Classes for the last semester

Reflections on the first day.

The semester began yesterday, and I hope it lasts for a loooong time. Mostly because of the classes I am taking. Yesterday’s classes portend a fun semester of things and projects I want to do (something I haven’t really felt in the last few semesters) and that’s a good thing. There are also a lot of people in my classes I know, which makes things way better!

Class #1:

Weight Training.

Every senior should have some slacker class, or so I’m told. Well, instead I chose a class which would be fun, but also a little challenging. I’ve always wanted to lift weights properly, so when the opportunity to take a course presented itself, I latched onto it. This is my earliest class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and requires me to be warmed up and ready to lift by 9:05 AM. That’s not particularly bad, since it allows me to incorporate a varied exercise schedule which looks something like:

Sunday: 2 hrs exercise bike

Monday: 1 hr walk/elliptical/jog

Tuesday: Lifting

Wednesday: 30 minute

Thursday: Lifting

Friday: 2 hrs exercise bike

Saturday: rest

Class #2:

Quantitative Analysis of the Macroeconomy.

Suffice it to say that the instructor began the class saying: “this is the class I wish I had taken as an undergrad.” I have the syllabus in front of me right now, and here are the items that we will be covering in the course: Economic measurement (micro & macro,) Dynamic Programming, Numerical Methods, Log linearlization: Impulse Response functions/computations, applications in Endogenous labor supply, taxes, stochastic technology shocks, etc. Looks like a semester packed with a lot of interesting stuff, no? The course was designed by Ed Prescott, who won the Nobel in Econ in 2004. Pretty cool. Of course, this is all from the Minnesota school of Economics, so things must be taken with a grain of salt.

 

One of the first assignments in the course is to listen to Prescott’s Nobel lecture, which ought to be interesting. We also have a lot of group projects in this course, which means it’ll involve a lot more of making new friends and developing old friendships. I know 5 or 6 people in this class, which is pretty awesome. Need I mention, all the recommended reading for this class is available online. You know what that means? A $150 stimulus in my pocket. That’s right.

 

The required reading for this class is: The ABCs of RBCs by McCandless and George; Dynamic Economics: Quantitative Methods and Applications by Adda and Cooper; Dynamic General Equilibrium Modeling: Computational Methods and Applications by Heer and Maußner; Numerical Methods in Economics by Judd; and Applied Computational Economics and Finance by Miranda and Falcker.

Class #3:

Macroeconomic Policy.

This class is taught by Justin Barnette, whose intro macro class I took freshman year. I remember the class being kind of boring freshman year, most likely because it was really easy. This class promises to be pretty fun. It’s going to be very technical, but Justin has promised to incorporate some of the pressing topics of today into the coursework. Based on my memory from 3 years ago, I think he’ll do a quite excellent job.

The class is slated to cover the Neoclassical Growth Model, Ramsey Optimal Fiscal policy, Commodity taxation, Competitive equilibrium under taxation, optimal taxation in NGM, Capital taxes, consumption and labor taxes, Cash in advance models, Ramsey monetary policy, Cash-credit goods model, Utility functions with money, and the New Keynesian model. We also need to write a paper for this class, which I think I’m going to use as my final paper. There is no required reading for this class either, so that puts another $150 in my pocket. Awesome.

Class #4.

Computing in Biology.

This class is going to be a killer. It is taught by Chad Myers who’s a fairly young guy and seems very approachable and easy going. The class, as the name implies, focuses on the computational side of biotechnology. The goals for the course are to understand the current state of technologies/methods in genomics and proteomics, understanding the kind of analysis that can efficiently be performed algorithmically, write scripts to manipulate data and extract info, and learn some basics of programming in the process. This sounds pretty great, as it’ll give me some employable skills which I can extend to other classes as well. GOSH. Why didn’t I take this class before?!

Class #5.

Renewable Energy and the Environment:

This seems kind of like a career exploration course, but I took it because it was a lib-ed requirement. I probably should have gone with the Health informatics course or something. This one proceeded awfully slowly, and I don’t see myself being motivated enough to go to all the classes, especially since everything is going to be so easy. There are apparently tests with 120 available points but only 50 of which will be graded. I feel like I’ve done all of this before, can’t I just get out of it?!

 

Why did I Ever Sign Up to be an Econ Major Part II

Back in High School, I liked Econ not only because I was good at my AP microeconomics class, but that econ just felt intuitive. It’s not like other classes were not intuitive (mechanics, for instance, was pretty intuitive) but econ somehow seemed to explain why certain behaviors I saw out in the market. I could simply parrot ‘supply and demand’ at pretty much anything and it would explain why   got cheaper over months, why the price of gas rose up, etc.

