Business continues below

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.

The man with the golden eyeball

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.

I was in another world

Today's lecture was cancelled due to lecturer illness. The bookshop still doesn't have any Micro textbooks. I have the Innacold. The two desirable employers who both wanted to interview me back in May now both want to employ me.

Did I ever tell you the story about cowboys and midgets?

From CTU Circular 1991/65, Resolution of Affiliates Meeting, 18 April 1991:

THIS SPECIAL MEETING AUTHORISES THE NEW NATIONAL EXECUTIVE to explore the feasibility of, and if realistic to initiate:

• ...
• the organisation of a "Business Roundtable Experimental Test". The activity would be built on the BRT premise that workers were living beyond their means and consuming too much. To see if the austerity route to economic recovery would work in one specific case, workers could stop consuming the products of one leading BRT company for six weeks, and see if this helped the company become more export focused and more internationally competitive.

There's only one thing better than paging through interesting unpublished records, and that's coming across passages in them that make you laugh. It's even more awesome when you're laughing for the same reason that the original authors would have laughed when they wrote it - sharing a joke across the decades.

I have an outline. Concerningly, it has nine sections including the bookends. Each section in the body (except the first) is derived from a key area of theory we've looked at during the course:

1. Narrative
2. Evidence of awareness of political opportunity structure
3. Evidence of organisational resource mobilisation
4. Evidence of awareness of shared identity
5. Evidence of use of cultural resources
6. Evidence of impact on wider culture of society
7. Evidence of impact on policy

There is, in fact, evidence of all of these things in the material I've collected. Writing it should be fun if I'm able to spend enough time on it. I'm using Kelsey (The New Zealand Experiment) as my key source for contextual material, which should be even more fun.