, so I promptly forgot all about it. Not that her comments were useless, but it was clear that she was after a particular thing, and whatever that thing was, my essay didn't have it. No point having further discussions about it, really.

Digging my way to something better

2009-09-14T14:39:00.004+12:00

When I first started this countdown, it had over a year to run. At that stage it was counting down to the last possible ending time of the last possible exam in the 2009 end-of-year exam period, calculated from the university's official calendar.

That's how it looked just before 2pm today. At 2pm the final exam timetable came out, and I was able to correct it for the actual date and time of my very last exam. As a result of the correction the countdown lost 30 hours.

It's a very spread-out exam timetable by Honours standards. I have two weeks between the end of the trimester and my first exam, then another whole week, then a bunch at once. This is probably the worst possible timetable for my study style - I'm not much good at multitasking in the absence of an urgent deadline.

Having said that, it's good to have time at the start, and it's good that they're all in the morning.

Slipping slowly from my reach

2009-09-12T23:46:00.001+12:00

The first thought to enter my mind on waking this morning was the thought of all the things I should have mentioned in the midterm, but didn't. It was as if my subconscious had been plotting all night to ambush me.

Between now and the start of exams (on 27 October) I have only three assessments remaining. The year crashes sickeningly to a close, and surprisingly enough, I feel again the way I felt in the dying weeks of my math major. I'm digging in my heels to try to slow time down. Not that I've gone crazy with enjoyment for my study this year, but studying at Vic is all I know, and soon it will be gone forever.

However, I can say with complete innocence of cliche that the thing I will miss most about Vic is my classmates. As there's a fair chance I'll be able to stay in touch with some of them, that means leaving is not as scary as it could be.

Now deservingly this easy chair

2009-09-11T15:45:00.000+12:00

The Metrics midterm was fine. I felt weak afterwards, but not from horror, just exhaustion. Prof Metrics took the unusual step of asking us how we found it while he was still collecting in the papers. We all gazed limply at him for a while until someone ventured that we could probably have used more time.

My sketchy intuitive understanding of the material will be the single factor that costs me the most marks. I can prove stuff from morning till night, but not in only two hours. This made it difficult to satisfactorily explain some of my conclusions without including a full proof.

The unsettled mind is at times an ally

2009-09-10T17:10:00.000+12:00

New Metrics topic (time-series analysis) is good. New Macro lecturer is good. Preparedness for Metrics test (tomorrow) is not so good.

Today's two lectures had an area of perfect overlap. This hasn't happened since the time in first year when I was introduced to propositional logic three times in one year. It's never happened in one day before.

Calling out to idiot America

2009-09-08T14:43:00.013+12:00

I would just like to make the following point.

If P \left( A \right) = \dfrac{ e^r }{1+e^r}, then, obviously, P \left( \neg A \right) = \dfrac{ 1 }{1+e^r}.

Last night I couldn't figure this out (yeah, I'm awesome), so I wrote a fancy function which has the result of outputting exactly the above. In somewhat simplified form, when A is the event that Y=1 and Y is a binary variable,

 P \left( Y = y \right) = \dfrac{ e^{y r} }{1 + e^r }

It takes a really special sort of blindness to write a fancy function to output an obvious fact when that fact is not itself understood.

Take the plan, spin it sideways

2009-09-07T15:24:00.002+12:00

The Micro assignment came back today.

I've been doing all my assignments (and most of my essays) in LaTeX since MATH 301, which comes to just over two years of TeXing. Today, for the first time, a marker offered TeX suggestions in their comments on my assignment. This is a happy day.

It's not every day, too, that an assignment comes back with a comment that begins "okay, it has been a bit of a struggle for me to understand your argument"... and still gets 90%.

We have a different lecturer for the last six weeks of Micro. We're back with Dr A Micro, the same guy who lectured the first six weeks in the first half. He's probably one of my favourite economics lecturers (and I swear it's not just his accent!), so this half should be good, Micro-wise.

Right at this moment, though, I'm deeply embroiled in a Metrics problem set. It's nominally due today and I'm really trying to get it in before... say, midnight.

As you are, as you were

2009-09-04T15:34:00.000+12:00

For the last six weeks of Macro, commencing Thursday, we have another adjunct ("Mr Macro"). I know him slightly from life outside university. What I know of him has made me very hopeful for these six weeks.

Today, six whole days before his first contact with us, he sent us all an email. Spot the difference in the following Blackboard announcements.

Dr Macro, whose assessment was due on August 20:

Mr Macro, whose assessment is due on October 8:

I'm even more hopeful now.

Never thought I'd do you the same

2009-09-02T09:53:00.000+12:00

My referee report grade is not what you'd call outstanding. I got a B+. Dr Macro's comments suggest that I may have spent too many of my 1000 words summarising the contributions of the paper, and not enough suggesting areas for improvement.

If I do okay in the Macro exam I might still get an A in the course. It's happened before.

My Modelling assignments both got A's. This is fine with me.

Lots of people talking, few of them know

2009-08-31T12:54:00.001+12:00

Prof Metrics gave us Problem Set 2 in the last class before the break - that is to say, 11 days ago. One question in the problem set requires use of a dataset which would normally be posted on Blackboard. Last week I checked Blackboard a few times, but the dataset wasn't there. Today I got around to emailing Prof Metrics about it.

My real question is, was this a test? Did Prof Metrics deliberately refrain from posting the dataset, in order to force us to email him, and thus ascertain when we started the problem set? I wouldn't be surprised - we were all at least a week late handing in Problem Set 1, so he would have some incentive to find out how we think we're organising our time.

Bitches, they come, they go

2009-08-26T01:00:00.015+12:00

There is this long to go until the end of university.

At that time I'll have posts remaining on exam results, Honours class, and any final reflections on my time at university - and that'll be it. I'll have to find something else to talk about.

That means this blog will become useless to me. There's not space in the masthead to change the title again, and anyway, I can't think of another word that fits into the rhythm. ("Employed Rhapsody"? No.) Then there's the label set, which is specifically university-related, and which will become unmanageably large if I start adding other types of labels to it. And the layout, and the colour, and the gimmick of titling all my posts with song lyrics - no, there's just too much to change. Better to make a clean break.

Also, because of my job, I won't be able to contribute much to discussions about economics from next year. You can see I'm going to have to find a way to change direction a bit.

For the next few months I'll dual-blog here and at litblog (there's a new widget in the sidebar to help my four readers keep up with litblog from here), and then I'll close this and take all my blogging over there. This blog will remain online as a static archive as long as Google and I both see fit.

Like an Armageddon flame

2009-08-25T10:27:00.001+12:00

24 August 2009 20:08

Hi Prof Modelling,

After handing in my assignment this afternoon, I realised I made a silly mistake with the nominal GDP figure at the top of page 4. Specifically, I omitted three zeros when I typed out the value of GDP...

