Stand-up economist

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

I see from his website that Dr Yoram Bauman, the self-proclaimed "world's first and only stand-up economist" will be over in the UK in May as part of his new "Neo-Keynesian Kickstarter tour".

It is almost a year to the day since Bauman was here at USE with his stand-up routine (and also to give a more standard staff seminar the following day). Bauman, who is a faculty member at the University of Washington and a specialist environmental economist, first came to prominence as a stand-up at the February 2007 meeting of the American Economic Association where he cleverly deconstructed the chapter headings of the best selling economics textbook "Principles of Economics" by Gregory Mankiw. Since then he has developed a routine that he takes around the world to conferences, economics departments and stand-up comedy venues.

His session here at USE included a reprise of his 10 Principles of Economics routine and also some very funny analysis of the sometimes weird comments that have been posted on YouTube next to the video of his original talk. Having captured his audience's attention he then neatly squeezed in some very serious and telling points about environmental economics and climate change.

Bauman has also written, with the help of illustrator Grady Klein, two economics comic books - one on microeconomics and one on macroeconomics.. If you are a student, particularly if you are studying economics but not as an economics major, you can probably learn as much economics from these books as from any standard textbook.

His latest cartoon book, just out, is the Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change which will cover the science, impacts, and policy of global warming. As with the other books he takes a tough subject and makes a fun and accessible cartoon book that everybody can relate to and learn from.

If you haven't seen his stand-up videos or want to find out more about his coming books just visit his website at http://standupeconomist.com/

Scrutinizing Exam Papers

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

Our Head of Department Mike Rowe has made us go back to the full meeting of all staff in the department to scrutinize the exam papers this year. In recent years we have been split into small sub-panels to look at groups of related papers - for example Richard Gardener chaired the sub-panel dealing with the papers for econometrics and other quantitative modules, while Mike himself took charge of the microeconomics and industrial organization modules.

The sub-panel approach had the advantage of efficiency in that we weren't all tied up in a day long meeting as we shall be again this year. But Mike is right in arguing that it is important for all staff to see all the questions that have been set for all the modules that we teach. Otherwise there is a danger that we won't be fully conscious of what students are being expected to know about right across the degree programme.

Whichever system we use the meetings can be tedious. We have to remember the protocols that the university has laid down for the use of quotations and quotation marks, the clear indication of the marks available for each question and sub-part of a question etc. And it is now required that as well as the exam paper itself you must supply indicative answers or, in the case of the quantitative subjects, full answers. To be fair it is really important that the questions on the quantitative papers really do have feasible solutions . There have been occasions in the past when students have been faced with a question that doesn't work out and invigilators have had to get hold of the lecturer who set the question to come and sort it out on the spot. Not ideal.

We also now have to submit a resit or referral paper for our modules at the same time as the main paper. This is to avoid a situation where the resit date arrives and there is no exam paper ready because the module leader has forgotten about it and might now be on leave or away from the university for some other reason.

Unfortunately these meetings do provide the opportunity for the more pedantic members of staff to indulge themselves, picking on the incorrect use of apostrophes, semi-colons and other grammatical niceties. They also make sure that we don't make use of words or phrases that might not be easily understood by a student whose first language is not English (or even a student for whom it is!). Students should, of course, be able to recognise well-established terms in particular subjects and sometimes there have been disputes as to what these might be. Richard has tried to prepare two lists - one of words that people have tried to use that are not acceptable and one of terms that students should know about. I will put some of these that I can remember at the end of this post.

We have to avoid questions that could be answered simply by the words "Yes" or "No" such as "Do you agree that austerity policies are the wrong way to go about tackling a budget deficit in a recession?". Often this can be done by the addition of a second sentence that says something like "Show clearly your reasoning and provide references to relevant contributions to the literature".

Whichever type of meeting we work with you can guarantee that there will be some lecturers who fail to provide their draft examination papers in time - the people that Molly refers to as "the usual suspects". This is really annoying as it means that there has to be Chairs' Action to deal with these papers. With the sub-panel approach this could mean one member of staff who has had to chair the sub-panel chasing up a colleague over whom they have no authority. At least with the full meeting approach it will be the Head of Department dealing with these cases.

