Quarter 2 - Week 4

When you dont have an assignment to complete, it's such bliss! :) And when you have two holidays in the week, it's bliss-squared..! Monday being one of those 2 holidays, I spent it trying to read Macro Economics.. we had a test/quiz the coming Saturday. I must have read 25 pages in 4 hours? No, dont get it wrong.. the book's easy to follow, I just kept getting distracted. That must be the most dangerous thing ever, it's very easy to get distracted, there's always something that is just a little more important. I'd come home early the entire week and try to read Macro Economics, and it was quite tough to trudge along. But I kept at it! Persistence... thy name is my name! Friday also was a holiday, and I managed to read up the sections for the test. Anyway, October 2(Friday) was a holiday at IIMB, so we'd catch up with the expected class schedule by coming in on Sunday. Sigh.

On Saturday, we started off with Macro Economics. We discussed what the government can do in times of recessions. How they can give "antibiotics" to keep the economy sustainable. We then began a discussion on the Great Depression, what caused it, what could have been done to avoid the difficult period at least to the extent we could take it to. The quiz was held in the last 20 minutes of the class. Man, I really liked those questions. Yes, they were simple, but they were crafted in such a way that we would have gone over all our fundamentals within 20 questions. What googlies! We're eagerly awaiting our results. The next day, Sunday, we continued speaking about the Great Depression and what were the mistakes we could have avoided and how this affected the majority of the western world. A question was raised, why should the government bail out the people who caused the mess in the first place, what message are we sending out. The words of our teacher ranked true - When a doctor has a patient who may have, let's say, a drinking problem. If the patient is in the ICU, struggling between life and death due to some liver-issue, the doc won't say 'I wont operate on you because you didnt listen to me, and you didnt heed my warnings'. He'll do his best to save the patient, and give the bhaashan later. Seemed sensible enough..

Managing Organizations was theoritical this week. Bugger, we were pretty sure that we'd have a surprise quiz on Saturday, and when our prof came in with this ghost of a smile on his face, there was such a rush for the books and readings so people would cram as much as they could. Amidst yelps, howls and pleas for "postponement by a day", he was quite sure-footed when he told us that the surprise quizzes were meant to test our readings. If you are unable to spend a little time reading the articles, then you wont get much out of the class. Dont share your worldly knowledge about the questions posed in the test he said, he was more bothered about whether we got the right idea. We must have grumbled for a minute or so, and then we got into the groove. I am learning to write loads of crap, and I must say I'm getting pretty good at it! We are still talking about Org Structure, and the reasonings behind wanting to restructure. We had a case to study for Sunday, but I was unable to read it up properly. Anyway, I paid attention to the discussion hoping to gleam something out of it atleast... Next week, the midterm examination. The horror!

Business Statistics. (Note to self: Why do I bother?) Waste of my time, and the prof's time... He's still talking about random variables and I'm getting zilch. No matter how many times he says "practice, practice", I seem gung-ho on testing the limits and not doing anything. We spoke about Binomial distributions, Poisson distribution, Normal distribution, Chebyshev made an appearance somewhere, Turing also said hi. I fell asleep in the class! Asleep!! Tell you what, when I'm studying for the coming quiz next week (yes, that's another nightmare I have to prepare for), I'll go over the discrete random variables chapter properly and then let you know what it was that he was trying to hammer into our brains.