Monday, August 25, 2008

Obama Gets RickRolled

I try to avoid politics on this blog, because it brings out the moonbats at both ends of the political spectrum. But this was pretty clever.

I wondered if someone could do a similar one for McCain, but I don't think he's got the moves...

HT: Ace of Spades

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 4:42 PM |

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Rocky Balboa and The CFA

I came across analystforum while studying for the Level 1 exam of the CFA. It's a fantastic resource - they have forums for all 3 level, people who pass the various levels continue to post in the forums long after they've passed. If you're taking the exams, sign up - it's free, and worth it's weight in gold.

Results for the CFA exams were just announced, and a number of people who seemed to be locks for passing ended up failing. For others, it was not the first time failing at the exam (I've heard that the average time to completion is 5 years, which means most people that complete the people fail 2+ exams along the way).

In any event, people on the forum were consoling and encouraging those who failed, and one of them linked to a bit of dialog on the movie Rocky Balboa (one of my all-time favorite pictures). It may be the best talk I've ever heard a father give his son:
"Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are. It will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life.

But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep movin forward. It's about how much you can take and keep movin forward.

That's how winning is done.

Now if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits and not be pointing fingers and saying 'it's because of him, or her, or anybody'. Cowards do that, and that ain't you. You're better than that. "
Of course, it's much better with a South Philly accent.


Now go rent the movie, and watch it with your kids.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 4:18 PM |

Friday, July 25, 2008

Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational At Google Authors

Here's a video of Dan Ariely (author of "Predictably Irrational") in his recent talk for the Google Authors program. Ariely has written a fascinating book about some of the cognitive and behavioral biases that most of us exhibit. If you listen carefully, you'll find that he even gives a hint about how to increase your student evaluations.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 2:42 PM |

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Your Daily Dose of Patriotism

I'm a big Muppets fan, so I thought this was hilarious. My favorite part is around 1:12 (I always had a soft spot for Animal...).

HT: Neal Boortz

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 8:34 AM |

Thursday, July 17, 2008

I Didn't Know Godzilla Managed A Private Equity Fund

You're gotta love an ad that uses old Godzilla footage to slam PE firms - if just for the sheer shlock factor (say that three times fast...).

I was curious about the McCain reference in the video (it seemed to come out of nowhere). Then I checked and found out that the ad was paid for by the Service Employees International Union. Like most other unions, they're big Obama supporters. In fact, they were just mentioned in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal (unfortunately, I can't find a link to the piece just yet).

It's a pretty interesting mishmash of messages with a populist slant. It starts off with the obligatory gas pump picture (the economy is hard, and it's the fault of the eeeeeevil buyout firms) , and then shifts to say that there's a group of people who make millions and slash jobs. And worse yet, /sarcasm on/ they get tax breaks for doing it! /sarcasm off/

So, I guess the message to take from this is that gas prices are high, the economy is tanking, and it's all the fault of buyout firms with tax breaks.

But at least it was educational - I didn't realize John McCain and people at PE firms could breathe fire. That alone would be enough to get them my vote (if just for the coolness factor). Hey - if the Presidential campaign doesn't work out and McCain gets tired of the Senate, he could get a job in commercials.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 9:30 AM |

Monday, June 23, 2008

RIP George Carlin

George Carlin went into St. John's Health Center on Sunday afternoon, complaining of chest pain. He died at 5:55 p.m. PT.

Carlin was one of the icons of my generation. He constantly pushed the edge, and his routines contained some of the best social commentary around. While one of his pithier ones, his best known routine is Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television

(caution: definitely not safe for work), which my classmates had memorized shortly after it came out.

However, if you want more Carlin, there are a lot of other routines linked to the YouTube piece.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 8:48 AM |

Friday, June 20, 2008

Investment Advice

Here's a classic
video
"I appreciate your honesty"

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 11:43 AM |

Monday, June 16, 2008

Coffee

My kids already know "When Daddy doesn't have coffee, he gets GRUMPY"
song chart memes
more graph humor and song chart memes

And just in case you don't refill the pot, watch the first 30 seconds of this:


"You kill the jo, you make some mo. You know that, baby!"

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 9:29 AM |

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Harvey Korman Dies at 81

I just found out that Harvey Korman passed away on Thursday. He was one of the giants of comedy in the 60s and 70s. I still remember many of his skits from the old Carol Burnett show. In particular, I loved how Korman and Tim Conway would play off each other. Here's one of my favorite pieces where Conway plays a novice dentist and ends up injecting himself in the hand and leg with Novocaine. Korman tries his best to play it straight, but eventually can's help himself and starts cracking up.


Rest in peace, Mr. Korman - you made many of us laugh so hard we cried.

"I'm so glad we had this time together
Just to have a laugh and sing a song
Seems we just got started and before you know it
Comes the time we have to say, 'So long"

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 4:45 PM |

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Rube Goldberg Videos

Here's a video with some pretty elaborate setups. They seems like just the kind of thing I'd have really gotten into when I was a kid.


