Rollin, Rollin, Rollin, Keep Them Doggies Rollin

I and a couple of fellow alums of the Unknown Alma Mater have been talking about a project for about the last 6 months. We finally started working on it in earnest about a month and a half ago. So far, we've got initial result (and kick-hiney ones, if I may say so), a literature review, some pretty good looking but simple charts, and (by the end of this week) a couple of tables. This might be the fastest initial progress on a project I've ever seen.

So far, it's been a good summer. I've almost finished reworking a paper that got rejected (it'll be sent out to a nearly-top-tier journal in the next week or two), started two new projects that we've already got interesting initial result on (they'll be done in time to submit to a conference in September), and moved a fourth project from the "vaporware" stage to the point where it could also possibly be conference ready by the end of September.

But I have to be careful what I say, because coauthors on two of the projects are regular readers of the blog. So, I can't gripe about them here. Not that I have to - they've all been (if for different reasons) pleasures to work with. Keep up the good work, y'all.

Could This Have anything To Do With My Blog Recently Being Flagged as a SpamBlog?

I try not to get too political on this blog - it really isn't my thing. But this caught my eye.

It's probably just the latest conspiracy theory.

Where Did The Scrap Steel From the WTC GO?

It turns out they made a warship out of it.

Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the ‘hair on my neck stood up.’ ‘It had a big meaning to it for all of us,’ he said.

Read the whole thing here here:

Outstanding.

Eponymous Laws

Pretty much everyone knows Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will"). But there are a number of other eponymous laws (i.e. laws named after someone). I just came across the Wikipedia page listing many, many more. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Brook's Law - "adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later" (this also holds for academic initiatives)
• The Dilbert Principle (coined by Scott Adams) - "the most ineffective people are promoted to the place wher they can do the least amount of damage: management"
• Godwin's Law - "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
• Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
• Muphry's law - "if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written"
• Parkinson's law - "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
• Peckham's Law - Beauty times brains equals a constant.
• Peter principle - "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence"
• Skitt's law - a corollary of Murphy's law, variously expressed as "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself"
  
• Wirth's law — Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

There are quite a few others. Read the whole page here (and feel free to add your favorite in the comments section).

I Am Not a Spammer

I was locked out of my blog for a couple of days, because the folks at Blogger had flagged it as a possible "spam blog".

I guess they figured out that while it may be low quality, it's not spam.

We Produce Thecal Matter

Some are just better at piling it.

My Students Are Getting Their CFA Level 1 Results

For the first time, I have five students who sat for the CFA Level 1 Exam. Today's the day results are given out.

So far, three have reported in, and two of those passed. Well done, lads.

I have a bet with my Dean that three of the five will pass. So, I need one more out of the two remaining...

update: It's now three out of four (the 4th, who didn;t make it was in the top band of those that failed, so he should make it in December). I guess that means the Dean owes me dinner. Since the overall passing rate is 35%, our initial group of Level 1 test takers have done very well.

Note: if you want to calculate a rough estimate for your score, here's a link to a scoring calculator someone hacked together.
Note: If you want to receive updates, either sign up for email on the right sidebar, or add our RSS feed to your feed reader.