I love the way you make it sound

Finally, finally, finally the ECON 314 grade is out. I got an A+! It's amazing! I actually did it, despite having mentioned in advance that I might (I firmly believe it is bad luck to tell anyone your honest expectations about your marks. Always downgrade them first).

ECON 309 is out too. I got a B+ for that, which is about what I expected, and doesn't drag my lowest ECON grade down any further.

Here are all my undergrad ECON grades. If my MATH grades were a parabola, these are x⁴-2x²+1. The symmetry astounds me.

Code	Title	Trimester	Grade
ECON 140	Economics/Strategic Behaviour	2/2004	A+
ECON 201	Microeconomics	1/2005	A+
ECON 205	Development of the Modern International Economy	2/2005	B+
ECON 224	Intro to Public Econ	1/2006	A-
ECON 202	Macroeconomics	2/2006	A
ECON 305	Macroeconomics	1/2007	A-
ECON 309	International Economics	2/2008	B+
ECON 314	Microeconomics: Information & Markets	2/2008	A+

The light divided

The mark for my last ever math course came out the other day. It was an A+, meaning that my math grades over time make an almost perfect swoop down from and back up to the best grade available. For completeness, here they all are.

Code	Title	Trimester	Grade
MATH 114	Algebra & Discrete Mathematics	1+2/2004	A+
MATH 214	Discrete Mathematics 2	1/2005	A-
MATH 113	Calculus 1	1+2/2005	B+
MATH 206	Calculus 2	1/2006	A-
MATH 207	Linear Algebra	2/2006	A
MATH 312	Analysis	1/2007	B-
MATH 301	Calculus 3	2/2007	A
MATH 311	Algebra	1/2008	A+
MATH 314	Coding & Cryptography	2/2008	A+

The reason I'm a-travelling on

If you ever go to Waitomo Caves, don't eat there. Head back onto SH 3, then north for about 2 km. There in the middle of nowhere lies a place called the Big Apple, which is both cheap and enchanting.

If you ever drive north from Taupo or south from Hamilton with a bit of time to spare, skip the main routes and go via SH 30 and Te Kuiti. It's a lovely scenic road with very light traffic, which is most relaxing.

If you ever stay in a motel unit with a real kitchen, don't make the mistake of thinking you'll have time to cook.

A challenge before the whole human race

So, he did it. They did it. I never thought they would, but now the free world (whatever that is) can finally move on. Hurray.

Tomorrow is my last undergraduate exam. In view of this, I shall share the three pieces of useful advice that I've picked up in my five years as an undergrad:

1. If you want to be an economist, do not do a BCA at Victoria. Do a BA with econ and math majors. If math isn't your thing, you will never be an economist.
2. At the start of every technical course, find out what kind of calculators will be allowed in the test and exam. Use this kind of calculator for everything throughout the course. It's no good being a whizz on a graphics calculator if you have to use a scientific one in the exam, and calculator errors are way at the bottom of the list of "valid excuses why I got a bad mark in that exam".
3. If you get behind in your readings, don't stress out and don't try to catch up. Just go on reading the current material whenever you can. The stuff you missed is for study break, not for now.

That is all. I am now going to prepare for an exam, sit an exam, vote, go on holiday for a week, and start an awesome job. Next time I blog will probably be sometime in the early weeks of the awesome job.

Ginger sling with a pineapple heart

The French Green party is called Les Verts. This is not half as awesome as Chartreuse. However, I see that the colour is named after the drink and not vice versa, so I suppose we must forgive them.

Edit: My god, is there really an entire band founded on a single obscure Beatles reference? What kind of people choose to call themselves Ginger Sling and then produce an album named Pineapple Heart? What would people think if I founded a group named Ground Control and then addressed all my songs to some dude called Major Tom? They'd think I was a derivative idiot, that's what. Jeepers.

Use his back or use his brains

If there is a French Green party, is it called Chartreuse?

My program never did terminate - I had to abort it. It only got this far in the first hour:

I'd been looking for output something like this, but with tighter convergence as a result of many more points:

It looks like I was getting there, but it probably would have taken four hours or so all up. Possibly something less bulky than EViews could do it in a sensible amount of time, but probably not with such syntactical ease.

The beads of time pass slow

Now that the Micro exam is over I intend to post about random stuff as often as I like. This is a good time to start, because I'm waiting for output from a program that won't finish for at least 20 minutes, and it doesn't seem like enough time to actually bother doing anything productive. I do have one more exam, but not until Friday week. That kind of timescale isn't a great motivator.