We used to have a requirement that the draft papers were also sent to the External Examiners for scrutiny. But the university, in its wisdom, decided that this wasn't really necessary, This is something that rankles with some of our Externals who think that it should be part of their job to check that the exam papers reflect the learning objectives set for each module. And this should occur at a stage in the process when action can be taken to change things rather than just leaving them to make comments after the event. As with many things at the university at some point the powers that be will decide to change things back to how they were before. Gus says that if you stay here long enough at USE you will see the regulations cycle from one thing to another and then back again.

Some lecturers try to insert little in jokes or references to their favourite football player into their questions which is a bit naughty as it can distract students who recognise the reference and erroneously think that they should comment on them in their answers. For example I noticed that one of last year's papers asked students to compare the properties of two different utility functions for consumers called respectively Terry and Ferdinand.

In some subjects the lecturer has moved entirely or in large part to multiple choice questions. While I can understand the pressure to simplify the marking process for a module for which a large number of students are registered, and it may be OK at first year level, I don't think that it is really appropriate for more advanced level modules where we need to assess students' critical awareness.

Let me end with some of the word and phrases on Richard's two lists:

1 Acceptable words or phrases: adverse selection, cointegrated, disintermediation, externality, fiscal drag, free-rider, Laffer curve, laissez-faire, marginal propensity, normative, per capita, principal agent, regression.

2 Unacceptable words that we have ruled out in previous meetings: cogent, cognisant, cursory, efficacious, immutable, predisposition, propitious, substantiate (although there was quite an argument over this word). You can see why the meetings can last a long time as it can take over half an hour to get people to agree on which list a word should appear!

Student stunts

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

I was having a coffee in the cafeteria with Gus Johns the other day when Bob Bunn came in to get himself a coffee to take away. Bob is an ex Head of Department, retired for some years now, but still doing some part-time teaching for us. Gus and Bob exchanged pleasantries and Bob left to go to a class.

Gus looked across at me and smiled. "I will never forget Bob's 60th birthday" he said. The students had heard that it was his birthday and organised a policewoman strippergram to come to his big microeconomics lecture. Apparently when she had first entered the lecture theatre Bob froze in alarm, mid-sentence. Some people wondered if he hadn't immediately realised that the woman was not a real police office. Maybe he had concerns that something bad he had done had been discovered. Anyway, it very quickly became clear what her real purpose was as she said "Dr Bunn, you have been a very naughty boy" and started to removed her clothing. The students, of course, yelped with delight. The woman then started to try to hold on to Bob, who pulled himself away and said "Enough of this. Please stop". Eventually one of the more responsible students who could see that Bob was quite distressed about the whole thing ushered the woman out of the door. Bob said, "OK, lecture over" and stormed out. Later he read the riot act to the students and said he didn't want anything like that to be even contemplated in the future.

"Oh, we have had a few student stunts over the years" said Gus, who then proceeded to tell me about some of them. One, dating back to the late 1970s, involved a huge plastic spider that the students had rigged up on an elaborate pulley system just above where the lecturers stood to deliver the lecture. At a certain point in the lecture one of the students would activate the pulley and move the spider right above the lecturer's head. When the students started to laugh the poor unfortunate lecturer (usually a young inexperienced one) would start to panic thinking that his flies were undone, or that he had rubbed chalk on his face.

Then there were the times when a student would get into the control room at the back of the lecture theatre and use the controls to move the blackboards about remotely (often to reveal a message written up beforehand on the rear blackboard) or just to gradually dim the room lights. All pretty harmless really, but designed to unsettle a hesitant lecturer.

Another thing that students have done more recently is to slip an extra slide or two into a lecturer's Power Point presentation. Some of the econometrics lectures were scheduled as two hour double lectures, but of course with a break at the halfway point where people could leave the lecture room for ten minutes to have a coffee or a smoke. At this midpoint the lecturer concerned left the room without logging out of the computer system. So it was easy for the students to introduce a couple of slides that would get displayed during the second hour. One showed some glamorous looking women with the caption "Econometric Models" . Another displayed the photo of a lecturer who was not well loved by the students with the caption "Biased".

