Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road

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.

Still frames in your mind

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.

The dawning of the rest of our lives

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.

Calling out to idiot America

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.

Like an Armageddon flame

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.

Am I retarded or am I just overjoyed?

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

• neoMac
• Dark jeans from Kathmandu

Sequence of events this morning:

1. Woke up after insufficient sleep
2. Didn't have time for coffee at home
3. Went to Sweet Fanny Anne's to get coffee before lecture
4. Drew and Ace and got a free one
5. Marshmallow got stuck in bottom of takeaway cup
6. Used miniature chocolate-flavoured snack bar to scoop out marshmallow
7. 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.

Take the pressure from the swelling

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.

The only one that I have ever known

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.

Seven years has gone so fast

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.

I took a different path

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 beg to dream and differ

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.