I've spent 10 hours over the last two days debugging a SAS program I wrote about 2 months ago. It was written for a paper that's coming along nicely, but I haven't revisited the data (or the program) for a while.
Unfortunately, I didn't document the program very well.
I thought, "well, all I have to do is run this one test. That shouldn't take long."
Cue Jaws theme song and commence profanity
...
/profanity
When will I learn?
Now that I've gotten down to a part of the program that has to run for a while (merging two VERY large (> 50 gig) datasets), I can take a break.
update: It finally finished running. It "only" took 14 hours (yes, that's right, 14 hours). And that's after having used every trick I knew to make it more efficient.
Memorial Day
It's Memorial Day - time to remember and honor all those who fought to preserve our way of life.
As I've done in previous years, here's a link to Ronald Reagan's classic "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech, given in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of D-Day (compliments of American Rhetoric).
After that, go see this PowerPoint file sent to me by Bob Jensen. If you don't have Powerpoint click here to view it without music. If you do have it, download the file here (both stored on DocStoc).
Now it's off the the movies, followed by charring some animal flesh on the grille.
As I've done in previous years, here's a link to Ronald Reagan's classic "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech, given in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of D-Day (compliments of American Rhetoric).
After that, go see this PowerPoint file sent to me by Bob Jensen. If you don't have Powerpoint click here to view it without music. If you do have it, download the file here (both stored on DocStoc).
Now it's off the the movies, followed by charring some animal flesh on the grille.
Googlenomics, Auction Theory, and Hal Varian
Like many programs, the Unknown Alma Mater's doctoral program used Varian's Economics text for our Micro Sequence. So, I perk up when I hear Varian's name mentioned.
It turns out he's Google's Chief Economist (who knew - Google has a chief economist?). A recent Steven Levy piece in Wired magazine talks about the ways the company uses economic theory (and auction theory in specific) in their Google AdWords program. Here are a couple of snippets:
It turns out he's Google's Chief Economist (who knew - Google has a chief economist?). A recent Steven Levy piece in Wired magazine talks about the ways the company uses economic theory (and auction theory in specific) in their Google AdWords program. Here are a couple of snippets:
At the time, most online companies were still selling advertising the way it was done in the days of Mad Men. But Varian saw immediately that Google's ad business was less like buying traditional spots and more like computer dating. "The theory was Google as yenta—matchmaker," he says. He also realized there was another old idea underlying the new approach: A 1983 paper by Harvard economist Herman Leonard described using marketplace mechanisms to assign job candidates to slots in a corporation, or students to dorm rooms. It was called a two-sided matching market. "The mathematical structure of the Google auction," Varian says, "is the same as those two-sided matching markets."Read the whole thing here.Varian tried to understand the process better by applying game theory. "I think I was the first person to do that," he says. After just a few weeks at Google, he went back to Schmidt. "It's amazing!" Varian said. "You've managed to design an auction perfectly."
...
AdWords was such a hit that Google went auction-crazy. The company used auctions to place ads on other Web sites (that program was dubbed AdSense). "But the really gutsy move," Varian says, "was using it in the IPO." In 2004, Google used a variation of a Dutch auction for its IPO; Brin and Page loved that the process leveled the playing field between small investors and powerful brokerage houses. And in 2008, the company couldn't resist participating in the FCC's auction to reallocate portions of the radio spectrum.
Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center."
HELP!
I also run a blog for Unknown University's Finance department. Unfortunately, I seem to have inadvertantly changed a setting on the blog (either that, or I've got some kind of virus).
I was just trying to post something on the blog, and when I typed anything in, it immediately transformed into different characters. For example, if I typed in
ABC
It displayed as
एबीसी
Can anyone tell me what's going on, and how to fix it?
update: yes, I am an idiot. Somehow, I had enabled the "tranliterate into Hindi option" in the settings.
I was just trying to post something on the blog, and when I typed anything in, it immediately transformed into different characters. For example, if I typed in
ABC
It displayed as
एबीसी
Can anyone tell me what's going on, and how to fix it?
update: yes, I am an idiot. Somehow, I had enabled the "tranliterate into Hindi option" in the settings.