The fact that Prof Modelling decided to accept this email as part of my assignment doesn't change the fact that I did a fairly shoddy job of the whole assignment.

I never pretend to be perfect, and this is why.

Out on the wing of this wobbly bird

2009-08-23T12:14:00.000+12:00

If I was proud of my first LaTeX game with continuous choice nodes, I should be even happier with this one. It has a disagreement arrow at the third node - another feature not supported by the basic egame package.

Pathetic jokes about Q theory, devised and/or noticed by sleepless macro students just before the referee report was due:

Me: Q makes us QQ.
Y: Q sounds just like a French word meaning "ass", therefore the paper is a load of ass.
Cooper and Ejarque (2003): paper subtitled "Requiem in Q" (because Q is now a member of the diatonic scale).

Someone, I'm sure, must have said something about "minding their Q's", and someone else surely mentioned that their creativity is "stuck in a Q". If not, we were nowhere near sleepless enough.

One Thursday a few weeks ago, the main door into Railway Level 4 from the stairwell spontaneously locked itself. This door also happens to be the emergency egress for that floor. There's another stairwell, but it's card access only so I wouldn't bet on it becoming unlocked in case of an emergency. While the main door was locked, the lifts also seemed to seize up, and the entire Macro class waited for around 15 minutes before one came to take us from Level 3 to Level 4 for our lecture.

The stairwell door was still locked when the lift came, but it was open again when we left class two hours later, so it was probably locked for at least half an hour in total. I can only say that if there had been a fire on Level 4 during that time then the university would currently be in mourning, and probably facing legal damages in the millions. There are certain systems that just should not fail, for any reason, ever.

Working from seven to eleven every night

2009-08-21T07:57:00.003+12:00

Writing my referee report required having a very large number of article PDFs open at the same time. I think I broke Exposé...

Looks like... 51 windows, including the two not minimised? Must try to reproduce.

Edit: Actually it's probably more than 51. iPhoto and Activity Monitor should be visible too; I assume they're both un-minimised and sitting behind iTunes. There may be an arbitrary number of other windows in the same situation.

Ice is forming on the tips of my wings

2009-08-20T01:30:00.000+12:00

My referee report is done, except for the changes I'll inevitably want to make when I re-read it after having some sleep. I've even done the reference list, which is always the bit I dislike the most. Unsurprisingly, my report is precisely 1000 words. That's what happens when you write just a bit too much, and instead of cutting whole sections, you just delicately prune it word by word until you reach the upper bound.

Observations:

Neoclassical papers are a lot shorter than new-Keynesian papers
All the authors writing about Q theory in the past decade have surnames that start with a letter before I in the alphabet, or else collaborate with someone who does
Contrary to popular belief, dialup does not get faster in the middle of the night

Now I have to do some micro and some modelling. Both of these promise to be at least a little bit fun, so I'm going to relax for a while.

Here is the thing I'm most proud of among my achievements of the past week:

Why am I proud of that? Because I made it in LaTeX. Because the egame package doesn't natively handle continuous choices. Because I taught myself how to draw ovals just to force the game to look precisely how I want. Because it was fun.

Heaven waits for those who run

2009-08-18T09:53:00.000+12:00

Yesterday afternoon was supposed to be set aside for summarising the approximately 20 bazillion articles that I may wish to cite in the Macro referee report. Instead, I spent it working on Micro. Today I will have to make up for this lapse; I predict that by dinnertime I will be exhausted, tense and extraordinarily grumpy. It may end up being a gin-toddy evening.

On I read until the day was gone

2009-08-16T09:43:00.006+12:00

Having put in two blocks of brief intense work (for Modelling last Tuesday, and Metrics on Friday), I'm now in the midst of a furious assault on the Macro referee report. Unlike the paper we reported on for Macro last trimester, this paper makes it very easy to see where it fits into the literature. This is only a good thing insofar as it cuts down on research and reading. Otherwise, it's a very bad thing, because it makes the paper extremely irritating to read. Not to put to fine a point on it, the authors like themselves, like their work, and whack you over the head with this fact approximately once per page. I don't need to be told ten times that you did it all with the assumption of perfect capital markets! Once in the introduction and once in the conclusion is plenty!

Today's work is downloading papers and, time permitting, summarising their relevance to the paper under reveiw. I always start with the reference list at hand before branching out to the horror of database search. (A real referee wouldn't have to do this - being a subject matter expert, they'd already know exactly which papers to cite in their report.) My favourite database is JSTOR, because it's easy to use, but if JSTOR doesn't have a particular title then ScienceDirect always does. There seem to be a large number of ScienceDirect collections. I've never bothered to work out why that is, but if something appears in both, say, the ScienceDirect Freedom Collection and ScienceDirect Journals, I always go for the Freedom Collection. Because it has a much more awesome name.

Graduate Rhapsody: bringing you the very best in academic research technique!

Edit: I've just finally worked out how I download NBER working papers. I was aware that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but now I've figured out what makes it work, so I'm recording it here for future reference. This method works for any NBER publication to which our library has access; other methods may work as well.

Search the library catalogue for "NBER"
Click on "NBER technical working paper series [electronic resource]"
Scroll to the bottom of the record and click on "Full text available from National Bureau of Economic Research Publications"
Login with student login ID when prompted
You should now be looking at the latest Technical Working Papers on the NBER website. If the paper you want isn't a TWP, or is more than eight years old, you won't find it here. Instead, go to the top left and hover on "Publications". Select "Working Papers" from the list that appears.
Enter the Working Paper number (if you know it) or keyword in the "Full Text Search for Working Papers" box, and click Search.
Click on the title of the paper you want. Because you got here from the library catalogue, you'll be able to download it as a PDF from the links on the left. (If you just went to the NBER website without going through the library catalogue, the download link wouldn't be available.)

A repeat, and it's getting old

2009-08-14T16:55:00.000+12:00

Things that I want my laptop to do in the future:

Recognise and respond to the body language which humans cannot suppress even when using a laptop. Try to run faster when I'm frustrated, or at least offer a sympathetic sad face in Growl; increase the screen brightness when I squint; be more colourful, louder and more inclined to switch to my browser when I'm energetic and happy; suggest that I go for a little walk when I slouch for more than a few minutes at a time.
Relatedly, slow down and offer to undo actions which are immediately followed by a groan and expression of annoyance.
Notice which part of the screen I prefer to look at, and put my active windows there automatically.
Notice which tracks I frequently turn the volume up or down on, and play them more or less often, respectively.
Focus windows and buttons which I stare at for a while.

Am I retarded or am I just overjoyed?

