bhurma
what's great about all this is that the US won't intervene like it did with Iraq, which was what it had to do in order to assuage people from protesting like are doing in bhurma.
Nirav on 10.02.07 @ 01:47 PM EST [link] [No Comments]
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Tuesday, October 2nd
Wednesday, September 26th
ideas
1. schooling in capitalist amerikkka
is it possible to see the channels through which schooling affects outcomes later in life? christiano wants to see the effect of social clubs on wages later on by implementing a stuctural analogue to andy's height paper. is it possible to identify whether or not school helps people by making them better worker bees? bowles and gintis didn't do a good job of this in their 2002 paper (which may be why it was relegated to the journal of the sociology of education). even if someone has a better attendance record than someone else, this is plausibly (or even "more plausibly", some argue) due to home conditions or motivation that is entirely derived from reasons not related to having been conditioned to arrive at work on time. selection effects are tough to get around. it seems that schooling in capitalist america used marxism as an identification assumption.
also interesting: how about conspicuous waste aspect of social clubs? conditional on the educational outcomes, background, whatever, more clubs mean you're doing the same as others with less time. and how the fuck does one test this as well?
2. efficacy of political campaigns
if i have information on prior knowledge of voters, how much they were subjected to advertising, posterior knowledge of voters, and votes, i might be able to fit a model of political campaigns as advertisements. identification assumption: more informed voters will be less affected by the informational affect from advertising.
obvious problems:
a. how to voters obtain different priors? i'd need a panel data set to account for individual heterogeneity. outside of this, i'd need to do a keane-wolpin workback to some initial heterogeneity, which isn't appealing b/c i'll have the answer that all the differences are due to differences in initial endowments, and i'm not sure that this will allow me to think of political campaigns much at all, since the initial distribution would eat up most variance.
b. political parties clearly strategize w.r.t. advertising campaigns between states. i don't think i have any way of estimating this right now. would be a much better story if i estimated the equilibrium instead of the one-sided decision theoretical problem. what data would i need for this?
more coming later. i'm just afraid this computer might shit off randomly.
Nirav on 09.26.07 @ 11:35 AM EST [link] [No Comments]
dream night 9.26.2007
it's about koreans and italians mostly.
italians: i'm working with or for merlo. i need his help. he is wearing that black striped shirt it seems he's always wearing and white jeans. i think he's lost some weight. he's just bought a flight to see his wife in maine tomorrow. he's leaving and i can't talk to him and it's really frustrating. he doesn't seem to notice me. something about me chasing him in an airport (probably the next day) and getting chased or arrested by the police in the terminal. lots of levels, switchbacks on handicapped ramps, jumping over sides, and non-consistent ramp connections.
koreans: there's a war going on. on the wall there's a huge glowing world map. it's got the south pole in the middle and expands out from there. south korea and some other places are pulsing red. skoreans are hatching a war plot, i don't know what side i'm on but the dream alternates b/t war room, where i am aware of own body, and watching skoreans in a submarine. the sub is actually a blue-tinted but otherwise clear tupperware container. one can see directly inside and there is no periscope.
high school jumping around: bringing my bike down from mcneil (no bike lock), can see a crowd of people on a green just east of mcneil (in place of frat house and locust walk there's now a rolling green). people are all huddled around something. apparently there's a great bouncy ball in the middle and i finally see it and grab it and throw it while jumping. i can jump like birds can fly. i can jump like superman. it's effortless. in fact, i gain energy every time i jump. i see david blackwood, just run to him, not breathless. i climb into a tree and throw a ball to clint page. i am a running jumping machine. i am a golden retriever but better configured for a jumpy lifestyle.
Nirav on 09.26.07 @ 11:08 AM EST [link] [No Comments]
Saturday, August 11th
Friday, November 18th
goals?
i asked people in my program what their goals were.
here follow 3 examples of things i don't think are goals:
1) the only two women at the table told me their goals were to "pass prelims and then have a baby". i told them that having a baby isn't a goal, i think my reason for thinking it's not a goal is that it's normal enough (most people who make it to the relevant age end up reproducing).
2) however, someone else told me that they wanted to "live a good life". this seemed a non-goal as well, because it's not clearly defined, includes no plan of action, and it's not obvious that it's been met (and how does one measure living a good life over an extended period of time? economists and health economists might have some vulgar measures, but those remain crude, and what i need here is refinement, not an arbitraty reduction of complexity imposed so we can make the problem more tractable).
