Humphrey Lyttelton

April 29th, 2008 Obituaries, radio

The much loved chairman of ISIHAC has passed away on 25th April 2008. Tribute still available on BBC via Listen Again – a 1995 show. Various obits from Guardian, BBC,Independent,Times, Associated Press, and Telegraph.

Trying to Graduate 12

April 29th, 2008 atschool

Markets tested: 3
Models variant created: 9
Number of Ys : 11

And my aunt said to me, “Are you sure you got them right?”

At this point, I’m trying not to give a damn because I cannot face redoing 270 estimations. If the model is rubbish, c’est la vie!

Mystifying

April 28th, 2008 Treats

Trying to find a clearer photograph of Jean-Frederic Schall’s “La Comparaison” for the computer, I discover that Venus Callipyge meant Venus of the beautiful buttocks and the painting was considered erotic. I thought the girls were cheekily copying the the Venus for a laugh.

Instead, Two Crabs by Van Gogh is the wallpaper.

English Breakfast

April 27th, 2008 Uncategorized

I have always thought that the English ate nothing but milk tea, toast with a bit of butter and marmalade every morning. What a fine nation it must be to concoct The Great British Breakfast:

Two rashers of crisp back bacon, pork sausage, two griddled eggs, whole-cup mushrooms, crispy saute potatoes, fresh griddled tomato, Heinz baked beans, and, toasted or fried extra-thick bloomer bread

Although I have never heard of a meal more perfect, I cannot imagine how badly cooked it must be to come out the way it is pictured in the article. If time permits, grilling the sausages and bacon and collecting the fat from the meats to flavour the potatoes improves the meal than a plain chuck in one-thing-after-another fry up. The tomatoes and mushrooms would need some fresh olive oil before going into the oven. Bake beans go well with hot, runny eggs. The bread is just perfect with a generous bit of butter. Orange juice does not go well with this meal – the citrusy flavour feels weak and insubstantial. A full glass of milk, because of its cream, gives you that feeling you have had too much and need to upchuck. The best beverage is hot milk tea. Perfection!

Parker 51

April 26th, 2008 TreatsTags: Pens

Right after paying up, I came down with buyer’s remorse – I’ve never tried a Parker 51 that worked for me: like old men in homes, they leaked like mad and were scratchy.

Fast forward two weeks later, today.

Having received it an hour ago from the postman, I immediately inked it with Waterman Florida Blue just to clean it a bit. The pen writes smooth as a Pelikan, did not skip, has a wide sweet spot and lays a wet line. I am happy with it. It’s a nice working pen and it’s a pen that would last years. I’m not sure if I would buy another if it stops working years later, however. This pen reminds me of my Flighter 45 – lovely writer but I felt no attachment to it.

Trying to Graduate 11

April 26th, 2008 atschool

“My model is rubbish,” I said, to my computer. Rather, we said it to each other. The r-squared, the DW, every stat in the estimation out says it’s completely unusable. My mom, not looking up from her tap-tap-tapping of the her ancient 386, said disinterestedly, “You’ll get it”.

“You no confidence,” said my father, having ice-cream in the kitchen. Chocolate ice-cream. “Ba maths very good. When teacher ask, Ba can tell him ‘Everything correct’.” My father refers himself in third person when he’s talking to us. I’ve not heard other parents doing that.

I had a slice of chocolate cake from the fridge, no frills style: knife and scoop into hands, deliver into mouth. At the computer, I grit my teeth and ran the model in two other currencies. Not only that, I put in dummy variables – four event variables, testing 911, Sars, Asian Financial Crisis in ‘97, the recent sub-prime crisis. The dummies are saying nope, nothing is significant, and where they are significant, the coefficients turned out to be a negative bunch of nonsense. I swear everything is done right because I redid everything twice.

My hand is hurting again. It is most certainly a psychological pain because it never hurts when I’m happy.

