snl on financial peace

Found here.

unfair but funny

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Home Crisis Investigation
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

Found here.

why i teach naked

I am a firmly in the camp of those who teach naked. Teaching naked causes students to pay more attention in class and become more active learners. There is more than enough research to show teaching naked increases student learning. I've found to teach economics effectively I must teach naked.

Isn't student learning what is important?

Oh, did I mention that to teach naked is to not use technology in the classroom? That is, to teach without computers.

The most often used technology in the classroom is PowerPoint (ppt). PPT presentations make it easy to follow lectures and the slides can be posted online for students to reference later. The only problem is that ppt has been shown to lower learning outcomes. Students are not actively involved. It is better for student learning to have them just copy notes from a chalkboard than to sit passively listening to a lecture and watching the pretty pictures on the ppt slides. The worst active learning beats the best passive learning.

Here is a sad commentary on higher education. Recently I was talking with a yet-to-be-tenured colleague from another department who mentioned she felt pressured to use technology in the classroom. So far she has resisted the pressure because she cares about student learning. However, she also has to receive tenure to keep teaching.

A recent post on Freakonomics cites articles and findings about ppt. PPT is not only destroying student learning but according to the Armed Forces Journal, PowerPoint is hurting our national defense by diminishing decision-making skills at the Pentagon.

Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. Six years ago that was the quite appropriate sub-title of the first known ppt-hating article. The title of that article was:

PowerPoint is Evil.


Be blessed.
RB

P.S. I do require my students to use Aplia outside of class to do both practice and graded problem sets and assignments. However, this requires active learning.

wedding dance

RB found this here.

conservatives in the ny 23rd congressional district

According to a newspaper article, NYS Conservative Party will not give its line to Republican Scozzafavo in the expected upcoming special election.

It might have something to do with Scazzafavo's 2008 voting record in the NYS Assembly. She is not only pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage, but garnered a measly Conservative Party rating of 15. By this, she is not only the most liberal Republican in the Assembly, but is more liberal than the average member of the Assembly which is firmly in the control of Democrats.

Today I also received a mailing slamming State Senator Aubertine, a Democrat, which was sent out by the National Republican Congressional Committee. (I guess they hadn't heard that Aubertine isn't running for Congress.) Earlier this summer they had phone recordings going out attacking Aubertine.

Too bad Mr. Aubertine is not going to make a run. In the evenly divided NYS Senate he had a Conservative Party rating of 50 for 2008. This makes him the most conservative member from any party in the state senate, save four (4) members who each had a slightly higher conservative rating of 55.

merle hazard: bailout

I found the following on a number of blogs:

africa: anything new in 70 years?

Not much, at least not according to William Easterly's blog, Aid Watch, where I found the following:

Is African poverty caused by lack of the necessary technical knowledge applied to disease, nutrition, clean water, and agriculture? Reading many discussions, like that of the recent food security initiative, or the UN Millennium Project (UNMP) on how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, would make you think so. Would it change your mind if that technical knowledge already existed and there were attempts to apply it as long ago as 1938? The following table compares the technical recommendations from a prominent and exhaustive survey of African problems headed by Lord Hailey in 1938 to those of the UNMP in 2005.

I don't know way there is such a long gap but please scroll down to the table.

African Problem to be Addressed	African Research Survey, 1938	UN Millennium Project, 2005
Malaria	“mosquito bed-nets …malaria control by the spraying of native huts with a preparation of pyrethrum”	“insecticide-treated nets…. insecticides for indoor residual spraying …{with} pyrethroids”
Nutrition	“…the African suffers from deficiency of Vitamin A”	“Malnutrition {is also} caused by inadequate intake of … vitamin A”
Soil fertility	“methods of improving soil fertility {such as} green manuring”	“using green manure to improve soil fertility”
Soil erosion	“increasing absorption and reducing runoff on cultivated land {through} the use of terraces”	“Contour terraces, necessary on sloping lands… when furnished with grasses and trees…{to avoid} soil erosion”
Land tenure	“… legal security against attack or disturbance can most effectively be guaranteed by registration”	“security in private property and tenure rights … registration of property”
Clean drinking water	sinking boreholes	“Increase the share of boreholes”

A longer version of this table and the citations for the quotes appear in my recent article “Can the West Save Africa?” in the Journal of Economic Literature.)

Enthusiasts for technology fixes for poverty concentrate almost exclusively on the science and the technical design -- this is a characteristic fault of poverty solvers from Silicon Valley, the Gates Foundation, doctors, and natural scientists.