Gus said that he remembered another occasion some years earlier when a group of students tried to catch the attention of Dr Bell from the Maths department who was giving some second year lectures in statistics. Apparently Bell had a reputation for avoiding any eye contact with students. He would enter the lecture room and immediately start to cover the blackboard with theorems and diagrams. He would keep this up for the entire lecture with his back towards the students and not so much even a glance at them to see if they were understanding what he was doing. Then at the end of the lecture he would quickly leave the room in case anybody tried to ask him a question. So one week four of the students hired fancy dress costumes - one was a clown, another was Superman, and they all sat together right up in the front row. They felt sure that Dr Bell would see them out of the corner of his eye and have to make some comment. They were wrong. Whilst the entire class was waiting to see when he would spot the dressed up students, as usual Dr Bell ploughed on relentlessly and left without a comment. It was after this, Gus said, that the department decided it would be better to get the stats lectures given by a quantitative economist from within the department.

Gus's final story didn't relate to USE at all, but to the University of Warwick back in the 1960s when Gus went there to be interviewed for a place on the undergraduate degree. After the individual interviews, a guided tour of the campus and a nice lunch, the prospective students were asked all to go to a lecture room where they would have a talk from the Head of Department and there would be an opportunity to ask questions. Gus said that after a few minutes a man in his early thirties, well dressed in a suit and tie, came into the room. He introduced himself as Professor Graham Pyatt and said it was nice to see us all here and hoped that quite a few of us would be back here in October to start the course which, he claimed, was second to none in the country. He then said that as modern economics courses did require some knowledge of mathematics, particularly algebra, he was going to give us a short maths test to see if we would be able to cope or not. He distributed the test papers and then said that he had to just pop out for a few minutes. He would trust us not to cheat while he was out of the room. Off he went and we started to look at the questions in front of us. The first few were fine. Gus remembers that one was something of the form Y=100+0.8Y - solve for Y. Another had two simultaneous equations in P and Q that you had to solve. Perfectly sensible problems that an economics student might have to deal with. But when he turned the paper over it was immediately obvious to him that he next question was a bit different. Effectively they were being asked to prove Fermat's last theorem. It was at this point that another man in his early thirties entered the room. "Good afternoon everyone, my name is Professor Pyatt and I am the Head of Department". Then, seeing that we were all engaged looking at our test papers he said "Hello, what is going on here?" Looking at the questions he said that we had been the victims of a student prank. He had been stopped along the corridor by a group of students just long enough for his entrance to be delayed giving time for one of the mature students to come and impersonate him. He said that he hoped it hadn't spooked us too much and was actually a sign of how good relations were between staff and students at Warwick. Many of the lecturers were still quite young and identified very closely with the students. Gus said that this was certainly borne out by his experience at Warwick.

Gus then went on to say that when he first came to USE and was given the responsibility of teaching the first year quantitative methods course he made use of a simple maths during the first week of the course to help him establish exactly what maths students knew and to help him identify students who might need extra help. As happened in those days the test was typed up by Sally, one of the secretaries. There were 30 short questions in the test and Gus said that he asked Sally to try the test. He said that she got a score of 8 and he used this as the benchmark to identify real problem students. Anyone who couldn't get 8/30 would definitely need help!

Of course the stunts that students play on each other are often more extreme than what they do to lecturers. They do things like putting cling film over toilet seats so that someone going to the loo half asleep in the middle of the night would get a nasty surprise. Or after a drunken night you might wake up to find your head has been shaved. Another thing I have heard of is blue dye being put into shampoo or Deep Heat in people's underpants. Ouch!

Mission statements and logos

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

There was a big hullaballoo today as the Vice Chancellor, Professor Victor Crispin, unveiled the new university mission statement and logo. Staff, and the unions in particular, are outraged by the amount of money that has been spent in getting a marketing company to design the new logo, especially at a time when cutbacks are being made in staff numbers and some departments are threatened with closure. What's more the cost of the logo has doubled from the original estimate we were given to nearly £400,000. And the worst thing is the logo itself which looks like some kind of teenage doodle. It is just the four points of the compass with the letters USE in bold at the bottom, underneath the south pointing arrow. We have both marketing and design expertise in the university itself who could have done a better job.