This afternoon marks the end of the penultimate week of working with my high school student for this year. The program I'm running is for her - it's a little simulation that calculates the experimental probability of success in two attempts, when the theoretical probabilities are 0.6 on the first attempt and 0.4 on the second. Well, it started out as a little simulation. It's now 99,001 little simulations, with sample sizes increasing from 1000 in the first attempt to 100,000 in the last. This is intended to demonstrate how the experimental probability approaches the theoretical probability with increasing sample size. Smaller ranges would do it equally well, but pushing the limits of my computing resources is much more fun.

Today I had the great idea of making lemon, strawberry and apricot muffins for breakfast tomorrow. Sounds tasty, no? It's my own invention (as the White Knight would say). I'm not sure how well the lemon will go with the other flavours. Will they need rind, or will juice be sufficient? Should I add cinnamon as well? That would make the batter dark, and with pink strawberries these would probably be quite pretty with a white fluffy batter. Maybe currants would be a good addition. Planning out tomorrow's breakfast is a good way of ensuring that I remember to get out of bed each morning during the study break.

I really hope this simulation produces output before my student arrives at 3.30.

Thinking starts a chain reaction

Wow, that was almost exactly the exam I had prepared for. The only really unexpected thing was Section A, and I'd expected that to be unexpected, if you get me. My signalling question in Section B was beautiful (but it was about sausages! It made me hungry!). Section C contained two questions that were simply joint-value-maximising, partial-derivative-zeroing, gains-from-trade-splitting contract implementation; I did one of those, then went straight for the question on repeated games, because I was so excited on reading it through to realise that I could actually do it. I even got my favourite seat at the left of the lecture room. It was all perfect.

After all that stress about moral hazard, I never even looked at that question. It looks very long.

Section A strangeness:

... you are to take any non-italicized text as true. State if the statement in italics is true or false, and explain why.

Question 4: In models of moral hazard, the equilibrium contract will not be unique. The reason is that incentives for the optimal effort can be provided either by a linear contract or by a threshold contract.

Now, surely you'll agree that only the second sentence should be italicised? If someone believed the first sentence was false, they'd have a really hard time answering this question.

I'm not sleepy

The exam is tomorrow. I cannot think of anything intelligent to say about this.

The new graphics card is installed and works fine.

Nobody said it was easy

With 33.5 hours remaining until the exam, I'm now thinking more about strategy than content. We expect to have:

1. Section A: theory. 2 x 12.5-mark questions, chosen from 5 (whole course).
2. Section B: calculation. 1 x 25-mark question, chosen from 2 (Jack's section).
3. Section C: calculation. 2 x 25-mark questions, chosen from 4 (Paul's section).

So far I've spent most time preparing for the calculation sections. I can definitely do a question on signalling in Section B, and the odds are high that there will be one. I can definitely do a question on repeated games in Section C. For my other Section C question, I could do moral hazard or bargaining, depending which is less horrible. It's about even odds that there will be a question on all three of these. There are good odds that some pair of them will be present. That leaves me in a situation of quite possibly having to choose in Section C between a horrid question on something I've prepared well, or a standard question on something I don't know so well.

As for Section A, I haven't thought about it too much. We will be required to state the truth value of a given statement and explain why it has that truth value. There are so many tiny theoretical details in the course that could show up here, I'm in despair about what to swot up. My consolation is that two from five is a lot of choice, and that "false" answers can be demonstrated with a counterexample, reducing the need for deep theoretical understanding of every pointless little thing.

In short, I can calculate, but not theorise. Or (if you prefer) I can do stuff, but I don't know what it is I'm doing.

Not your rolling wheels

Today was study group. It was marvelous. Six of us squeezed around a tiny table in a tiny room in the Kelburn library, distributed piles of paper all over the place, and furiously disagreed about everything for two and a half hours. By the end of it I had an enormously enhanced understanding of all of the following things:

• Moral hazard, as taught by Paul (harder than the textbook version)
• Infinitely repeated games
• Finitely repeated games
• Bargaining without full verifiability
• Extensive-form rationalisability
• The awesomeness of my classmates

The others say that Jack has said that there will be (a) definitely a question on one of signalling or conditional dominance, or (b) probably one question on each of those (depending who you listen to). I'd be very happy with a question on signalling. Conditional dominance may require some more work.

Why is the "commerce library" open on Sundays but not Saturdays? I'm beginning to think they really do hate students.

No class, no style, no social skills, no comprehension

What is with commerce students spreading their papers across four feet of bench space, then going away and leaving them there for hours? What's with the related habit of leaving half their notes on a bench, half by a student computer, and leaving the computer logged in while they randomly wander between the two spaces all day? Study areas at Pipitea are too scarce for this crap. The worst of bad wishes on all their exams.