Trying to Graduate 10

April 20th, 2008 atschool

Key financial shocks from 1993 – 2007:
- Asian Crisis (Q4 1997)
- Dot Com bubble (Mar 10, 2000)
- Sub Prime (Q4 2007)

Found
Eight hundred years of financial folly which highlights the correlation between highly mobile capital and financial crisises. – Full pdf here –

If financial crisis are found to be more prevalent when capital is highly mobile, then, current VaR and credit models may not work in predicting extreme risk events because of the contagion effect and the study of other methods such as EVT and Conditional VaR is important and needs to be immediately commercialised. Financial crisis is not merely a crises in confidence but because of the lack of confidence, the crisis may deepen without warning. For instance, a crash in a particular stock means a lot of stop loss taking place for trading books, forcing the prices to nose-dive, creating a larger loss than neccessary and creating a contagion effect to increase overall systematic risk of business.

Trying to Graduate 9a

April 18th, 2008 atschool

This morning at the doctor:
“No-no, No Resting. I have to finish my thesis. I have to graduate.”
“Of course they will let you graduate. Once they accept you, you are bound to graduate. You just need to go through the whole process.”

I was moaning about my hand to the doctor, hoping for some painkillers and this reassuring nugget popped up. A better student might be offended but I’m an awful student. (That HD was a fluke.) I shall continue to nose the grindstone. But the painkiller is not as effective – I still feel pain.

On the thesis, I had written for some advice from the adviser. I wouldn’t say he was helpful but he did point me in some vague direction – the kind where if I were standing right there in front of him, the finger would be showing the door and the speech balloon would be saying “Get back to work”.

Trying to Graduate 9

April 17th, 2008 atschool

19 days to my reckoning. I have decided, somewhat reluctantly, to drop GMM altogether. Yes, although I’ve said that I will drop it earlier, I have been trying to learn it. Despite going through a lot of reading material GMM remains baffling. I’ve written to my adviser for some directions and hope for a reply.

Thankfully, the GP gave me some mild painkillers for the distracting pain in my hand.

Soldier and His Virtuous Wife

April 14th, 2008 theatre

Let me get the gushing out of the way first. I had a wonderful time at this performance. While the comedy is funny, it’s not explosively hilarious, the cast did great work on it. High energy, strong singing voices, and excellent comic timing.

The show warm up is a fantastic touch. Darius Tan, Catherine Wong held their ground in warming the house. (Catherine Wong needs to be given more work and immediately after the end of this show.) The show began in earnest after the usual address to the audience. Ric Liu, as the unremarkable young man who has taken on a pretty young bride, has an excellent singing voice and holds his on well but I have to add ‘for a newcomer’. His stage stiffness peers out like a four year hold from behind mummy (or mummy’s behind!) until he resumes his singing and dancing. Joanne Dong, as the virtuous wife Mei Ying, expresses well the quiet confidence of the wife and the straight (wo)man in this comedy. She could have been short changed by having to sound like the traditional hua-dan and the show would have lost the pizzaz if she did do it but she handled the problem beautifully. Jacqueline Chow as Chio Bu, Darius Chow as Master Lee and Jonathan Lim as Master Luo were appropriately over the top. (Jonathan Lim must have been bored in this role because while he was good, he wasn’t amazing. I think he’s not getting enough challenging acting work.)

The script, I feel, could be made better with some updating and minor rewriting. The show’s comedy is liberally sprinkled with asides to the audience and bringing in the non-actors. It feels a bit 10-years-ago. I think the script could use some updating by having actors directly addressing the audience out of character, it would have been hilarious. For instance, in one of my favourite scenes where Qiu Hu returns home after 10 years in the army with his officer, Gordon Choy – who most certainly must have run away from a circus to somersault that well – and because they were tired, said to the conductor in the pit to slow down was funny. It could be funnier if Cho’y’s character said he was tired because he had been made to somersault like a performing monkey etc. The last scene bit where Qiu Hu got a scolding from his wife feels a over-long because the audience knows of his guilt and Qiu Hu did nothing surprising in his denial. I think the show would not have lost a lot if the scene was removed and re-written to show his guilt (the bit where Mei Ying holds the 100 tales of gold as evidence). If the script writer and composer was in, the show would have benefited greatly from some re-writing.