That was in 2006, when the Dow was at 14,000 something. I remember catching whispers in the air about how things were going to unfold in a couple of years, but there was nothing concrete. Back then I didn’t know of any of the blogs I currently surf, didn’t know of any of the debates that rage on in the intellectual circles/blogosphere, etc.

I took macro economics freshman year of college. In my sophomore year, I took intermediate micro and micro and was introduced to “calculus” in economics. The classes are all well and good, but I thought they were just too easy. How is it that after spending several weeks on Walrasian equilibrium people were still unable to understand what “market clearing” is? and how come people couldn’t figure out the solution to relatively trivial optimization problems?

Given the theme of my previous post, and all the thinking I’ve done over the last day or so, my belief is that many of my classmates lost track of economics once it lost the intuitive appeal.  A bunch of log-linear or Cobb-Douglas production functions provide a poor illustration of how an economy decides to allocate its productive powers, and as I discussed yesterday, it is simply not possible that you’ll find someone who knows that his utility function is the natural log function.

Mathematics is a fine tool to study economics. I’m kind of glad that people resorted to quantitative approaches, since I’d probably have been turned off if economics only involved making field observations and producing theories to describe the observations. However, by diving into the wreck of equations and optimizations without motivating them, instructors are doing a poor job of reaching out to the people who are generally confused about where these equations and things originated from anyway.

Instead of stressing on the fact that mathematics is a tool for describing some relationships in economics, stressing on making sure people setup optimization problems properly puts the mathematics front and center, leaving the economic framework defenestrated from the students’ perspective. I know this is not the case with me, but I bet there are good portion of students who pass intermediate micro and macro econ (the “gateways” into more econ) being able to solve optimization problems but not having the faintest clue of the implications of the theory that the problems are addressing.

Physics and Engineering departments, for instance, have done a great job of making sure students understand what equations mean; ask an engineer a problem about heat flow, and he’ll immediately tell you the equations he used to solve the problem and the phenomenological description of the equations. Ask people in my finance class about what the CAPM equation is telling you, and you might hardly get 10 responses, no two of which tell you the same thing and none of which are right. I can go so far as saying “It describes the idea that the risk premium associated with a security is a function of the risk premium of holding a market portfolio and a function of the covariance of the security with the market portfolio as a proportion of the variance of the market portfolio.” I hope it’s right; if not, I’ll look like an idiot, but “khuda meherban to gadha pehelvan” always applies.

People in academia these days seem to talk a lot about how models in economics need to change significantly in order to better deal with situations like the financial meltdown (c.f the Economist’s discussion on the same topic.) But nobody ever talks about how dismal the  state of undergrad econ classes are. My colleagues have specifically said that they have gone through 4 years of undergrad without learning absolutely anything beyond Econ 101 and 102. Couple this with the fact that none of the classes are taught by professors*⁺, and you get a student body that has only really seen marginal gains in any knowledge of economics and which is not prepared at all to use their background information to take a stand on particular topics.

Do academicians simply view undergrad as a filter by which the best of undergraduates will be picked out for grad school a and lucrative business jobs, and the remainder see some marginal gains in their incomes due to the possession of a degree? Why is it that during and after recessions, when the popularity of econ majors suddenly starts rising, the University of Minnesota is unable to get any of its faculty to take on some of the excess demand? Do professors just not care about undergraduates? Are they just not worth it? Like I said yesterday, I hope that is not the case, but given the pessimistic outlook you see from me, it might just be wishful thinking.

*This is not exactly true. I have had one course taught by a professor, and it was all right.
⁺I don’t mean to imply that all graduate students who teach classes are terrible. I’ve enjoyed some of the grad students I’ve had, but in general it seems as if undergrad students feel like they’re not getting their money’s worth and generally resign to the fact that instruction is going to be of a relatively lower quality compared to what one would expect of professors.

