Category: General

Money and Trust

My first employer had his landscaping business looted by his CPA, who then skipped the country. That incident planted a seed of mistrust in my mind for all financial service professionals (CPA, CFP, CFA, IFP, etc.).

Every time I hear people tell about “this guy” they know that does an outstanding job of managing their money, I can’t help but think of the very long and never ending parade of financial service professionals like this weeks example.

If I recall correctly, it was William Bernstein in The Four Pillars of Investing that, when outlining the perverse incentives that exist within the financial service industry, pointed out that the term service could aptly describe how a bull services a cow.

EditGrid

Apparently EditGrid let their domain name (editgrid.com) expire, and at present, anyone using their excellent shared spreadsheets is without access to them. What gets returned when someone currently visits www.EditGrid.com has been a 403, a parking page, and a 404 in the past 24 hours.

This morning, I did some sleuthing and found the working IP address of the www.editgrid.com web site. I have regained access to my spreadsheets by adding this little tidbit to my /etc/hosts file:

209.157.66.183 www.editgrid.com

 

Measures of Effective Teaching

http://www.metproject.org/

Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:

  1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
  2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
  3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
  4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
  5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

When Ferguson and Kane shared these five statements at conferences, teachers were surprised. They had typically thought it most important to care about kids, but what mattered more, according to the study, was whether teachers had control over the classroom and made it a challenging place to be. As most of us remember from our own school days, those two conditions did not always coexist: some teachers had high levels of control, but low levels of rigor.

From the Atlantic article, Why Kids Should Grade Teachers.

Money Mischief, By Milton Friedman

In the first chapter Friedman compares using gold as the basis for money to using stone discs:

For a century and more, the civilized world regarded as a concrete manifestation of its wealth a metal dug from deep in the ground, refined at great labor, transported great distances, and buried again in elaborate vaults deep in the ground. Is this one practice really more rational than the other?

Then he spends all but the final chapter detailing the pain and suffering inflicted upon societies using silver or bi-metal standards. I felt like much of the data (some in works with no citations) was cherry picked or tortured to fit his conclusions. If his conclusions are sound, and the evidence is so clear, then why does he need to work so hard to prove them? I nearly gave up the book. But the the last chapter turned out to be quite good, containing this little pearl:

It is natural for individuals to generalize from their personal experience, to believe that what is true for them is true for the community. I believe that that confusion is at the bottom the most widely held economic fallacies-whether about money or as an example just discussed, or about other economic or social phenomena.

The first and last chapters of the book are good. I think that only economists that drink from the same Kool-aid pitcher as Milton Friedman will enjoy the rest of the book.

Mobile phones in Costa Rica

To use an iPhone in Costa Rica, one must have an unlocked phone. When we travelled in February, my iPhone 4S was not yet unlocked so I took a jailbroken and  unlocked iPhone 3. When we arrived, I dropped in a prepaid Kolbi SIM, set the data APN to ‘kolbi3g‘ and was off and running. I found the APN on the flexispy list. I used the TetherMe app to share the 3G connection with my iPad.

During the two weeks trip, I had only one issue when my phone stopped working. I just needed to reboot the phone and unlock the SIM. Besides an iPhone 3 being slow, everything worked flawlessly for the rest of the trip.

Notes to self:

  • do bring along the bluetooth iPad keyboard
  • February is the right time to go. The change from soggy grey Seattle days is welcome, and the 9 Seatte residents we met in C.R. agreed.

Scale is hard: gmail edition

Sometime on or about August 8th, IMAP access to Gmail stopped working for me. I don’t depend on Gmail so I ignored the error messages for 6 days. Then I simulated an IMAP session and was able to authenticate to Gmail, but after that, all IMAP commands timed out. So I looked to the Google Apps Dashboard which reported that everything was fine. Lies. Then I found the Gmail Known Issues page where I found this:

We are aware of an issue where users are receiving an error that ‘”imap.gmail.com” is not responding’ when using IMAP on their computers, mobile devices, or tablets. We are currently working on resolving this issue.

In the meantime, you can sign in to Gmail through a web browser. For Android and iOS users, you can also download the Gmail application in the interim.

Then I found the Gmail Forum within the Google Product Forums where many other users were reporting this issue. What I find interesting about this failure was that it took 7 days before my account access was restored and many users are still affected, 9 days later.