Negative Power Prices in Germany and a Cold Spell in Champaign

Greetings on this holiday weekend:

I thought you might be amused by the thought of negative energy prices.

In our house, and I'm guessing where you are too if you are still in Illinois, it's pretty cold , partly as a way to keep the fuel bill in the manageable range as the weather is, unfortunately, quite cold and partly because temperatures are way below average.  I would love it if energy prices were negative now, so I wouldn't feel so cold in the house.

Power Prices Go Negative in Germany, a Positive for Energy Users - The New York Times via kwout

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday and that it warms up reasonably soon.

An interesting read on Christmas

This piece is written by a philosophy professor.  I thought it was a good read.  Our course definitely wasn't a philosophy class, but maybe there was a bit of philosophy in it.  So enjoy and Merry Christmas.

Waking Up to the Gift of ‘Aliveness’ - The New York Times via kwout

A post course quiz

This is one from Alexa.

Q:  How many software engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:  None.  It's a hardware problem.

The Dilemmas in Undergraduate Education

Please only have a look at this after you've finished for the semester.  It is still more about your education, broadly considered, but not about our specific course.  And this time it about something I wrote.

Five years ago, meaning when most of you were still in high school and I was in the middle of that semester where I had rotator cuff surgery, I wrote a very long post called Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  If you do read it, you'll get a sense of two things:

(1) My view of the overall issues with undergraduate education at the U of I and like universities elsewhere.  Note that this is not something I came up with on my own.  But my experience in teaching largely supports those findings, as does my experience when I was involved with moving the corporate finance course in the College of Business to a blended format, where we did extensive evaluation of the students during the pilot phase, as well as prior evaluation work in a large course setting.

(2) An indirect diagnosis of the learning issues that many of you face, in my judgment.  This would be the reason for you to read the piece, to take a reflective look at your own education and see how well the diagnosis lines up with your own experience.

If you think the diagnosis is even in the ballpark - correct in general but errant in some particulars - the issue for you individually is what correctives you might take from here on out to redirect your learning in a better way.   There is also the issue from our course perspective, which is why the market or individual institutions don't correct these issues.  (Hint: a big part of the issue is that learning is unlike widgets.  You can count widgets.  It is very hard to measure real learning.)

You might then be amused about the suggested remedies in the piece.  I am far less confident those are right, or that they could possibly be implemented.  Know that I write pieces like this to promote discussion on the matter, not to make a planning document for implementation.

Finally, let me tie this to teaching our class.  In part I do that to see if some alternative might matter, even a little.  But in the last couple of years I've found my energy level is not what it was earlier, so I can't implement all the things I'd like to try.  Perhaps some of you might eventually get involved in undergraduate education on the supply side and then the baton can pass to you in doing this.

Take Aways

This is more you might read over the break.  The first three are somewhat related to the course.  The last two are more in the vein of a post from a week ago with links to pieces about learning goals.   In all,  these are just some suggestions of interesting reads, none of which are very recent, that you might peruse over the break or next semester for your own entertainment and edification.

• Bolman and Deal Part 2 - the second half of the book, which we didn't cover at all, is worth a read in its own.   It takes the four frames developed in the first half and recasts them in a leadership setting.  You might enjoy that. 
• We did not talk at all about executive pay, which really is a big topic.  Since the subject matter gets more than a mention by last year's Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, Bengt Holmstrom, I thought this might be interesting for you to look at.  Note in the second half of the piece the issue on whether the compensation must depend only on verifiable performance.  We did talk about that in considering the principal-agent model.  
• This piece called Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? is from a few years ago and is by Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton (the business school at U Penn).  The giving he talks about is more random acts of kindness than it is where a quid pro quo is expected.  You might try some of your own random acts of kindness over the break - with your friends or your family.   See how they react, particularly whether you surprise them with your kindness.  A positive reaction (as opposed to a gift in return) may encourage you to try it again. 
• This piece called The Bell Curve is one I really like.  It by Atul Gawande, a MacArthur Genius Award winner and a prolific author (plus he is a very well known M.D.).  It is about what determines excellence when excellence can be measured, in this case in the treatment of cystic fibrosis.  It might interest you to to see excellence cast this way, as it probably defies many of the stereotypes you have for it.  
• This one called The Expert Mind mind and should appeal to those students in the class who have a chess interest (I didn't poll this year's class on that) and other students as well.  It is about how experts differ from novices in their thinking and what it takes to become expert.  Chess is used as means to illustrate the more general issues.  

