Yay, ASA Spring Meeting! Boo, ASA Spring Meeting!

Every year, my local statistics group holds an all day meeting/mini-conf. Lots of local people give talks, especially students. This is my 3rd year going, and it's getting to that great point where I know a lot of the people.

Today, I gave a talk. (I hate public speaking. But I survived business school with flying colors, which means I am pretty good at it. Today... not so much.) I gave the talk Wednesday at school to help fill out the stats seminar schedule and to practice it and make sure it was the right length and everything. Lesson learned: talk given to 4 people who are not afraid to interrupt - 30 minutes. Talk given in smallish auditorium where no one says anything? 15 minutes. Elementary talk issue and I so know better, but I didn't want to think of more content so I tried to pretend it was ok. Oh well. I was right before lunch, and I don't think anyone begrudged being able to go to lunch early. I did get some good responses from other people in industry, no one suddenly found a huge flaw in my project, and an undergraduate told me he wants my job when he grows up.

Today, I was SUPPOSED to present a poster. They didn't tell me that no one else wanted to present a poster, so they canceled the poster session. I was really looking forward to having something in the "Posters Presented" section of my C.V., but oh well. The bad thing is that I spent ~ 4 frantic hours attempting to print the damn thing out yesterday (plus another 2 finishing it up). FYI - Adobe Reader refuses to tile a large pdf and print it on many sheets. You need Acrobat. The people at Kinko's have Acrobat (or something) and will do it for you, but they will not listen and print it on big sheets so they can charge you more. They would love to print it all at once, but that will cost at least $50, so....

I have a 8 sheets of 11" x 17" taped together that I'm going to take to school and post somewhere, because goshdarnit, I made a poster!

Three weeks left in the semester. Two function analysis homeworks (take home quizes, whatever you want to call them), one paper for monetary policy (How much of the Financial Crisis can be explained by the Credit Channel?), and one example to work up for Bayesian. Research may get to wait a bit, since it got a lot of the last two weeks in order to make the poster happen. STUPID POSTER.

The best part of doing everything at once

is when it all overlaps. It makes me so happy to read monetary policy papers - written by my teacher - using the same selection bias fix we're using at work. I love how math sits in the middle of all these fields.

School is right on top of me

which I think is pretty normal for this point in the semester: 4 weeks left including finals.

Since I'm only taking one "real" class, this is almost all self-inflicted, which will hopefully give me an edge next year when its all research. The worst of the deadlines are because of ASA Spring meeting next Friday - where I'm hopefully giving a talk and presenting a poster. Except the project the talk is based on is not done, and I haven't actually turned all my source material and simulations into a poster yet. (The poster is on the first tangible piece of my thesis research and I'm really happy that it's so together in my head. But it will be FANTASTIC to have it be a real thing even if it is taped together sheets of regular paper.)

Part of my Monetary Policy independent study is sitting in on the related classes of Macro - at 7:00-8:15 MW nights. Which with Judo kills every last one of my weeknights. I skipped Judo Tuesday, opting to fight with Bayesian (why does MCMC simulation converge to the correct posterior distribution?) and bang out the R code for my poster simulations. The class is good - I'm following everything despite having taken Macro 4.5 years ago - but I hope it doesn't last for the rest of the semester.

Functional Analysis homework due Thursday - and he hasn't covered even half of the sections the homework is out of. Wish me luck on an extension to that due date.

It's snowing. I'm not sure whether I want to find out if there is an econ talk today. If I don't know, I don't have to go. (Is it my fault they can't seem to send out announcements? and then they wonder why no students show up.)

This is about as exciting as it is likely to get for the next few weeks - the home stretch of mathematics coursework. (I'm taking one more class this summer towards my economics masters - then it's all thesis hours!)

New home on the web

Blogging is a great way to keep in touch with the friends I don't see often enough. So no apologies for the minutiae, or the many weeks when nothing seems to happen.