Living in exile

Two temperature readings sent to our building representative. Advice for filling up new WeChat forms has been given but not yet tried. But overall, not so bad. I was able to read and work on half of Jeffrey Racine's Reproducible Econometrics Using R. I probably would post an unsolicited review after I finish it. Quite a nice book but could use a polish since it was intended to be a book deployed online rather than in print.

In terms of our meals, we had the following. Breakfast: Finishing up our stock of oats from a while back. Put some cocoa shavings and sugar to make oats taste better. If you have excess chocolate that you do not like, get rid of them this way. I wonder how we can use up excess tea leaves without drinking them but integrating them into food?

Lunch: Fortunately, the first few boxes from JD.com have arrived. We had instant noodles (Reeva, a product from Vietnam: quite good but not as popular as the Chinese brands) with some old frozen dumplings. We shared five dumplings. Six more left for another occasion.

Dinner: Finished up the rest of the oats. Had some congee left over from last night. This time we had fish floss instead of beef floss.

Today, we cleaned up almost all of our clothes from the trip. Fortunately, we still had some detergent. We watched a couple of those ridiculous Hong Kong comedies. We caught up with a couple of seasons of Keeping Up Appearances (a good show to pass the time).

I was able to continue doing some setup for the online delivery of the classes. I say online delivery rather than online classes because we have not thought very well how the classes are going to be setup, how students are going to actually “meet”, and how assessment is going to be done. So the band-aid solution is to try to deliver the classes in an online fashion through mixed media. We are going to be using Slack as a workspace. Let us see how far it would go.

But this is easier said than done. Internet bandwidth is a scarce resource. I think people overestimate internet capacity and attention spans. I have students who are out of China for the moment and would likely have poor internet access. We still have to resolve these issues. People treat online classes as if it were a general-purpose hammer to hit the “classes must go on” nail. I believe WeChat sucks both as a professional and educational tool. It is time to think analog solutions for the moment and improvise from there.

We spent some time sleeping a bit more. It feels like hibernation, as the building we live in is not robust to the cold temperatures. They designed the building so that the “cold sticks to the walls”.

At this moment, people in China are starting to return physically to their work. I am not sure how wise this really is given that work from home (or other alternative work-style arrangements) should be an option that every institution should consider. Is this a step toward the evolution of work in China? I believe really wrestling with this question is a useful way to restore “economic momentum”.

That's it. I leave you some words from Racine's book:

“Just because you bootstrapped your standard errors doesn't render your inference robust.”