I've reviewed my macroeconomics notes a gazillion times, and I'm convinced I won't remember anything more if I continue to recite definitions for the next two hours. So instead of continuing my bout of superfluous studying, I'm going to weigh in on the App Store pricing debate.

Since it's debut in the summer of 2008, many pundits have criticized the downward trend in application prices on the App Store. They argue, quite reasonably, that a norm of super-low prices has driven all kinds of quality out of the market. But then many of them add some commentary about the cheap applications conditioning people into thinking all applications should be cheap. I suspect the market breakdown is more a flavor of the "lemons problem" as made popular (among academics) by George Akerlof's famous paper on the market for used cars. (Lemons refer to bad used cars, not the fruit.) In other words, people are only reluctant to spend money on applications because they have little or no idea whether an application is worth more than $0.99.

Certainly, my problem with the App Store has always been the lack of information about particular applications — the symptom of a market with problems due to information asymmetry. Namely, I have virtually no idea whether an application will be a high quality application or not when I click the "Buy" button in iTunes. Some would point to user reviews as a way to reduce asymmetry, but I have a hard time gauging how much I will like the application based on the shallow commentary of a random stranger.

I only bought a $20 copy of OmniFocus for the iPhone because I knew the Omni Group has a strong reputation, and because I figured the iPhone client must be at least as good as its desktop counterpart. And even then, I worried that I might have paid $20 for a clunky, inoperable piece of software. Likewise, I have been reluctant to buy a copy of Tweetie for the iPhone, despite its relatively low price and the bevy of positive reviews from reputable sources, precisely because I cannot try it out.

More recently, the fine folks at Wolfram Research released a Wolfram Alpha application for the iPhone. Much to my surprise, they priced it at $50. A number of technology bloggers (e.g., John Gruber) have applauded the move, claiming that it represents a return to prices that allow developers to create high-quality applications. But my objection to the $50 price tag on the Wolfram Alpha application has nothing to do with an intrinsic opposition to paying for software. Rather, I don't understand how they expect anyone to pay $50 for an application that offers content no different than what one can access through the iPhone's web browser. It's called a single-price monopoly folks.

Fortunately, there is a possible light at the end of the tunnel. Apple recently allowed developers to do in-application purchases in free applications. This opens the door for developers to offer a free, but crippled, application that can be easily upgraded, the same sort of model most Mac desktop software uses. It's certainly the only reason I paid my $80 for a copy of Panic's Coda software.

Forgive me. For I have more venting to do about my econometrics course and professor.

A few weeks ago, we had a midterm exam. Because this professor always seems to find a way to humiliate me and make me feel stupid by way of finding some minor fault in my work, I really spent time studying for this exam. I worked example exercises in the textbook. I worked old exams from MIT's much more mathematically-aware econometrics course. I even worked some problems I felt were relevant from a graduate-level econometrics textbook. And I did fine on those preparatory exercises.

Then, just a few hours ago, I received the results of the examination. I received a C on said exam, measuring in absolute terms. (This particular professor claims to have some scheme whereby he doles out letter grades based on the number of standard deviations a particular student is above the mean.) To me, this says there is something wrong. Exams are supposed to measure how much a particular student has learned in a particular class, no?

Though, I suppose if one defines "class" as the set of lectures delivered by the instructor of that class, then I haven't learned very much in the "class." My professor does little to better my understanding.

On the other hand, I have learned quite a bit from reading the course's assigned text, working problems on my own, and supplementing that with readings from other econometrics texts and journal articles. It doesn't seem to unreasonable to me to say that someone who can prove the Gauss-Markov theorem probably understands it. Yet my midterm results would lead one to think I spend my spare time drooling.

In fact, using the very hypothesis tests that my midterm claims I can't perform correctly, it's fairly easy to show that the grade I received on this midterm is statistically improbable.

I try not to care too much about grades. My working theory is, "If I actually understand the material, the grade will follow," which has worked pretty well over the last seven years. (For the record, I earned an A on my more recent real analysis midterm.) But this econometrics course (and this professor's statistics course, last semester) seems to violate that postulate. So much so that my ability to gain entry to a top-flight graduate program could be jeopardized.