Last obnoxious post about the Yankees

It's only 56 days till pitchers and catchers have to report to spring training.  Happy holidays!

Discussion Group Next Spring - Last Reminder

Two students are firm for participating in the discussion group.  So we are on.  It would be good to have a couple more students.  If you are interested, please let me know.

--------

There will be a few more posts on the site before I call it quits.  I hope this doesn't impact any of you, but I got the first spam comment on the site yesterday, so I imposed the requirement that comments have to be moderated. 

About the Final Quiz and Course Grades

The Final Quiz has concluded, as I'm sure you all know. The third and fifth questions produced perfect scores, which is reassuring since they were on previous quizzes.  The second question, on the principal-agent model, had the lowest mean.  It framed the issues in a non-geometric way and some of you didn't translate it well.  In a nutshell, if you reduce the spread between wL and wH, you weaken incentives.  If you hold one payment fixed and vary the other payment, you impact both the spread and the mean.  If the mean payment goes down, then the outside option become preferred. 

If I were into testing you, all the questions would be written in this manner - to translate into a different way of considering the issue.  Being able to translate the economics shows understanding.  But, as I said earlier in the semester, this sort of testing makes sense for intermediate micro, but doesn't really make sense for our course, as what we studied isn't a prerequisite for anything else.

The Course Grades have been uploaded into Moodle.  I will get them into Banner either later this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

I used a more generous grade distribution than was announced in the syllabus, so I hope everyone is satisfied with what they received.  This is the distribution I actually used.

Obnoxious post about the Yankees #2

It is now likely that there will be one more of these after I upload course grades.  This one is from here.

Paper and Virtual Elevator Speech Grades Have Been Uploaded Into Moodle

Comments on the projects have also been uploaded.

Regarding the virtual elevator speeches - a few teams did a a full presentation, either by going longer or by having a lot of text per slide (or both).  This is what a lot of presenters do the first time through.  They don't understand the audience so they expect to have more time than they actually will.  Keeping it simple is the goal.

I mostly evaluated the elevator speeches on slide title and image selection.  Some presentations were glitzy, others more run of the mill.  That might matter to others.  It didn't matter to me.  No team did a perfect job on this, but some teams were a bit better than others.

Also, now that the discretionary grading part of the course is over, you should know that I was quite biased toward rewarding doing the work and much less concerned with how the work was done, given that the students appeared to be trying.  I wouldn't have said this before the project was due, and I might take down this particular post if I teach the class next year, but really all of this is intermediate product.  The effort part is what counts for learning. 

There was some variation in the points on the projects, but not a lot. Also, in our class you aren't in competition with the other teams.  This is not a tournament.  We're grading on an absolute scale.

I need to proofread the quiz tomorrow when I'm fresh, to make sure there are no silly errors in it.  But I think we're good to go for that last bit of the class. 

All virtual elevator speeches can be viewed online

I made a folder of the screen capture videos.  You can watch those online by using the preview.  You can also download the video for your own team (or for other teams, for that matter) in case you want that.  Some are interesting, though no Academy Award will be given.

I have also written the final quiz.  I need to take a good long break now.  I will have the projects graded by this evening - 5 or 6 PM - with the results posted in Moodle.  Please note that the comments in Moodle will only pertain to the Virtual Elevator Speeches, since I've already commented extensively on the papers.  The points, however, apply to the entire project.

I am reviewing the Virtual Elevator Speeches now

Here are two observations - mundane, but this is how you think when you are in grading mode.

1.  Regarding musical selection - many, but not all, of the pieces selected are more my vintage (or earlier) than your vintage.  I wonder if this reflects a subtle form of moral hazard or some fear/concern that I wouldn't get your vintage stuff.  (That fear is rational.  Making reference to TV shows or movies I haven't seen might very well communicate to students your age, but not to me.)

2.  I forgot to give you instructions about the end of the slideshow.  In fact, many presentations end before the music ends, so there is an abrupt conclusion that the viewer can be expecting (at least if the viewer is familiar with the music).  The right way to do this is either to time the slides to coincide with the end of the music or to gently fade out the music before the slides end.  Nobody will be penalized for not doing this, since the error is mine.  But note that they are less interesting to showcase as is.

