R-dy R R

Hey, all.

So, I haven't been by in some time. Sorry 'bout that - you know, to my four loyal readers. :)

I spent winter break taking a class on a scripting language called R. That was a kick: two weeks to try and learn the language, the basics of LaTeX (a typesetting system), and how to get the two to talk to each other via a process called 'Sweaving.'

Also, as 8 days are such a long time: introductory spatial statistics.

Needless to say, this didn't go as planned. We all tried very hard: I pulled a lot of sessions staying up 'til midnight, and I was far from alone. The instructor's wife had a nightmare that he was cheating on her with a woman named 'R,' from what I heard. Part of the trouble was that everyone was deficient somewhere:

• Poor Professor Rogers had never even taken a computer programming course before

As a result, he wasn't expecting all the difficulties with different machines. We had Macs, Windows XP through 7, etc. Not everything worked the same on every platform, naturally. I warned him this would never get better, with systems constantly changing. (One poor guy had a tiny little Asus machine that couldn't run the regressions for our final project.) We could use the school computers for R, but not LaTeX/Sweave.

• The class only required entry level econometrics to get into, so all the students were unprepared in some required area.

For most of them, it was computer programming experience. I actually had the most experience in that area, which is a scary thought. Nobody else really knew anything at all, and I used to doodle games on my TI-85, way back when. (I did get the little thing playing Tetris, but I'm not exactly a code monkey. Never really did anything with C++ or anything, and all my exploits are over a decade old.)

In my case, the weak spot was econometrics: I hadn't even heard of most of the techniques we were supposed to be expanding on, while most of them were comfortable there. Lots of Criminology PhD students. I guess they do that stuff a lot.

...

Needless to say, I had a blast. It was just like old times: obsessive focus on a single subject, no time for anything else. Didn't write. Barely remembered to eat. Loved it. I think I was the only one who did. I have some fellow students in the current term who are all treating it like a traumatic experience.

Now that it's over, I'm continuing to try and learn about all this on my own, and just wanted to post about it here, (partly as a reminder to myself to actually come here and post more).

I'm trying to learn some of the basics of social network analysis, just for kicks. I found an online textbook, and my beginning project has been to try and map out the connections between the people who play on my girlfriend's favorite MUSH. They maintain a wiki for it here.

So far, I have learned enough to construct a simple adjacency matrix and run some plots of it. I haven't had time to make them pretty, but here are a few samples of what I've done just to peek:





For the more technically inclined, I stripped out vertexes that didn't have at least one two-way connection to another vertex, just to keep the scale manageable. Looks worse with isolates included, and it's hard to zoom properly in the rgl window.

The end goal is to try and embed the 3d object in a pdf, but that appears to be dishearteningly complex with the tools at hand. I have created an R script to just peel the links out of any arbitrary html page, though, so that's something. I could maybe create the crayon version of a spidering/pagerank system, between the two elements. (I'm not sure if it's obvious there, but I scaled the node size by the number of edges connecting to it.)

Anyway, I hope to be back with more stuff soon. I've been writing, too, now that I'm free. :)

Choices

So, I was talking to a dear friend of mine about... well, you know, random friend stuff, when this exchange came up:

I guess you can't really put a price on the love of a child (though I'm sure Futurama made a reference to it.)

... Actually, you totally could.

The way you do it experimentally?

You would have to determine what people are willing to give up for the love of a child. For instance: a promotion? A car? Etc.

That puts a dollar value on a child's love the same way it does on a Big Mac - you can completely quantify it. Of course, each child's love is a highly differentiated product due to physical, locative and branding concerns along with the unique preference sets of each adult, so it would be hard to make, like, predictive models. But on a small scale, it totally holds up.


Probably all four people reading this blog already know that I'm very close to a Bachelor's of Science in Economics, having jumped ship from Accounting.

Here's the funny thing about it, though:

Nobody seems to really understand what economists actually do. We get lumped in with business guys, because, hey, we all wear suits and talk about money a lot.

It's a whole different thing, though.

Economics is the formal study of choice: that is, how people should allocate resources when they want more than they have. Money's a useful way of comparing two unrelated things, (in fact, this is one of the required properties of anything to be money), but it's really not the point.

Anyway, one of the most fundamental concepts in the whole field is that of opportunity cost.

You can always tell what something is worth to a person by what they're willing to sacrifice in order to have it.

Anyway, I'd better get back to the grind, but I wanted to share that thought while it was fresh in my head. I'll try to share more detailed thoughts about economics later. Oh, and do the other blog entries I promised about narrative. :)