Why did I ever sign up for an econ major part I

Please don’t interpret this post as one big lament for the state of my economics major. It’s just a bunch of questions that I probably should have asked myself a little while ago, but never did.
——————–
I have been preparing for my finance final. It’s been a fine class though it’s not taught in the best possible way. Some of my classmates are extremely frustrated, but I like the instructor enough to overlook most of the complaints people voice. I have normally been resigning to the fact that people like to complain and nothing will change their nature. My kind of dismal experiences with plant biology will only support the above claim, I think. There probably were a fair number of people who enjoyed the class and the way it was taught.Most of the content that was taught was fairly enjoyable, but the methods used to teach the course were disappointing. The notion of completeness in markets, of passive holding strategies, etc. is all clear to me. However, it became increasingly and painfully obvious that even though it was all clear, it was all useless.
Nobody out there is living in a world that only consists of today and tomorrow. Nobody out there knows that only a finite number of states can be realized tomorrow. Nobody out there is writing contracts that will guarantee him $1 to buy medicine if his son catches a cold.
Sure, I understand that the above examples are approximations to real life. People can see today as their working years and tomorrow as their retirement years; they may predict the economy might grow between the 7 possible states of 0%, 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5%, 3%, etc.; they may want to invest in a fund that guarantees them a payoff enough to cover their child’s education funds, etc. But the intellectualization that is inherent to representing all the above decisions as a utility maximization problem given a set of constraints is a poor way of making sense out of anything. I know not one person who is able to figure out a) his utility functions, b) his budget constraints, and c) the solution to maximization problems, i.e. his consumption bundles.
Why, then, do colleges continue to fool these poor undergrads into taking courses which are all about abstractions and have absolutely little to do with anything that’s not in the heads of intellectuals. I keep hearing that employers don’t care about whether or not I understand what production functions are and whether I can solve optimization problems. Why, oh why, did I have to sit through a whole semester worth of classes in which I did nothing by solve optimization problems? Was it just so that I could get an A in it and show employers and/or future graduate school adcoms that I am capable of sitting through classes and understanding mundane things which are irrelevant? My only answer to the above question is “I hope that isn’t the case.” How else can I justify so much effort spent at doing basically nothing.
Frankly, I am surprised at myself for this dramatic change in thought. If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would have been an ardent supporter of learning for learning’s sake. I also believed that even if the content I learned was not relevant, I could still profit from knowing what intellectuals’ worldview is, and that would surely get me somewhere. From the last few years of classes, here’s what I have learned: the intellectual’s world view is a gagaland in which everybody is the smartest person who knows exactly what he is doing.
————-
There’ll be a part to this post which I’ll write tomorrow after I’m done with the final.

–Gautam

O, reason not the need

I am somehow churning out a paper on the following monologue from King Lear (Act 2 Scene 4) at a decent clip.

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,–
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall–I will do such things,–
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

BIOL 3007W Lecture

Part 2: Lecture 15

ALgal motile cells. Basic type: cells with two falgella pointing forward.

Looking at cryptophytes, strameophiles, haptophyta, dinophyta, euglenophyta, chlorophyta.

Chloroplasts occur in 4 supergroups: archeplastida: primary endosymbiosis. others: secondary or tertiary or exotic flavours.

Review of primary/secondary symbiosis. Remember to look at membrane arrangement in chloroplasts.

Beginning with Euglenophyta (Euglenoids.) Green or colorless flagellates. Mostly freshwater. They really like pollution (excess nutrients, etc.) Ancestor s were non-photosynthetic, and phagocytosed things.

Chloroplasts arose by secondary endosymbiosis (have chlorophyll a, b) with an extra membrane. There is no sexual reproduction.

They are widely distributed in freshwater habitats, but oftentimes they are found at air-water or water-soil interfaces. They are highly tolerant of extreme environments. Look at soil on euglenoid diversity.

They don’t have true cell walls. Flagella are apical. long flagellum with tinsels emerges out, but the second one does not emerge. There are a set of protein plates beneath the plasma membrane (called the pellicle.) They have eyespots to orient them towards light.

They have pyrenoids, where photosynthetic carbon is metabolized. However, these pyrenoids are negative for iodine stains, since they do not have starch. They store a material called paramylon. Euglena have contractile vacuoles for water modulation. Lots of contractions and expansions to maintain water balance.

moving onto Chromalveolate group.

Chromalveolates’ origins from endosymbiosis of red algae. Typically they have three or four membranes. Interesting uptake of chloroplasts. THey are not very common. They tend to be in deeper and colder waters. Important components of freshwater and marine habitats/

They have two flagella at the apex, which are differently decorated compared to each others. They have chlorophylls a and c, and phycobilins (light harvesting complexes) and carotenoids. Some are photosynthetic, and some are colorless. Remember: phycobilins are only found in red algae, glaucophytes and cryptomonads.

