Weekend from hell.

This one was truely a weekend from hell. Rarely have I felt streched so much. Thankfully, it has ended.

Predictive ability of collective wisdom.

In an earlier post here I spoke about a company called intrade.com. This is a trading exchange for political, weather, current events, Financial indicators & other unique future contracts.

Something similar, I think, was started inside Google by its employees. See this post.
This system also tries to predict the probability of occurence of an event based on collective wisdom of a lot of people. This is interesting;
Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market

Difference a prof can make..

Need to give credit where its due. Most of us have been awed by core term profs in 'hard' subjects like Macro, Mkting, Accounting, DMO, etc.
'Managing Organisations' is a pure 'soft' subject this term. HR or OB or whatever you may call it but this is one field towards which majority of batch doesn't look forward to with hope. Kinda 'need to get this out of my way to graduate' types subject.
So, the first 5 out of total 10 lectures of this subject are taken by one prof. Now, imo & in opinion of most of the batch, those classes sucked BIG time. Having to listen to such a monologue for 2 hrs. did give terrible doses of frustration to many. The course pack is again well designed. Apt examples. If one actually reads it, given the fact that most junta here have a lot of work ex, make a lot of sense. But the teaching pedagogy (which he probably perfected at his 13 yr teaching stint at a well known mgmt insti in WI) killed all but any interest in the subject.

Cut to class 6. New professor for the second half of the course. Tina Diacin - prof of strategy & OB from Queen's, Canada. & yeah, she has been way more refreshing, engaging & intelligent in her lectures. The way she captures interest of the class in an arguably dry topic deserves credit. Nothing outrageously spectacular just good application of psychology she talks about. The start contrast in the 2 halves of this course clearly brings out the difference a prof can make to learning of students.

The talk of onus of learning being on students, the talk of self learning, etc etc are fine but nothing acts as a better catalyst to learning than a GOOD prof. We, here at ISB, have been fortunate to witness a few of them. Hope the privilege continues.

Hummmmm...

Some famous guy once said that there are 2 types of market(stock) pundits.

First are those who dont know where the markets are headed.
Second are those who dont know that they dont know where the markets are headed.

Pretty true in general also. Managing one's ignorance is very imp.

Life is bad.

Term IV started on a bad note. Toooooo many assignments, pre reads, ELP & other stuff. Feel like a zombie. Its getting near limits.