The Daily Cow

Every point I lose on a test can be categorized into one (or more) of the following:

• Careless miss: This is the most common, and includes arithmetic mistakes, misreading a well-composed question, or circling the wrong letter. The incidence quickly approaches zero with more time and practice (i.e. taking practice tests or doing homework), but can rarely be eradicated by simply studying. Of course, there's the random occasion when a test question asks what you've studied exactly--then you just have to recite from memory
• Compulsory miss: What? A term or concept appears on the test that I did not come across during lecture or whatever other means of preparation. For example, professors sometimes pull random concepts from the textbook (which aren't covered in lecture), just to give those who read a little bonus. There are few fixes aside from doing all the reading, and these are often unavoidable also (hence compulsory).
• Capacity miss: I could have sworn I've encountered this fact, concept or term somewhere--I even remember which lecture! But what it really means escapes me. This is when my memory fails. Reviewing lecture slides help immensely.
• Conflict miss: Instead of forgetting something I've encountered, or not ever encountering the concept or fact at all, I simply learned it wrong. My understanding of the concept was wrong. Or I mixed up two different concepts that seemed similar. This is like careless mistakes, but instead of at recall-time, it's at store-time.
• Consistency miss: The lecture, test questions, or study material were inconsistent, confusing, or misleading. I can often detect them, but I can't prevent them.
• Clueless grader miss: The grader makes a mistake. Improving penmanship helps.

Some things can be addressed with practice (careless, capacity and conflict misses). Some things can be addressed with review (capacity and conflict). Some things require extra work (compulsory misses). Some things require vigilance (conflict and consistency misses).

But there are trade-offs with each. It's a matter of where you are weakest, and how you are most effective.

What do you think? Did I cover all the basic ground with these categories? (You can tell I modeled this on the types of cache misses)

Last week, I discussed the immense leverage the higher education systems have with regards to pricing. This week I will cover how UC Berkeley is abusing its monopoly power.

The average student has suffered through years of cumulative tuition increases (9-10% annually), cutbacks in services, elimination of necessary classes, and escalation of living fees (food and residence). For example, I have a class that I absolutely need to take before graduation, and I signed up for it in the earliest time possible (sacrificing the slot that could've been used for another class) only to see it get cancelled without a single notice; now every substitute for that class is either completely full (including the waiting list) OR conflicts with my schedules. The cause of the cancellation? Budget. Stupid reason, because this is a mandatory class and cancelling it for one semester will only mean that there must be more the next semester.

The ostensible cause is the increasingly restrictive budget, but I don't believe it. The University assures us that it understands that we're all in financial hardships: It is giving underqualified minorities full subsidies to try their luck at Berkeley while it is giving the rest of us the middle finger. This favoritism is appalling. It has to stop.

The University is pulling away from its purpose as the institution whose purpose is to educate the public. It is becoming an institution that plunders the middle class to give life support to the poor; it is obviously standing at the wrong side of the balance between fair outcomes and fair mechanisms. It must rediscover its original mission to provide education for the masses, not by sacking the middle class to pay for the poor, but my making it affordable for everyone to get a good education.

If you cannot obtain at least 30000 dollars of long-term value from your education at Berkeley (your break-even point if everyone paid the same tuition), perhaps you need to re-examine what is wrong instead of taking my money anyway. Thanks.

The question was the following:

Consider a setting with three bidders and complete information where bidders' values are commonly known. There is a sealed-bid auction where the highest bidder wins the object and pays the AVERAGE of the all three bids. In the case of a tie, the lowest-indexed of the high bidders wins the auction and pays the average. Suppose v1 > v2 > v3. In any Nash equilibrium does player 1 win the object?

And the choices were: (a) For some v1, v2, v3 and (b) For all v1, v2, v3.

The use of "any" in this context confused me. I thought it meant that, for a given values v1, v2, v3, if there was any Nash equilibrium where player 1 wins the object, the condition is satisfied for the given values. Apparently any meant all! My professor says it means that given the values, player 1 must win the object in all the Nash equilibria (which is certainly not true).

I am more familiar with (and prefer) determining whether ∀i∃j such that P(i,j) is true or false. It avoids the confusion between any and all (apparently they mean the opposite of what I thought they meant), is more concise, and is language independent.

