Exams.

For my courses at LSE, most, if not all of my grade is determined by my performance on a single two-hour exam taken at the end of the year. If you're lucky enough to have your homework graded, the grades don't count for anything -- they're just feedback to help you study. (My two math courses do have take-home exams, which count for only 10% of the grade.) All the exams are in May and June, even for courses that only met in the Fall term. So, for example, my theory of computation class ended in December, but I won't take the exam for it until June. Moreover, exam results cannot really be challenged. I won't ever get to see my corrected exam, and will never know why exactly I got the grade I did.

You would think a department that was world-renowned for its expertise in applied statistics would realize that this is not going to give them a very accurate measure of our ability.

All About Darfur.

I would like to highly recommend "All About Darfur", a documentary filmed by a Sudanese-British woman about the complex Sudanese attitudes towards the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. It was shot on a shoestring budget as the director and interviewer traveled in Sudan, disarmingly and revealingly interviewing the people she met about their attitudes towards the conflict, racism, the West, and what it means to be Sudanese. The most remarkable aspect of the film is the way it unabashedly faces the many aspects of the conflict, making no attempt to simplify it or impose an agenda. As much as is possibly, it simply gives eloquent voices to the many Sudanese the director meets, their experiences, and the terrible complexity of war.

The director came to speak to the showing at LSE and answered questions afterwards. I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- this sort of thing is why I love it here.

A Stunning Election Result.

In a residence-hall wide election in which twenty people actually voted and nobody else ran for the position, I was elected treasurer of LSE's Butler's Wharf Residence for the 07-08 academic year. Technically, people were allowed to vote against me even though there was nobody else running, since there was an option to "re-open nominations". I slipped by, though, thanks, I believe, to my campaign poster. Besides getting my Thumb in the Pie, this guarantees me a place in the residence halls next year, something which second-year students are otherwise rarely able to secure.

Errata.

When I first posted about the proportion of women in the facebook group "I Love the Smell of Econometrics in the Morning", I hadn't properly covered hypothesis testing in statistics, and so had only a heuristic understanding. I'm sorry to say that I got it quite wrong. I'm a little embarrassed. Also, the fact that nobody called me on it testifies either to the apathy or statistical innumeracy of my readership. Or possibly the absence of any readership at all. Anyway, we have more data, and I have corrected my analysis below.

We will use a most powerful likelihood ratio test to distinguish between the composite hypotheses H0: p>p0 and H1: pp0, is decreasing in x and p0, so the uniformly most powerful test at 90% confidence for our hypothesis is to reject H0 if x=k)>=0.9.

New members have joined since last time, so we now have a larger sample in which we observe fourteen girls out of a total forty-eight members. If p0=0.4, then k=15, so our sample allows us to reject the hypothesis that econometricians are, on average, more than 40% girls with 90% confidence.

This result is less striking than last time, where I (using pretty erroneous statistics) asserted that the number was less than 35%. As a dude, I have to say that this revision is a good thing.

Bilingual Calligraphs.

My flatmates and I use my magnetic poetry set creatively.

I Am Really a Nerd

and Garage Band empowers me. This song is about the Gauss Markov theorem, and how under a certain set of assumptions the OLS estimator is the best linear unbiased estimator of a set of endogenous variables, in the sense of having minimum variance. This property is commonly referred to as an estimator being "BLUE", which just begs to be made into a song.

I would like to add that by sampling Prof. Seo's lecture I intend no disrespect. I do, in fact, intend just the opposite.

Listen here.

And here are the lyrics.