2009-08-13T13:44:00.001+12:00

Possessions which still smell new, months after I bought them:

neoMac
Dark jeans from Kathmandu

Sequence of events this morning:

Woke up after insufficient sleep
Didn't have time for coffee at home
Went to Sweet Fanny Anne's to get coffee before lecture
Drew and Ace and got a free one
Marshmallow got stuck in bottom of takeaway cup
Used miniature chocolate-flavoured snack bar to scoop out marshmallow
Felt happy after my chocolate-flavoured cakey melted-marshmallow-covered caffeinated snack.

Things that the Metrics students said while Prof Metrics was out of the room, after he asked nicely if we could please try to hand in our overdue problem sets tomorrow:

"Has anyone handed anything in?"
"I'm only going to hand in question 3."
"I handed in my half-arsed effort last week."
"I'm going to do question 4 tonight and skip question 3."
"I'm not going to hand in anything."
"Question 2 is easy." "Really?" "Yeah!"
"I won't hand anything in if you don't."

I guess this is what happens when you set assignments that aren't worth anything for a moderately overworked group of people.

Comes to you as to us all

2009-08-11T16:17:00.000+12:00

When I feel awful about my study, I generally don't blog, so it's meaningless in the context of this blog to say that I suddenly feel better. Nonetheless, I do suddenly feel better, after feeling awful for the past week. The same litany of deadlines exists - Macro Thursday week, Micro the day after that, Metrics already six days overdue - but it's not freaking me out any more.

Why? Because this morning before the Modelling lecture, each and every one of us confessed that we haven't started the Macro report yet.

Ain't it strange how just knowing you're not alone can make the world look better?

You just want to be on the side that's winning

2009-08-09T11:16:00.004+12:00

The Economist recently published an excellent pair of articles on the future of, respectively, macroeconomics and financial economics in the aftermath of the financial crisis ("The state of economics: The other-worldly philosophers", July 16th, 2009). In the macro story, they outlined some of the various battlegrounds on which the modern macroeconomic consensus has been worked out - first Keynesian vs classical, then new-Keynesian vs neoclassical, then "freshwater" vs "saltwater". By the time the battles were over, a consensus had arisen which, they say, was destroyed by the events of the past 12 months. However, The Economist holds out hope:

Thanks to the seismic events of the past two years, the prestige of macroeconomists is low, but the potential of their subject is much greater. The furious rows that divide them are a blow to their credibility, but may prove to be a spur to creativity.

Excellent. Nothing could give me more pleasure than the prospect of entering a discipline which is in the process of rebuilding itself, particularly when that discipline has been so deeply divided in the past. If a new consensus is what we need then I and my classmates are going to be right there, striving to understand the old arguments, struggling with the new realities of the economic world, doing our best to bring one to the other and make something better from the synthesis. We'd like to think it's what we're being trained for. After all, we've all studied both new-Keynesian and neoclassical macro this year; incomplete though our understanding may be (and it must be, after barely six months on each), this roundedness can only be an asset in the strange new world of macro.

But what's this? Our new-Keynesian professors are rubbishing the neoclassical assumption of full employment. Our neoclassical lecturers are scoffing at the new-Keynesian focus on short-run welfare improvements. Each side is deliberately presenting the other's arguments as facile. The two camps are not engaging with each other. They are not accepting their own shortcomings, nor the other's strengths. They are pushing us, their semi-educated students, small units of the future of macro, to choose a side. Now. At the age of 23, before experiencing either the real or the the academic worlds, we are being required to put ourselves in intellectual boxes.

Intellectual boxes are the past of macro. Mutual understanding is the future. Vitriol, like that quoted at the start of The Economist article, is counterproductive; measured debate should be brought into the public arena. If, as The Economist suggests, we are a discipline with a credibility problem, then it's well past time for us to lay this pettiness aside.

I will not choose a side. I opt out of the battle. If I wish to believe in both full employment and imperfect capital markets, I will. Where I see strengths, I shall use them, and where I see weaknesses, I shall cast them out. This is our right as students: to be shown all sides of any debate, and allowed to draw our own conclusions. When our lecturers and mentors seek to pin us down to one side or the other of a defunct intellectual debate, they are failing in their moral duties as educators - and putting their own discipline at risk of falling into irrelevance forever.

I must eliminate my enemy

2009-08-07T15:46:00.002+12:00

On Tuesday I went out and bought the missing cable required to make my new power supply suppy power to my hard drive. Now my hard drive works again. The entire experience took two weeks and one day, and cost me around $35 (shipping and the purchase of the cable).

Otherwise my week has been full of fail. I need to work more.

Who's the fucking mastermind here?

2009-08-03T14:42:00.001+12:00

This morning I got a power supply from Ascent!

The drive-end connector matches my drive, so assuming it works, I should be home and hosed. But I have no way of knowing whether it works because, oopsies, what plugs into that socket you can see in the photo? A detachable PSU-to-wall cable which I returned along with my faulty power supply, and which was not replaced along with the replacement power supply.

So whose fault is this: mine, for returning a detachable part that wasn't faulty, or theirs, for not replacing everything I sent them?

Edit: When I Googled to check the artist of the song for this post title, I got many lulz:

Take the pressure from the swelling

2009-08-01T10:49:00.000+12:00

Now that I have actually looked at the article for the referee report (posted yesterday, but I sulked and didn't open it until today), I may have to soften my opinion of Dr Macro a little.

The article was written in, or at least has been processed by, TeX. That means that even if my brain bleeds when I read it, my eyes won't.

So on Thursday aftenoons when Dr Macro arrives late, uses H and H to represent totally different variables, includes "a wizard did it" lines in her derivations, shouts, and runs over time; at those moments I'll be the one doing deep breathing and muttering "she digs TeX. She digs TeX..." over and over in a calming mantra.

You've got a lot of nerve

2009-07-31T13:00:00.001+12:00

Ascent: decided the new hard drive was "a misship" and asked me to send it back. Implied that I would get a power supply if I did so.

Micro: assignment due in 3 weeks. Looks fun.

Modelling: assignment due in 12 days. Time consuming.

Metrics: problem set "due" (but not very formally) on Thursday. I need to do this to get a grip on what's happening in class.

Macro: the article for the referee report was posted this morning. It's due in 20 days. When I asked why the article couldn't be posted earlier, I was told to be grateful for having almost three weeks, because Dr Macro usually gives her students only two weeks for this assignment. I disbelieve. It's a major piece of work if it's done properly.

Dr Macro went overtime yesterday by 35 minutes without indicating that she would do so, nor apologising when she did. She keeps making remarkably stupid errors of notation. She speaks so loudly it hurts the ears. She gives no indication of the purpose of each lecture. Students groan when they mention her name.

Far from being intellectually drained, as I should be after two lectures in one day, it looks like I'm doomed to arrive home on Thursdays frustrated and fizzing with anger.

Do you take me for such a fool?