As a result of 2, I am lest concern about the videos I'm recording of the slide presentation, particularly when they end. I do a bit of snipping so there isn't a lot of dead video after the slideshow is over, but it is not elegant. 

Tone - in writing and with interacting in organizations

I want to make some observations taken from reading through your blog posts that might help you later in other interactions. 

Many of you are at or near graduation, have been on the job market or will be there soon.  In that situation it would seem you want to be professional and act accordingly.  The question is, what does acting professional mean? 

If I switched this from how you communicate to how you dress (not my comparative advantage but it is easier to make the point that way) then there are some businesses which prefer formal attire while other businesses have gravitated to business casual.  Formal attire conveys a certain solemn nature to the work.  Business casual conveys a more relaxed view. 

The same goes for the writing.  Formal writing (such as in the course projects) is more solemn.  Blogging, which is more informal and often represents early thinking on whatever the person is writing about, should convey a relaxed tone, especially if done well.  I want to note that both types of writing are serious and require real effort.  They are different, however, in that formal writing usually happens after the thinking is done - to write up the results - while informal writing is done while the thinking is ongoing - a work in progress, if you will. 

Many students in the class seemed quite "measured" in their writing of the blogs, as if they feared to make a mistake. Being measured conveys that you've thought about what you say, but it also seems that you are not relaxed in saying it. 

If you've gotten to know me at all over the semester, I like the combination of informal and thoughtful.  I think it is appealing to others when it is delivered well.  So we should ask, how do you get from where you are now to where you might be with this a few years out?

I may have told this story already in class, but in case not I will repeat it.  My first semester at the U of I, fall 1980, I taught intermediate economics and was petrified about having to do so.  It wasn't that I didn't know the economics.  I was competent that way.  What I didn't know was whether I could communicate about the economics in a way where the students would grasp it.  As it turned out, the fear I had was rational.  I didn't communicate with the students well at all and I bombed in teaching that course.

It's 37 years later and now the fear isn't there.  I hope for you it doesn't take that long to become relaxed when writing or speaking in front of an authority figure.  For that relaxation to happen, you need practice.  Some of that will be stressful, but the fact of the stress doesn't lessen the need for the practice. So know that you do get better at this over time and consider our course as place where you started down this path.

Obnoxious post about the Yankees #1

I don't know how many of these there ultimately will be.  But at least one more seems likely.

Regarding Giancarlo Stanton, stat cast plotted his hits this year on the Yankee Stadium map...73 dingers!!!

Grades Uploaded for Blog Posts and Comments

I have now just finished uploading grades into Moodle.  I think I was pretty generous with the points for those who did all the posts on time.  Not everyone did that, which is why the mean is lower than it otherwise would have been. 

My next task for the course is to write the final quiz.  I will get to the virtual elevator speeches after that.  A few of them have come in that I have yet to acknowledge.  I will do that later today.

Running slow on grading the blog posts

I did upload the comment matrix.  I should have the scores for both the blog posts and the comments done sometime tomorrow morning.  Sorry for the delay.  I made a clerical error in Excel that took a while to track down.

This one is by the same guy who said you rise to your level of incompetence.

Quote Details: Laurence J. Peter: An economist is an... - The Quotations Page via kwout

A few points I had wanted to make but forgot to/ran out of time

These are really for down the road and I know you are keyed into finals now.  But they are something for you to consider.

1.  Some students in their last post discussed how much time they put into doing the homework.  There is the issue of what doing the homework means.  I believe most students interpret it as getting the assignment done so it can be submitted.  A different interpretation (and the one I'd prefer) is to produce a reasonably deep understanding of the topic being addressed in the assignment.  The second interpretation requires greater time.  How much additional time depends on the particular topic and what the student already knows.  There is no fixed relationship between time put in and generating a deep understanding of the subject, though I'm sure you get better at doing it with practice.  Most students who reported their time input, which I believe they did honestly, had too little time on task to generate a deep understanding, unless the student is a really sharp cookie and knows a lot of this stuff already.

