I’ve officially taken down ERPZ.net. It’s been running since 2009, collecting materials I used for tutoring Economics and Mathematics as well as General Paper. But life has progressed to a point that maintaining a site like that became increasingly difficult. As student life passes on into working life, the content of ERPZ.net may become increasingly distant from the audience it was originally targeting.
I’ve shifted my focus to writing more targeted rather than broad materials for students as evident from the eBooks published last year. I hope to continue this endeavour and benefit more students in Singapore in the years to come.
So for the past few months since August, I’ve been sprucing up on my skills in R through the Coursera online course designed by a couple of folks from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Biostatistics. It’s been interesting to pick up not only data analytics skills but learning about the different tools and platforms available online just for presenting data, doing visualizations and all that fancy stuff. I find it amazing how I first learn about Bootstrap, Spline Regressions, Permutation Tests, and a couple of other statistical techniques that might be useful in Econometrics through some of those courses in the Data Science Specialization.
So shortly after picking up those cool skills and programming some rather sophisticated looking data processing stuff (at least in my opinion), I actually started presenting stuff on various platforms using R! I wrote my first data analysis report on Rpubs, started a Github account and picked up Git (just a little; I simply wasn’t geeky enough), developed this rather useless fancy webapp and then even pumped out somewhat cooler slides to pitch it. All in all, I believe I gained more in this 3 months of learning from the series of online course than stuff I picked up in school over the past year (granted, that Advanced Math course sure was tough and made me feel like I picked up something, though I promptly forgot all of them).
I experienced a revival of interest in the intersection of Economics and Philosophy (or rather, the attempt to reconnect Economics with its philosophical roots) was sparked by Michael Sandel’s ‘Moral Limit of Markets’. I got to see his brilliance at the recent Rethinking Economics conference held in New York City. As it turns out, there is a passage from Analects of Confucius quoted by a recent article in New Yorker (it was a story about recent developments in cancer research involving the approach of targeting cancer cells and coaxing them to mature instead of dividing further):
If you use laws to direct the people, and punishments to control them, they will merely try to evade the punishments, and will have no sense of shame. But if by virtue you guide them, ad by the rites you control them, there will be a sense of shame and of right.
Of course, I’ve dealt with this before in something I once wrote introducing Sandel’s book. As a matter of fact indeed, Sandel is trying to draw to our attention something we already know at the back of our mind but decides to stay silent about.
There is something about our handwriting that reveals our character, people say. And strangely, this is not something wise of this new age of more-typing-than-writing, it is something that has been around for a while now. As I graded script after script, I discover to my horror how handwritings of students have gotten way worse compared to my days in school. There is something about the weakness of grip on the pen, the poor positioning of letters on a word, senselessness of certain curls. And it reveals a sloppy manner no other aspects of you would have been able to show.
Clarity of thought is also amply demonstrated in hand written pieces because you can no longer copy-paste or splice the stuff that you have previously written. Planning ahead and knowing what you are trying to articulate becomes immensely important. Unfortunately this art seems to have been lost through the rise of technology and its emphasis faded in pursuit of new ideals in American education.
I always wonder what is fairness and equality; is equal opportunity or equal outcomes fair? Why do we have that instinctive fairness protest while being able to tolerate some degree of what would be considered ‘unfairness’? Is meritocracy fair?
So for the guy who is disabled, is it fairer that we make sure he gets to the second level perhaps by installing a lift or do we force him to crawl/walk up the stairs just as everyone else do? True meritocracy leaves no room for charity and we must thus acknowledge the limits of applying that argument on incentives and solutions to various different problems.
Whilst speaking to a family member about her workplace, I discovered a problem their management was facing, with incentivizing the sales team. Previously, they operated on a system where everyone shared a commission based on sales generated by the team; but the new system entails charging sales to individual salespeople based on who eventually closes a retail sale with the customer at the till.
As probably expected, the result was that salespeople begin ‘snatching’ customers by bringing them to the till while their colleagues helped obtain a pair of shoes or a dress of the right size for them at the storeroom. Instead of creating additional sales, the system merely redistributed commissions across different salespersons, and in a way that is not encouraging effort.
Previous system was scrapped because there were free-riders in the sales team but the new system didn’t work very much better. Question is, how much is the firm trading off and what exactly is optimal from the perspective of the management?
I hesitated to start ‘blogging’ since I’ve got so many writing platforms but I guess I want to work on something with shorter bits of musings. Twitter seemed too concise and brief for that purpose so I opt-ed for this blog instead. So here goes.
Google left China and soon after that the shares of Baidu on NASDAQ soared above that of Google, going above 600 USD per share. The Economist reports on the message Google’s departure leaves for businesses in China, trying to warn business people that it is still not that easy to do business there.
Yet as Fortune explains, it’s not entirely about business. Beliefs of the founders of Google mattered, it seems. Well, I guess there is a concoction of complex ideas there but to simplify matters, let’s just say Google don’t agree with China and realised that dealing with China might entail too much costs (both in the business, social and emotional sense) and so they have pulled out. Yet they didn’t exactly pull out of the Chinese world, because they merely made Hong Kong their headquarters for the Chinese Language Google.
Meanwhile, it appears as if Climate Science is also under similar sort of mess. People are not agreeing with each other once again and making excuses here and there. But I believe The Economist makes a good point when they say that the uncertainty is precisely what justifies our efforts at combating climate change. The uncertainty should be what binds us together rather than become a point of contention. It’s stupid to agree that the science is uncertain and imprecise and then go on to squabble over what is the ‘true findings’ or ‘accurate data’.
I’m not sure how many people have chanced upon Post-It Notes with inspirational illustrations anywhere in Singapore and picked them up; the author/illustrator/documenter of Things We Forget is certainly doing something amazing for his/her own life and that of the others. The Post-It illustrations and notes are indeed inspirational if not a reminder of how much wisdom we lose in the course of conducting our lives. The address of the blog is apt in that sense.
And since I’m at introducing and recommending other websites, there’s an interesting free online textbook project at BookBooN. It’s not exactly free so to speak, since the textbook is interspersed advertising much like a magazine is. But well, you don’t pay a cent to download.
Blogging from a nanotechnology laboratory in Illinois isn’t exactly what I envisioned for my post-ORD trip but reality often strikes us in the most awkward ways. Dressed in a white lab coat and a safety goggle, I shall share with you my holiday experience thus far:
Life was getting boring in hot and humid Singapore. I have just finished my national service in January. Most of my peers decided to find employment, before the start of their university term, to earn some money and to use their time “productively”. I use “” because productivity is a subjective term; while others may think spending their time at work and slogging their guts out for their employer is more rewarding than rotting at home, I think using this time for personal development by broadening your horizons and discovering yourself is far more valuable than being stuck at the work desk. Hence, I decided to venture overseas to move outside of my comfort zone and explore independent living in a foreign country.
My journey has brought me to many places. I admired the skyscrapers of Chicago, walked the streets of Times Square, and relaxed in the slow pace of life in Illinois. Saint Augustine once said, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page”. So don’t stay at home. Go far away and immerse yourself in another culture of life. Get inspired in another environment. Lose your stress and worries in your new home. And take some time to organize your life.
I hope to come back with renewed vigor and a focused attitude on life. Won’t you say this is a better substitute than sitting at a work desk?