HT: The Volokh Conspiracy

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 7:11 PM |

Stewie Griffin Meets Wall Street

Since I'm a Family Guy fan, I thought this was pretty good.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 2:30 PM |

Monday, May 19, 2008

Construction Worker Foreplay

This one's amazing - undressing a woman with construction equipment. And yes, it's relatively safe for viewing at work. That backhoe operator has some crazy skills.


Stripped by a Mechanical Shovel! - video powered by Metacafe

This is the sort of thing that would have ended up on the old Home Improvement series. Just do NOT let Tim the Toolman operate the equipment - it could get ugly.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 8:12 AM |

Monday, April 14, 2008

Five Good Commercials

Here are some pretty funny commercials from Ameriquest Mortgage (combined into one video)


HT: Some other blogger who I forgot to write down.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 12:13 PM |

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Some Time Wasting Resources

In case you're looking for a few new ways to kill some time (right - like we need more of those):

Fancast has entire episodes of many tv shows available online - free. And yes, they have Firefly and Buffy.

Crooksandliars has compiled a list of the 100 best standup comedians of all time - with links to Youtube clips for many of them.
Now you can blame me for your lack of productivity.

I spent most of yesterday editing a paper with my two colleagues. I like working this way - all three in a room (or in a conference call), arguing over each line, suggesting alternate phrasings, etc....

It's noisy and contentious, and takes time, a good self image, and an even better sense of humor (or we'd end up killing each other). But generally, if you can get three people to agree on something (or at least to not be vehemently against something), chances are, it won't suck.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 12:35 PM |

Monday, March 10, 2008

Childhood Cancer Awareness Video

Regular readers of this blog are aware of the Unknown Son's continuing treatment for cancer. While I try not to post about his illness and treatment too much, I do talk about it (and related topics) from time to time.

Here's a great video someone put together for National Cancer Awareness Month (it's actually September). My sister lost her oldest son recently to the same cancer that Unknown Son originally had (neuroblastoma), and she linked to it on her site


If it touches you, consider making a contribution. There are are many good groups that are supporting research on childhood cancer. One of the best is Curesearch, which is associated with the Childrens Oncology Group and the National Childhood Cancer Foundation.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 2:23 PM |

Monday, February 25, 2008

Revise and Resubmit

For those of you who aren't academics, the publishing process (for "refereed" journals) goes like this:
  1. You send a piece out to a journal
  2. The editor reviews it to find one or more suitable referees (people who supposedly have some background in that area)
  3. The referee goes over the piece with a fine-tooth comb. They make comments/suggestions about everything from the statistical methodology you've used to the writing style to the basic premises of the piece. Pretty much anything is fair game, stopping just short of "you dumb, you ugly, and yo momma dress you funny")
  4. They write a referee report that can be either clear rejection (i.e. go away or we will taunt you again), revise and resubmit (make the following suggested changes and we'll look at it again) or accept (almost never done on the first round).
  5. If it's a revise and resubmit, you attempt to make the changes (or at least address the issues raised in some way) and then resubmit it to the journal. The editor sends it back to the referee(s) for another look. Sometimes they even bring in a new referee.
  6. Steps 4 and 5 can be repeated several times (the record I've heard at a finance journal is 4 rounds).
Most times, the referees' comments truly improve the paper (they should, since they're chosen ostensibly because they know the topic). But once in a while, you get a referee who seems like an idiot. Or alternately, you get two referees who ask you to do two things that are mutually exclusive. In that case, it can feel like this:

HT: Mike Munger

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 11:36 AM |

Tongue Twisters

My kids love tongue-twisters, and lately I've gotten them into watching reruns of Pinky and the Brain . So, they got a big kick out of this video.
I figure it's working because the other day I heard Unknown Son ask Unknown Daughter what she wanted to do. She answered, "The same thing we do every day - try to take over the world".


"It might make more sense to have the sixth sick sheet sitter's son pick the plug if the sack pickers and the sock pluckers are behind the rubber baby buggy bumpers".

Riiiiiight.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 10:32 AM |

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Should We Teach Broadly or Deeply (part Deaux)

I received a number of interesting comments on my last post on teaching broadly vs. deeply, and I thought a few follow up comments might be in order.

First off, it's important to keep the context of the video in mind - Dr. Frank is talking about his experiences in the introductory course in Economics (not the higher level ones). In the intro course, students (Supposedly) get exposed to the most important, fundamental principles of the topic. If they don't learn them there (or don't find them interesting), they likely never get to the more advanced courses.

There are a lot of parrallels to the intro finance course. It's often viewed by non-finance majors as the topughest course in the business school. In fact, I've heard (but not verified) that the nationwide "drop or fail" rate for the course is well in excess of 25%. At one of my previous schools, we called the class FINANCE301, and had a phenomenon called the "FINANCE301 Major". This label gave homage to the fact that some students took the class multiple times (the record was five attempts). Granted, some undergrads simply don't have what it takes to pass the class, but that number seems incredibly high to me.

