Hi Everyone,
It has been a busy week and a half on Hive for me. I have posted almost every day since my previous report. I have posted all my conference and journal papers from during my time working for the Queensland Government. Writing these papers was one of the most enjoyable parts of working in the Government even though much of this work was not fully appreciated or implemented.
The papers were mostly focused on methodology to improve how economic evaluation and cost benefit analysis is conducted. I wrote about improving current practices such as evaluation measures and indicators. I also wrote about developing evaluation techniques for project types that did not have sufficiently defined approaches and methods such as flood immunity projects and bridge upgrades.
The shift in leadership attitudes towards self promotion made conducting research and developing new approaches considerably more difficult. My employer, Transport and Main Roads, wanted to use conferences to promote how well they do things and how much success they have had improving the state’s road transport infrastructure.
My papers were about how we can do things better. This was taken as criticism of the department and Government. The desire to strive to improve current practices should be seen as a positive development. Offering solutions to current shortcomings should be seen as a step forward. Sharing these solutions with other road agencies that most likely have the same problems should be seen as a valuable contribution to the field as a whole. Transport and Main Roads should have seen these papers and presentations as offering leadership in problem solving rather than a form of self criticism.
In 2011, I was the only economist writing conference papers. Two years later, two of my colleagues were also writing papers. One of them even won an award for best paper. It was like a mini movement in analysis research. With the change in leadership, there was no longer any incentive to write these papers.
There was some work involved in reformatting the papers for Hive. The equations were the most tricky to handle. In the first few posts, I converted the equations to pictures. In the following posts, I wrote them as text and, if needed, I reduced the size of the text using markdown. The tables were a little tricky too. I initially converted them to pictures but later used markdown to create tables and reduce text size.
I have also updated my NFL playoff predictions twice. My predictions have been quite bad this year. Both my Super Bowl teams have been eliminated even before the conference finals. Now, I’m predicting a Chiefs-Commanders Super Bowl. This is to celebrate the new US Commander in Chief, Donald Trump.
That wraps up this Actifit Report and Update. I will be posting again tomorrow, this will be the first Sapien Loop quiz for this year. It’ll be a little different from last year’s quiz. I’m hoping it’ll attract more participants. I wish everyone a wonderful weekend and an active week ahead.
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