WGL… Three from the end

Bet you thought I forget about this! Well, maybe I did. But here’s a whole heapin’ serving of more of what Greg learned. Cloud computing’s up for a discussion, I vent my frustration over logical inconsistency, why games are better than classes… heck, it’s a potpourri of delicious Greg smells. Transcript after the break.

Hello tiny subset of the Internet. I’m Greg, this is What Greg Learned, and I waited an entire extra week after last week’s classes to record this because, uh, I was tired. But no matter! It means I forgot last weekend, which is great because some elements of last weekend were worth forgetting.

The good news? Three more weeks. Two of them including weekends where I take classes. And then I’m done! You try being a perfect student under those conditions… I dare you. I’m still far from a bad student, but I’m just sayin’.

And the classes this term aren’t making it any easier. In no particular order, the software class is by far the most enjoyable and the least educational, because I already know the material. We’re moving on to more discussion of elements like cloud computing, which is a plus because I don’t know a ton about that… except as I’m finding out there’s not all that much to know, and NOBODY knows even that much. I have a few people who listen to this who probably would like to know, and this podcast is all about me sorting through my thoughts. In actuality, this is from the reading for next class, so I should wait until then to talk about this, but right now, my take is this: putting something on “The Cloud” is often right now just shorthand for making it available online. That’s bollocks – we’ve been doing that ever since Gopher, ever since BBS systems and CompuServe. What’s different in particular is changing the cost structure of using something, and the flexibility, and the improved efficiency of having a single specialized provider do what they do well for a bunch of customers. A storage network like Amazon’s cloud system can add capacity and guarantee uptime at a far better cost per customer and per terabyte than any university or most companies can, and they can plan around the average growth of all their customers to add capacity so that it’s always available when any customer asks for more space. That’s why the cloud is important. It turns part of the costs of managing a system from a big fixed cost with additional potential big costs to upgrade, scale, or make more reliable, and turns it into a predictable cost that scales smoothly with the amount of business you do.

And the cool part about understanding that is that you can recognize bad uses of the cloud as well as cases screaming out for use of it. I’d say my place of work is crazy for not using an external cloud provider for email, for storage, for database hosting, for SharePoint. But when we talk cloud, half the time I hear us talking about pushing web hosting out, when it’s both relatively easy and far from capacity constrained.

Ah well. If… for whatever reason… I end up here for longer, maybe I can start making my push on this front.

If that’s the most enjoyable class, I’d have to say R&D management is rapidly becoming the least so. The professor’s approach doesn’t seem designed to impart any meaningful knowledge, though he sure does end up handing us a lot of paper with slides printed on them. Many of my profs do this, and the practice throws my learning for a complete loop. If a class is good, I want to take notes because processing what I’m hearing and turning it into my own record of it is how I learn. It’s what I’m doing right now, come to think of it. It keeps my brain engaged, even if the material isn’t exactly rich with intellectual nutrients. But when all I’m hearing is already written down on a piece of paper I’ve been given, which is how this class operates… I got nothing. I still do my best to take notes in his class because I’ve taken it upon myself to stubbornly insist on learning no matter what he does. On the plus side, for our big paper, which involves investigating a company and reporting on its R&D, I was running into some trouble finding enough info so I talked with him after class, and much to my delight he’s been extremely helpful hooking me up with multiple strong possibilities of people I may be able to interview for it. I get the sense I’d be fine with him outside of a teaching environment, and that my furious note-taking in class wins points with him even though I’m sitting in the back with all my fellow almost-done slackers.

Strategic Management threw me for a loop this week as the prof suggested that, rather than having a final, we would play some online game. The final counts for a large portion of our grade, and the game would be with group teams. It’ll actually be more work than a final would be… for us. But none of my classmates saw it that way, figured it was the easy way out, and I wasn’t going to be the twelfth angry man. These games often work as a great demonstration tool of how not understanding the underlying mechanics can lead to ruin… but it’s hard to say they’re much of an assessment tool. Just think of it like the Prisoner’s Dilemma (one of this prof’s favorite topics, since he’s a game theory guy)… the best long-run strategy if you trust everybody else to do what’s right is great and all, but breaking that strategy can screw over everybody… but at the end of the day, the company that broke the strategy is ahead of everybody else. You want to grade people based on this? I can’t think of a more subjective basis for grading, because your grade has to be based on your own values – do you reward the teams that stuck to the best long-term economic value to everybody, or the ones that figured that the only way to avoid losing was to strike first against that strategy? For that matter, I’m so consistently on the “do the nice thing” side of the argument, and if I end up grouped up with strike-first jerks, we’ve got long teleconferences ahead of us. Mostly, given that the class has exactly three data points for a grade – with just two cases and the final, whatever that is, there’s so little actual basis for a grade. I hate even thinking about a grade… I know it doesn’t really matter. But there are so few places in the world where you can legitimately hope for merit-based rewards, and school seems like the one where you can reasonably hope for it.

Let’s move on, though. Computational Finance was mostly characterized by somebody talking about a conversation they had with our prof, who’s obviously very smart. They had said to him that they were concerned that the class was not very geared towards practical understanding of the financial instruments we were talking about – it’s all proofs and abstraction, all very academic. His response: “Well, yes. I’m an academic.” The class is what the class is, and it’s certainly not his fault or his problem. I don’t even pretend to pay attention in class any more – anything he says is covered in better detail in the book and in the spectacular notes he provides in our online class portal. Homework… well, I stopped caring about that after the first one where I lost points for what I will argue TO MY DYING BREATH was an error on his part that damaged the degree to which I will really hold by my claim earlier this paragraph that he’s all THAT smart. His error in logic is extremely logically crafted, and this led him to punish anybody whose logic was more consistent in either direction.

But I’m all about not picking fights, and like I said.. I don’t really want to care about grades. I wish they would stop giving me reasons to care about grades. Luckily this period before class 5 is very light in homework which gives me more time for all those things I talked about last time… sowing seeds for the cosmos and marigolds, weeding around the garlic and carrots, repotting the tomatoes and cucumbers, and getting in a nice double fistful of downtime. And recording this! But no more. That’s all I’ve got, and I’ll see ya later!

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