I wrote a panicky blog post last week about the questionable absence of statistical software in my econometrics class. Today, I discovered my intuition (and the course syllabus) misled me into believing something so utterly outrageous. The good news is that my econometrics course will integrate a statistical package into the coursework. The bad news is that my econometrics course will integrate EViews into the coursework.

I have to admit something is better than nothing as far as software in econometrics goes. But why we're using EViews is a mystery to me. As I understand it, most academic research economists use either Stata or R, while researchers in private industry tend to use SAS or R. So, by learning EViews, I'm essentially learning a dead language. It's like learning Sanskrit, but without the redeeming esoteric and historical qualities.

Furthermore, and more importantly, EViews does not allow users to customize and extend the software as readily or as easily as Stata or R. I've never tried to extend EViews, but from everything I've read, it's much less extensible as Stata or R. Both those packages also have thriving user communities, each of which has produced hundreds of useful add-on packages and plug-ins.

The one potentially redeeming quality of EViews is its sugar-coated user interface. I haven't used Stata enough to really comment on its user interface. But I will concede that anyone uncomfortable working in the command line or with object-oriented programming would probably have trouble diving into R.

In most cases, I would praise the package with the superior user interface and more gradual learning curve, and bash the package that takes some time to master. When it comes to more professionally-oriented software, however, I put much more emphasis on flexibility, extensibility and robustness. Professional software can't omit important features for the sake of simplicity — if a researcher needs a feature, the feature needs to either exist or be easily added.

Still, I do feel better (if marginally so) about my econometric course. The idea of being confined to datasets of five observations was frightening.

Today I was humbled. Humbled by the first day of my ballroom dance P.E. class.

A part of me wants to attribute my seeming inability to perform even the most rudimentary dance step to poor instruction or poor choice of music. But something tells me I have only myself to blame.

To be sure, I didn't expect to walk out the first class with the ability to do much of anything. At the same time, though, I didn't expect that the first class would be so totally disorienting. The dance du jour, a simple swing, comprised a whole four steps, yet, at least for the first fifteen minutes, I was wholly incapable of placing my feet where they needed to be in time with the music. Something about that seemed particularly embarrassing, given that I'm a reasonably good at playing the piano. It was like finding myself suddenly unable to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or add seven and seven.

Close to a mental breakdown, I spent the two hours immediately after the class locked in a practice room playing Beethoven sonatas. I can't think of a word that really captures just how comforting it was to hear music, and not some garbled mess of hisses and squeaks, coming out of that piano.

I suppose the quality of my footwork has nowhere to go but up. Yet I can't help wishing my first foray into the wild world of ballroom dance had gone just a little more smoothly.

Sometimes I have to wonder whether my econometrics professor has been following developments in his field over the last two decades. I say this because he seems to have no intention of teaching me or my classmates how to use Stata, R, EViews or any other statistical computing environment.

I'm more than a little worried. Half the goal of most undergraduate econometrics courses is to teach students how to use a statistics package. In fact, two of the most popular introductory econometrics textbooks — Jeffery Wolldridge's Introductory Econometrics, and James Stock and Mark Watson's Introduction to Econometrics — include Stata datasets and integrate the software into their various lessons. Fortunately, I'm enough of a computer nut that I've mastered the basics of R, and I can use Stata without too much difficulty. But it really shouldn't be the students' onus to both determine they to learn Stata and teach themselves the package. There's a reason we're paying as much as we are to be here!

No doubt my professor would respond to my criticism with the facile assertion that one needs to understand the math underlying econometrics, as opposed to the more practical aspects, like using a statistics package. To some degree, I would agree — economists should know what a BLUE is, for instance. Shunning statistics software in its entirety, however, makes it extremely difficult to analyze all but the smallest datasets, which are uninteresting and much less useful than their beefier brethren.

Needless to say, it takes every ounce of my self-restraint not to stand up in the middle of an econometrics lecture and declare a fatwa.

***

On the other end of the enjoyment spectrum, I have nothing but praise for my first history course at college, The French Enlightenment. It is, by the professor's own admission, more of a "great books" course than a traditional history course, but that's fine with me. The reading list looks promising, and the professor is fantastic.

I just finished René Descartes' Discourse on Method for tomorrow morning. I like René, even if he comes across as mind-numbingly arrogant and egocentric. (His arrogance seems even more pronounced in the original French, though that may have more to do with the fact that 17th century French looks so much more archaic than the English translation than anything about the man.)