I never seem to get more than half of True/False questions right. Either I circle the wrong thing, or my intuition is tricked by the wording. Since they are not usually worth too many points I neglect to go through a proof of my answer, and consequently I choose the wrong one. The problem is intensely magnified when the consequences of missing a question is the loss of twice (or five times) the value of the entire problem (say, losing 10 points, as opposed to getting nothing, on a 2 point problem).

The economist's objection to monopolies is that they are not socially efficient--they do not produce up to where price equals marginal cost. Instead, because they are the sole supplier of the market, the price at which they can sell their goods depends on the quantity they decide to produce and sell. When the monopolist tries to sell its good to more people, it must lower the price for its other customers. Hence, they produce less than is socially optimal--the level of production at which they maximize profits is much lower than the socially optimal level.

So what if we made monopolies--sole (or close to sole) suppliers of certain markets--produce at that socially optimal level? Then it would be great! We would have the scale efficiency of monopolies and none of the deficiencies of market power. The curious thing is, it already exists.

Example: Higher Education

The higher education system is exactly that. The school--the monopolist--can almost perfectly discriminate among its "customers". It can charge a high "base" fee, and based on ability to pay, offer "financial aid". It can do that almost perfectly because each student who wants financial aid is required to submit an entire financial disclosure of his family's assets, earnings, liabilities, etc. The university then has everything it can reasonably obtain to determine the highest price that the student (or his family) can "afford" and is willing to pay. That is perfect monopolistic exploitation.

In this case, the monopolist (the university) captures the entire social surplus that other forms of monopoly miss out on. It can do so because it can offer its services to poorer students for a much lower cost than its general offering without adversely affecting the price it can charge more affluent students.

Berkeley's Fee Increases

Berkeley for instance recently announced another 9-10% fee increase--on top of the double-digit fee consecutive fee increases in the past several years--but it assured its students that the financially needy will still receive assistance via FAFSA (and perhaps other programs). Essentially, it is raising the cost to the middle class to subsidize the cost to the poor. In doing so, it diminishes the dollar's value to the middle class relative to that to the working class. The fact that 0 dollars buys the same education for the poor as 10,000 dollars for the affluent completely redefines what it means to be poor. (The fact that FAFSA does not consider regional cost-of-living as a factor in determining the ability to pay is also inefficient)

Is it fair to continually shift the cost of the service from the poorer population to the middle class? Just because the middle class is better off does not mean it is not also suffering from the job losses plaguing the entire state and world economy. The country needs to stop paying people for being poor and to start paying for proven results and potential. 5000 dollars (say the average student gets 5000 dollars in financial aid) a year really isn't that much for an education that's worth much more in expectation over the long run.

I have to write a six page paper by Monday to answer the following prompt:

The film Imitation of Life takes place between 1947 and 1959 in and around New York City, following the lives of two single mothers. Each mother has a very different relationship to money, work, and family. Write an essay that attempts to account for why these characters are so different. Be careful to avoid simple compare-contrast arguments. Instead, focus on the meanings behind those differences, paying particularly close attention to their relationships to money, work, and family. As with the above prompt, since at least part of this prompt is historical and/or sociological in nature, use one historical, sociological, or critical source to assist you in your argument.

What does it mean to answer WHY one character differs from another? Wouldn't it be rather presumptuous of me to assign arbitrary causes for why one woman is the way she is; while the other is another way? Also, am I attempting to decide why the characters are different in the movie by pretending that it were real (and hence they had unique and physical histories), or infer why the film director made them different in the way they are different?

How would you like it if I gave a 10 minute speech on why you are different from me, assigning reasons where there are none?

In essence, for the assignment I need to come up with the following and write it in English: A set of N independent variables S={s₁, ..., s_N} and the causality function f:S→C that produces a set of characteristics (dependent variables) C for every set S of independent variables.

The only difference between the two mothers is race. One's black and one is white. Everything else is a consequence of it: in the 1940s-1950s America, being black meant limited career opportunities. But I can't explain why they're different just because of their difference in race.

I might as well write an essay about how this is impossible given the dependent nature of everything but what each character is born with. The state of the entire universe at any particular instant is a function of the immediately-preceding state, and in a similar way, the circumstances of the characters are a direct result of how they began.

This doesn't make sense. Help me. This is why I'm an Engineer, so I can actually solve and prove things that can be solved and proven.

