I just came back from a Micro Theory Lunch, which is a great thing here in SD. It is similar to Brown Bag seminars, expect the food is provided by school (and it is good - sandwiches, cookies, sodas). It has a regular schedule and it takes about an hour. The usual presenters are students, even though faculty members like to present, too. This time, the presentation was by my office mate Jim. He is a very smart and curious guy, but the presentation itself was, given my standards, bad. There was almost no structure, it was really hard to understand what is the main point, where is it all going. He also spent a lot of time on motivation but did not link its content with the theory he (very shortly) presented afterwards. It made me wonder what is the actual quality distribution of people (and their presentations) around the world. Maybe CERGE-EI is not that bad after all. Or at least, the good guys at CERGE-EI are better then the average elsewhere.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Radiohead
You probably heard the news - a band called Radiohead (never heard about them) published their album on the web. You can purchase(i.e. download) it for any price you want. There was a big fuss about it and lots of speculation whether it will be a success or no.
Well, it is definitely nice experiment, but the experience itself is appalling. The website is terribly slow (and I mean terribly) and very, very confusing. If you still manage to obtain a code to download the album, the code does not work.
This is not a way to go. Downloading from P2P is as easy as a one mouse click, so this is no competition. Even though somebody is always listening, it is so much easier to download it this way than to try to pay for it 0.0 pounds. Anyway, Nohavica way is simpler - just let people download it and encourage them to use P2P to reduce the burden for your servers.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Baby changing station
I love it - there is a baby changing station in the men's restroom in the swimming pool. I called that compete gender balance.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Presentation skills
Today, I finally had the opportunity to compare the quality of our (CERGE-EI) graduates to those of UCSD. Based on the small sample of one girl going to the job market and her first presentation, I would say we are roughly comparable. Her (empirical micro) paper was interesting, but the presentation itself was quite confusing and several problems were discover (and to many questions, she simply had no answers). Still, I admired her english. Much, much better than what we see at CERGE-EI.