And to think I'm actually paying this professor's salary!

I meant to post this last weekend. But on Sunday — and most of last week for that matter — I was in bed coughing and wheezing with some kind of cold or sinus infection. Fortunately it was not the dreaded H1N1, though my mystery bug was still unpleasant.

At any rate, in addition to coming down with a sinus infection and not writing a blog entry, I attended the annual Harvard debate tournament last weekend. I could spend lots of time ranting about the questionable cases brought against me and my partner (e.g., prosecute a voodoo-worshiper for conspiracy to commit murder?), or even discussing the mobs of young, mostly Asian parents with small children forcing their youngsters to pose in front of John Harvard's statue. But that's not what I'm going to do. Instead, I have to say something about the chalkboards in Harvard's fancy new Northwest Science Building. In a word, the chalkboards are "amazing." In fact they're so amazing, even a team from Yale was willing to admit Harvard had better chalkboards.

While the boards do nothing to fix my principle complaint about chalkboards — the horrible residue chalk leaves on my hands — the boards in Harvard's new lab science building do have some kind of engineered graphite surface that offers two huge advantages over any board I've ever used anywhere else.

First, the boards' surface make it impossible for even the most inept professor or determined troublemaker to make unpleasant noises. No squeaks. No horrible "fingernails on the chalkboard" sounds. It's great. Second, the boards' harder surface make it a chinch to actually write on the board. Whereas even my hands, which spend a dozen hours a week pounding the absurdly heavy action of a Steinway grand piano, have trouble writing on most boards, the boards in Harvard's new science building made writing a breeze.

It has become my new goal to have the chalkboards at Bates resurfaced with whatever miracle material Harvard uses. It's really that good.

I have an exam tomorrow morning, so I need to make this quick so I can keep studying. But, of course, it's the exam that this post is about.

I've mentioned on several occasions my dissatisfaction with my econometrics professor, and the course itself. (It's the same professor I spent time whining about in my posts several months ago related to economics and statistics.) We're using weird statistical analysis software, after three weeks we still haven't done multivariable regressions, and there's no matrix algebra to speak of.

The strangest part of the course, though, is my professor's obsession with having us not only derive equations in class, but also memorize how to perform those derivations. I suppose in some sense this might be called "rigorous," but really it's just a pointless exercise in frivolity. The real derivations — the ones that might actually be worth knowing — use matrix algebra, which, of course, we can't use in this econometrics course because the economics department has what I consider an insufficient mathematics prerequisite.

But back to the exam. One of the "proofs" my professor wants me to be able to recite has to do with showing that a particular estimator is unbiased, which, of course, involves showing that the expected value of that estimator is the value it's trying to estimate. I couldn't remember how exactly to do the proof, so I looked in my notes. I don't know whether I was bored to death, just took bad notes, or the professor didn't do a very good job of explaining the derivation. Whatever the case, I couldn't obtain the information I wanted from my notes. So I opened the course textbook — the one my professor chose — to find what I needed.

It was then that I realized how perverse this course and my professor is. Even the authors of my textbook — two MIT professors — don't think these proofs are worth knowing particularly well. As they put it, "The details are relatively straightforward, but since they are somewhat tedious, we have relegated them to Appendix 3.1" (Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts, Pindyck and Rubinfeld, pp. 63).

I feel like my professor really misses the point when it comes to teaching. The details are doubtlessly important, but it's a whole lot more important — especially in a course that's about economics more than rigorous mathematics — to understand the economic principles behind and the application of the formulas.

Update: Because I'm angry and frustrated, I thought I'd vent some of my other dissatisfaction with this professor too.

Often, in the course of doing these banal derivations, he will make an offhanded comment that one particularly bizarre reformulation of a particular formula would be "the one you'd use if you were a writing software for Microsoft." It's clear to me that he does not understand algorithmic analysis.

The unviolated formulas he has spent so much time tinkering with would, as algorithms, all grow in linear time. And so would all of his reformulations. So, from an algorithmic analysis point of view, neither algorithm is preferable! On the other hand, some forms of the formulas would, from my point of view, be better because they would be easier to maintain and support, always big concerns when one is writing software.

Back to my studying.

