I wanted to write “The Best Perl IDE” on the title, but on a second thought, I have decided not.  There are so many good ones out there, why would this be the best?  Anyway, I think it is the best for me.  It is extremely compact, but fits my need.  Beauty is simplicity.

It is called SciTe.  The one I’m using has only one file. Only 500KB.  You can type in the code on the left panel, and the result will be shown on the right panel.

More information can be found here.

SciTE currently is able to syntax style these languages (* denotes support for folding):

• Ada
• ANS.1 MIB definition files*
• APDL
• Assembler (NASM, MASM)
• AutoIt*
• Avenue*
• Batch files (MS-DOS)
• Baan*
• Bash*
• BlitzBasic*
• Bullant*
• C/C++/C#*
• Clarion*
• conf (Apache)*
• CSound*
• CSS*
• diff files*
• E-Script*
• Eiffel*
• Erlang*
• Flagship (Clipper / XBase)*
• Flash (ActionScript)*
• Fortran*
• Forth*
• Haskell
• HTML*
• HTML with embedded JavaScript, VBScript, PHP and ASP*
• Gui4Cli*
• IDL - both MSIDL and XPIDL*
• INI, properties* and similar
• InnoSetup*
• Java*
• JavaScript*
• LISP*
• LOT*
• Lout*
• Lua*
• Make
• Matlab*
• Metapost
• MMIXAL
• MSSQL
• nnCron
• NSIS*
• Objective Caml*
• Opal
• Octave*
• Pascal/Delphi*
• Perl, most of it except for some ambiguous cases*
• PostScript*
• POV-Ray*
• PowerBasic*
• PureBasic*
• Python*
• Rebol*
• Ruby*
• Scheme*
• scriptol*
• Specman E*
• Spice
• Smalltalk
• SQL and PLSQL
• TADS3*
• TeX and LaTeX
• Tcl/Tk*
• VB and VBScript*
• Verilog*
• VHDL*
• XML*
• YAML*

The course evaluation is out. I like the fact that the students liked it

I put down the averages and standard deviations for my Section, and compare them with the average scores of the school as well as with those of the University.

My friend Jiayin’s research shows that for high scores, a smaller standard deviation is a good thing. Given that the scores are high in general, many of the small Std. Dev. values show that the students consistently thinks that I am a good professor.

Overall

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	78.2	19.2
School	73.8	23.6
University	74.5	22.8

Preparation

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	81.5	18.7
School	76.3	22
University	76.3	21.2

Explaining concepts

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	73.3	23.6
School	71.6	24.7
University	72.5	23.8

Making the Course interesting

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	77.7	22.7
School	68.6	26.8
University	69.2	25.8

Enthusiasm

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	79.9	20.1
School	75.5	22.6
University	75.4	22.2

Encouraging students to participate, to ask questions, to express ideas, etc.

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	73.8	20.3
School	72	23.7
University	71.8	23.2

Improving your ability to think

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	67.6	22.0
School	68.3	24.3
University	68.9	23.7

Apparent knowledge of the subject

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	80.3	18.4
School	79.3	21.1
University	78.9	20.7

Attitude towards students

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	80.6	18.9
School	76.1	22.1
University	76.3	21.8

Use of English

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	80.9	17.0
School	74.8	23.6
University	74.2	23.2

Fairness of grading

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	71.8	19.9
School	69.7	22.4
University	70.8	21.9

Speed in returning graded work

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	71.4	17.9
School	71.3	22.1
University	71.1	21.8

Availability outside class

	Mean	Std. Dev.
Section	74.9	18.4
School	70.4	21.9
University	71.6	21.5

Kind

he is knowledgable

He makes the class very interesting
He encorages interaction in class!!

have good knowledge of the course

really very kind. always willing to help students. try to make the course interesting

use many video clips
conduct surveys to get the opinions of students for improvemnt
polite

He really knows a lot.

He always emphasizes we should have fun in this course, making students more relaxed.

His lessons are interesting. He is capable of obtaining students’ attention.