2009-07-29T10:41:00.000+12:00

The sheer number of AC/DC fans yesterday took down both the Ticketek website and their call centre, but I got my tickets anyway, by the time-honoured method of walking to the ticket office and using my EFTPOS card. (Ticketek admit that the website issue was caused by too much traffic, but claim the phone problem was Telecom's fault. Yeah, right.)

It's a good thing I wasn't able to buy my first choice of tickets online...

... by the time I got to the ticket office in person, the Thursday show was sold out and the vastly more desirable Saturday show had been announced, so the glitch caused me to get better tickets than I would have if everything went smoothly.

Unlike the fans mentioned in the Dom Post article above, I did not get charged for the online transaction that failed, so I'm all good. Just broke.

In other news, I got a package from Ascent this morning!

Not what I asked for - I wanted a working power supply for my old drive - but a whole new drive is a nice surprise. I got out the new power supply from the box to see if it was compatible with my old drive, and immediately ran into two problems.

The small end is manifestly not compatible with the old drive. Darn, I thought, I'll have to borrow back the power supply I used for the diagnostics, and clone the contents of the old drive across to the new one. Oh well.

Then I noticed the other end of the power supply... manifestly not compatible with being in this country. And there were no adapters in the box, despite there being a set of instructions on how to change to a different adapter.

Ascent's response? "I believe New World Supermarkets have them very reasonable. Otherwise Farmers or Dick Smith?"

It's not my fucking job to go out and scour the town for a part which you failed to supply me with. It's your fucking job to get that part to me as soon as possible. Jesus, people.

Your streets where all your money's earning

2009-07-27T15:58:00.001+12:00

Awesome word for the day: supermodularity. It's almost as epic as it sounds, because it enables vital microeconomic analysis without having to use the implicit function theorem.

Worrying moment for the day: discovering that printer ink is a lot more expensive than I realised. Trying not to look too anxious while punching in my EFTPOS pin. Trying not to look too surprised when the transaction is accepted.

Places where I would rather not have spent the latter half of the day (but was forced to due to circumstances beyond my control): Victoria Street. Pipitea Campus. Parliament.

Don't know how you'll spend it

2009-07-26T17:47:00.000+12:00

Tomorrow I have to buy:

A 1:50,000 Topo map of the northern Marlborough Sounds
A new colour cartridge for the inkjet printer
Batteries for my laser pointer
A packet of Tazo Chai teabags

On Tuesday I have to buy:

AC/DC TICKETS

Depending on the way the wind may blow

2009-07-24T16:04:00.001+12:00

Hard drive update: yes, the power supply was covered under warranty. Yes, Ascent will replace the power supply. No, I don't have to send in the whole drive to achieve this. If the end result of the process is an actual working power supply (and it's looking increasingly as if it will be), I will have to start sacrificing a Flash drive to Ascent every Friday, as clearly their powers must extend beyond those of your average retailer into the realm of the gods.

Today was a lot of fail centred around my attempts to get the power supply mailed to Auckland, but it doesn't really matter, because I don't have much to do anyway. I want to start on my coursework but cannot do so until various dates next week (a different date for each course). Until then there's nothing to do but read.

The man with the golden eyeball

2009-07-23T16:42:00.000+12:00

This morning I asked the slightly anxious Prof Metrics if he can teach us some Bayesian estimation techniques later in the course. He protested that he knows nothing about them, then took the opportunity to ask whether his lectures are pitched at an okay level for us. I asked for more proofs (sorry, guys).

This afternoon I got bored in Macro, although I woke up briefly to be amused when Dr Macro failed to distinguish between the words "additive" and "addictive". The reason for the boredom was a bunch of equations which we manipulated in fairly simple ways to no apparent purpose.

At the end of the lecture Dr Macro told a student that the article we have to review by the 20th of August will be made available next week. Personally, I'd prefer to have more than three and a half weeks to do the review, and I suspect the rest of the class feels the same. Not happy.

Macro has gained the same German Exchange Student who joined Micro this week, with the result that Macro is now a huge class of 15, still with 8 girls.

As I want you to be

2009-07-22T13:49:00.000+12:00

It's halfway through week 2, and I still don't have any assignments to do. It's disturbing. It isn't likely to change much, either - in this entire trimester, I have only seven formal deadlines (plus one midterm that hasn't been scheduled yet). None of these fall in July or September. This leaves a huge amount of time for normal stuff, like reading and understanding material, which I would never normally have time for once the assignments are out of the way. I've been reading every day, and it's... bizarre.

Observation: the Commerce library is so small that you only need to look up every callmark once. Having found a book by callmark the first time, you locate it on subsequent occasions by your memory of its position on the shelves. It's pathetic how few books we have for a university campus.

Some kind of happiness is measured out in miles

2009-07-21T15:02:00.002+12:00

Yesterday was a day of furious perambulation around Wellington. Highlights: nearly getting hit by three separate vehicles while crossing Salamanca Road (I had the right of way!); spending almost $20 on photocopying; losing the annoying bits of my hairstyle.

At the second lecture yesterday, Micro had the same number of students, but the makeup had changed: Russian Guy seems to have dropped and instead we now have German Exchange Student. We learned about the implicit function theorem. I've never liked this theorem much; it's inelegant no matter how you state it. Turns out, though, that it's rather useful in certain types of application. Glad to know that it does serve some purpose in the world, so that part of MATH 301 wasn't torturing us in vain.

Modelling, this morning, has lost three people, leaving us with three guys and four girls. Dr Modelling has been bringing along various colleagues from the think-tank he works at, which helps the room feel a bit less empty. (No less cold or dark, though.) Occasionally his colleagues correct him during class. In his shoes I would find this extremely disconcerting, but he doesn't seem to mind.

Another disconcerting thing is that, come Tuesday lunchtime, my week is already half over. Last trimester it hadn't yet begun by Tuesday lunchtime!

Diet coke, I'm on my knees

2009-07-20T14:55:00.000+12:00

I need a power supply, preferably from a WD external hard drive. The connector should look like this:

And the power rating should be like this:

If you can sell me one, or tell me where I might get one, I'll be eternally grateful. My drive is fine - only the power supply has packed it in. I don't want to send back my non-defective drive and lose all my backups just for the sake of a new power supply.

The highway is for gamblers

2009-07-19T18:54:00.000+12:00

The good news is that my failed external backup drive was under warranty.

The bad news is that I've committed most of my current account balance to AC/DC tickets, so buying a new external drive isn't possible just now. If neoMac fails before I get a replacement backup drive, I will be very extremely unhappy.

The other good news is that neoMac is still less than a year old, so it's unlikely to fail in the next ten days. *crosses fingers*

So where were the spiders?

2009-07-17T16:08:00.000+12:00

Warning: this post is even more boring than usual.

