Living in exile

It has been a week since my last blog entry. I have to return to the rhythm of posting daily.

Online classes: My current setup involves international students across three time zones (US, EU, Asia). I do livestreaming so the schedule can be a bit ungodly for some students. I work with Slack for handling feedback, Q&A, and communication. I did not want to risk using WeChat (feels a bit too on-demand for my taste). I use Zoom for livestreaming. During the outbreak season, Zoom allows unlimited use of its streaming functionality. I am sure we will be paying the hidden costs of this “free” offer in due time. But Zoom does have good features and screen sharing among multiple participants is quit good. I use Xournalpp along with a Wacom CTL-4100WL to do my “board work”. Finally, Zoom allows you to record the livestream.

Impact of online classes: Not sure to be honest. I feel that I spend more time doing teaching and prepping that it feels like I am teaching two courses. Perhaps it is the nonstandard nature of how I think my course should be delivered under the institutional setup. I teach a course that is technical, required for both master and PhD students, and should be useful to mixed-ability groups. In fact, there is nothing inherently wrong about the latter. I would argue that this is more the norm rather than the exception. I wonder how much university administrators realize that teaching is not theater. It is hard to find the right balance and it does stress me out.

Advanced Econometrics 2: (Skip if you wish) I teach this course in a very non-standard way to keep up with the challenges. I spent time emphasizing concepts (expectation has two practical interpretations), building Monte Carlo simulations (I ask students to design a simulation to estimate the probability that rolling 6 fair dice will give a sum greater than 15), and walking through a scientific investigation. So the first research question we investigate is whether we can or cannot predict rates of return for different securities. I spent time outlining what answering this questions would entail (motivation, theory, methods, limitations, more questions). But this eats too much time. I did CAPM as part of the theory (though not really part of a traditional metrics course). For the method, I decided to be extremely technical with respect to the theory behind simple linear regression. This might be a strange choice for some but I thought this is the least notationally annoying and allows me to do everything fleshed out without too many technical asides (such as linear algebra). Furthermore, I started with large-sample theory first rather than finite-sample theory (no matter how much I love finite-sample theory, the latter is really an artifact of the 70s). Instead, I show how limited this finite-sample theory really is in the “modern” interpretation of the linear regression model. I also started with a time series example rather than a cross-sectional example so that students do not fall too much in love with the iid case. And it will allow me to segue to unit roots immediately and conduct nonstandard inference. I hope this whole gambit will pay off.

Donation: The university announced roughly a week ago that it will be soliciting donations to help out in the efforts at Wuhan. What is strange about the donation drive is the public posting of the amounts of money donated by every person. To be fair, you can choose not to have your details posted. I wonder what sorts of people will eventually be on the list. To me this is just bad business. What is supposed to be public is the full accounting of the donations. The financial statement along with the complete file of receipts should be a public archive instead. That is why I was wrestling between giving and not giving. I asked whether I can give up the rest of “my” startup fund and the rest of “my” meal subsidies (until my eventual departure). Both are not possible which is really curious, in my opinion. In the end, I decided not to donate and would be finding other ways to donate instead.

Kick up and kiss down: (Nothing naughty, I promise.) I ran across the phrase “kick down and kiss up” in some article I read that is related to Chinese management. I think a good way to donate is to donate understanding instead. I hope we could all kick up and kiss down instead.

Lust in the time of corona: Recently, we found that JD is “encouraging” sales of sex toys, especially dildos. This is good news because women all over China should be having extracurricular fun. They deserve to get a moment to know their bodies, especially during these times when there are “pockets of boredom”. I hope that the women in the frontlines of the outbreak could also get a moment or even a room for themselves. I really hope someone could point me to a donation effort that could make this happen.

I end this rather long entry with a line from the TV series The Closer. This police procedural/drama stars what people now call a strong female lead. Strong female leads have been around for a long time but they are getting more attention these days. Find out more about The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Murder She Wrote to get some sense of the examples from the 70s and 80s. So, the lead investigator quipped:

“If we stop lying to each other, how can we ever get to the truth?”