Three things, one directly my fault and the other two not, caused me to waste eight otherwise-productive hours on the second project. You'll see how ridiculous those three things are.

I thought I had a completely functional submission yesterday morning. All I needed to do was to use the test script once to verify that. But when I uploaded it, the test script wouldn't even run. After some time of research (my professor was out of town and nobody else had the same problems), I discovered that it was because I was running Bash as my default shell. I changed that to csh (C-shell) and now the script finally ran.

I failed every test. It gave me absolutely useless explanations for why I failed them, but I found one lethal error that could have caused me to fail them all: instead of using sb $0, 0($a0) to save a null character, I used lb $0, 0($a0) (which obviously doesn't work). After I fixed that (using notepad), I uploaded the file again, and it still failed all the tests. I read through the code again, but I found no bugs!

I opened Mars (our MIPS assembler) and tried running the code, and surprisingly it worked, so I saved it (even though I made no changes) and uploaded it. And now the tests don't complain that they failed--instead they complain about some command not being found. After Googling a bit, I realized that that command isn't in csh, but it's in tcsh. So I changed my shell to that, and program passed all tests--yay!

Now that I was confident my code worked, I put off the last part--commenting the code (yup, the whole assembly file was nearly uncommented when I wrote it) until 10:40. But after commenting, the code stopped working--it failed all the tests again! I was so confused! So I replaced code bit by bit to see what made it work, and only at 11:55 did I figure out that this whole time, the only reason the test script failed me completely was that I didn't have a newline at the very end of my program.

And this is also why opening and saving in Mars, even with no changes, fixed my program up above (paragraph 2). Isn't that stupid? How should I have known that I shouldn't use Notepad to edit my program? (it doesn't automatically add a newline) How should I have known that the script works only on tcsh? I suppose it was unwise of me to change my settings away from the default, but isn't that what settings are for?

Part of it was lack of documentation on Clancy (my professor)'s part--a simple "The script only works on tcsh and on newline-terminated code" would have sufficed to save me 4 hours! The other part was a bona fide mistake of a programmer. (I made one typo!) But together they were disaster because nobody else had the same problems. Lesson: There are dangers to doing things unconventionally.

In my edition of this novel by Herman Melville which was published in 1971, there is an "is" masquerading (sorry) as an "it" on page 103. It's funny that 38 years after the novel's publication, the publisher still hasn't fixed the typo. Anyway, that sentence with two consecutive "is"es greatly confused me. I'm surprised nobody else suffered the same confusion!

The Haas admissions notification website is dead. I can't access it. I saw my notice for a few seconds at 3 before it crashed again. Isn't it strange that technology services are down ("Object reference not set to an instance of an object" kind of errors) right when you need them?

Hi, this is a holder page for the DeCal that Jack and I are co-hosting. For now, the syllabus is attached. In the future, the lecture powerpoints will be also attached.

Class Curriculum

We will cover two topics: financial investment, and the current economic downturn. The DeCal will ensure that students understand the different methods of investing during a bull market (e.g. 1992-1999) and a bear market (2007-2XXX).

Class Objectives

Students will:

• learn how to invest in stocks, bonds, etc
• receive experience by practicing using simulation programs
• be able to execute orders and invest without a financial adviser
• understand the fundamental ways of investing during regular as well as difficult times

Class Schedule

1. Week 1: Stocks (1) – Introduction and Administrivia
2. Week 2: Stocks (2) – Functions, politics, corporate news
3. Week 3: Stocks (3) – Data analysis
4. Week 4: Stocks (4) – ETFs, Options
5. Week 5: Investment Psychology
6. Week 6: Introduction to the Recent Crisis
7. Week 7: Who's to Blame?
8. Week 8: Continuing the Blame
9. Week 9: Technical Analysis
10. Week 10: Navigating the Bear Market & Bonds
11. Week 11: Bonds and Currencies

Also, Prof. Arturo-Perez will run an additional discussion

Grading

• 20% Attendance
  • One excused absence allowed
• 20% Homework/Project
  • Weekly check-up on stock simulation project
  • Late homework lose 50%
• 60% Quizzes, Paper, Final Exam
  • No unexcused make-up
  • Paper must be turned in to pass the course

Contact Info

• Jack Wei: j.wei@berkeley.edu
• Jinghao Yan: jinghao@berkeley.edu
• Prof. Arturo Perez: perezre@haas.berkeley.edu