Nice and enthusiastic

The professor have try very hard to preparing lecture materials. The video show in the lecture is also very interesting.

he is very patient to explain the concepts to us and he tires hard to make the class interesting. very good!

He really tries to make this course fun and easy.

detail explaination

Michael is very willing to help the students and he successefully teach us a lot of things. Also, he is willing to listen to the student’s opinion and continuously improve the quality of education.

He is very interesting

he is nice

willing to help students

He makes the lesson become more interesting and funny

Excellant, very nice and helpful

he is well-prepared and encourage participation. I enjoy the music

he encourages us to think more in-depth for all problems

he makes the class to be fun

very nice

He prepares very good and funny video clips.

Take care of his students

good attitude towards students
good english
interesting materials eg videos

He’s enthusiastic in answering students’ questions, as well as fast respond to students. He always shows us interesting videos and he’s really knowlegable in the area of ISMT101

nice guy

He is patient and well-prepared.

nice, good English, sincere, modest, good attitude

Patient and clear delivery

he is nice and is willling to answer every question we ask.

nice and encourage students to speak ,hv interaction wf students,and interesting content

caring and try to make the lesson more interesting

care about students

his effort in makin the class enjoyable shown

very enthusiastic, prepare a lot before lectures, regular evaluation

willing to teach the students

nice

understand our needs

He is kind and sincere towards students.

he has a nice personality that appeals to the students

ok

welcome students asking him questions

The instructor with good preparation .

passion

very good and fluent english, prepare a lot for class, interesting

funny and nice

Nice to students.

teach with good manners and preparation

Michael is the BEST!!!!

Prof Zhang is a very nice person.

answered mails quickly and in details

very willing to answer student’s question and always encourage studets to ask question !!

He is nice and prepares interesting videos in the class.

English is good and nice to us

Handsome and nice!

he is vy helpful, answer any thing we ask

flexible

makes the course interesting by using videos

he is enthusiastic about the course.
He also give extra information which is useful and interesting.

kind

I like this course very much!!!

Should have less extra credit

Nil; Thanks so much, Prof.

the course is boring.

>< nice teacher

he’s a good teacher with great enthusiasm~

it’s very hard for students who haven’t studied Computer Application/ Computer Studies before. So the course should be made easier.

cover less materials

I may want to take IS as my major in Yr2 mainly due to the influence of Michael~

I enjoy attending the lecture!!!!!
Because you teach really well!!!
making the course very interesting!!!

Dr. Percy Dias Just came to my office and told me about the enrollment for IS majors. We had 105 students this year, a big increase from last year’s 40 something. Our total capacity is about 110, so this can’t really get any better. This is excellent news to me and probably so to the other two professors of ISMT101.

Due to enrollment issues, we had various resource problems in the past few years. Without a better mechanism, the government and the school simply allocate resources according to student head counts. Now this issue is gone. James and Percy can have good sleeps, and I shall be foreseeably happily left along to do my research for the next 7 months.

To the students, I guess they are making a good and informed (”informed” because of our hard work in teaching) choice. If you ask me to choose from Accounting, Marketing, IT, Finance, Management and Strategy, Economics to find the most useful major in a business school, I would probably tell you that combining IT and Finance, or IT and Marketing are the best choices.

I really spent huge amount of time on this course and tried to make it useful and fun. I guess the hard work just paid off.

My folder for this course grew to more than 6GB, filled with all sorts of materials I planned to use in classes. Now I can’t even fit everything on a DVD for archiving. Anyway, I enjoyed teaching so far, and the students should have enjoyed my course. That’s all what matters.

I have finished grading my first course: ISMT 101. This course is called “Introduction to Information Systems and E-Commerce”, offered to all first year undergraduate students in the business school. It was a very intensive semester for me, as it is the first time to teach, not to mention the size of the two sections of 240 students.

I think the semester went well. I proved that I am a great professor. Student not only liked my classes, they also respected me for broadening their horizon. I wish this course could be offered to second year students, that way, I can probably teach more quantitative materials to them.

Just to see how my students did, I plotted some figures below:

The following one is a scatter plot of mid-term score versus final score, they obviously have a positive relationship, especially in the range of high scores. What I learn here is that good students tend to be good students consistently.