Interesting Times In The Unknown Household
For a number of reasons, I haven't been blogging much:
Next week continues the crazy pace. We travel to my sister's house for Memorial Day, have a meeting with the Stem Cell Transplant unit at Children's Hospital of Boston on Tuesday (if the irregularity mentioned above turns out to be nothing, this will be the next step in his treatment), and have a biopsy to check out the irregularity in U.S.'s scan scheduled on Wednesday. So, regular blogging might resume by the end of next week.
That is, if my head doesn't explode before then...
- First off, I'm still in post-semester recovery mode. This happens every Spring - after the semester is over, I need a week or two to decompress, clean out the detritus of the year from my office, and kick back a bit before refocusing on my summer research goals. This time around, between the timing of exams and faculty meetings, it was worse than usual.
- Second, we've catching up on some "family time". We offloaded the Unknown Baby Boy (UBB) to the Unknown Sister-in-Law and took the kids to Six Flags in Lake George for a couple of days. Unknown Son is currently into a minor Looney Tunes obsession, and they have an entire section of the park with an LT theme. Without UBB, we got to focus on the older two kids, and we even got a couple of good nights' sleep.
- We're also cleaning up the Unknown House. Because of all the craziness we've had this spring, we're doing Spring Cleaning this time around in June.
- Meanwhile, we've been arranging some pretty cool stuff for the kids. There's an organization called Famous Fone Friends that works with sick children. They've arranged to set up a meeting between Unknown Son and the author of one of his favorite book series (he lives about 80 minutes from us, and agreed to meet Unknown Son for lunch at a nearby restaurant for lunch). In addition, U.S. will be getting a phone call from Sam on iCarly. The organization also sent Unknown Daughter an actual script from the Hannah Montana show (her favorite), so she's also pretty excited.
Next week continues the crazy pace. We travel to my sister's house for Memorial Day, have a meeting with the Stem Cell Transplant unit at Children's Hospital of Boston on Tuesday (if the irregularity mentioned above turns out to be nothing, this will be the next step in his treatment), and have a biopsy to check out the irregularity in U.S.'s scan scheduled on Wednesday. So, regular blogging might resume by the end of next week.
That is, if my head doesn't explode before then...
Grading - The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Sometimes I think I'm in a Godfather movie (i.e. "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in").
Actually, it's my own fault. Last week, I had a touch schedule: lack of sleep, doing executive education, an all-day faculty meeting, and only 48 hours between my final exam and when grades had to be posted. With all that, I somehow managed to get it all done.
Or maybe not.
Turns out I made an error in my grading spreadsheet. Not surprising, since I use the excel functions quite a bit in grading - I pick the highest "n out of k" quizzes, weight the exams differently based on whether then grade on the final is better than on one or more of the earlier exams, and have a few other curves built in.
As a result, I usually spend a LOT of time debugging the spreadsheet before assigning final grades. But not this time.
So now I have to file about a half-dozen grade change forms.
Grading - the gift that keeps on giving.
With a bit of luck, I should be able to get back to productive stuff by this afternoon.
update: regrading is done - only a few grades actually needed to be changed. Now, back to research!.
Actually, it's my own fault. Last week, I had a touch schedule: lack of sleep, doing executive education, an all-day faculty meeting, and only 48 hours between my final exam and when grades had to be posted. With all that, I somehow managed to get it all done.
Or maybe not.
Turns out I made an error in my grading spreadsheet. Not surprising, since I use the excel functions quite a bit in grading - I pick the highest "n out of k" quizzes, weight the exams differently based on whether then grade on the final is better than on one or more of the earlier exams, and have a few other curves built in.
As a result, I usually spend a LOT of time debugging the spreadsheet before assigning final grades. But not this time.
So now I have to file about a half-dozen grade change forms.
Grading - the gift that keeps on giving.
With a bit of luck, I should be able to get back to productive stuff by this afternoon.
update: regrading is done - only a few grades actually needed to be changed. Now, back to research!.
Q&A With Myron Scholes
Here's a short "Crash Course" interview with Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes, conducted by Deborah Solomon.
The guy's got a sense of humor. Who'da thunk it?
The guy's got a sense of humor. Who'da thunk it?
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