Eric. Bengals Fan.
Maria. Colts Fan.
Rematch, Sunday 1pm, in Indy. Round 1, week 7, did not go super well for the Bengals.
Vegas has the line at Colts -3.5. My model says that is a little low. Bengals are super unpredictable though, so who knows.
I would like to see a Cincinnati team win a playoff game/series for the first time since 1995. That would be nice.
Come watch it with us.
Living with Water Scarcity
by David Zetland, 2014
Living with Water Scarcity gives an economical evaluation of the state of water in the U.S. and abroad. The premise of the book is that water should be treated as a valued, scarce commodity. In reality, consumers are given poor incentives toward the limited use of water and social planners/politicians often poorly allocate water when faced with varied water demands from households, businesses, farmers, and the ecosystem. The book asks plentiful questions about the treatment and allocation of water and suggests answering the questions economically.
I was hoping to like the book more than I did. The first few chapters, on personal, household economics, read well. However, the second half of the book, about the public allocation of water flows, became both whiny and preachy. Whiny in that it complains of corrupt politicians and lazy government water managers. Preachy in that it speaks of the effect of mismanagement of ecosystems in light of climate change. There were also a stream of stick figure illustrations throughout that made the book seem amateur and sarcastic. I think the topic of water economics is of value, but I hope that there are better books out there to learn of the subject. If still interested, the book can be downloaded in .pdf form for free from http://livingwithwaterscarcity.com/.
People ask me all the time what I’m working on. While the Current Projects page has a little bit of relevant information, it is intentionally incomplete. I have a list of the multitude of projects that I am working on at this time.
Hopefully leading to academic papers:
-Prehospital Triage paper
-NFL betting model
-Sunk Costs in Call Centers Project
-Energy research (beginning in January)
-Forecasting Sports Attendance to aid in staffing decisions
-End-game decision making in basketball
-Anchoring effect of online advertisements
Conferences:
-Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in February, as a spectator
-Potentially POMS, INFORMS Healthcare, and MSOM, depending on funding and talk submission
Interesting projects (most of which do not have a defined goal or end-state at this time):
-Compiling list of seminal papers in operations management/research
-Applying network-based ranking system to sports leagues
-Writing and recording video lectures based on my graduate studies (for website and for future student reference)
Courses (Spring 2015):
-4 Operations Management/Decision Science topical courses (half-semester each)
-Data Mining course (half-semester)
-Information Economics (half-semester)
(Expect to read 3-5 academic papers per class per week. 3 classes each half-semester, so 10-15 papers per week.)
Personal Projects:
-Plan wedding
-3-5 website posts per week
-Fantasy Football (just finished season)
–Watch Sports
-Work out or exercise 3-4 times per week, keeping track of lifting improvements
-Read lots of books (currently reading: Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman, Blackett’s War by Budiansky, Common Errors in Statistics by Good, It Works by Evans, Microeconometrics by Cameron, Master and Commander by O’Brian)
-Keep personal lists (books read, movies watched, etc)
-Have lots of dinner parties and other parties
I worry that I have too much on my plate, and I am very busy. But I enjoy the variety, and neither my coursework nor research seems to be suffering. So I carry on.