The trimester got underway in a flurry of room confusion. Having one lecture per course per week tends to make one a bit set in one's ways. After 12 weeks of going to the same cold, dark seminar room on Friday mornings, suddenly finding oneself there an hour later on Tuesday morning is a bit disconcerting.

Micro is in the Metrics/Growth room. Modelling is in the Macro room. Metrics is still in the same room. There's nothing in the Micro room (this was surely predictable, as it's my favourite seminar room), and Macro is in a ridiculously huge room which I've never been in before. You have to go upstairs from the Honours room to reach it. It's all so confusing.

This trimester looks to be light on assignments, heavy on reading, and totally free of textbooks (yay!). I may as well summarise my week in statistics, since I couldn't be bothered blogging after each lecture.

Micro: Monday morning. Two assignments, one exam. Eight people (we've gained three!), three girls. Lectured by the non-mathematically-minded Dr C Micro for the first six weeks, then back to Dr A Micro for the rest of the year.
Modelling: Tuesday morning. Two assignments, one essay, one exam; ten people, six girls (female outnumbering male for the first time this year). Lectured by an adjunct, who I shall call Dr Modelling, for the first four weeks. After that most of the course is lectured by Prof Modelling, who happens to be the same person as Prof A Macro from last trimester. There may or may not be a guest lecture later in the trimester.
Metrics: very early Thursday morning, but Prof Metrics has declared that we shall start at 9am rather than 8.30 from now on, so that's a small improvement. One test, one exam. Unknown number of assignments, not counted for assessment. Seven people, three girls. So far as I can tell, they are the same seven people who got As in first-half Metrics. It's nice to be lectured by a professor, but he declared early on that he doesn't specialise in the one thing I really want to learn about (time-series econometrics), which is a bit disappointing. There's only one lecturer for this course.
Macro: Thursday afternoon. Scheduled to finish at 5.30, but actually expected to finish at 4.30, according to Dr C Macro. (This means my Thursdays have shrunk to a manageable size - yay!) One report, one assignment, one exam; 14 people, eight girls (again, female outnumbering male). The second half of this course will be lectured by an adjunct. He doesn't appear to have a doctorate, so I'll call him Mr Macro (that's actually quite an awesome name).

The institution that will be employing me at the end of the year has finished its graduate recruitment round, with the result that I now have one future colleague among my classmates. I don't know her very well, but hopefully we'll get to know each other better once we're working in the same department.

The only one that I have ever known

2009-07-10T08:16:00.000+12:00

Trimester 2 starts Monday. I was going to get textbooks early in the week, but my Monday and Tuesday courses are both free of set texts, and my Thursday courses both have set text "TBA". So I can't really do anything about that until Friday, which is great, cos by that time I'll have been paid again :)

Last trimester this blog was full of "I hate Fridays", because I had two lectures on Fridays, and they were for my toughest courses. This trimester it'll be "I can't stand Thursdays", for much the same reason - with added day-length horror!

The difference is that Metrics hasn't, to date, been one of my toughest courses. I expect that Macro and Modelling will hold that title, so I can at least be a little glad that it's not those two together on the same day. All the same, I predict much whinging, sighing, and difficulty getting out of bed on Thursdays for the next 14 weeks.

Nice thing: can sleep in Fridays to make up for it.

AAAAAAAAH-aaaaaaah!

2009-07-07T10:12:00.001+12:00

When it comes down to it, I guess the letter grades are fairly distinct from the letters in the course titles. The extra character after the grade helps :-P

I must say that I was not expecting this result in any way. Not for Growth. Not for Macro. I'm a bit stunned.

Really nothing to turn off

2009-07-03T08:26:00.000+12:00

It must have taken a special sort of sadism to come up with these course titles, given that the last column is for the final letter grades.

Couldn't they have called them "1" and "2" or something, instead?

Exam results should be coming out over the next week. I'm trying not to wait too hard.

While I'm posting screenshots, I may as well register my strong disapproval of Kiwibank's new online banking interface. It's not dialup-friendly:

What is more, when after several attempts we finally get enough speed on to satisfy the server, we find that this is what we've been trying so hard to load:

Would it have killed them to include the self-congratulatory promotional material on the account balances page, so as to get some actual information after all the waiting? This is the sort of situation for which the phrase "FFS" was invented.

Seven years has gone so fast

2009-06-30T16:00:00.006+12:00

The trimester ended for me a week ago, and already it seems like nothing more than a bad dream. It certainly wasn't all bad at the time, but by contrast with the social freedom I'm enjoying now, the memory of study seems a bad one.

Renewal is the name of the game now. I'm working hard to live and amass experiences in this break, because I won't have another chance until November. Here's some of what I've done so far - none of these are things I have time do properly during the trimester.

Slept in
Spent a week's pay on a single pair of jeans
Read Waiting for Godot (Act I | Act II)
Photographed the fernball from a new angle
Made bread rolls and pizza
Been to a movie (I've Loved You So Long) with a friend
Helped out in the garden
Visited a different Toastmasters group
Solved a New Scientist Enigma
Read half of The Mayor of Casterbridge
Had a long lunch with my parents
Seen the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra live

They're all such small, simple things, but being able to do them puts a whole new shine on life. I feel as if I can barely contemplate giving them up for another trimester. Hopefully once my renewal is completed, I will feel more like picking up my tools and going at it again.

Not so self-assured

2009-06-27T00:43:00.000+12:00

This is supposed to come out at ⁵/₁₂. What on earth has gone wrong? (Yes, g(x) is zero outside the range [¹/₈, ⁷/₈].)

Tired and underprepared

2009-06-24T10:00:00.007+12:00

It's common for university exams nowadays to offer a lot of choice about which questions to answer. I'm not sure what the aim of this is - I can't construe it in any other way than throwing a lifeline to the underprepared student - but as I have on more than one occasion been one of those underprepared students, I'm not complaining.

It does, however, introduce an interesting statistic which I like to think summarises the size of the class relative to the complexity of the course: the number of students who answered each possible set of exam questions. Let this be called x_i, where i denotes the particular set of exam questions chosen. For example, in a standard first-year accounting course of 300 students, you might offer them a choice of any four questions from a set of five. There are five possible exams the students could choose (i=1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and if they choose questions randomly, you'd expect ³⁰⁰/₅=60 to sit each exam; that is, E(x)=60. This means you could assign one marker to each of the five possible exams, each would mark 60 scripts, and it would all be over relatively quickly. (I know they don't really mark exams that way, but that's not the point.)

50 or 60 is a reasonable value for E(x) for lower-level courses. In an upper-level undergrad course, with maybe 20 students and the same five possible exams, E(x) gets a lot lower; it's likely to be less than 10. Given that the real marking situation will probably a different lecturer marking each question, we now have such a small sample that it's possible some questions will have been chosen a lot more often than others. That means the marking load is a lot less spread, and, probably, marking becomes a more specialised task - as you'd expect for an advanced course.