I'll write something about my other two courses — Real Analysis and Intermediate Macroeconomics — soon.

Today was my first day of classes for the Fall 2009 semester. I'll write more about them as I find time. For now, I just want to make sure the world knows how much I dislike my econometrics course. It is not a good sign when the professor asks you to show you can compute an arithmetic mean "step by step."

Just for kicks, here's my writeup of the first homework assignment for the course. The wording needs a nip and tuck, and I'm sure there is at least one trivial error that I need to fix before I submit it on Friday morning. The point, though, is to demonstrate just how insane and backwards my professor is. I don't use a calculator (or Mathematica) as a crutch. I use it because I already know how to add real numbers and I want to focus more on understanding the material I haven't understood since middle school.

PDF of my Homework

(If you don't know how to add numbers and need to reference this for your homework, don't forget to cite your source!)

I'm back at school. The food is still reasonably good. The summer weather is still a touch too humid. The state of Maine has yet to entice the folks at Design Within Reach to put an outlet within its borders.

Classes don't begin until Wednesday, leaving me with little to do but work on my Rails application and trawl through other people's shared iTunes libraries. It is the latter boredom-buster that is the subject of this post.

In browsing a few dozen different libraries, I have discovered that real people really do buy those weird "100 Most Relaxing Classical Songs" CDs peddled by home spa companies and questionable music labels. I find their existence troubling.

First and foremost, the recordings on these CDs are terrible. If these "Best of Bach" compilation discs are the only exposure people have to classical music, I can hardly blame them for not liking it more. One recording of Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto I sampled must have been played by a group of musicians on mood stabilizers. It was the most lifeless recording I've ever listened to.

More bizarrely still, none of the compilation albums I sampled bothered to include a single work in its entirety. I suppose this might be a benevolent omission, given how awful the recordings are. But it still seems like an insult to only include the first movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Of course, this particular defect in the albums's compositions might have more to do with our collective short attention span than bad taste on the part of the person putting the CDs together. (If people have trouble reaching the end of a four minute tune by Justin Timberlake, it's not too much of a stretch to assume they'll never make it through all 22 minutes of the Sixth Symphony.)

If you own one of these albums, please delete the music from your hard drive and buy a good album by a good artist. I'd highly recommend Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble's recording of Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony, or Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu's recording of Mozart's Piano-Violin sonatas K. 301, 204, 376 & 526 as good places to start.

A little over three years ago I bought an Apple Cinema Display. It cost a bundle, but it has proven to be a good investment. In fact, it's lasted through not one, not two, but three laptops. Not to mention, it still blows away most other displays in terms of its color reproduction, viewing angle and industrial design. (It has touch sensitive brightness and sleep controls!)

Unfortunately, however, one of the display's biggest features is also its biggest drawback — at least for people crazy enough to attend college 3,000 miles away from home. UPS charged me upwards of $70 to ship it one-way from Portland to Lewiston. So, at about this time last year, I set about finding myself another big widescreen monitor to plop down on my dorm room's desk. At the time, I reached two conclusions. First, I wanted to buy another Apple display. Second, I didn't want to buy old technology.

Thus I waited. In fact, I spent my entire sophomore year of college waiting patiently for Apple to take the wraps off something new and improved. But Apple never refreshed their Cinema Displays. In fact, they discontinued the 20" and 23" models without replacing them. (I'm not counting the weird 24" LED Cinema Display because it has a MagSafe connector and one of those accursed glossy coatings.)

Now, as I head back to school, I find myself in more or less the same position I was in a year before. I need another display for school, but I don't want to buy outdated technology and I really don't want to buy a piece-of-junk Dell display with a TN panel.

Part of me wants to keep waiting, despite the hit my productivity takes when I'm confined to the relatively small display on my laptop. While other manufacturers do offer displays with comparable image quality, none of them quite have the look of an Apple display. The less superficial, more pragmatic part of me wants to pick up an Eizo or a high-end NEC.

Decisions, decisions.

Ed Glaeser has a fantastic post over on the New York Times' Economix blog about the economic lessons imparted by various fairy tales. The whole post is funny (if you're an economics geek like me), but I just had to reprint my favorite part. Writes Glaeser:

I laugh every time.