Tick tock, tick, tick

More progress! Bayes-Nash equilibrium was a trivial extension of the Bayesian Normal Form. I read the textbook chapter on moral hazard. Where is the hard? It all seemed much nastier when Paul did examples in class. The review sheet he's made, a complete overview of contract theory, is extremely helpful. It really does gather into one place all the theory behind the last six weeks of class. It still doesn't define full verifiability, though. I'm resigning myself to going intuitive on that one.

My plans for next year have changed a bit, with the result that my timetable now looks a whole lot friendlier:

All go and according with the plan

Progress! Now I can find a Perfect Bayes Equilibrium without too much trouble. I can draw Bayes Normal Forms, too, and find mixed-strategy equilibria. Next is Bayes-Nash equilibrium, then I should stop messing around with probability-based games and get down to seriously worrying about contract theory. Vicky is organising a study group for Saturday afternoon.

As for the computer, it stopped restarting when we turned off Norton GoBack, and so far it hasn't gone up in flames as a result. We bought a new graphics card. It cost $116, so hopefully it's of acceptable quality. We'll install it over the weekend.

Mysteriously, the Blogger spell check knows "equilibrium" but not "equilibria".

I'll cry tonight like I cried the night before

This post is not about how 314 is ruining my life (it's not doing that at all, it's actually going quite well now). This post is about how my desktop PC is ruining my life.

It all started back in mid-September when the old CRT monitor died. We thought it was the computer that was dead, so we took it to Datacom to be fixed. (As should be obvious from this mistake, we all tend to be extraordinarily dim-witted when it comes to maintaining the desktop. Keeping this fact in mind will make what follows less painful.)

Datacom told us the computer was fine, of course, so we took it home and connected it to an older CRT, which worked (for some loose definition of the word "work"). This confirmed the deadness of the big CRT, so we took it to the recycling people and bought a nice new ViewSonic LCD instead.

The LCD turned up with a DVI port, but no DVI cable. Plugged into VGA it didn't look very nice. After some striving we located a DVI cable, but when we took it home that night, the monitor proceeded to not work with any kind of cable. Suspicions aroused, we plugged in the older CRT again, and found that it was also not working.

There was no mistaking this time. We took the computer back to Datacom.

A few days later Datacom called up to tell us our graphics card was fried, so they had removed it. We were very surprised, for several reasons - mostly because we didn't know we had a graphics card. This, I swear, wasn't our fault. We bought the computer off the shelf in an emergency situation in 2004. The spec sheet said it had onboard graphics, and we've never had it open in all that time. Honestly, we had no idea.

So we weren't very stressed about the graphics card being removed, not having realised that we even had one. We told Datacom we'd just go with the onboard graphics. They said fine and we took it home. Not quite at once, though - as our hard drive was getting old, we also got them to put in a new one and clone our data to it. They had the computer anyway, so we figured we may as well ask them to do it at the same time. (Yes, we could probably have done this ourselves. No, it wasn't my idea to get someone else to do it.)

When the computer came home this time - it was last Tuesday - it sat in the hallway for several days. We were busy.

Thursday morning I finally got around to setting it up. It wasn't difficult to work out where all the stray plugs were supposed to go, and I was feeling really quite smart when I ran into a problem with the monitor cable. There it was under the desk, and there was the photo I had taken a week earlier of the back of the computer (so I could remember where all the ports were). In the photo there was a DVI port right underneath the sound-related ports. Under the desk with me, no such thing.

I was confused.

About a minute later, I figured out that the graphics card had been the only thing in the hardware setup that supported DVI, and the graphics card was now gone. No doubt Datacom thought this was such an obvious thing there was no need to tell us about it. But really, people, come on. You're dealing with customers who didn't know they had a graphics card. Don't you think a little spelling-things-out would have been in order?

Being that it was eight in the morning and Datacom wouldn't be on the end of the phone to berate, I got on with the setup. I found the VGA cable. I plugged it in. I braced myself for some bad performance, and hit the power button.

I found the computer's power cable, plugged it in, and hit the power button again.

The computer hummed, then said something like "CPU changed. Please edit the BIOS. Press F1 to continue". This made me blink a bit - Datacom shouldn't have done anything to the CPU, surely? - but after a minute I did the honourable thing and ignored it. Pressed F1. It continued.

Before it got to the Windows loading screen, it restarted.

The second attempt was more successful, it didn't restart again, so again I ignored it. Instead I set about trying to make the whole desktop fit on the screen. This was interesting - the native resolution of the new monitor is 1920 by 1200, but there was no option for 1920 by 1200 in the desktop settings. I could have 1920 by 1400, which made the Start menu disappear off the bottom of the screen, or 1600 by 1200, which made everything readable but greatly elongated. There was just no option that made things look right. Anywhere.

