Family Portrait

This will slow things down for a while :) Noah was born two days ago. He is a very large baby - 4.71kg and 55cm long. If he was a t-statistic, he'd have 2 or 3 stars. He'll have to make do with one, his surname.*

* Stern = Star in German.

Big in Japan

I don't think our book will be big in Japan even, but it's nice to see a flyer for it in Japanese :)

 

I am now back in Canberra finally and catching up with teaching prep and looking at the books that Elgar sent us as payment :P An interesting one is The Art and Practice of Economic Research, which Shuang selected for me from Elgar's catalogue. Twenty five leading economists were asked almost exactly the same questions about various aspects of their career and worklife. It's reassuring to read that many top researchers confess to bad time management and feeling overwhelmed, for example: "What I am doing is not even feasible let alone optimal".

In other news, we have quite a few new CCEP working papers on RePEc. I hope to do a bit more blogging in the near future if only based on material from revising my energy economics lectures.

This is What Market Dis-Equilibrium Looks Like

Caption in the accompanying Sydney Morning Herald article: "High rents driving retailers away: 89 shops on Oxford street are vacant, for lease or closing."

EROI Goes Mainstream

Back in 1990-91 when I started my PhD I was introduced to esoteric ideas like Energy Return on Investment and Peak Oil in classes given by Cutler Cleveland and Robert Kaufmann. Nowadays, these ideas are showing up in humorous videos on YouTube.

Grad Student Classification

I guess this can apply to post-docs and assistant professors too :)

Things Scientists Say

Sounds Like a Headline from the Onion!

But it's a New York Times article: Union College Finally Admits Where It Is. I lived for 5 years in Troy, NY about 25km east of Schenectady and also in the Albany metro area when I was teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I think that Troy is worse than Schenectady if anything. I first arrived there in March for an interview and the cab-ride from the railway station in Rensselaer (I came up from a conference in New York City) along the East Bank of the Hudson went through some of the worse parts of town, and the heaps of dirty snow all over the place and grey sky didn't add to the attraction!

Peer Review, Berlin, 1945

The latest in the Downfall video clip meme:



Like many commenters on YouTube write the captions really capture the feelings many of us have (at least now and then) when getting back peer reviews of our papers.