All of the above seem to forget that technology does not implement itself. Technical knowledge needs people to implement it – people who have the right incentives to solve all of the glitches and unexpected problems that happen when you apply a new technology, people who make sure that all the right inputs get to the right places at the right time, and local people who are motivated to use the new technology. The field that addresses all these incentives is called economics.

an interesting way to save darfur

Show you really care by buying a Save Dafur thong!

I wonder if Mia Farrow has one?


[source]

california and the nick leeson school of finance

California's CalPERS is the largest public pension fund in the USA with just under $200 billion in assets. They are down about 30% from their peak and want to get back up in a hurry. This is from the financial blog Calculated Risk:

Double Up to Catch Up!

From the NY Times: California Pension Fund Hopes Riskier Bets Will Restore Its Health (ht several)

[Joseph A. Dear, the fund’s new head of investments] wants to embrace some potentially high-risk investments in hopes of higher returns. He aims to pour billions more into beaten-down private equity and hedge funds. Junk bonds and California real estate also ride high on his list. And then there are timber, commodities and infrastructure.

That’s right, he wants to load up on many of the very assets that have been responsible for the fund’s recent plunge.

The post title is an old gambling saying. Actually now is probably a better time to buy some of these assets than a few years ago.

This is a classic application of the Nick Leeson theory of finance. Who is Nick Leeson? A seemingly inconsequential trader in the Singapore office of Barings Bank. Barings was the Queen's Bank, it began in 1765 and was Britain's largest investment bank until 1995. In 1995 Mr. Leeson suffered some trading losses so he made even riskier trades to try to make it up. He lost another $1.4 billion and Barings went belly up.

The managers of CalPERS have a lost of lost pension money that needs to be made up. Maybe it will turn out better for California's state employees and retirees than it did for the stockholders of Barings.

outsourcing guilt

Yesterday I stopped at the SLU Library on my way home and picked up a couple of new books from the "browsing section." I've already finished off one, Jan Wong's A Comrade Lost and Found. It is an autobiographical tale of her search a couple of years ago for a long-lost acquaintance from university days. Days in the early 70's when Canadian Wong was one of the first foreign students at Beijing University. Days in the middle of the ten-year reign of terror known as the Cultural Revolution.

Now a journalist, Wong was then a young "Maoist wannabe" and Marxist True Believer who voluntarily ratted on a bright young Chinese student for expressing a desire to go to America. This women disappeared soon after. Under a burden of guilt, the fifty-ish Wong returns to Beijing for a month-long, quixotic quest to discover what happened to one of the Cultural Revolution's millions of victims, in a country with a collective amnesia of, and missing records from, that decade.

I recommend the book, an entertainingly fast read, a combination guide to present-day Beijing and a detective story of tracking down a long-lost woman thirty years after the fact in a country of over a billion people.

Against all odds, Ms. Wong finds the woman, hears her story of suffering internal exile and punishment as well as of her story of eventual financial and social success in modern China.

Wong of course apologized for ratting her out. It eased her guilt a bit to be forgiven by the victim as well as to learn her part in the downfall was actually relatively minor.

The book ends with a sense of closure, even on a note of redemption. However, there is also a sense of incompleteness. Ms. Wong knows that all she did, and all she received in terms of forgiveness, was not enough. She and everyone did all they could, but it was not enough to undo all the wrong she committed as a young woman.

The book ends with its own sort of collective amnesia. Like the Chinese who try to forget, ignore, and be silent about Cultural Revolution because it was so terrible and because so many victims also victimized others that there is nothing that can be done now, Wong wants to think that since there is nothing more that can be done about what she did, things must be passingly okay.

I don't think she really believes it though.

She is right. It is not good enough. There is nothing she herself can do to make it good enough. No one can doubt her sincere desire to make things right. No amount of human effort can make things right.

There is only one source of complete redemption, only one source of complete and total forgiveness for what she did. Ms. Wong, as do the rest of us, needs to outsource her redemption. We all need to accept what Jesus Christ did on the cross: His payment, His redemption, His forgiveness.

Anything else is ultimately phony. Deep down inside, we all know but try to forget that our best is just not good enough. We tend not to recognize the truth of the situation because we can't handle the truth. Any other way that tries to bypass the truth of Jesus is incomplete, unsatisfying, and ultimately dishonest.

We have a great God who is not only able to redeem the guilty, but is desirous to redeem the guilty who are completely undeserving of redemption.

That my friend is grace. That my friend is the love that surpasses all understanding.

Be blessed.
RB