This is getting a little bit too repetitive, but I changed the theme again. While I was fixing it to my liking (and to better reflect the rest of the website) I was wondering why it takes Yahoo ages to update simple PHP code. The changes in the CSS take hold in seconds, but I have to wait hours before the PHP changes. This is awful, as I am never sure if I did some wrong code or it’s just the server waiting to catch-up…
Although unusual in me, I have a moderate rant on professors in Panama who teach the Modigliani-Miller theorems. Let us first refresh what this theorem addresses (and these excerpts are from www.ifa.com):
The Modigliani-Miller Theorems concern decisions about aspects of the accumulated savings stock. The basic model was formulated in Modigliani’s and Miller’s essay, “The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance” and “The Theory of Investment” (1958). Two other important essays followed in 1963 and 1966. Using this basic model, Miller and Modigliani derived two so-called invariance theorems, now known as the MM theorems. As Peter Bernstein asserts, “You have only to mention these letters to finance people, and they know what you mean.”
The Model of Portfolio Choice and the Capital Asset Pricing Model focus on financial investors, while Merton Miller, initially in collaboration with Franco Modigliani, established a theory for the capital market relationship between the capital asset structure and dividend policy of production firms and firms’ market value and costs of capital.
The main message of the MM theorems is as follows: a firm’s value is unrelated to its dividend policy, and policy is an unreliable guide for stock selection. The MM theorems have become comparative norm for theoretical and empirical analyses in corporate finance. Merton Miller, who died in 2001, is the researcher who has dominated these analyses during the last two decades. He has made a unique contribution to modern theory of corporate finance.
In the latest particular case of a college professor at a graduate course, the assignments revolved around establishing fictitious cases where the students had to resolve the MM theorem using given assumptions of the likely outcome of different investment, their expected pay-offs, and the cost of a fixed pay-off with insurance. This is an exercise that involves basic non-linear programming, and most problems are also solved using simple matrix multiplication.
The problem begins when the professor makes the assignment tedious, by making most of the numbers variables. When I saw the problems I recognized an equation easily solved with substitution. The problem was all of them gave me negative solutions, and negative outcome solutions in the system of equations meant the solution had no mathematical solution within the positive real numbers, so it could not be solved.
Now, I was puzzled. I did not study mathematics, but a majored in finances and have resolved more complicated problems using complex non-linear programming in Python and Java. So I was either having a very unlucky day, I had sudden amnesia, or all the problems indeed gave solutions outside the expected positive real number realm.
The student in question returned to class with an empty solution assignment, frustrated, and I was left to ponder why it had happened. No matter how hard I searched the Internet I could not find a solution to these problems.
It turned out the professor had indeed made all the problems unsolvable, and the rest of the class was spent making assumptions as to what the finance teams would have done in real life.
Is it me or this seems the most idiotic class in the world? I already have a big enough problem in Panama, where colleges graduate MBA’s who are hardly fit to manage a hot dog stand, let alone a more complex business. Why on earth would the professor spend so much time teaching problems without a solution? I could understand explaining one or twice of these in class so students would know what to expect in real life, but the whole class teaching unsolvable equations? I would think explaining non-linear programming to solve systems of equations is a much better topic. Or even explaining how to correctly rate given probability rates using statistics is also a valuable choice. But I fail to understand why a professor would show off his (lack of) knowledge of the matter with the poor selection of assignments.
I tend to find fault with the deans of these colleges, who barely look at the curriculum of their professors, and at the professors, who confuse a pile of papers stacked together from different sources with real college course material that coherently address a subject. Our colleges are full of said individuals, to whom form is more important than content, and who are more interested in using a suit while lecturing than the innate content of the lecture.
Mediocre professors produce a constant batch of mediocre students who later become mediocre businessmen and women. As the value of a college degree lessens every day, colleges will resort to softening doctorate programs as students are desperate to obtain another degree to make a difference in their resumes. Colleges will respond with doctorate programs of inadequate quality, but easy enough to keep the college income high and the students from dropping out. When money and not quality of education dictates the standards of society, the result is a mass of poorly prepared individuals who will surely fail when the benchmarks of market dynamics became unachievable to the ignorant and uneducated.
