1. UW
Update 1/21/15
a. Woke
up, went to physics. We reviewed for exam Friday.
b. Returned
to dorm with Brandon. Did readings, email until my research class. Grabbed a
hot lunch from Motosurf and ate it in class. The speaker was a professor of
accounting, and she was actually awesome. She started off with a basic overview
of accounting to support the idea that accounting is far more broad than
bookkeeping; in general, it is the art of boiling down immense transaction
histories into useful data models, some (but not all) of which need to be
externally understandable.
c. After
the intro, she offered a wager based on the distribution of red and blue coins
in various boxes. As the price of playing the wager approached its expected
value, bidders dropped out until I was the only one left. So I played through
this whole “information game”, where I had to hire an “auditor” (negotiated
other student, who was also in my teaching class), and she discovered the
possibility that the information I had paid for was fraudulent. Faced with a
high probability of this, I switched my strategy, and it paid off. (The
professor, Dr. Weili Ge, actually paid me off at the end of class, and I paid
the “auditor”, Adree, I had hired, out of the winnings; we ended up splitting
pretty evenly. It would have sucked if I had been unlucky: I wonder if the
professor would have accepted my settlement in such a case.) I’m really curious
whether the probability inherent in the game was faked for teaching purposes
(i.e, whether all the coins in the box were actually of one color, and the
scenario, except for my decisions which could be guided, was deterministic, or
if Dr. Ge was ready to handle all pedagogical possibilities in terms of what
the auditor drew and what I ended up drawing at the end)
d. Dr.
Ge then discussed her research, which
was actually pretty cool. She analyzed how the tone of managers, as measured by
their frequency of usage of optimistic and pessimistic words in conference
calls, influenced both the actual accounting decisions and how they were
perceived by investors. She also had come up with a score, based on a bunch of
accounting variables (we were really rushing at this point) that estimated the
odds that a firm was committing accounting fraud.
e. After
research class, went to teaching class, where Frances lectured for a while. It
was actually really nice; since she doesn’t normally lecture, she had a lot of
interesting things to say. She told one crazy story about an educator who had
mentored her, who, when his wife died, moved to a smaller town and completely
turned around a small poor dysfunctional HS by scrapping the entire curriculum
and replacing it with a boatbuilding project, a very concrete idea which
nonetheless required research, organization, etc. and provided storng
motivation. The class ended with an idea-association thing which was a bit of a
flop for our group.
f. Returned
to dorm and did readings for a while, worked on CSE application. Grabbed a
quick slice of pizza then
g. Went
to Judo class, which I’d just signed up for. It was pretty cool. The
instructors were knowledgeable but laid back, which was nice because I don’t
need any more stress/trying to improve at things I don’t naturally learn
quickly like music and dance right now. We practiced various falls and carrying
each other back and forth, as foundation for learning throws.
h. Then
I got bogged down in picking out a gi (special Judo jacket that can be gripped
in the course of sparring), and pants, that were the right size, getting a
locker for them. I had never used a combination
lock before, so I needed to learn that.
i. Came
back, ate two more slices of pizza, then settled down to study for physics.
j. Took
a walk and listened to the first half of the first episode of Serial, a podcast
by the This American Life folks following a real-life controversial cold murder
case.
k.
Wrote this log and went to bed.
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