R&D E-trading game has arrived

So...The long awaited e-trading game has finally been officially released today! Writing the algorithm for the stock prices had been indeed extremely challenging and fun. I'm finally beginning to understand why mathematicians are so damn interested in functions that are continuous and yet un-differentiable.
The quest for such functions plagued my days of brainstorming. There were so many bs I had to deal with just to get it up. The MIT script server, being free, is very very very hard to configure and setup for deployment. Although, I have to thank the SIPB team for being very punctual and resourceful with my questions. I don't know about the students, I am personally very....very....VERY excited about this project. I really hope to blow it up into an intricate experiment: non-cooperative/cooperative solutions and such. I'm also hoping to hold an online auction at some point to test out auctioning theories in economics.

On another side note...I was just informed very recently about a peculiar lawsuit that took my favorite brand of cold medicine, Airborne, to court for consumer fraud...You can see where this is going. I have long been an endorser/consumer of their product - thanks to my spineless immune system. I have literally -*5*- empty cans (each can holds 10 tablets) of Airborne sitting next to my bed right now... My favorite flavor is zesty lime (you should try it, not for the medicinal purposes just for the flavor). After a lot of frustrated "but..." and "why..." and "...am so stupid!", I finally came to the realization of the truth: there is no spoon, jk, cure-all medicine to "boost" your immune system. I remember debating heatedly with my roommate about the efficacy of airborne. *Back then*, I held to my ground and refused to even consider the possibility of the medicine as a fraud...I was wondering how a elementary teacher get special biological/medical knowledge over night and develop a wonder drug presumed to be more potent than the million-dollar-drugs that come out of Merck or Pfiser. sigh...all I have to say is: "fooled again!". Let this be a warning to those of you believers still out there. Don't be fooled, just buying regular vitamin tablets will do just as well as airborne.

A new way to squander away my sleeping hours....

So, after reading all those different blogs out there (Julian, Manick, Anton...), I've finally got inspired enough to join the ranks and pontificate online. So... on to my life. There's a saying....I think it goes like this:

A picture is worth a thousand words....

This is what I've been up to:

There! I've just let the secret of blogging out. In case you ever wondered what kind of "blank piece of paper" us writers have to cope with on the backend, now you do!

For those of you who care to know, I've finally setup the local server (SPARQL endpoint) for my lab.

You can view all of its gory details here.

Feel free to try out this sample query:

PREFIX dig: .

SELECT * WHERE {
?person dig:first_name ?first_name.
?person dig:middle_name ?middle_name.
?person dig:last_name ?last_name.
?person dig:social_security_number ?social_security_number.
?person dig:marital_status ?marital_status.
?person dig:password ?password
}

For the non-technical, you have to select "HTML table" on the right to see a User-friendly table of people's social security number, their usernames and passwords...lovely.

Aside from my geeky rant, I have really really really....(super exaggerated)...really BIG news in BOLD. My game theory class starts this week! And of course, keeping in tradition with MIT's procrastination policy, I still have not even begun writing a lesson plan yet. =D *shrug*, guess I'll just have to wing it with Will on Sunday. I'm thinking of writing a stock-trading game online for the students. Check back later for a possible link...I'm personally very excited about it, and it's gonna be totally awesome!...just like the new Harry Potter Musical.

This tiny box I'm typing into is really pissing me off, so I'm gonna go back listening to Halo and reveling in the glory of gangsta grammar for another hour.