Teaching

Information for courses I am teaching, my Associate Dean job, and other material that’s only relevant to UCSD.

Lightweight startup ideas for new entrepreneurship course

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I will be co-teaching, with Parand Darugar and Paul Kedrosky, a course on starting a company. This 10 week course requires each team to develop a real project, to the level that they can test it with potential customers. (Beta test, approximately.)

Doing this in 10 weeks can be daunting, but it can be done. I used to teach a course on hardware product development, which required working physical prototypes and 2 long reports in 10 weeks. This year we expect little or no hardware. Instead we are looking for web-enabled, mobile-enabled, or other service ideas with little or no associated hardware. What you will sell is some form of a system that fulfills a need.

Part of entrepreneurship is looking for, and “sensing,” unmet needs. Do this in your everyday life, in your courses, as you watch people on screens. Here are a few ideas to suggest how little is needed. Please, add your own. It’s ok to list an unmet need without saying how to solve it.

Classroom feedback using sheets of paper

A visual barcode based version of the teaching “clicker” that many classrooms use to gather real-time student feedback. Students hold up a piece of cardboard, which the faculty member scans with a phone. https://www.plickers.com Why didn’t I think of that?  Get rid of the student-purchased hardware, and probably increase reliability at the same time. (Although I’m sure it sacrifices some capabilities of the electronic clickers.)plickers2

Search my many sources of free books

My wife and I read a lot of books, still. In the last 5 years a number of access methods for e-books have come along. I can buy ebooks from Apple, Amazon, or others. I can also borrow them free from my local library, Amazon Prime, scribd,  my employer (UCSD’s library) and probably some other services. Each service has its own catalog and its own ways of searching. Checking each of the free services is time consuming, and half the time none of them has what I want. Solve this pain! There are many ways to solve the pain, and the concept could be integrated with existing book services/systems in a variety of ways.

 

Fraudulent academic journals are growing

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Gina Kolata in the NY Times has been running a good series of articles on fraudulent academic publishing. The basic business model is an unholy alliance between academics looking to enhance their resumes, and quick-buck internet sites. Initially, I thought these sites were enticing naive academics. But many academics are apparently willing participants, suggesting that it’s  easy to fool many promotion and award committees.

All but one academic in 10 who won a School of Business and Economics award had published papers in these journals. One had 10 such articles.

Continue reading →

Showing linear regression coefficients

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I have just finished my Big Data course for 2017, and noted some concepts that I want to teach better next year. One of them is how to interpret and use the coefficient estimates from linear regression. All economists are familiar with dense tables of coefficients and standard errors, but they require experience to read, and are not at all intuitive. Here is a more intuitive and useful way to display the same information. The blue dots show the coefficient estimates, while the lines show +/- 2 standard errors on the coefficients. It’s easy to see that the first two coefficients are “statistically significant at the 5% level”, the third one is not, and so on. More important, the figure gives a clear view

Coef plot from strengejacke Bof the relative importance of different variables in determining the final outcomes.

The heavy lifting for this plot is done by the function sjp.lm from the sjPlot library. The main argument linreg is the standard results of a linear regression model, which is a complex list with all kinds of information buried in it.  Continue reading →

Schumpeter: The University of Chicago worries about a lack of competition | The Economist

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Its economists used to champion big firms, but the mood has shifted

Source: Schumpeter: The University of Chicago worries about a lack of competition | The Economist

There is an emerging consensus among economists that competition in the economy has weakened significantly. That is bad news: it means that incumbent firms may not need to innovate as much, and that inequality may increase if companies can hoard profits and spend less on investment and wages.

Yes, I certainly see this in tech fields.The double consequences are scary.

Thanks to colleague Prof. Liz Lyons for suggesting this.