2. Though you had the option to write on something other than the prompt, mostly students didn't try that at all.  There is a question why you didn't.  My tentative answer is that you've been trained to be deferential to authority (me in this case) rather than to pursue your own curiosity.  Part of becoming an adult is about getting a better balance on this, where you drive your own learning more often. The first day of class we asked, who owns the human capital produced in our course?  The answer, of course, is that each of you own your own human capital.  As owners, you are the principals, and I am your agent. Yet you didn't really behave that way.  This also speaks to #1, because writing on your own topic and tying it to the course would require doing some homework, which would certainly take time.  But I wonder if there is a different explanation as well - risk aversion and the fear of failure.  Writing to the prompt is safer, no doubt.  But there is definitely more learning if you fail on occasion and then take lessons from that experience.  The course didn't do much on helping you learn to fail as part of the normal process where eventually you do succeed in mastering something significant.

3.  This one is about math models.  When I was an administrator I found I often would make a simple model of the situation we were dealing with, analyze that, and use it to communicate about the situation and to try to shed some light on the important issues.  This is a personal strength - I'm a pretty good analyst.  I really don't know if undergraduate majors in economics can be expected to do something similar when they've reached a reasonably high level administrative position.  However, I do believe that part of the reason for learning the models that we've considered is to see the implications that arise from the model, rather than just treat the model as a thing in itself.  We've established that none of you are going on to graduate school in economics.  So mastering any particular model probably won't have much value to you down the road.  But having facility with such models in general might be an important life skill and help you climb the ranks of management.  The ability to conceptualize is definitely important and the modeling helps with that.

Some links of things you should read after the semester - to consider future learning goals

A book review of Grit by Angela Duckworth.  There is the famous quote from Thomas Edison that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration.  Grit is the perspiration part.

A paper on Getting Unstuck, and various strategies for doing that.  The part of this I found most interesting is where the student talked about writing a bunch of silly programs that weren't assigned but did get the student familiar with the issues that would be confronted in doing the assigned program.

A very long letter I wrote to Carol Dweck.  This letter has quite a lot about my philosophy of education and details where I have issues with Duckworth and Dweck.

A website on Abraham Maslow.  I really liked the discussion that begins with the section on self-actualization, along with the list of features that a self-actualizer exhibits.  It seems like a very good list to aspire to.

Bah, Humbug. Scrooge was an economist!

When gift exchange goes awry.  For your amusement only.  I thought you'd find the title of this piece interesting.  There is an economics paper  published in the American Economic Review (the top journal in the U.S.) back in 1993 that got all of this started.  You can find the paper here.

The Economics of Wasteful Spending: The Deadweight Loss of Christmas | PBS NewsHour via kwout

A little humor and.....

.... if you've never seen it before an essential part of anyone's education about American culture.

What will Santa bring you for Christmas? Perhaps your final grades.

I thought this memo was humorous, in a bizarre sort of way.  If you are in any high enrollment classes, note that they can get grades in after Christmas - and might very well do that.

Fall 2017 Grade Entry DEADLINE: Dec 28th at 2:00pm via kwout

This has absolutely nothing to do with our class...

... but it does have me intrigued.

The Yankees have traded for Giancarlo Stanton,  The trade is not yet official.  Stanton has a no-trade clause in his contract with the Marlins, so he has to approve the trade (though he has indicated he would).  And there is a physical that needs to be passed by all players involved in the deal. 

Nevertheless, the following factoid has captured my attention.

Number of home runs hit by the Yankees in 2017.......241.
Number of home runs hit by Stanton in 2017...............59.

I will be following Yankees baseball even more closely next year.

Grade Book Updated in Moodle

I just did a grade book update - 3 entries in the Excel Quiz category and 1 entry in Blog Posts category.

Note that there were actually only 9 Excel homeworks for the entire course, so I made an entry called Freebie, where everyone got 10 points.  The other two entries are Principal-Agent Model and Shapiro-Stiglitz Model.

I also uploaded an entry for the Triangle Principal-Agent blog post.  I have not yet done one for the last blog post, because some students are still getting those in.  For those of you have yet to do the last post, please do so soon.

Capturing Virtual Elevator Speeches

A useful screen capture application is SnagIt, which is what I've been using recently to make videos.  While free applications that come bundled with your computer (Quicktime on the Mac) can do screen capture video, SnagIt captures the system audio, and as far as I know that is unusual.  Most other apps don't capture system audio.  (For our projects, the background music is system audio.)  SnagIt is not an editing application. For that it is mediocre. But for capture, it is quite good, imho.