In launching the new logo, Victor Crispin said that he was delighted with the result and that it provided the university with a wonderful new integrated visual identity. The new logo must be included on all university stationery and documents, and there would be a gradual roll out across the campus to update all building labels and other signposts. So that will add a lot more to the cost. Crispin warned staff that there would be strict guidance on how the new logo could be used - for example there must be no attempt to change the size or colour of the image on documents - and that the marketing department had produced a special "brand book" on the use of the logo which was available on the university intranet.

Turning to the mission statement Crispin said that it was crucial that staff kept it in mind at all times to guide them in their work. Here it is:

"The University of the South of England (USE) is committed to excellence in its teaching, research and knowledge exchange activities. It will strive to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse body of students, to provide a service to the local community, and to follow its Green Agenda. "

In a way I don't have a problem with any of this, although we can't be excellent at everything, especially when resources are not provided to underpin our activities. And I am still not really sure what is meant by "knowledge exchange". Last year it was called "knowledge transfer" but I understand that this was thought to suggest a one way movement of knowledge rather than a two way process between the university and industry.

The problem was the VC went on to say that he wanted staff to remember that their teaching, research and knowledge exchange activities should be very much focused on USE, that is applied and practical rather than theoretical and esoteric. You can't just research on what interests or stimulates you - it must have practical application and match one of the Research Councils' recommended areas of research. The trouble with this approach to research is that you can't always tell in advance what is going to be of real practical value. Some of the most useful scientific breakthroughs have come from "pure" research. Who would have known in advance that work on DNA would lead to applications in crime fighting or health screening, for example? Or that the creation of a hypertext markup language and protocol would spawn electronic commerce and social networking in the way that it has?

I suppose what it means is that if I want to pursue a research topic that has not been "approved" I shall just have to do it in my own time. Well, there is nothing much new there I suppose as our "workload model" never really provided much time for research once all the teaching and admin work had been put in.

Student questions

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

I had another very interesting chat with Gus Johns in the cafeteria this morning. I mentioned to him that there was one particular student in my macroeconomics lectures who keeps wanting to ask questions. I wondered if he is attention seeking. His constant questions seemed to irritate some of the other students and also mean that I was running out of time in the lecture to cover a topic as I had planned. Gus said that it was really important that students should be able to ask questions, but that as the lecturer you have to manage it carefully. You mustn't have too many interruptions or get thrown too far off topic. He says that he tells students that they can ask questions during the lecture if it is a matter of clarifying what has been said, but that other questions should be left until the end of the lecture, where he usually sets aside a few minutes to deal with questions that may have arisen during the lecture. He also runs his economics cafe so students can come and ask him questions then. The German exchange students are particularly organised with questions and usually come as a small group with half a dozen questions carefully prepared.

Gus say that he invites questions by email too - some students are too shy to ask in front of the rest of the group, and he then posts the questions and answers up on his web site in a FAQ section. Often all he has to do to answer a question is to point the student to one of the existing FAQs. He has now also set up a wiki for each module where question and answers can be posted. What is good about it is that students themselves can suggest answers to questions posed by other students.in this shared space.

Another thing that he does, although this is not directly related to the point about student questions, is to ask each student every week to send a “One Minute Email” to him, identifying a) the most important thing that they have learned during the week (either from the lecture, from the seminar or from general reading) and b) one point that they are still not clear about. He doesn’t get a full response of course, usually only about 50% at the start of the module falling off over the weeks to probably only about 10% at the end. But it means that he can monitor closely students’ understanding of the material and, if necessary, add some further clarification of points that a number of students might be having problems with at the beginning of the next lecture. What is striking, he says, is that he sometimes finds students who believe that they have understood something but show in their email that they haven’t.