 

 

The next figure gives the distribution pie chart of the scores, I have roughly 20% A’s, 40% B’s, 35% C’s, then roughly 3.5% D’s, there are 2 F’s, they got the lowest score in midterm and final exam, and missed all my classes, and the labs.

 

I rank order the scores and plot a nice cumulative figure below:

 

Finally, I have the histogram to show the score distribution. The curve is nice, as anyone with score above the mean gets at least B-.

The top 5 percentile people get A+. People within one standard deviation below mean get from C+ to C, and people within one standard deviation above mean get from B- to A-.

 

There is an interesting story in New York Times yesterday: The mayor of New York City announced that a “Congestion Price” will be charged during peak hours on the most congested roads in NY.

From NYT: The basic idea behind congestion pricing is simple: make motorists pay to use the busiest streets. Under the Mayor’s proposal, an invisible line would be drawn around Manhattan from Eighty-sixth Street south to the Battery. Vehicles crossing this line on weekdays between 6 A.M. and 6 P.M. would be charged a fee—eight dollars for cars, twenty-one dollars for trucks. (Those travelling only within the congestion zone would pay half price, while taxis and livery cabs would be exempt.) The fees would be assessed electronically and could be paid either with a toll pass or over the phone or the Internet.

This seems a natural response to the problem of congestion: if you really need to use that street, that means you have something important to do, and potentially would rather pay more than other people to get a less congested street. However, look at many other congested places: Disney Land, Ski resorts, amusement parks, Movie theaters on the first day of blogbuster movie release. It seems that fixed price is a pretty standard practice. Why these places do not increase the price in peak season?

I went to watch Spider-Man 3 this Monday, in the whole cinema there were only a few people. So it felt like I had the movie in my living room, giving me the full freedom and preventing me from exposure to the germs in public areas… Should they increase the price or decrease the price on Monday? On one hand, I had a much better movie-going experience than people who went just one day before. I’d rather pay twice the price to enjoy this experience. Yet they did not over charge me. On the other hand, they can lower the price to attract more people to go on Mondays. Yet they did not lower the price. Maybe, these two effects can cancel out! That is: they do not need to lower the price to attract people, because people expected a better experience, and the people I saw on Monday already took this into consideration.

I guess more than in any other profession, in academia, being smart is very important.

This is true in many senses. First of all, without being smart, it is very hard to survive. There are only these many top journals, and there are so many equally smart people competing for the few locations of publication quota. It is often believed that quarterly journals are of higher quality in general, I have no question about that, this is something typical in the business world: when you want to differentiate yourself from other, limit the supply!

Second, people need to look smart in this profession. In addition to being researchers, we are often professors, and this scary title determines that we need to be the most professional, maybe more professional than the professionals. After all, we train the professionals.

These two factors might explain why we see some arrogant people in the academia. When I was on the job market, I met an assistant professor in an interview. He wrote some nice papers in my area, and I really looked forward to meet him. His first sentence to me was: “Why did not you quote my paper in your paper?” I thought it was a joke, so I joked: “because your papers are so seminal, we don’t really quote Pigou, Hayek these days, right?” The real reason was that his papers were not quite relevant to that particular paper of mine. He then asked about my research topics, and after listening for two to three sentences, he would say: “that is wrong, since you did not consider such and such.” My response was: “I did not really have time to explain the details, and I did consider these minor issues.” For one particular paper, he said instead of using your proposed mechanism, you can as well use this mechanism… I did not want to bother telling him that I was looking at a society’s social welfare point of view (instead of a firm’s view as his suggestion is related), so I simply said:”thank you for your suggestion, I’ll think about it when I go back.” Then he stopped me:”No, this is my idea, and you don’t have permission to use my idea in your paper.” I was speechless.