Outer membrane of chloroplasts (4th) is continuous with host’s nuclear membrane. Review Gene transfer slide. (transfer from plastid to secondary host, plastid to nucleomorph, nucleomorph to nucleus, etc.

SIDE NOTE: the professor is pretty boring.

BACK TO SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING.

Haptophyta. Cells can be unicellular or colonial. Mainly marine. Cell structure is pretty unique. They have two whiplash flagella, with a funny thing coming out of the middle, called a haptonema. They have both chlorophyll a, c, and carotenoids (especially fucoxanthin, makes them look brown.) They store chrysolaminarin in vacuole.

They have scales, which are sometimes calcified (then called coccoliths.) They can take up dissolved nutrients or ______. Haptonema have a sticky tip which adheres to microbes or other food particles. Upon attachment to a food source, the haptonema brings the food closer to a membrane, which allows the haptophyta to engulf them.

Often called coccolithophores. Round, calcium bearing organisms. They can have multiple layers of scales. They come in a remarkable set of patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccolithophore

They have a big impact on carbon and sulfur cycles. A big CO2 sink, since the calcium carbonate captures it permanently. They drop down to the bottom of the surface. They also make Dimethyl sulfide, which rises up and provides nucleation sites. Less light on oceans. The sulfur comes back down, enhancing acidity.

Acidic oceans: will the coccoliths breakdown? will the organims be able to compensate? http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;320/5874/336 At higher concentrations, they are able to compensate by building bigger coccoliths. Evidence for increasing size of coccoliths since industrial revolution. They have big impacts worldwide.

Last group: dinoflagellates. Diverse set or chloroplasts. Some have green plastids, though most have green plastids. Dinos  = whirling. When they swim, they spiral. One flagellum goes around the cell and the other flagellum goes back. The one that goes around is a tinsel flagellum, the other is a whiplash flagellum. Some have amoeboid stages, and some others have starch.

They have chromosomes which are condensed, but there are no histones. They always appear as though they are in division… i.e. always condensed. Possess chlorophylls a and c. They also have carotenoids, (predominantly perdinin.) They characteristically have plates, though some can be unarmored (only with vesicles.) They have a filament that emerges from the cell, an arm of cytoplasm comes down and engulfs the substrate. They are mixotrophic organisms.

They make elaborate cysts. They accumulate in sediments, and used in oil exploration (to date the sediments.)

Pigmented dinoflagellates may be symbionts in other protists or in invertibrates. Zooxanthellae: cells of dinoflagellates that get taken up from organisms. If they re-emerge from hosts, they will have the characteristic dinoflagellate shape. They synthesize many compounds used by the corals. In return, they get CO2 from corals.

Increase in temperatures may cause corals to expel zooxanthellae. Coral bleaching. Red tides. They produce toxins which are colorful, but also responsible for major fish kills. They are neurotoxins which accumulate in fish. Bioluminescence during night. Not known why they do it.

Disconnect

It seemed like the world turned over today; or maybe it was just that the people/media I follow on twitter were just creaming over the CES show in Vegas. Google launched the Nexus One, T-mobile upgraded its network (I’m now getting ~1 mbps download speeds, which means that it might just be worth it to tether my laptop to my phone in my apt.), etc. There have also been some pretty interesting things floating around. People managing the Philip K. Dick estate are not too happy with the Android/Nexus-One connection, and the BSE index has regained its Feb 2008 levels. In obviously beeeeeeees related incidents, some guy who likes honey a lot is probably going to suffer hell for the remainder of the week.

At the same time, I felt very, let’s say, disconnected. I really didn’t care about what was going on around me. I pretty much ended up just writing a few tossups for MUT, enquiring about the Language Proficiency Exam for graduation requirements, watching some of Dr. Thoma’s lecture videos on youtube, and … nothing else. I took too long to write the MUT questions, but maybe this is to be expected, due to the multitude of distractions around me. I didn’t continue reading about the Economic History of India, which was not a smart thing. Tomorrow, after I go about sending the emails that I was planning on sending, I will finish reading Chapt. 2 of that book and write a post summarizing the main points.