More importantly, (and this is what I took as Franks' main point), the current "broad but shallow" approach to teaching the intro class results in the vast majority of students lacking a deep understanding of the critical concepts necessary to succeed in their latter courses. The instructors feel better abbout this approach, since they can say that they're "keeping standards up" and teaching a very broad and impressive list of topics. But the students suffer.

So what's the solution? One school I'm aware of takes exactly the right approach (and in fact, it's related to what was suggested by one of the commenters on my previous piece):
  • For the intro class, they cover only a very limited number of topics: financial statement analysis, time value (including its variations like bonds and stock valuation, cost of capital, and capital budgeting), and risk and return;
  • Since they're covering fewer topics, they can spend much more time on each one. For example, they spend 3+ weeks on time value alone (as opposed to the typical one or two). Spending so much time on Time Value get paid back pretty quickly, since topics like bond valuation go much more quickly (students quickly pick up that it's just time value).
  • Finally, they give a lot of assignments that make the students "put pen to paper". In other words, they assign a lot of take home problem sets, end-of-chapter assignments, etc...
This covers the introductory class. It works because non-finance majors won't be setting dividend policy, or making capital structure decisions. So, they really don't need to cover those topics. But they do need to understand that financial statements reflect real business decisions (the accounting classes usually don't do a very good job of getting this across IMO), that money now and money later can be compared, that all assets muct be financed, and that there's an opportunity cost to investing. So, the above approach beats these concepts into them.

But UP, you say, this only covers the non-finance majors. Aren't you shortchanginh the finance majors? The same school mentioned above has a solution.

Before finance students can take any additional finance classes, they are required to take a six credit class class (called Fundamentals of Valuation) that covers all the theoretical and conceptual parts of finance that come up again and again (like TVM-based security valuation, contingent claim valuation, portfolio risk and return, etc...). It's a bone-breaker of a class, requires a huge time committment from the students, and has a very high failure rate. But once the studens have gone through it, they have an outstanding grounding in the basics that all other finance classes use again and again. So. later classes can move at an accelerated pace (basically, it's a decision to invest in fixed assets to gain operating leverage). As an example, a class on fixed income doesn't have to teach students how to bootstrap a yield curve, and can instead focus on applying it.

The approach works, because students begin to see that many (and perhaps most) advanced topics in finance are just combinations of the same basic building blocks (i.e. option valuation is really just a present value calculation with a few adjustments, CAPM is just an application of covariance, duration is time value applied to bonds, atc...).

Once I get tenure and can start making noise, I hope we can implement some of this approach here at Unknown University. As it is, I try to use many of the principles in my classes, but I catch flack from folks that teach classes following mine in the curriculum. Ah well, I guess I'll have to wait until I rule the world (BWAHAHA!). On that note, here's a classic I'm trying to get DVDs of for my kids.

Enough bloggery - back to work.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 9:41 AM |

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Should We Teach Broadly or Deeply?

Google regularly brings in interesting people to give talks at their company headquarters (talk about a free cash flow problem.) It turns out that these talks can be sen online at YouTube (here's the link).

I just came across a talk by Robert Frank, author of "The Economic Naturalist." He talked about his book, and about the problem of why so many students don't retain key concepts from their classes. For example, on the first day of my security analysis class I typically ask students the question "What should determine the value of a security." The answer, of course, is "The amount, timing, and riskiness of the cash flows from owning the security." Fewer than 1/4 of the class knows the answer without prompting.

Frank's explanation for why students retain so little is that we simply try pack too much into our classes. This makes our syllabus seem impressive, but shortchanges the students. As an example, we might cover 14 chapters (and 15-20 concepts) in a 14 week semester, rather than covering half that many and really drilling the concepts in.

"But Unknown Professor", you say, "We HAVE to cover A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, and in the introductory finance class or we're shortchanging the students." The problem with this approach is that a few months after the class is done, they don't remember anything about topics A-M except that they covered them sometime in class. Add they really don;t even have all that great a grasp of critical concepts such as the Time Value of Money.

In contrast, if you covered half as many topics, you could spend 3-4 weeks on Time Value rather than the usual week or two. This way, you could make them do about a hundred or so problems, and they'd really have it locked down.

In any event, here's Frank's Google Talk. Check it out.

And teach fewer topics (but more deeply) in your classes.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 8:05 PM |

Monday, February 11, 2008

How NOT To Do A PowerPoint Presentation

I've linked to this Youtube clip before, but it bears repeating. My students are starting presentations this week for my Financial Strategy course. Since learning how to effectively present material is one of the things they should get out of the class, I point them to a couple of sites. One is Presentation Zen, which should be a must-read fo all undergraduate (and graduate) students. Here's another, titled "Life After Death By PowerPoint." It hits most of the high (and low) points in a pretty memorable (and humorous) manner:

If you have any others, let me know.

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posted by The Unknown Professor at 11:12 AM |