Sunday, October 31, 2010

Irony

I regularly get together with a couple of guys from my church. We've been going over a book titled "Twelve Steps for Recovering Pharisees". It's main theme is that we are pretty much all hard-wired to find ways be judgmental twerps who try to make ourselves feel superior to those around us. So this cartoon from XKCD hit the spot.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

I Don't Seem To Have a Lot of Empathy

I just took an empathy test (the Baron-Cohen Empathy test) - I scored a 23. A high-functioning Autistic or someone with Aspergers typically scores about a 20. Maybe my wife is right, and I am simply not that empathetic. However, she could have been kidding (if so, how would I know?).

HT: Vox Popoli

Monday, October 11, 2010

New Video on Time Value

As I mentioned before, I've been doing a bit of work with screen recording software. Previously, I'd done a 4-video series on how to use the BA 2+ calculator. Well, I'm at it again.

This semester, I'm teaching the undergraduate core finance. I plan on making a series of videos on the main topics that I can then use in upper-level courses. That way, I can eliminate the need to take valuable class time for going over prior material. Instead, if the students feel the need for a review on (for example) Effective Annual Rates, they can simply watch the video. Eventually, I hope to have a library of videos on many of the major topics we cover in the intro course.

Here's the first one - on the basics of Time Value. This one covers problems and concepts related to Present/Future Values of single lump sums. If you find it helpful, let me know.

You can see my other videos at the following site - the BUS424 folder contains a number of lectures I made for my Fixed Income class. Feel free to use and share them.