But what happens at Honours level? Then things start getting seriously crazy. Here are the values of E(x) for each of the exams I just sat.

Course	Students	Choice of	From	E(x)
Growth	11	2	9	0.31
Macro	14	3	4, one of which has a subchoice	2
Micro	5	2 and 2	3 and 3	0.56
Metrics	10	4	4	10

The figure for Metrics is high because there was no choice in that exam. In all the others, the figure is so low, there's a real chance that some questions weren't answered by anyone at all - in two of the exams, there were more possible exams than students. Is that a win or a lose for the lecturer? Students with a great deal of specialised knowledge are probably a good thing, but what about the effort that went into composing the unanswered questions?

I took a different path

2009-06-23T16:02:00.001+12:00

Finished the take-home programming question for Metrics. If I hadn't fluffed around so much this morning, it would have taken less than 24 hours. As it is, it's early, and I enjoyed it.

The solid line here is my first attempt at writing a nonparametric estimator to the data points. I think you'll agree it's a very bad fit.

This fit is better - in fact, perfect, which shouldn't have happened. I somehow managed to cancel out the randomness and estimated the dependent variable data using only the dependent variable data.

This is more like it! Not too jagged, but nonetheless a good fit. This was the signal that the first half of the question was done.

It's difficult to demonstrate pictorially what the other half was about, because it involved finding an optimal value for a parameter used in the first half - except the plug-in parameter value we'd been given turned out to be exactly the optimal one, so the picture didn't change. The best I can do is point out that my results were precisely what Dr Metrics told us to expect:

Holiday time now. Oh dear... it's a while since I had one of those...

I started out on Burgundy

2009-06-22T14:11:00.003+12:00

Classwide reaction to the Metrics exam: "where's the rest?"

An easy question to answer. The rest is in the take-home programming question, which some have already done, and which I shall now start safe in the knowledge that my exam grade should be quite acceptable even if I do the programming all wrong.

The four questions in the exam were all either lifted straight from assignments, or very similar to assignment questions with minor modifications. It was not hard, and a person who knew what they were doing could have done it in an hour (half the exam time). Two people left around the 90-minute mark. I might have been with them if I hadn't drawn a mental blank on the first question; as it was, I stayed for the extra half hour (spending an hour in total on one quarter of the exam), and it was a good thing I did because I quite suddenly remembered the thing I'd forgotten. There was even still time to make use of it and complete the question comfortably.

No more exams! And no more Kelburn until October. Oh well.

Celebratory drink for the end of winter exams

Find your favourite enormous coffee mug. Estimate the volume. One part is one-eighth of this volume.

Put in the mug, in order:

One part gin
One part blackcurrant cordial
Two parts Charlie's old fashioned lemonade (or any homemade lemonade)
Four parts boiling water

Don't stir it, just drink it as soon as it's cool enough.

Nothing you can do that can't be done

2009-06-20T18:19:00.001+12:00

In the Metrics exam I only need to get 70%, on a strict numbers basis, to get an A+ for the course. The formal exam on Monday will contribute 80% of my exam grade, with the rest coming from the "take-home question" due Thursday. This means I need to get 62.5% in the formal part of the exam and full marks for the take-home question (which is possible; it's a programming question, and Dr Metrics is a sympathetic marker of code). Things are looking up.

The most amazing thing: all my plastic L-files are empty of paper!

My "temporary filing" shelves aren't quite empty yet, but they're getting there!

The only bad thing about life at the moment is that our central heating system has failed. Today it reached 10°C on the back doorstep, 14°C in the hallway and 21°C in my room, where I spent the day with the door closed, curtains drawn and oil heater running. This made me quite popular with certain members of the household.

I beg to dream and differ

2009-06-19T23:03:00.000+12:00

The Micro exam was this morning.

OMG. I love Micro.

The exam was like a long blissed-out trance. It was slow, being my only three-hour exam, and having been inexplicably cut to four questions from the anticipated five. And it was fun, being full of interesting problems to solve.

There was one part I couldn't do. Unlike in my other exams so far, I couldn't do it because it was hard, not because I hadn't prepared for it. It was one-third of the last question, making it one-twelfth of the exam. On a strict numbers basis I only needed 80% in the exam to get an A+. I might just be home on this one.

In the two days since my previous exam, the university has come all heavy on swine flu. They're preventing sick people from sitting exams with the rest of their class, and the exam supervisors have been given antiseptic wipes to add to the vast pile of stuff they have to take to every exam. (Our supervisor seemed slightly bemused by this, and I don't blame her. What are we going to do, infect our exam papers?)

A more worrying development is that the supervisors have also apparently been instructed to take in all the question sheets at the end of every exam. This is something to do with swine flu suspects sitting the exams at potentially later times; apparently the class can't be trusted not to show such people their question sheets. (Wouldn't most students avoid a suspected swine flu case for the sake of their studies? Just a thought.) This raises two issues. Firstly, there are people sitting exams under special circumstances every single exam period, and this has never before warranted the seizure of question sheets from the rest of the class. Secondly, when the entire class is in the same exam room at the same time, as with my exam today, the supervisor should be given the all-clear to let them keep their question sheets.

I've kept every single one of my exam question sheets since the start of university. Now the collection is incomplete. Oh, sure, I can download the 2009 exam when it appears online at the end of the year, print it out and file it with the others - but it won't be the original, and I'll know it. Thank heaven I hadn't written any notes on it that I would now have lost for ever.

Tonight an old friend phoned to whom I hadn't spoken for ages. This filled me with joy and hope, which I shall endeavour take with me into the preparation for my last exam - Metrics, on Monday. The real world is still out there, and it still gets in touch now and then.

It's cold when you're lonely

2009-06-16T16:57:00.000+12:00

Some things never change.

The Overbridge is dark, cold and lonely, the adjacent cafe doesn't have the same name it did the last time I was here, and the one formula I didn't look up turned out to be in the exam. So much for Macro.

Lonely, lonely, lonely time

2009-06-15T14:39:00.000+12:00

Coming to Kelburn for my first exam this morning made me feel homesick. It's a long time since I was here.

Remember THESE?

I had one in celebration after the Growth exam was over. The exam wasn't as bad as I thought - there were two questions I could do, so I did them. (We got to choose two of nine, so the odds were in our favour.) One was closely related to one of the essays I handed in yesterday. The other involved some mathematical unpacking of the Solow growth model. Both went pretty well, although my hand was really sore afterwards.

Then I sat down on a sofa and did the Metrics assignment, which I've just finished. So the worst is over, I think.