So, if you want me to capture your virtual elevator speech as a video, just ask.  I can readily do that and then deliver the video file back to you. What other use you might have for it (posting it to a video site, like YouTube) I don't need to know.  And if you want this capability yourself, you can buy it from the Webstore, slightly below market in price.  (Note that link is for Mac users.  PC users will have to search a little more at the Webstore for the app.

More on Being Treated Well On the Job

I want to give some different examples of work, what needs to get done, and stuff you want to avoid in considering being well treated on the job.   This should give you a better sense of things and consider issues that didn't get conveyed with that little diagram of  a hierarchy I drew in class today

Relationship with Business Office/HR Department  

This is incredibly important once you are in middle to upper management.  Let me give one example about capital budgeting and then one example about hiring/promotion. They are taken from my time working at the campus IT organization, which started more than 15 years ago.  So things may be a little different now, but the general issues remain.

Every organization buys stuff - various equipment and office supplies, for example.  When I had the group that ran the smart classrooms on campus report to me, a good chunk of their expenditure was on equipment.  For example, the lcd projectors that are in the classroom need replacement periodically.  If memory serves, they were on a 5-year replacement cycle then.  If one fifth of the projectors were replaced each year, that would be easy budget-wise.  You'd have an item in the budget for projector replacement and the spending would be pretty much the same from one year to the next.  However, there are model changes with projectors and from that point of view it is more efficient to support fewer models.  In the extreme, all the projectors would be replaced at the same time, once every five years.  Then only one model would be supported.

The question is how to budget for that, given that each unit has an annual budget but the units can't carry over funds from one year to the next.  To make this work some unit, either the Business Office itself or the boss of the entire organization, must be able to serve as a bank, to keep a store of funds, to disperse those for large capital expenditures, and to replenish the store of funds by taking it out of the budgets of the other units.  There are basically two approaches.  Either my classroom unit would save some of its budget each year so that after 5 years it would have accumulated enough to purchase the next round of projectors, or the purchase money is loaned to the classroom division, which then pays off the loan over the next five years.  Being well treated means either model is accommodated, with perhaps some one time injection of funds from the top to get this cycle functional.

I should also add here, given our discussion in class today, that internal banking of the sort I just described comes at a zero interest rate.  At least, that was true when I was involved with it.

Now the HR example, really two examples.  Campus HR is primarily concerned that the hiring processes are fair and non-discriminatory.  But much hiring happens internally.  A student employee shows his/her worth (much like in an internship).  After graduation, the unit would like to hire the former student as a permanent employee.   Is it fair to hire the student without doing a search that is open to any candidate?  Honestly, I don't know the answer to that question.  But I do know that it is the efficient thing to do.  Identifying a good person is like finding a diamond in a coal mine.  (Not infrequently, you end up hiring somebody only to regret that sometime later.)  Once you've found a good person, you have no motivation to do an open search.  If the HR office can get you a search waiver, that really helps.  It is not always possible, but it it is good to know that they try.   A similar situation exists for an ongoing employee whom you'd like to promote.  Is a search necessary then?   Job duties will change somewhat.  How drastic a change is needed to justify the search?

After the fact, it actually might be better for the person to have won in an open search process, rather than to simply be promoted, because then the search will have validated the person's credentials.  But during the process, it might be nerve racking, and as with the student case, if you are quite certain ahead of time that your current employee is the one who will win the search, then it seems like a big time waste.

Support staff

The biggest single perq I had when I was doing campus IT was having a secretary, Mary.  She was a gem and made my work life bearable. Here are a few reasons why

• No voicemail.  Callers had to go through Mary. Once you have purchasing power in an organization, vendors want a chunk of your time.  It may be that the supply of such vendors is not perfectly elastic, but it sure seemed that way to me.  Mainly I didn't want to talk with them, especially the ones I had not done any prior business with.  Saying no is not easy for me.  Having a human screen is much better than having unanswered messages in your voicemail.  A similar issue exits with people who want some of your time on campus for business that you otherwise don't see as relevant.  (Meaning you haven't been informed about it before through the normal chain of connections, committees, or known contacts.)  Having a secretary who screens calls that shouldn't get through while knowing which should is a huge perq.
• Scheduling.  This is the biggest thing on campus that secretaries do, and I suspect this is likewise true in the private sector.  People in upper management have very busy schedules.  They go from one meeting to the next.  If they are needed at a certain meeting, and that is true for a few of them from different units, finding a common time is quite difficult  It is quite inefficient for somebody in upper management to do their own scheduling, though it is quite common to do that for people lower in the hierarchy.  
• Dealing with details, such as tracking incoming purchase.  Business accounting systems can be arcane.  While I talked about purchase orders in class today, there is also a need to track purchases to make sure they've been received and to see when those funds actually get spent in the accounting system.  While the official software is there, almost every unit I knew at the time had its own Excel spreadsheets that were constructed for this purpose, customized to unit function.  Keeping those up to date is critical.  This stuff isn't rocket science, but it is detail that does need to be done without errors.
• Keeping the tone in the office professional and pleasant.  The person who answers the phone is also the person who greets walk-in traffic.  Much of that is with other staff.  Everyone needs to find the environment welcoming and friendly. 