Talking about being smart in academia, no other fields can compare with Physics and Mathematics. I personally worship many of the great economists, but aggregately as a discipline, Economics is not comparable with these two, not yet. In Physics, we can’t avoid mentioning Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman. In a recent post on “cosmic variance“, it is discussed how this “Feynman-Einstein-Hawking smart” can drive away many smart people from doing physics. It is suggested that there are three possible ways to exit physics: 1) be F-E-H smart, 2) pretend to be F-E-H smart, and 3) drop out. While it is not impossible to be F-E-H smart, I’m sure these people represent only a small portion of people we see everyday. [ I remember my advisor Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson's (himself a super smart person) comment on Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas:"Bertsimas is probably the smartest guy on the east part of the MIT campus." I took his class Optimization, and liked his way of teaching. Then I read some of his papers, and books. It was totally impressive. There were many many smart people in the Economics department at MIT: Frank Fisher, Bengt Holmstrom, Jerry Hausman, Jean Tirole, Susan Athey, Paul Milgrom, etc. (I do not list Peter Diamond, Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson because I have not taken their classes.) They may not be F-E-H smart, but they are truly outstanding. For the rest of us, only two ways are left, you decide for yourself.

In terms of research, following Erik's advice, I choose to work on big issues at this stage. Instead of writing trashy quick papers to publish on borderline journals, I try to do something significant, in the end, at least I would have enjoyed the process.

In terms of personality, I had an interesting discussion with my colleague Sean. We observe that smart guys in our field are usually nicer than others. We tried to figure out the direction of causality: whether being smart is responsible for being nice, or vice versa. My take on this? A mean person can never truly be a master.

Let me end this long and messy story with a story, about Einstein and Hilbert.

Einstein was quite weak with mathematics (”weak” for the unbelievable work he has done, not weak as in “weak with mathematics”). Invited by great mathematician David Hilbert, he visited University of Gottingen and reported his research to people there. After a few weeks, Hilbert solved the famous field equations of general relativity, later to be called Einstein Field Equations. When people tried to persuade Hilbert to claim credit for the equations, he replied:”although the kids on the Gottingen streets know more than Einstein about solving equations, Einstein is the one discovered the theory of relativity.”

[[Click Image to Enlarge ]]

I’ve decided to support \LaTeX in my blog, just to prepare for some “more technical” posts.

Here is my favourate equation:

where is some probability density function, is its corresponding cumulative distribution function.

By the fundamental theorem of calculus:

Of course, we also have

To show off the Greek letters:

I do this because I can.

Ah, I need to thank the nice folks who produced this plugin for latexrender at http://sixthform.info/steve/wordpress/?p=13.

When economists talk about changes in demand curve, they generally look at how the demand curve gets shifted. If suddenly all the consumers’ valuations are increased for some reason, the demand curve is said to be shifted outward. This means for a certain price, the demand will be higher; or equivalently for the seller, to sell to a certain number of consumers, the seller can charge a higher price.

[[Click the image to enlarge]]

 A recent paper in AER by Johnson and Myatt studies rotation of a demand curve: “On the Simple Economics of Advertising, Marketing, and Product Design” (vol 96, no. 3). The basic idea is that, through advertising, marketing, the firm can influence the dispersion of the consumers’ valuations. When the dispersion changes, the demand curve rotates.

That’s on the demand side. On the supply side, there is an interesting dual problem. Following Hal Varian (1980)’s formulation, when dispersion exists, each firm in the market has a density function f(p), which indicates the probability with which it charges each price p. Economists seem to be happy with this general form of pdf. However, when consumers interact with the seller, the seller would react to any changes in the consumers’ perceptions of the product, therefore, the density function may be changing over time. And, if it changes, I bet it would be rotating the cdf.

I wrote about the book “The Long Tail” a while ago. The central thesis of that book is that we now have the capability to search and find many many obscure products all over the global market, and therefore aggregately, these obscure products (the ones on the tail of the curve) becomes more important than the most popular products.With the advent of the “long tail”, we are blessed with the explosion of choices. Many people equate choice with freedom, and the video above shows that this is not the case.Presented in the TED conference :

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

The presentation is very straightforward. As an author of 6 books, Schwartz certainly has a way to deliver his ideas. The picture on the left is borrowed from his article in “Scientific American”. The article’s name is “The Tyranny of Choices”.

Sometimes more is less!