Run and you run to catch up

2009-06-14T16:36:00.000+12:00

Essays done! The one on my preferred paper was 5000 words (hah, 2500 indeed). The one on the unreadable paper really was 2500 words, but I think it contained more interesting arguments than the longer one. They aren't the best essays I've ever written, but hopefully a dim light of comprehension shines through somewhere.

Metrics time. Aargh.

Sunday morning is everyday

2009-06-13T22:36:00.002+12:00

Today I dared to believe for the first time that I might actually make it. A week ago I was still in denial. Four days ago I started working harder than I've done in years. I haven't been outside since Wednesday. And tomorrow, I'm going to make it.

Make what? Before Monday morning, I have to write introductions and conclusions for both my Growth essays; finish the last third of the Metrics assignment; and do whatever revision I can get in for the Growth exam. Each of these things on its own is small, but together, they add up to a ridiculously busy Sunday.

Blue mist round my soul

2009-06-10T14:39:00.001+12:00

Working so hard I have nothing to blog about. Handed in the last Micro assignment on Monday. Finishing Growth essay 1 today.

I was so sceptical about some empirical assumptions in this paper, I wrote a GAUSS simulation to find out what would happen to the results if the assumptions were violated. The conclusion from this is most interesting, but how can I use it in my essay? My lecturer won't understand the code and isn't that into econometrics. Oh dear.

The riot squad, they're restless

2009-06-05T19:18:00.001+12:00

Well, that's that. I'll never (unless I wind up at a grad school that has coursework) be formally taught anything more about DSGE modelling¹, nonlinear regression, general equilibrium theory, or growth economics. Two of my favourite lecturers will never lecture again. My classmates and I may never see our souls back in one piece.

1. Actually, DSGE may turn out to be the main subject matter of one course next trimester. Uncertain at this stage.

Chasing down a cyclone

2009-06-03T15:57:00.000+12:00

The trimester is definitely nearly at an end - I can count the number of assessments remaining (not counting exams) on one hand! Of course, the tragedy of Honours is that this only happens halfway through the last week of the trimester. Such is life.

I've written 1500 words of Growth essay 1 (anticipating around 2500). I haven't started Growth essay 2. Micro assignment 5 is due in four days. Metrics assignment 4 is due in 11.

And that's all.

The flames went higher

2009-06-02T17:40:00.000+12:00

The Honours room is full of noisy people, so I never go there any more except to visit my locker. At the moment, my locker contains the following:

A roll of cloth tape
Whiteboard markers
An extension cable
A laser pointer
A double adapter for a power outlet
A dirty cloth that has been used as a whiteboard eraser
A fan heater (yes, I've used this in lectures)

If the SIS forced open my locker, what kind of sedition would they accuse me of?

Now the dishes can be cleared

2009-05-29T09:00:00.001+12:00

Seek and ye shall find:

The Budget debate streaming live from the Parliament website:

(Actually, the quality was pretty good most of the time, but changing tabs in my browser seemed to give it a headache.)

Something strange happened to my Dock while I was trying to grab the above image:

Best opening to an assignment question ever:

Just a minute while I reinvent myself

2009-05-28T09:27:00.002+12:00

You can't have a little bit of sex, but you can drink a little bit of alcohol. I let the payoffs in all situations be multiples of the quantity of alcohol, covered over the thin parts with intellectual ducktape, and hammered the stupid model together until it stopped being self-contradictory. It is not a thing of beauty nor a joy forever, but at least I have something to hand in.

The only time he's satisfied

2009-05-26T16:57:00.000+12:00

The Favourable Bet Theorem is a statement about the tradeoff between money and risk. It says that a rational agent will prefer some risk over total certainty if the risk offers a chance of getting a higher payoff, but only if the agent is allowed to choose how much money to sink into the risky venture. You might not bet $100,000 even at very good odds (like 10:1), but given the choice, most people would bet at least $1 at those odds.

The current Micro assignment, due Thursday morning, asks us to apply the Favourable Bet Theorem to an actual student health poster about the risky business of having sex while under the influence of alcohol.

I do not know where to go with this one. You can choose a little bit of a bet, but you just can't have a little bit of sex.

Yes, I know House of the Rising Sun is not originally Bob Dylan's, but with a song so frequently covered I reserve the right to reference whichever version I want to.

Science and progress

2009-05-22T14:53:00.001+12:00

This picture shows a technology that the university have yet to fully understand.

It is called a radiator. When connected to a boiler, it represents a remarkably cheap and efficient way to heat a large building. To enjoy this benefit, you need about one radiator to each room. A room is an area which is sealed off from the heat of other radiators, with the result that it is cold inside even when there are radiators operating outside the room.

If you own a large open-plan area which was designed to be heated by radiators, and you want to use partitions to create artificial rooms, it's actually quite important that you introduce alternative forms of heat in those rooms. If you seal off an area that contains no radiators, and you don't put some other heat source inside, it will be very cold there, all the time.

Next lesson: how to ensure a healthy air flow to the artificial rooms.

It's been no bed of roses

2009-05-19T18:00:00.001+12:00

This picture would have more meaning if Vic's graduations were shortly after the end of the academic year, as in America. In fact, my first graduation (tonight) prefaces six more months of hard work, and my second (a year from now) will come after six months of real life. Graduation, for Vic alumni, does not mark a clear life transition.

Drew a line for you

2009-05-17T00:30:00.000+12:00

Forgot to mention: there was indeed another A in the Macro essay, and it was obtained by someone I know a little better than my other classmates. An almost-friend, if you will. I'm happy for her :D

On the high road to remembering

2009-05-15T22:30:00.000+12:00

My second Growth presentation is over, thank god. When it gets to five minutes after your last slide, the lecturer is still asking you questions, and you suddenly understand what the paper was about... it was a bad presentation.

The trimester is winding down like nobody's business. Here are my next lot of deadlines.

Macro: nothing. Exam 16 June.
Micro: assignments 28 May and 8 June. Exam 19 June.
Metrics: two more assignments (I guess 26 May and 2 June). Exam 22 June.
Growth: two essays, both due 14 June. Exam 15 June.

In view of this, to what should I devote my next week - researching for the Growth essays, getting to grips with Metrics, or commencing some exam prep?

Is it something comes natural?

2009-05-14T15:51:00.002+12:00

Ever since I got my first Mac (in 2007) I've favoured free and open-source software. This is primarily for reasons of convenience rather than ideology. The free software community tends to be pretty onto it with making their Linux/BSD software compatible with OS X, and such software is quick to download and install. No need to go to a store or mess around with license keys. It's not even about the money - I've donated money to a few projects that seem particularly worthwhile. It's just the ability to get new software in under 30 minutes and without leaving my sofa.

As a result of this laziness, all my class work is now done with some combination of OpenOffice, TeXShop and GIMP (and when I get around to learning some syntax, I'll add Sage to that list). It works pretty well. Graphics handling of any kind is superior on my Mac. There's not much Excel can do that OpenOffice Calc can't. There's nothing Word can do that TeXShop can't (although actually making this happen, of course, is a different story). And as I'm now discovering, there's nothing PowerPoint can do that LaTeX can't be made to imitate.