Let me switch to tech support.  I don't know if it is a big deal at most jobs.  It was a biggie for me, both for when I would make on campus presentations that would have to go without a hitch and for my home computer network, where I paid people privately for the work, since it was out of scope for campus work, but where the people were happy to provide such service for me.  Having friendly tech guys you can trust makes life so much easier.

Discretionary Funds

Even in a starting position, your professional development is important.  There may be some conferences or other events you should attend.  You shouldn't have to pay the registration fees or travel costs for these out of your own pocket, provided you can convince your manager that it is related to your work.  Likewise, sometimes you need to host business associates for a meal.  Again that shouldn't be your nickel, if it is work related.  Then there may be training materials to purchase or equipment to buy that is related to your professional development.  Having a reasonable budget for such items makes life much more bearable.  If you have to pay for this stuff yourself, maybe you should do that, but it will give you the feeling that you are not well treated.

Social Life and Work

This one is trickier to talk about along at least two dimensions.  One is where you live and how close to work that is.  The other is whether you are single or not.  So it can be either good or bad to have your social life revolve around the people you work with, or for there to be an expectation to that effect.  I don't want to describe the right answer other than to say that you feel well treated when you are comfortable with balance along this dimension.  So...

• If you feel lonely, both at work and away from work, that cuts against being well treated.
• If you have family obligations that you really want to participate in but it seems work is blocking you from doing that, it cuts against being well treated. 
• If you have friends at work but they are not close friends so you are not comfortable opening up to them, and you have nobody else (a mentor, for example) who is knowledgeable enough about the situation, but distanced enough so you wouldn't feel compromised about opening up to that person, then that cuts against being well treated.  More generally, you need to talk about work (sometimes it's venting, but not always) with somebody you like and trust.  There will be stress.  This is a way to relieve stress and manage it.  If you have that release valve, it is a really good thing. 

One More Observation

Rome wasn't built in a day.  Patience is a virtue.  If you have a sense of what you want at work you can diligently build to that, even if it isn't all there at the outset.  A first job that you have after graduation may be just that.  These things will come with time if you are good and productive at what you do. 

Some Misconception

It occurred to me after class that some of you are operating under the assumption that the attendance tracking which I have been doing matters for your grade.  It did when we were doing those surveys for which you could get bonus points.  But we stopped doing that.  I have continued to track attendance because I'm curious with how it correlates to measured class performance - the points you ultimately earn.  I will do an analysis of that at the end of the semester. 

I was impressed with how well the class did today on the in class quiz.  Next year, I'll have to make those questions harder.

Today's Quiz

This one is not a joke.

Which word has three double letters in a row?
bookkeeper (or bookkeeping)

This one is a favorite of my sister.

In Russia before the revolution everyone was penniless, except the Tsar.  Why is that?
He was Nicholas.

Finally, here we will prove a theorem.  The theorem is that all horses have an infinite number of legs.  To prove this theorem we will take as a lemma that all horses are of the same color.  A lemma is a smaller result used to prove a larger result.

Proof:  Take your average horse.  It has two hind legs and forelegs.  Together that makes six legs.  Six is an even number, but it is an odd number of legs for a horse.  The only other number that is both even and odd is infinity, so a horse has an infinite number of legs. 

You may say that you can find a horse that doesn't have an infinite number of legs.  But by the lemma -
that must be a horse of a different color!

Another Video on the Shapiro and Stiglitz Model

This one is about social efficiency in their model.  Here it is:

Reminder: A totally optional discussion group

If you are interested, please indicate that either by commenting on this post or by sending me an email.

