When I read this morning that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I first thought it was a joke. Then, when I found out that it was real, I realized it was still a joke. Unfortunately, it was one that the prize committee played on themselves. They've definitely beclowned themselves - if I ... Read more

Robert Brooks is a finance professor at the University of Alabama. He's trying to get a new organization (the Christian Finance Faculty Association) off the ground. To that end, he's scheduled a meeting at the upcoming Financial Management Association meeting in Reno in a few weeks. Rather than ret ... Read more

Those of you who haven't seen "A Beautiful Mind" might not get it. Butif you have (or if you know Nash's work), it's funny. In case you didn't know, in addition to Richard Feynman being a Nobel-prize winning physicist, also found the Feynman-Kac solution to the third-order partial differential ... Read more

It turns our Austan Goolsbee (U of Chicago Economics prof and member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors) is a pretty funny guy. From what I recall, I'd gotten a couple of emails from him a while back (when he was just a normal mortal) regarding possible things to blog on. Of course ... Read more

I try not to post too many political things on the blog because 1) I have a mostly finance readership, and 2) It brings out the moonbats (from both sides). But sometimes you find something too good to pass up. Recently Will Ferrell put up a video of celebrities chiming in on the health care deb ... Read more

At the end of the semester, I often get a student or two who want to protest their grades. Not too many, because I make a lot of preemptive moves explaining how their grade is determined, and I try to be very explicit in my syllabus. In addition, I teach mostly upper-level courses with almost all fi ... Read more

I just did the a bikeathon for The Hole In The Wall Gang Camp . Today would have been Jonathan's 11th birthday, so being able to do a fundraiser for the camp had special meaning. I had initially planned on riding the 60-mile course, but they canceled that ride due to inclement weather(it was rai ... Read more

Since students in all three of my classes will need to do a data table in Excel at some point, I decided to put together a short video on 1 and 2-variable data tables. Teaching three preps has been much more time consuming than I'd expected. Luckily, I'm almost through the most time consuming par ... Read more

I survived the first week of the semester at Unknown University. This is my first time ever teaching three preps, and it's tougher than I expected. I'm about 1 1/2 weeks ahead in my classes, so I'm not running around playing catch up (another first, it seems). But, it's still no cake walk. On a ... Read more

Blogging's been light lately for a couple of reasons (and probably will continue to be for a while). School just started up at Unknown University and anyone in academia knows that the beginning of the semester is always crazy. In addition, I have THREE preps this fall (I typically have two preps, bu ... Read more