After my workout this morning, I popped into Commons to have breakfast. Normally, this is not something I would write about. As evidence, I don't think I've ever posted anything about this aspect of my routine before. But what I witnessed this morning was so strange, so out-of-the-ordinary and so remarkable, I had to write about it. For, when I entered the dining room this morning at around 9:30 AM, all the tables were clean. I'm sure to some this does not seem remarkable or particularly noteworthy. But to me it was a small miracle.

Because I don't like to eat breakfast at 6:45 or dinner at 4:30, I'm never in Commons just after they open, when everything is spotless. So I usually find myself sitting at a table that is, to one degree or another, covered with the remnants of someone else's meal. As something of a clean-freak, this always makes me uncomfortable. I like to eat on clean surfaces.

Until this morning, I never really understood this phenomenon. My fellow students may not know as math as much as I think they should, or share my opinion that pajamas should not be worn in public. But they are definitely not lazy or unconcerned for the welfare of others. When I read stories about people collecting the lids of yogurt containers to help children in need, I usually feel a twinge of guilt for sitting at my desk and trying to understand the Khun-Tucker Theorem instead of raising money to dig wells in Cambodia.

This morning, though, I concluded that some people must be sloppy and lazy. For this weekend is parents' weekend, when parents from all over New England come to see a highly-stylized version of their son's or daughter's college experience. And with parents everywhere — parents who admonish their children for eating like dinosaurs and leaving half-eaten sandwiches splayed on the table — there was hardly a stray crumb to be found. I'm sure the lazy mess-makers fit into a Pareto distribution (so about 20% of the people make about 80% of the mess), but it's nevertheless disheartening. Not to mention, I'd bet money the 80% of us who don't leave partially eaten slices of pizza behind would be much less uncomfortable, or at least less like to contract a nasty virus.

As I'm sure I've mentioned on this blog many times, I'm not exactly the world's biggest sports fan. So forgive me for not writing this commentary sooner.

Anyway, I learned the other day that the National Football League (that's "American Football" for any international readers) offers a special channel on most cable and satellite systems called the NFL RedZone. The channel is basically a live mash-up of a given Sunday's plethora of football games, so that whenever a given team in a given game is inside the 20 yard line, the channel will switch to that game. (I'm not afraid to admit that I only have a vague understanding of what the latter part of that last sentence means and why it's a good criterion for determining when a game is about to be exciting.)

My inner-technologist really likes the idea of a curated channel for sports fans. While I'm about as close to being a die-hard football fan as Earth is to Alpha Centauri, I have watched enough football (if very passively) to know that the games can be very boring and devoid of action at times. So I can imagine why someone who loves football as much as I love object-oriented programming would like the idea of having a feed of only the "cream of the crop" moments from a day's football lineup.

But at the same time, I worry that services like the NFL's RedZone only serve to reinforce our society's freakishly short attention span.

Even something as simple (from a technical standpoint) as the president's weekly video address has a cut every few seconds, as if people will somehow be more interested in what the president has to say about tax policy if they are treated to alternately close and wide shots of the president's upper body. Further, the latter four minutes president's five-minute videos are really just recapitulating the well-articulated, but vague and unexplained first minute.

By contrast, FDR's original fireside chats sometimes lasted a half hour, and were usually genuine efforts to educate the public about everything from the role of banks in an economy to the dynamics of inflation, not just superficial assertions that "banks play an important role." I don't think I've ever heard a modern politician mention — let alone explain — the concept of purchasing power parity, as FDR did in one of his addresses. (Or at least not in a message intended for the general public.)

Even in football, I suspect the true magic of a game is not to be found only its most intense moments, or in the final coup de grâce — when one team is on the brink of making a game-changing move — but rather in the sum of the small strategic steps each team or player makes in pursuit of victory.

Focusing solely on the sensational and the superficial, while perhaps more relaxing or "pleasurable," blinds us from understanding and really appreciating greatness. Just as I suspect citizens would not be as angry about the bank bailouts if they took the time to genuinely understand how our financial system works, I also believe even the most die-hard football fan would have an even greater, deeper understanding of their passion if they took the time to appreciate more than the touchdowns alone.