| Things in economics that sound cooler than they actually are |
[May. 19th, 2008|05:34 pm] |
Exhibit A: The ARMA model.
What it should be
A battlemech. It could stand for either "Armor A" or for "Advanced Robotic Machine Armor".
What it is
A time series model combining both elements of autoregression (AR) and moving average (MA). |
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| A sign (of what, I don't know) |
[May. 8th, 2008|08:57 pm] |
At the coffee shop today, an attractive girl (maybe 16) and her mother walked in. The girl was dressed in your typical schoolgirl-like uniform; button-down shirt, plaid skirt, calf socks, etc. My first thought was, "Damn it, why would you let your kid walk around in such a sexualized outfit?" My second thought was, "Oh, right, she's actually a schoolgirl."
So yeah, I'm not sure what exactly that says about me or our culture, but I can't imagine it says anything good. |
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| Call me Master Goldston |
[May. 6th, 2008|05:09 pm] |
I finished my last final a little before noon today. I still have core exams, which are the really important ones that determine if I can continue in the program, but given that I obliterated the shit out of all my finals, I should be receiving my MA in the mail sometime over the summer (for what little an MA in Economics is worth, and I can tell you its worth very little indeed).
Next up: Micro core exam on the 15th. Bring it on, general equilibrium! I WILL DESTROY YOU! |
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| New post up |
[May. 5th, 2008|05:16 pm] |
At, as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7) adychka would put it, the grown-up blog.
Other than that, my life has been pretty dull lately. Wake up, go to coffee shop, study, come home, access internet, go to sleep, repeat. My last final is tomorrow; if I pass that (which I will), I guess I will have my Master's, for what that's worth (not very much). Beyond finals, however, are the dread spectre of core exams, which are a set of 3 fun little 4-hour exams that test everything I've learned in the last nine months, and which I have to pass before continuing in the program. So that's how I'll be spending the rest of my month.
Assuming I survive that ordeal, I've got some interesting work lined up for the summer. I'll be going to India this summer to do some prep work for a study of the correlation between types of communities and the effectiveness of community directly-observed-therapy for tuberculosis control, which should be an interesting project (albeit one that won't be bearing fruit for quite some time).
Incidentally, I've been thinking about the links between gaming and development economics, spurred by two unrelated datapoints:
1) Ahead of my upcoming trip to India, I've been reading a couple of books on / set in India (The Defeat of a Congressman by Mark Tully, a series of essays about India by a BBC correspondent; and Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan, a book of short stories by a famous Indian novelist), and I've realized what I really would like to read is "India: the RPG Supplement" (or, for those of you in an L5Ry mindset, "Way of the Indian"), something that gave a combination of "fluff" and "crunch" for India, and was introductory but targeted at people trying to set a stories there rather than at tourists.
2) Resident Evil 5 takes place in Africa, and purportedly does a pretty good job modeling (at least physically) African villages. While obviously "African village that's infested by zombies" is going to have a different feel than "regular African village", setting video games in realistic depictions of developing nations could be the wider, shallower version of Peace Corps, giving American kids some exposure to what its like to live in the rest of the world, especially if you gave a developing city the GTA IV treatment. Granted, RE 5 is not exactly uncontroversial in its choice to depict a white guy shooting zombie Africans in the face over and over again, but I think there's some deeper value that could be extracted from it (although the Japanese do not have a strikingly good track record of not being horribly racist against black people.) |
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| My first post is up |
[Mar. 24th, 2008|02:56 am] |
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At the blog that adychka made me an unwitting accomplice in. Nothing too earth-shaking; I had some anecdotal evidence, found a paper with hard data, and gave it a little critique. Few, if any, comic book analogies were involved. |
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| Landcalf acquired |
[Mar. 19th, 2008|07:47 pm] |
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I am now the proud owner of a 2008 Honda Fit. I likes it. |
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| Now is the time in grad school when we complain about our poor work ethics |
[Feb. 1st, 2008|11:58 pm] |
I've got problem sets due Monday, Wednesday, Thursday next week and a 60-page paper on deworming to present on Tuesday (summary: econometrics tells us that deworming rules!), none of which I've worked on at all, because I've been too busy carousing with my classmates, dicking around on the internet, sleeping in, and having three-hour English/Spanish lessons (wherein I teach the English and am taught the Spanish). I'm in a mood to work right now, but my downstairs neighbors are having a fairly lively party, which is making it difficult. Tomorrow I'm possibly cooking dinner for my currently-two-man co-op, depending on whether the other (wo)man decides to show up, and I definitely need to clean the apartment and maybe bake something in preparation for my roommate's birthday party tomorrow night. And, of course, Sunday is the Superbowl and Tuesday is Super Tuesday. Basically, I need this weekend to be about twice as long as it is.
Life was a lot simpler when I was friendless and miserable. |
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| Alive in Hong Kong |
[Jan. 8th, 2008|02:21 pm] |
So, I have arrived here in the HK, after only a 15-hour flight. In fact, I arrived yesterday afternoon, but who's counting?
My initial impressions: good lord is it vertical. I spent some time this morning just staring out over the city from Aaron's 73rd floor apartment, which believe you me is quite a view. One thing I hadn't quite appreciated about HK is that only the rim is really citified; inland its basically a big mountainous wilderness, which is pretty cool.
The plan is to work for the first few days I'm here, mostly figuring out what kind of data they've been gathering and what I can do with it, and then do touristy stuff for the remainder of my stay. Aaron's been an excellent tour guide thus far, and I think its really going to be a lot of fun.
P.S. I apparently have been living my entire life on HK time. This morning I woke up at an extraordinarily civilized 7 am. |
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