3) yet another person (actually, one of the future moms from above, but i don't want to rag on her) told me that her goal was to "do research". that doesn't seem like a goal for reasons similar to the "living a good life" "goal". like "living a good life", it's something over a period of time, so it's hard to measure success. second, and this seems more interesting, one presumably would want to do research because one cared about something else. maybe there are only two categories: to advance some field of knowledge itself (oncology and clown-tipping are two fields that immediately come to mind) out of a love of the field and the myriad problems is poses or to gain some sort of acknowledgment by a community that one cares about that one is indeed a smart/useful/whatever person. those don't seem mutually exclusive at all. so "doing research" doesn't seem a goal as much as a symptom of a larger, underlying goal that would be of more interest.
Nirav on 11.18.05 @ 12:32 PM EST [link] [1 Comment]
Thursday, July 7th
goals 1 (finance tracking)
i'm in the process of delineating goals for projects i'm thinking about. when i'm done with this, i think a mindmap would be the best way to track the different projects and their respective goals.
project $
general goal: track my money
specific goals that define what the project must do:
- have an idea of how much money i have, and in which accounts
- track expenses by category
- predict out how much money i will have in the future
- save receipts to track what i pay for and when (merge with physical receipts for certain items)
- keep track of monthly recurring and variable expenses
this means i don't need anything complicated. i can download monthly credit card statements for most of my transactions (i'd say over 90% of my transactions, comprising more than 95% of overall expenditures). monthly bank statements provide a picture of how i pay my credit card bills, and also how i gain income (as i have direct deposit from my job into my bank account). monthly mutual fund statements give a picture of how those funds get money from my bank (a level of redundancy is available at each level). the idea is to dl these three statements every month. i'm not sure whether or not i want to match these to receipts that i may save. for example, i usually purchase coffee with small globs of cash (<$2) - but rarely save these receipts.
i could save all reciepts, but then monthly statements from my visa card would be excessively redundant - they'd allow me to check the validity of charges, but i don't feel that i'm there yet. maybe an initial level of discipline is good. i can follow this with some other fancy jizz.
Nirav on 07.07.05 @ 03:32 PM EST [link] [1 Comment]
Sunday, July 3rd
oh, no god
during my drive from albany to cherry hill, nj, i came across a good way to think about whether or not there's a god-like thing.
it depends on how you think about free will (this strain of thought will eventually turn paradoxical, but keep with me). if we live in a mechanical universe, one without souls and magic, there's a compelling argument that we ultimately don't have free will. (this is b/c we can trace back the causes of events to observable phenomena - and out inability to do so hinges on our lack of complete information [ a constraint that becomes less and less binding as time progresses]).
however, in order to live a decent life without going nuts, we need to believe we have free will. things that remind me that i don't have it drive me nuts. things that make people apparent for the b0ts they are drive me crazy. i think a decent way to resolve this problem is that given that we don't have anywhere near a complete information set or complete rules of the game, and even if we did, nowhere near the ability to compute what outcomes will be or would have been, we don't know what's coming next and therefore the upshot is that we have free will, because it seems that way to us.
on to god-like forces. like with free will, what matters is what we can observe. if god-like forces have no observable impact on my life, there's no reason to act is if it exists. assuming that things exist when they don't impinge on our lives isn't helpful (though i suppose i'll have to concede that stories give people piece of mind).
Nirav on 07.03.05 @ 12:37 AM EST [link] [2 Comments]
Friday, July 1st
admirable traits
it seems that good character is valued over intelligence. could this be because a sizeable amount of intelligence is directly exogenous (given semi-randomly [or by genetics or some other deterministic force]), while character is often developed through harder-to-trace personal histories? this means character has more of an unexplained (or at least, not as easily explained) component than does intelligence.
if we think it has a larger unexplained component, this means it might be more likely to be percieved as magical and mysterious, or ultimately, "human" - like "souls" and "consciousness" (the latter until recently). we tend to value things that make it hard to reduce things to their mechanical underpinnings because we feel special.
blammo! we value character over intellect.
Nirav on 07.01.05 @ 06:46 PM EST [link] [5 Comments]
holy fucking shit (e.g. objectives)
right, so there are a few basics to cover in this inaugural entry. reasons for starting this:
- i'm trying this out to see what it's like, whether or not it's easier to keep tabs on my day's "work" on various projects
- i'm learning how blogs work. i hope to get a feel for what they're good at and where they fall short, and maybe think of ways to fix perceived shortcomings
- it's a way to make sure my ego keeps growing, like a stalk of superfertilized asparagus
- it may eventually help me get into the habit of writing more frequently. this may return amazing dividends. among these may be listed: increased ability to spell correctly, proficiency in my native language, and i might actually develop a writing style (or at least convert my vulgar cadence to text)
bling blang blong
Nirav on 07.01.05 @ 02:20 AM EST [link] [No Comments]