My Senior Honors Thesis

As many (or most, if you're visiting this blog) of you know by now I submitted my honors thesis An Empirical Analysis of Fundamental Indexation on the 15th. Over the course of the last seven months I've poured days and nights (though as always, fewer than I should have) into this and learned many valuable things along the way:

1. Most people have no idea what the S&P 500 is.

2. That while financial professionals are concise, often amusing writers, their conclusions are ultimately infinitely less useful because they don't share data. I'd like to give Fama-French a shout out for publishing and updating the factors that drive their model.

3. That for every hour spent brainstorming, researching, running regressions, and writing there will be at least three spent manipulating data.

4. Fuck tables. (See #3)

While I doubt you're inclined to read a 20+ page finance paper, you can none the less access a working version here. The final version (containing all new data and never before seen regressions!) will be submitted to the Duke Journal of Economics this summer and should be made available at that time.

The PDF generator did a bit of a chop job on the formatting; if you'd like a prettier version ask for it and I'll print one out for you myself.

Disclaimer stuff: Do not reproduce, distribute, transmit or alter without the permission of the author.


Finally, following in the footsteps of my last post I'd like to leave you with some random links:

Water Balloon in Slow Motion - Ever wonder what happened when you popped a water balloon? Me neither, it's a dumb question. But it turns out it's pretty cool.

The 10 Lies Pornographers Tell - Don't ask me how I ran across this. Just. Don't.

My New Web Addiction: RSS Feeds

So as my semester has been winding down I've allowed the news junkie in me to come out once again - and he's come out in full force.

It began innocently enough; I finally learned how to write batch files so that instead of using "Open all in tabs" on Firefox, I could just double click on the batch file from my desktop. And while I'm at it why not add Facebook, the New York Times, iGoogle, Thunderbird, AIM and MSN messenger for good measure? At least that way I won't miss anything right?

So now I'm reading 30-40+ articles a day (my iGoogle page has 22 news feeds), and downloading a good chunk of those "just in case" I need them later (do you see how my twisted brain works?). With all of these articles, plus the BBC Firefox feed, plus Hulu, plus my all encompassing Economist addiction, I barely have enough time for my social life and my courses are most definitely suffering.

I clearly need to find a way to save time. But i find all I can do is look for more, and, lo and behold, some of my friends/acquaintances/ex-professors have blogs. Now I'm tracking these on top of everything else, and annoyingly I find that though I'm considerate enough to visit their blogs several times every day (via that handy batch file) they are apparently unable to feed my need by posting between every visit. Selfish bastards.

If only there was a way to only track when they posted... Enter the RSS feed. Now, without paying much attention to it I'd already been utilizing this tool in the form of the BBC menu built into Firefox, but the Firefox RSS menus required you to go through the painful intermediate step of clicking on them individually. Luckily I'd been tinkering with Thunderbird to consolidate my Duke and Hotmail accounts in one place (thus removing the need for the Hotmail line in the batch file - see how efficient I've become?). Here was a single page where I could not only check both of my email accounts (my Gmail account doesn't count - it just backs up the other two), but also see precisely how many unread blog posts were up!

I quickly moved my friends' blogs into an account labeled "Blogs". Brilliant. And, while I'm at it I might as well create a "News" account for the BBC feed, and maybe one or two of those other feeds on iGoogle... Wait - most of the comics I follow are also RSS feeds! No more opening them all every day to check only the 30% that happen to update on Tuesday, or 10% on Sunday! My batch file is shrinking quickly as the "Comics" account balloons. But it makes the "Blogs" and "News" accounts look so small in comparison, and now that I've freed up all this time, well, I should find a few more to fill out each of those categories.

Now Thunderbird never closes.

The final tally?

13 in "Comics"
22 in "Blogs"
7 in "News"

Keeping up is impossible. Right now I have 475 unread posts.

I found myself walking out the door to go to my car this morning (after starting this post, along with two others - my first three posts in five months) with my usual economist issues (yes, plural) in my backpack just in case I had some downtime. But for some reason I wasn't content - I was wishing that instead I had some form of mobile RSS feed reader... now if only those existed I could-.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

Oh dear god. Oh dear Mary and Joseph. Sweet Jesus. Additional Blasphemy.

I'm one of them now. The ones with full keyboards on their $300 phones. The ones who need net access so very, very, badly that they prefer reading about their friends' activities, or better yet strangers', that they spend more time looking down at little screens than up at the world.

Of course I couldn't lose this thought so I took out my phone, speed dialed '2' and Jotted it back to my inbox:

So I'm walking out the door this morning after having taken the extra time I had not to study for my two exams tomorrow but to look at more RSS feeds and more web posts articles and the like and I realize that what I want more than anything else more an a coffee would be a economist or a book to read on the way over is a small portable device to read on so I can keep up with this things and for the first time I understood why people pay ____ amounts for phones that have e-mail capability and it shocked me. I was wondering how to record this cause I wanted to start blogging again because of all of these and then I remembered jott. So here I am. Alright. Adios.

O brave new world...



Here are just a few of the things I've come across over the last few days:

Jott - A service that you call into which converts voice into text and emails it to you, a friend or even posts it directly onto your blog.

Twitter - Blogging on crack. Limit of 140 words to post randomly throughout the day updating anyone that cares (no one does) about the inanities of your day.

The "Last Lecture" - This is a must see. Must See. Randy Pausch is an incredibly charismatic 40-something professor of virtual reality at Carnegie Mellon. Oh and he's terminally ill. This is his last lecture, and it's a doozy.

Indexed - Little humorous graphs and diagrams on index cards. Lots of fun.

Me Too - Ever feel like the only one with problems here is you? This will cast the campus in a whole new light, and perhaps help you relate a little better to your fellow students even if you don't know which ones.

Letters from Johns & Working Girls - A project by Susannah Breslin, aka "The Reverse Cowgirl", publishing letters sent in by 'Johns' (people paying for sex) and 'Working Girls' (people paid for sex, or other erotic services).

Give Away of the Day - Free software for seemingly no good reason! Does life get better than this? Well, yes, probably it does.

Dynamic Periodic Table of Elements - Educational and pretty.

Delaycast - What are the chances you'll be stranded overnight in Bismarck, North Dakota? Find out.

How to pick up and carry your iMac G5 - I've actually known about this for years. I still think it is hilarious.

This doesn't even begin to cover all of the random, wonderful, awful, useful, and bizarre things I've found, but it's a taste. Now, if you're anything like the monster I've become, you'll have tabbed every one of those links, will subscribe/download at least half, and click through onto 75% of the things they link.

God Speed.