first day of school
Nile is scattered brain, more so than usual. He wants to work on academic papers, namely:
- getting firms to understand how to position themselves in a customer distribution to optimize for profit
- bad estimation of marginal costs as a power law function over time
- something else?
Conversely he is spending most all of his time developing his MSB 325 class (entrepreneurship data analytics). He is excited about moving everything over to Quarto live documents. The Quarto live documents are nice because students can test code within the readings he's made for the class. Though the documents can "grade" the students responses, they have no memory and will require an immense effort to connect to the students grades. Quarto live grading does not pass the cost-benefit test currently, but there are rumors that STAT 121 has done something like this. If true we could use their template?
Setting up an auto-grader is high priority because A) department is trying to double student intake B) Nile's classes are likely the bottleneck C) Nile doesn't consistently get TA's that can grade for him. Again Quarto live is a possibility, but maybe we can do something else clever? I don't know if I could implement Paul's Magnum Opus of a free standing website that runs code on a virtual machine, gives detailed feedback and ships grades directly to learning suite. Best path forward would be to copy STAT 121 template.
At the same time he would love to have the students work towards a culminating project: multi-linear regression of which franchises would best suit a demographic area. He still needs to find compiled data of all franchises performances for different demographics. While Kaggle might have a couple of individual franchises siloed in different pages, we need data for all (or as many as possible) franchises.
To prioritize I think I should work on getting the franchise data today and reaching out to the STAT 121 auto-grader owners. Nile's comparative advantage is in the academic papers and right now the class work is eating him alive.