In general, people seem to be happy about 2010, which is a good thing overall. I am particularly looking forward to what the year has in store for employment prospects. There are a couple of job-related events which are coming up in Jan and Feb that I’m planning on attending, and the possibility of awesome summer research internships is also exciting. I am sure there is still cause for concern, what with the several warnings about sluggish employment growth in 2010. Prof. Veglia had suggested that I not worry about jobs so much; he suggested that I rather focus on doing well with my basics in the sciences, learn the right lab techniques, have a solid foundations of the theories in chem/physics/mathematics so that I can have a better base before I enter grad school. Dad suggested that I look at something like the Peace Corps so that I can have a phase in which I have a mindset predisposed towards expansionary ideas rather than contract myself into the sciences.

All that said, there are still a few months left for those decisions to be made. In the meanwhile, I need to focus on finishing up my Statement of Purpose and other writeables for internship apps. I also got an email today from Rita Garni at the Biochem Office about a course in Mass Spectrometry that is going to be offered next week; registrations are open, and I think it might be a good exercise to learn a new technique. I will thus continue to keep myself busy this week.

My plan of writing 100/100 for MUT ain’t happening, but I’m pretty sure that I can atleast get to 50 tossups, which isn’t all that bad. Assuming we produce 15 packets, that’s still about 1/6th of the total number of tossups that we need to produce, which can only be good.

Gautam

Schedule for Next Semester: Edited

Link

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

EDIT: NO MORE SYMMETRY, BUT SWEET COURSES SCHEDULE YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Freshman Seminars

These are arguably the most interesting options:

ECON 1905 – Game Theory and Human Nature – 230-345 Tu,Th

CHEM 1905 – My Other Car is a Bicycle – 330-510 M

CHEM 1905 – How do Chemists Study Biology? – 330-510 W

AMST 1905 – Boomtown and Borderlands: Life on the US-Mexico Border 125-240 M,W

AST 1905 – Nothing – 335-530 Tu

“Nothing” sounds interesting because it’s probably going to be about black holes. However, that means I shall have class on Tuesdays from 8:30 AM – 10:00PM almost non-stop. Same is the case with Game Theory, but I wouldn’t mind being tired Tu night just because Game theory is pimp. The two chem ones also seem very good. The bicycle one is my current fav because I like to bike around and my bicycle is my other car a lot of times in the summer. The chemists studying biology is also interesting. I will try to see what kind of stuff is discussed in that class. The boomtowns one, every time I think about that I’m reminded of Mr. Raths and El Norte. That is the only real charm of the class. I don’t want to end up taking a freshman seminar which requires me to write stuff every week, and non-science ones are really good at making students write.

Heeelp!

–Gautam

4 Year Plan

So, I sat down today like an HS student what my 4 year plan will look like… CLICKY

I’m attaching the file for those of you interested. Most of the courses are requirements, and it looks like there aren’t any lib eds or electives, but I have most of them done so they are taken care of. Anyway, summer classes are always an option and I intend to take some classes the first couple of summers anyway.

–Gautam

Schedule – New and Improved

Not very many changes. Just better timings and slightly better teachers (I hope so, at least)

I will be back in Chan tomorrow. So, I should see you guys around soon.

Fall ’07

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
8:00am		PHYS 1301W LAB 302 8:00am-9:55am Phys 154
8:30am
9:00am
	WRIT 1401 DIS 002 9:05am-9:55am LindH 325		WRIT 1401 DIS 002 9:05am-9:55am LindH 325		WRIT 1401 DIS 002 9:05am-9:55am LindH 325
9:30am
10:00am
10:30am
11:00am
	PHYS 1301W LEC 300 11:15am-12:05pm Phys 150	PHYS 1301W LEC 300 11:15am-12:05pm Phys 150	PHYS 1301W LEC 300 11:15am-12:05pm Phys 150	PHYS 1301W DIS 301 11:15am-12:05pm FordH B60	PHYS 1301W LEC 300 11:15am-12:05pm Phys 150
11:30am
12:00pm
	MUS 1013 LEC 001 12:20pm-1:10pm RarigC 190		MUS 1013 LEC 001 12:20pm-1:10pm RarigC 190
12:30pm
1:00pm
1:30pm
2:00pm
2:30pm	PHYS 1905 LEC 006 2:30pm-4:25pm Phys 236A				MUS 1013 DIS 012 2:30pm-3:20pm FergH 107
3:00pm
3:30pm
4:00pm
4:30pm
5:00pm			ECON 1102 LEC 030 5:00pm-7:30pm BlegH 205
5:30pm
6:00pm
6:30pm
7:00pm
7:30pm			ECON 1102 DIS 031 7:30pm-8:20pm BlegH 255
8:00pm

Class

Name

Credits

http://schedulizer.com