Dear Prof. Zhang,

I thoroughly enjoyed your isom 2010 course this semester! I have been so inspired by you and this course has made me more of a proactive and outside the box thinker! I had joined the uni with the ambition of hopefully becoming an entrepreneur pursuing econ and finance as a major but now face a dilemma because this course has sparked my interest in Information systems due to not only the knowledge learned but also the skills gained! Thank you so much!

Which segment are you in?

Looks like we should go to the creative class that represent less than 1/3 work force, but gets 1/2 the total money.

Quote from the “Organization and Markets” blog by a group of professors:

| Peter Klein |

To my colleagues who teach: how do you handle disengaged students? Paul Trout describes them thusly:

They do not read the assigned books, they avoid participating in class discussions, they expect high grades for mediocre work, they ask for fewer assignments, they resent attendance requirements, they complain about course workloads, they do not like “tough” or demanding professors, they do not adequately prepare for class and tests, they are impatient with deliberative analysis, they regard intellectual pursuits as boring, they resent the intrusion of course requirements on their time, they are apathetic or defeatist in the face of challenge, and they are largely indifferent to anything resembling an intellectual life.

I have known a few in my time. The pointer is from George Leef, who also provides this excerpt from Generation X Goes to College:

[B]y and large, students view themselves primarily as consumers who intend to study just a handful of hours a week for all their classes, and who expect, at a minimum, solid Bs for their efforts. . . . In short, they view themselves as consumers who pay their teachers to provide “knowledge,” regardless of how superficial that knowledge might be. After all, how hard should a consumer have to work to buy something?

I have to say there are students like these in my class. I would call myself a fully engaged professor: I spend huge amount of time preparing for each class and use every bit of my effort to deliver what I believe to be important to the students. There are still students who skip the classes (some even for the whole semester), and some would complain about any change I bring into the class.

Here is one example: In one class for group presentation, a student came to me and told me he had not seen any of his team members throughout the semester and he had to work on the project on his own. They did not answer his emails and did not even tell him if they would come to the presentation.  While he was presenting, the missing team members came one by one during the class. They did contribute in applauding.

Another example: One day, it was time for group presentation. There were 5 groups in that session. After the first presentation, I learned that there would be a fire-drill in about an hour.  At least one group will be affected by the fire drill.  To avoid the negative impact on the last team, I decided to hold an auction among the 4 remaining teams.  The plan was that I start from awarding 1 extra grade point and seek any group who would take the offer and move to the next week’s session.  If there was no one to take the offer, I’ll raise the offer to 2, then 3,… points, until one group takes the offer. The plan immediately got objected by the first team who just finished presenting. “It’s so unfair!” as they say.  They did not consider how unfair it was for the last team who would have to take the extra effort to prepare again.

Some professors actually make the situation worse by baby-sitting the students.  For example, I know professors who hire professional TAs to “page down” his slides in class. The TA is quite busy in doing things like playing the videos, dimming the lights, etc.  The professor would be busy creating flash cards with cartoon stamps on them to award the students who answer the questions.  To avoid cheating, they also sign each card when they hand out the cards. When a student skip the class, they would ask the TAs to teach the students in special sessions, and when the students skip the exams, they would allow a make-up exam for them.  When the students miss the make-up exam, I know someone who asked TAs to offered make-up make-up exams. Part of the reason is that TAs here are like public goods (air, water), so they tend to overuse them. In return, the students believe they are consumers and instead of learning knowledge, they are enjoying the service provided by the university.
There are of course very engaged students. Some students really deliver excellent presentations and are amazingly thoughtful in answering my questions in classes.  They are the reasons for me to do my best in teaching.  Fortunately, there are many of them.

Just received an email from MIT alumni office.  MIT will be tuition-free for nearly 30% students.

From the email:

MIT has long been a proponent of need-blind admissions and need-based
aid and this additional investment in our brilliant student body continues
to award aid based solely on need.

I’m very proud with this move.  I somehow have the impression that schools like Yale and Harvard are for rich kids. As a consequence, it means that some brilliant students can not go to those places due to financial constraints.  This artificial financial divide creates a feedback loop to discriminate kids from poorer families.  The free-tuition move at MIT will definitely help those smart and poor kids to fulfill their dreams, and more importantly help the society to benefit from better matching good education with smart kids.

I’m grateful to MIT for the support during my PhD study.   In addition to tuition waiver, I also got stipend to pay my rents, etc.  In return, I don’t know how to pay back this generosity.  Should I send my daughter to MIT in the future?  One thing for sure, her dad is richer than her dad’s dad.  If she needs to pay some tuition, I’d be happy to contribute.  The question is “Is MIT a good place for her?”

Back in Boston, we had some guests visiting,  one of them (G) asked Alantha (A),

G: Hey, Alantha, do you want to go to MIT or Harvard?
A: Hmm, I don’t want to go to either.
G: Oh, so where do you want to go?
A: Disneyland… (a sheepish smile)
Everyone else: (speechless)

I can categorize people I know into 4 groups. Well, at least theoretically, because I can’t really find an example in the (stupid,mean) domain.

