Quality rules. Not.

One of my colleagues from UCSD office came to me with question whether I know anything about Stata. Yes, as a theoretical micro economist, I know (very) little* about Stata. And the reason why she asked was that she is going to teach a course in econometrics, heavily based on Stata, in two weeks.

I have to say that this was the last piece necessary to crack my mental health today. Why should I even try to write a decent paper/dissertation? The world is probably ruled by people like this lady, who are paid (and will surely embellish their CV) for doing something they have no idea about, who cannot possibly do a good job for the students yet do it anyway. When the rule "If you want to teach something, you should know something about it!" lost its power?

More broadly (and depressingly) - what I'm doing here? Why didn't I go to the beach (or National Park) like a friend from unnamed Central European country, who came as a grad student with a finished PhD. and who keeps complaining how little opportunities we have here in San Diego "to socialize". (BTW: he even complaints about how much people from his country complaint.).

I hate days like these...




* There is no field further away from Stata then theoretical microeconomics.

Quality distribution

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.

Olives

I love good olives. I was surprised to find that black olives are typical in the US, while I was used to green olives in the Czech Republic (for the description of the difference, check Wikipedia). The cheapest olives I found (Safeway) were probably the best black olives I have ever had. Moreover, they were not salty, which is the thing I hate the most about the green olives you can often buy in CR (try to find green olives that are not salty and let me know).