Day 16
We are 16 days after our release from self-isolation. I am happy to report that we might be able to manage not going out for another day given the meal planning we have done. So far, we have done no meal deliveries and (sorry for those eating while reading) no diarrhea! Cleanliness really is next to godliness.
Today is my 4 year wedding anniversary with the University of Amsterdam. After a successful PhD defense inside a church, PhD candidates are “wed” to the university. It is quite a ceremony, as you have the public, the defense committee, you, your paranymphs (the people by your side during your defense) and the master of ceremonies (who is somehow acting like the priest).
Today is also quite an eventful day in terms of admin tasks: vetting webinar materials to be streamed, dealing with some technical difficulties for a webinar streamed to our graduate students, dealing with the system for our applicants along with the planning for the coming school year, dealing with interruptions here and there.
Today is also the 6th whole day for which I have been back to using Windows (or as the anti-establishment people would call it, losedoze). It has been more than a decade or so since I moved completely to Linux and I am now back in Windows. It is somehow remarkably stable. Perhaps because I do not install the usual share of shit programs. I got rid of the antivirus which occupied 1 GB of space!! I also got rid of Minecraft, Candy Crush, and other Chinese programs that were installed by default. The only bad thing about buying Windows with your laptop in China is that their basic edition does not allow you to change the language interfact. Although it would have been a learning experience for me to learn these new words like 操作, 设置, etc, I think I am at the limit of my curiosity with respect to operating systems. I have also been able to somehow set up what I needed in my Linux environment in Windows. Overall, it is not a bad experience (for now). The experience is a far cry from Windows 95, 98 and the god awful ME.
Today is also the day I cooked a fried fish dish with some sort of sweet and sour sauce. This is called escabeche in the Filipino language but I used some of the homemade Japanese pickled cucumber as part of the dish. It was quite good but I really do not buy fish. That fresh fish was in our freezer for a year already.
In today's online class I spent time discussing the parallels between the linear regression as an algebraic tool and the best linear predictor, the motivation for studying linear regression as a statistical tool, the proof of the consistency result for OLS (using only observables, no errors introduced at all), the parameter uncertainty problems arising from two-step estimation, the zero denominator problem (as a precursor to weak instruments), the motivation (through a Monte Carlo simulation) for studying the asymptotic distribution of OLS estimators. I think I am too slow but I have to flesh things out to reach everyone (not sure if it happens for everyone but I think I am able to reach most). On Thursday, I will be deriving the asymptotic distribution much more fully (will be using the delta method), why we have the root-T magic number, and then do consistent estimation of the asymptotic variance. Et voila, all inference results flow directly now. Hope I will finish that on Thursday. Then, I will finally put a nail on the Gauss-Markov result, once we think about the “modern” version of the linear regression model.
That's it for today. Thank you for reading.