My second last exam was super-quick. I finished it in one hour even though it was a three hour exam. Although to say I "finished" it may be a little misleading. What I mean by finished is that I stopped writing.
I need to get 4 out of 50. I'm feeling fairly confident, but it will be tight.
Normally I get upset when I get 100% for an assignment, because I feel like they mustn't have really read it and I could have worked heaps less hard. It's like at TAFE when they tell you that you're brilliant for putting a full stop at the end of every single sentence and using capital letters in the right places. You don't feel as chuffed as their enthusiasm should lead you to be. But when it happens in ECON3203 I don't mind nearly so much, because in this subject I have become a Percentage Player.
It's good because it makes my mark so far 80%. Which means I only need to get 8% in my final exam to pass the course. It is sad that this is much less reassuring than you might think. Fingers crossed that the final is like the mid-session exam.
Wouldn't it be funny if I got 8% in my final exam and then went off to work for the government and build econometric models and tell them how to run the economy. Funny enough that I'd like to go and get that job just for the giggles.
I passed my econometrics mid-session exam. 60%. Sweet.
Update: I got her to look at my paper again and I actually got 70%.
I did the mid-session exam for econometrics. So much easier than last time. I had time to do all the questions I understood and I understood more than none. I might even pass it.
I started the latest Monte Carlo at 1pm. It finished at 7:45pm, 20 minutes before the last bus home. I'm very fortunate.
I passed my first econometrics assessment this semester! I got 2.5/5. That's totally a pass mark. Yay! Although I failed my mid-session exam big time. So big time, that she ignored my mark when she told the class what the minimum mark was. The problem with getting a mark as low as mine, is that her deciding to scale us all will make absolutely no difference to me at all.
Taking assumptions L3 to the limit then yields MLL = M-1LL + plim nDD'
Even econometricians sometimes like to live dangerously.
Two hours and 38 minutes into my econometrics study I have completed question 1 part b and c. Lucky I did part a the other day, or I would have been here all day. Now I only have questions 2 to 13 for chapter 3. And then the questions in chapters 4 through to 16 (minus 12, 13 and 14 thankfully). Rocking.
I've stopped studying for all my subjects. I need to study for econometrics the most because it's totally the hardest, and the only one I'm likely to drop this Wednesday. So I spend all my study time studying for that. But because it's so frightening, I don't study for it either. So I'm in a spot of bother. I've read and read the textbooks, but I seriously have very little idea what's going on in chapter 2, and we're up to chapter 11 and 16. I had to read the first chapters over and over, so I didn't get to the middle chapters like 4, 5, 6 and 8. You'd hope that would mean I had a good grasp of chapter 2. But it doesn't. We have this question that assessable and due on Thursday. I can look at it, and understand how incredibly easy it is. There are no tricks. It's totally straight-forward. But I have no idea how to start it.
Tuesday - I decided yesterday. that I would drop this course. I can't even do the homework questions, so I reckon I'll fail the exams. I went and told my lecturer I would drop it today and she was fine with it. I asked her if she knew anything about people who might do tutoring, but she didn't. I wonder if the reason she was so worried when my friend dropped out was that he did it before the date for financial penalty. In a class with 10 students, you have to worry about that sort of thing.
But the more I've thought about it, the more the risk of failing seems less important. I suspect it will prevent me from getting jobs, but maybe that's not as bad as having to spend an extra year or semester at uni. But maybe I have to forget about trying to do things well. I only have to understand the easiest 50% of the course. It feels like that must be achievable. I just wish I could find someone to explain it to me.
This sounds like a job for economacronomics. Some floozy reckons 4WDs are just as safe as other cars because they don't cause more crashes than other cars proportionally to their numbers. The problem is, as Stuart Newstead said, 4WDs are newer than other cars on average, and the drivers are older men (and we all know older men are the best drivers*). And oddly enough, they're more likely to be driven in cities. In rural areas 4WDs are more dangerous.
If you'd done it with econometrics, using very easy to find data, then you'd probably have got a different result. I once saw statistics the relative dangers of new cars versus old cars, and the differences astonished. Yes that's right. They astonished me.
On the more amusing entertaining side, 4WD sales went up 61% between 2000 and 2003. Just before petrol prices shot up. As much as I dislike 4WDs, I enjoy watching people driving around in them when I know they're paying $1.40/litre. Am I a bad person?
Anna and I had to present some stuff to CHERE yesterday. I thought I would be much more scared than I was. Normally when I wake on the morning of major sorts of things I have butterflies, but I kept repeating to myself part of email which the organiser had sent me.
It is very informal and lunch is provided.
It quelled all my fears very nicely. It was very informal, and lunch was provided. And the lunch was good and gourmet. One of the nice things about being a research assistant is all the econometrics lunches and nibbly evenings you get to go to.
The people at the presentation were really polite and interested and clever. If I had a paper I was writing, they are exactly the people I would want to present to and have ask questions of me. The interestingness of questions asked by professors so far seems to be rather a lot higher than those asked by undergraduates. Which is reassuring I can tell you. Undergraduates rarely ask questions at all.
The trip to the place was very difficult. I didn't have a watch, and I was worried that I was late, so I was racing across the city on crutches, in the middle of a sunny day, wearing a giant winter jacket (which I couldn't carry because of the crutches). But the time I arrived there I was so sweaty and hot. I hadn't been able to put deodorant on that morning because I'm not really sure where any of my stuff is, so I was hoping that the Mitchum "you can even afford to skip a day" promise held up. And I realised my shirt was totally crumpled and I looked generally pretty shoddy. Fortunately I was 20 minute early, so I had time to cool down.
I collapsed into the boardroom still looking rather appalling, and I think the girls running it wondered if I was legit. They ushered me through and got me some water and I dumped all my bags and coats and crutches in the corner. It was a bit awkward until one of them suddenly piped "Do you know Vineta? We'll go get her!" And they did. And despite having to compare myself to Vineta's chronic and infuriatingly pristine appearance, I was relieved. We had some little chats until Denzil - who was supposed to be violently unwell and probably wasn't going to make it - arrived.
Everyone arrived and they were actually quite a large number and the lunch feasting began. I wondered if maybe it was one of those glorious events that everyone goes to just so they can eat and chat, figuring that having to sit through a presentation is a reasonable admission fee. But it wasn't.
I did my little presentation, and people were really interested, and were talking about things they could do with the dataset. Which was the whole point, so that's grand. Anna did her talk, which was far more ambitious and sophisticated, but also much more vulnerable. She got a very considered and friendly lambasting from most people in the room, but stood up to it very well I thought. Especially considering she had just claimed to a room full of health experts that the risk of children being overweight increased by 5.7% for every additional hour their mother worked.
I think the nicest thing was that everyone was chatting and discussing stuff, and most of it I understood. And even better the stuff I didn't understand I felt like I would understand pretty soon. And they were talking about important things and problems that make the world better. And if I could make the world better, I'd be a very happy chap.
Although if I can't make the world better moving to France and starting a cheese farm would make me almost as happy.
It's remarkable how exciting it can be just watching numbers trickle past and slowly converge.
I'm looking at some survey data at the moment. One of the variables is Sex of mother. The options are Refused to answer, Don't know, Male and Female.
I found some issues with Stata's leastlikely command, so I fixed it up a bit. If you're getting issues with missing brackets, or failed to generate "Prob" or the error option outcome() not allowed then this will probably help. It's called leastlikely2, but you can rename it.
I also found that to give it a variable to put the probabilities into, you need to give it a previously generated variable.
gen pr = .
leastlikely2, generate(pr)
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