Sadly we might not have the students to blame, but the institutions and educators who were in the first place also ill-prepare to teach.
Against all possible odds, I redesigned the theme to adapt it a little bit more to my taste.
I wanted a bigger area for text, and basically that meant retouching all CSS elements inside the wrapper. I can see a clear case for those who prefer liquid versus non-liquid cascading style sheet elements. It took some time and lots of writing codes for colors and numbers for sizes in paper stickies to get the job done. There was nothing scientific about it, more trial and error than anything else. And I still have many doubts about if I keep website and post as separate entities (which for the moment I will).
My initial thoughts were to keep more static elements such as my design portfolio and resume in the website and use the blog for more dynamic content, such as writing. But my lack of decisiveness kept me from either writing more posts or changing the whole enchilada. Last night I stayed late playing around with my HTML files but I keep hitting the same wall: web engines are much faster at indexing, tabulating and all that administrative work that HTML pages are not. I could roll my own, but I program in Python and Ruby, and my Yahoo! host only allows Perl and PHP, neither which I care to learn right now…
So for the moment being I will try to finish here and see if I can post at least twice a week. There is a lot less people coming here than my previous and public Wordpress blog.
Non-conformance is my norm. I am not comfortable with the look of my blog. I would like to adapt the CSS so it fits more closely the design of the rest of my website. Now, changing a Wordpress or Movable Type theme has never been easy. Does anyone know of a good tutorial or free PDF that explains it?
I recently moved to a beautiful, new loft, which is also smaller than my previous apartment. I just love the new neighborhood, and the view is great. I can see the whole of Coco del Mar and the Pacific Ocean.
As such, I waited for this time to set-up my new iMac, a machine powerful enough that I hope that I won’t have to change for the next 3 years or so. And you know why? Because moving systems is painful.
Yes sir, reinstall drivers. And that Canon 676U scanner driver no longer works on Tiger 10.4; which is weird, since it worked just fine in my previous and lovely iMac running 10.3.9. I mean, come on, it’s just a 0.01 difference in OS upgrade…
And there is the problem of the native libraries… Yes, Ruby 1.8.2, which is way old. My computer did not arrive with Leopard. And this is so in purpose, because I got a discount on it. But now I had to download and install gems, and then update, and then I forgot and I ended with Rails 2.0, which is a little hard for me…
Never mind the Python 2.3.5 version which works perfectly in 10.3.9 but has broken libraries in 10.4. So you reinstall Python 2.5 and the wxPython libraries as well.
And then Eclipse, Aptana Studio, Netbeans and all.
But that is nothing. The problem is my MP3 collection, which took many DVD’s and countless hours watching the screen while one copies from disk to disk… It makes you start hating music.
Accounting backups? Those are nasty. Be careful or you might loose the next VISA payment. It happened to me once.
After all was done, the system looks beautiful. But it took I guess close to 8 hours or more to migrate everything. And this was not an easy morning in the house alone. This was mayhem while I tried to paint the walls, install that new bathroom mirror, and try to remember where I put the box of underwear, all at once…
Did I say three years? Make it four… after all, I am still using the same languages to solve the same problems I did in 2000.
I used to love Basic.
Basic was the first language I learned about 25 years ago. Basic is the language I used to create a kick-ass accounting application back in the CP/M days, and it run faster than the COBOL version. Basic is the way I paid for my college money, by teaching kids to program their old Spectrum and TI-94A computers back before the PC took off.
Now, I find Basic not so much…
I admit I am not a Windows guy so I never used VB or .NET. I realize there is Gambas for Linux and Real Basic for Mac. But it doesn’t seem to have the power of other languages. Why?
Maybe Basic did not have the syntax elegance of Python or Ruby, or the intricate library and static typing of C++ or Java (at least in my days, A was a number variable and A$ was a string, period.) But just as Perl, Basic got the job done and done well. I bet that if someone came up with a real funky and easy to use graphic library, more people would take time to learn Basic as opposed to using Qt with C++, wxPython with Python, or Cocoa with Mac OS X (no, I don’t mention SWING Java because I think it is too hard compared to the other options).