On poverty

Lately I learnt that TAs at the U of C got pay raises--from $1500 to $3000 a quarter. Hurrah!

I was approached by a panhandler when I was sitting at a cafe on Michigan many years ago. "Uh oh," I thought. I was a poor international student. You should never bug a poor international student for money. But at least I had sandwiches on my plate. On the other hand, apparently the poor woman had not eaten for days.

Being talked to by a panhandler was a new experience to me. I rarely saw people living on the streets in the sanitized suburb I grew up. I have seen homelss people in downtown Tokyo, but they did not talked to ME.

Confused by the sudden appearnce of a talking panhandler, I gave her 20 bucks. I did not know how much was appropriate. I do not know if it was appropriate to give money. Perhaps not. The U of C police told us not to give panhandlers money because it does no good to them--they often waste money on alcohol and drugs. The police suggested that we give them "food stamps" (again, a new idea to me).

But there was no police around, and I had no food stamps. It was hard for me to tell her go away. So I gave money. She murmured, "God bless you!" many times. Thank you, but I thought she was the one who needs lots of blessings from the lord.

The woman and I were both living well below the poverty line, but me being poor was --fortunately, as it turned out--temporary and I was okay about that.

On other occasions, I gave muffins and fruits I just bought because I was stopped by panhandlers. Did I do something wrong by spreading the wealth? Did I contribute to perpetuate their misery (I know the good samaritan paradox, neo classical ecnomists can save their talk)? What was a better alternative?

If I had power, I want to create a world where no panhandler and graduate student live in poverty. But wait a minute, a graduate student is a graduate student, rich or poor. But what about a panhandler? Maybe she can stop asking for money and go to a grad school and can be miserable in a different way.

What their web site does not tell

Just out of curiosity, I visited Lehman Brothers' Japanese website.. Knowing that the firm is in a big trouble--on the verge of bankruptcy--I expect to find some explanations/updates about the situation. Nothing. They are still showing images of happy shiny people. Is it that their Japanese operation is so irrelevant to those at the headquarters that they do not care to provide the latest info at this critical moment? Maybe those in charge of updating their website is simply busy packing.

This glaring gap between what is actually happening and their online presentation of themselves is interesting. Web is supposed to be a valuable source of information, but often organizations misrepresnt themselves both online and offline. We know full well about individuals misrepresenting themselves in cyberspace, but organizations can do the same. Lots of firms "put on lipstick" to quote the popular phrase of the last week, so much so that their websites look all beautiful and they are indistingushiable from one another. Hmmm. This is a story I can use in my lecture...

How to use R with WinEdt

It took me a while to figure it out. At first I thought I had to run a macro from WinEdt because that was what I did to use Stata with WinEdt. No.

1. Download the package RWinEdt. Start R and type:

> install.packages("RWinEdt")WinEdt

2. In the R Console, type

> library(RWinEdt)

The instructions are in the readme.txt of the RWinEdt package, but they were hard to locate--I first looked at RWinEdt.pdf and other documents. So here I jot down what I have done for future reference.