Richard Feynman, among many other people who I respect belongs to the first quadrant of (smart,nice). A good example of (smart,mean) is probably Lu Xun or an assistant professor I met at Wharton (he subsequently left Wharton and went to Europe). I’ve been listening to two of his audiobooks “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, and “What Do You Care What Other People Think”, and I feel very intellectually stimulated by his view of the world.

On my ipod, I have all sorts of audiobooks from Kung Fu novels by Jin Yong to bestsellers like “The World is Flat”, “The Devil Wears Prada” to non-fictions like one explaining E=MC^2, and a few of Stephen Hawking’s books on the universe. None of the these books can keep me awake at night. When I listen to Feynman’s audiobook, sometimes I get too excited to fall in sleep. For example, he described how he studied the process of people falling into sleep and how to examine the dreams. When I was young, I did almost exactly the same thing, and had some interesting findings such as “I can see color in dreams”, “I can control my motion consciously in my dreams”, and “I can create the situation in dream to explain the external sound I hear while I’m sleeping”.

The curiosity of finding how things work can be immensely rewarding. In the following video, Feynman explains how he appreciates the beauty of a flower. It’s amazing.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8777381378502286852[/googlevideo]

I hear, and I forget;

I see, and I remember;

I do, and I understand.

– Asian Proverb

In Discovery Travel channel, there is a program called “Miami Ink”, it tells many stories about people getting tattoos.    Despite the way they tried to make it sound like fun and cool, I still don’t see any meaning of getting a tattoo.  I don’t think anyone I know has a tattoo, too.

The figure above is an ad for body piercing.  It shows that the risk of body piercing is very very low, compared to many other risks we face everyday.   That small number really is insignificant.  However, there is a fatal logical flaw in it. If you put the death as a result of body piercing on top of the human population as the denominator, you get such results.

I sometimes use MIT’s VPN to download obscure papers from the MIT library. To do it, you have to have an MIT IP address. The MIT VPN software allows me to obtain one.

I sometimes also download files through BitTorrent (for legitimate files of course), and HKUST blocks this kind of traffic. So the VPN proved also useful.

This trick can be used in mainland China, too. Last time when I visited Shanghai, I tried to access a Wikipedia article (in fact, I was writing a wikipedia paper, and needed to check the page). Due to the block in China, I could not access Wikipedia directly, so the MIT VPN was used again. Alternatively, I can set up a quick proxy connection in my Mac. Here is how:

open Terminal, and type:

ssh -ND 9999 zxq@mikezhang.com

where “ssh” is the command to connect to the server “mikezhang.com”, which is hosted in California. “zxq” is my login name on that server. The “-ND 9999″ part tells the machine to keep the connection and use it as a proxy server.

That’s all, then I just need to go to Firefox to set up the proxy. Below is how, just choose “Manual” and change the port for “SOCKS Host” to 9999.

Of course, I mean the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Here is a link to Prof. Greg Mankiw’s post http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/10/my-bet-on-nobel.html, he, as an economist, used data to show that past winners all got huge amount of citations.

I wrote a few papers on predicting movie sales from word-of-mouth. The one using a Bayesian Model gives amazing power. A hollywood media consulting company emailed us (my co-authors Prof. Chris Dellarocas, Prof. Neveen Awad and I) about creating a software to do the predictions. I guess that model could have gotten us quite some money, however, we had more fun things to do than to work on a software.

For this issue, I don’t have data. So let me use a behavioral method to predict (a.k.a guess).

Some people said Romer and Tirole, I don’t think they can be put together. They are working in different areas, and they are kind of young for Nobel. Romer is invited to UST for an IAS talk, they typically only invite nobel prize winners, so I guess he has a good chance this time, if not next. Tirole is amazing, I liked his papers, his books, and his lectures (He came to MIT to guest lecture in the IO class. Erik and I went to him once to consult about our idea on innovation incentives. He pointed us to some Michael Spence’s papers, they can not be more relevant). Only problem is that he’s too young.

I was reading quite a few papers on efficient market hypothesis these days due to a project on price’s informational role in asset markets. (Why I’m writing a finance paper? This is related to information! And to me, everything related to information is related to information technology). Fama and Shleifer were quoted so many times. I’m not a big fun of EMH (efficient market hypothesis), but who ever contributed to it lead finance into the prime time in b-schools. Fama should definitely be credited for it.

I took Holmstrom’s class, he has some very influential papers, so I guess he has a good chance.

Robert Gordon contributed significantly to Macroeconomics, but under two grounds I don’t think he’s the one. 1. there has been some recent awards in Macro, can’t be so soon. 2. he really doesn’t understand IT and its impact to the society. I was totally disappointed by his keynote speech in last year’s WISE conference at Northwestern U.

Overall, I would vote for Fama and Shleifer. If I can not do it correctly, I’ll develop a Bayesian model on this next year.

Can’t wait till Oct 15 to get the result.