I boggled.

Then I switched it off, thinking I'd look for a new device driver for the graphics later, but not now because I would be late to meet with my awesome new boss. I went away and had a lovely meeting and didn't think about it any more until Saturday.

Saturday, on first boot, the thing started restarting itself again. Repeatedly. In an infinite loop. It would get to a certain point in the boot process, go "GAAARRRGGH", and restart. Then bring up a helpful Norton GoBack message telling us it had restarted because "Norton detected that your system was unstable". Then it'd boot for a while before going "GAAARRRGGH" again and repeating from the top.

What could this be? Is there something wrong with the new hard drive? Is our motherboard really not capable, as rumoured, of supporting anything bigger than 120 GB? Has the first use of the onboard graphics caused major confusion? Has it become self-aware and decided it doesn't like our wallpaper? Should we try the older CRT again? Should we try to rescue some data? Should we try to do a full system scan?

Only one thing, in these uncertain times, is set in stone: Monday it is damn well going back to Datacom.

and then we're buying a Mac
I hopes
I hopes
I hopes

Better not mess with Major Tom

So far, not a huge amount of success. Lots of practice, not much insight. More practice needed. My textbook, I've realised, is worse than useless - at best it treats lightly topics which require deep understanding, and at worst it gives different definitions from those used in class. The lecture notes, being mostly examples, aren't much use either. Teaching by example is not a valid way of imparting information.

Overboard and self-assured

The second Micro assignment is marked already and grades for everything, finally, are posted on Blackboard. My posted test mark took me a little by surprise - presumbly this is after scaling:

So I have 88% on assignment 1, 72% on the test, and 96.7% on assignment 2. This gives me a weighted internal mark of 84.2%, which is achingly close to the A+ I thought I'd given up on. The marginal utility of time spent studying for Micro just shot up dramatically; tomorrow morning I'll sit down with that textbook and, by god, I will read it.

The Micro exam is on October 28. Can I bring myself up by 5% or so in 15 days? Not sure, but I can at least give myself a good chance of a pure A. Having said that, last year's exam is heinously difficult.

In the long run there's still time

Last day of class for Micro. The tutorial made more sense than usual. The lecture didn't. The students are starting to talk to each other, like a group of helpless people will when they realise their doom is both imminent and unavoidable. They're all saying the same thing: "How are you finding 314? It's got very mathematical hasn't it? I don't even understand a word he's saying any more... hey can I email you if I get stuck? Shall we meet up in study break? There must be some way we can get through this stuff..."

Me, I have glimpses of comprehension here and there, but I'm not sure if I'm even looking in the right direction when it comes to seeing the big picture of what we're working on.

This morning I went to see Jack about the test, because I couldn't figure out where I'd lost all those marks, or why. Turns out most of them went on question 1, all as a result of the same small misconception early on. Darn. At least it was something I really didn't know, not a silly mechanical error.

Having spent the past week writing as if avoiding finishing the International essay would prevent the trimester from ending, I've just finally printed the damn thing out. There's no avoiding it now: it's the end of the trimester. Next come exams, my fantastic summer job, and the end of everything I've come to love about university. Next comes nothing but a lot of hard work.

Lights will guide you home

So apparently the test was out of 20, meaning I got 65%. FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL

Got the assignment in on Monday. It satisfied me, so hopefully it will satisfy Paul as well. In yesterday's lecture he rushed madly to finish the topic he was on, so as to finish teaching us all the material for the exam before the end of the week. Psst, Paul... this is why your colleagues usually make the last week not examinable.

Today, after class, that girl with the friendly face (I now know her name is Vicky) approached me and invited me to join a study group. I'm a bit chuffed by this - not knowing any of my fellow econ students has been kinda getting to me. Hopefully we'll be able to find a time we can all meet. I'm not sure yet how many of us there are.

Did you hear about this one?

The Micro assignment, due Monday, is now effectively done except for a few semantic issues. (Must I really go through and asterisk every variable that is known to be taking its socially efficient value? Really? Cos there are quite a few of them.) The only thing left to do this trimester is now a 1500-word essay, due Friday.

The test finally came back - five weeks after we sat it - but the marking is very unclear. Apparently I got 13. 13 out of what? There's no way to tell, and the lecturers aren't answering their email.

Yesterday there was a meeting for next year's Honours students. It was a slightly scary meeting, with lots of harping on about the workload, but not much actual information. There were maybe 20 intending Honours students there. I recognised some of them, but most of them are complete strangers. I'm so far out of my year it's not funny.