For your convenience, the previous post about the discussion group is reproduced below.

* * * * *

I normally make this announcement at the start of December, but this year we seem to have a large number of students who will graduate after this semester.  I wanted those students to be aware of this possibility, in case you do stick around town for the spring.  You would be more than welcome to be part of the group, although you would no longer be enrolled at the U of I.

The last few years I have invited students to join me in the spring for a weekly discussion group on the topic of how they might get more out of their learning.  Four years ago, I didn't get enough nibbles.  Three years ago I had three takers.  We met each Friday afternoon throughout the spring semester.  It was an interesting experience, unusual for both the students and for me.  Two years ago I had two takers initially, but one soon dropped.  The other person was extremely shy and it was kind of odd to have conversations with him.  We went for a while but didn't meet quite as regularly. Likewise, last year I had one student in the spring and it was more mentoring than discussion group.  I have another student this fall, where again it is more mentoring.  The mentoring thing is okay, but for students with an eye on the job market, I'm probably not the right person to mentor that.  I think the discussion group approach would be more interesting, but it does take a few students to make a group.

This year I'd like to do something similar but on a different topic.  I maintain a reading list on leadership and learning.  We might start with a few pieces from there to help us find a rhythm.  After that, I'd hope that students would offer up their own pieces for us to discuss.

When the group seemed to work well we went for somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours and met in BIF.  That much of what we did I'd like to keep.  Based on that experience the ideal number of students is at least 3 and probably no more than 5.  If we can get that this time around we'll be a go.

Why people don't engage more in experimental consumption.

This piece is interesting - both because it ties into what we were saying in class today - name brands want repeat customers and get them if people don't experiment with the knock-off brands that are really just as good - and because it says something about a certain type of risk aversion.

I will note here that when I was your age (or a year or two older in graduate school) I did experiment eating spicy food.  Then, there was good Thai places in Chicago that were inexpensive, so a grad student could go out and have an interesting meal.  I would never eat that stuff today, my body can no longer handle spicy stuff.  So in that dimension I am much more risk averse than I once was.

In other dimensions, I believe, I still like to experiment.  The quiz of the day that we've been doing the last couple of weeks gives an experimental approach of sorts. I suspect you won't see something like that in your other classes. I wonder if participating in it will encourage you to do a bit more experimental consumption on your own - and not just in the food you consume, but in the activities you undertake.

Submissions for today's quiz.....And the winner is...

1.  From L - When is a door not a door?

2.  From E - Imagine you are in a dark room.  How do you get out?

This next one is not an official submission since it is from my brother and he got a prize recently so he doesn't need bonus points from me.  But, sequentially, it came in the middle of the pack.  And quality-wise it fits.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who do not.

3.  From A - How do you make 30 cents out of two coins, if one of the coins isn't a nickel?

4.  From R - Why is a sandbox so expensive at Whole Foods?
It's sold as gluten-free pancake mix. 

And from Professor Arvan - no joke but a serious question.
What does the word copacetic mean?

Principal not Principle/Submissions for In Class Quiz

As many students have confounded the two words in the most recent blog posts, I thought I'd belabor  the meaning.  There are many possible definitions of principal.  For us, definition 6 is the most relevant one.

a person who takes a leading part in any activity, as a play; chief actor or doer.

In contrast, principle has really only one meaning, though they give three ways for providing that meaning.  A principle is an underlying rule or tenet.  In our class you have been exposed to the Efficiency principle, given in M&R.

It would be good to keep these straight in the future.

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There are now two submissions for the in class quiz on Tuesday.  Get your submission in, to make it a real contest.

Quite an interesting piece about gender bias and venture capitalism.

I thought this Op-Ed relevant to the class because one team wrote their paper on venture capitalism.  So while we haven't discussed it in class, it is something students should be aware of.  The author has quite strong credentials to write this piece:

"I have seen it up close in the two worlds I know best: Wall Street, where I was chief executive of Smith Barney and of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, and in Silicon Valley, where I’ve raised money to run my start-up, Ellevest."

What she describes is a kind of market failure based on gender bias.  Hmmm.

The Cost of Devaluing Women - The New York Times via kwout

Points on the Second Quiz - Update

It looks like I was able to change the scale to 50 points (what it should have been) with a simple adjustment.  I did that a few minutes ago.  So now the grade book is correct.