The trouble with this approach is that, while obtaining and installing free software is trivial, learning to use it is not. Occasionally it's necessary to make a huge leap in knowledge in quite a short time, and during this time, generally nothing else gets done. Fine when you're not relying on the new knowledge to get something done to a deadline, but...

I'm discovering the slide-creating capabilities of LaTeX 24 hours before a presentation, and boy, is it slow going. Yeah, I could use OpenOffice Impress, but somehow OpenOffice output never quite looks polished enough. Or I could abandon my vision of fancy slides with graphs, but then I'd have to do a bunch of extra math to compensate. Or I could login to a School PC and use PowerPoint with Microsoft Graph... ugh.

I feel dirty just thinking about it.

My last presentation was unsullied by proprietary software, and I'd like to keep this one the same way. But my last presentation was text-only (in LaTeX, equations count as text-only). Tomorrow's presentation calls for something more. And I don't know if generating crude plots in OpenOffice Calc and importing them to my LaTeX is quite going to do the trick.

OTOH, by virtue of my ignorance, I will be completely and totally incapable of bombarding my audience with bright, flashing, singing, dancing slides which utilise the full potential (shudder) of PowerPoint. Maybe fancy tools should always be this hard to use.

My sole intention

2009-05-12T17:58:00.000+12:00

Back at high school I was, liek, uber-competitive. Every time we got an assignment or test back, I would go around asking people what their mark was in order to ascertain whether I got the top mark. In each subject I knew just who to ask, and I kept a record of those people's marks to see whether I was coming top in the subject or not. In my defense, I had a particular goal for the year: I wanted to be Dux. For this goal it didn't matter a jot whether I was smart or had any skills, so long as my grades were above everyone else's.

Since then my priorities have changed. I view as wasted an assignment where I don't make any mistake. I'd rather spend four hours wrestling with a concept than ten minutes writing down a correct answer, if the wrestling means I get a better understanding of the concept. And needless to say, I no longer give two pins where my grade falls relative to my classmates'.

Consequently, it's entirely owing to the investigative efforts of other people that I've found out that my grade for the Macro essay is, quite possibly, the highest in the class. Just like me at high school, a group of my classmates have asked around everyone they consider likely to have got a good grade. So far, mine is the only A.

Honestly, this doesn't change my feelings about my own grade at all. I did some hard work, I got a nice result, and I felt that the one justified the other. End of story. But I can't help being puzzled about the apparent dearth of other high grades in the class. My classmates are a smart bunch. Some of them have the technical skills, unlike me, to understand the econometrics of the paper we were reviewing. Some of them have studied some humanities, like me, and know how to write well. I wouldn't lay money that these two skillsets are mutually exclusive among the class. So why no more A's? Did the paper leave them cold? Did they have other important things to do at the time? Or was the grading done particularly hard?

Most likely, though, there's someone else out there - someone who hasn't been asked - secretly nursing another A (or even an A+!). Two A's in a class of 14 is reasonable, I think. I assume that the other just hasn't been uncovered yet by my classmate-sleuths.

All the words in the dictionary

2009-05-12T12:51:00.001+12:00

No sooner had I posted Friday's whinge about assignments not coming back, than the Macro essays came back. I got an A and I'm pleased with it. Another one in the bag.

Since then I've been ill and hiding from the thought of all the work I'm not doing.

Here is a picture of the ceiling above the spot that delivers the worst wireless access on campus. Yes, that is a wireless access point up there.

Me and the dragon

2009-05-08T11:54:00.000+12:00

Yesterday I accidentally tried to invert a 200×200 matrix in GAUSS.

Today was the penultimate Macro lecture given by the dynamic adjunct. He'll be back in four weeks to take the last lecture of the course, but until then we've got Prof A. I don't think it's any skin off Prof A's nose if I confess to being slightly sad at the loss of the dynamic adjunct; as a lecturer, he's a hard act to match.

Since the start of the trimester (70 days) I've handed in seven assignments, an essay, and a test. I've got back three of the assignments and the test; the rest have disappeared into a black hole. On average, the items that have returned took 7 days to surface. On average, the ones that haven't returned are now 18 days old. (One of them is 42 days old.)

Surely makes you lose your mind

2009-05-07T00:25:00.004+12:00

This intriguing problem has come up in Macro.

We're analysing dynamic systems (on a very, very basic level) and working out when they are "determinate" and/or "stable". Before anyone brings in the heavy artillery, I should say we haven't used any actual differential equation theory. We've been told this: if \epsilon represents a stochastic exogenous shock (with mean zero), and the system is

 \left[ \begin{array}{c} y_{t} \\ \pi_{t} \end{array} \right] = A \left[ \begin{array}{c} y_{t+1} \\ \pi_{t+1} \end{array} \right] + \left[ \begin{array}{c} \epsilon_{y,t} \\ \epsilon_{\pi,t} \end{array} \right]

then the system is "determinate" if and only if both the eigenvalues of the matrix A are inside the unit circle. "Determinate" seems to mean having a unique solution (economists are pussies), and is taken to be synonymous with "stable" (lazy pussies, at that).

On occasion we work with a model where the form of the matrix is simply heinous, and calculating the eigenvalues becomes difficult. In case of this, clever textbook writers have come up with conditions which imply that both eigenvalues will be inside the unit circle. However, they don't always state the assumptions necessary for the implication to hold.

The problem with the current Macro assignment is that a question was designed using some of these clever stability conditions, but that those particular conditions rely on unwritten assumptions which the assignment question violates, with the result that the system of the assignment is actually not stable at all.

The matrix of the system has the form:

A = \left[ \begin{array}{cc} 1-\frac{\phi_{y}}{\sigma} & \frac{1-\phi_{\pi}}{\sigma} \\
\kappa(1-\frac{\phi_{y}}{\sigma}) & \beta - \frac{\kappa}{\sigma}(\phi_{\pi}-1) \end{array} \right]

The conditions which supposedly imply eigenvalues inside the unit circle (Gali 2008, pg 79) are:

\kappa (\phi_{\pi}-1) + (1-\beta)\phi_{y} > 0

\kappa (\phi_{\pi}-1) + (1+\beta)\phi_{y} < 2\sigma(1+\beta)

These conditions fail when \sigma=\beta=\kappa=1 (EDIT: and \phi_{y}=0). Why? What are the unwritten assumptions under which the conditions can be derived, and which of the parameter values are violating them?

In a cardboard box

2009-05-04T16:53:00.000+12:00

Anyone else want to have a go at this? I'd really appreciate your comments. Blaise? Bruce? qwandor?