Another thing that he does in some seminars is to ask students to come to the session with one question of their own on the topic being covered (they should know the answer to the question themselves). He then gets each student to address their question to another student in the group (chosen at random by Gus). If the student can answer the question he gets a point. If not, the questioner gets a point. When a question can’t be answered by the student to whom it was addressed other students can jump in with an answer, getting a point if they give the correct answer and losing a point if the answer is wrong or inadequate. Anyone who comes to the class without a question loses a point straightaway. At the end of the seminar the student with the most points wins a prize, usually a free cup of coffee or a small bag of Maltesers (he says he owes the Maltesers idea to Bethany from the Systems Management department). The idea behind this is to get students to think for themselves what questions they should be able to answer on a particular topic. A little friendly competition between students can be healthy too, he says. He says it has worked best with final year and postgraduate students.

Gus said that, even after all his years of teaching, he is still occasionally surprised by a student asking him a question that he hadn’t thought of before, so he is still learning. For example he says that a student in his microeconomics class asked him about the difficulty in choosing the best mobile phone or satellite TV package. Why is it so difficult to compare prices? Standard consumer theory says that consumers will choose pattern of product quantities that will equate marginal utilities with prices, subject to the budget constraint. But firms seem to go out of their way to make it difficult for you to know what the price of a particular item is. This led to an interesting discussion about bundling, price obfuscation and switching costs.

A student once asked “Why do restaurants not charge more for their meals at busy times like Saturday nights?” Gus said that it was a good question, but if you looked carefully you might discover that they do find ways of extracting more revenue on Saturday nights and on special occasions like Mothers’ Day. You often find that they offer specials which are limited to these particular times and that the prices of the specials may be a bit higher than the standard menu items. The restaurant owners want to differentiate their prices but do not want to make it too obvious.

Gus said that he was also asked recently what he thought about the idea of a minimum price per unit of alcohol as part of a policy to reduce alcohol consumption. Don’t addicts, said the student, have lower price elasticities of demand, so reductions in consumption would come mainly from rational non-addict consumers?

Gus said he was really pleased with these questions as they showed that the students were trying to relate theory to important policy questions.

Gus’s final point was that students should be reassured that there were no simple or stupid questions. Some questions were annoying though, like “Would you repeat what you just said please?” to which the answer would be “No, I am not dictating notes to you. Listen carefully and make a note of the point in your own words”. The other thing that annoys him is the question “Do I really have to know this for the exam?” He said he always replies “You decide!”.

How to get published

Hello. My names is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

Anyone working at a UK university will be fully aware of the need to publish, in a top ranking journal if possible, and the pressures of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) One of the problems facing an academic trying to get a paper published is which journal to send it to. There is pressure for you to aim as high as possible to get your paper into a top ranked journal. But here you face two problems: 1 the large number of submissions means that there could be a long delay in getting the paper refereed and the cut off point for the REF is November 2013. If the paper is not already being looked at it almost certainly won't now get accepted in time to count. 2 In any case the acceptance rate for these top journals tends to be lower than for some journals that focus on a narrow field, say just energy economics or cultural economics. So if you have a paper that fits a particular sub-field it may be better to send it to a journal specialising in that field even if it doesn't have the same rating. Better to get the paper published in a lower ranked journal than not at all.

These were the kinds of points being made at coffee time yesterday in the cafeteria. It can be very frustrating waiting for a response from an editor or a referee once you have sent off your paper (or more likely these days having submitted online). And then, when you do get the referees' reports you may think from what they have written that they haven't read your paper properly or that some of the points that they make are wrong or inconsistent with each other. If you want to get the paper published and the report provides a list of points to be addressed then there is nothing for it but just to try to address them, even if you think they are inappropriate.

The other day one of my friends on Facebook posted a link to a really nice set of tips for authors by Professor Rene M Stulz, Advisory Editor to the Journal of Financial Economics and former Editor of the Journal of Finance. I have reproduced some of the points that he makes as they are important but also in a way quite amusing::

"Avoid insults and slights. It may well be that Professor X is an idiot, but unless the editor agrees with you, Professor X could be the referee of your manuscript."

"I just received a referee's report. The referee is an idiot. What should I do? Answer: If the referee has indeed misunderstood your work, you have to ask yourself why he or she did so. Was the paper poorly written? Were your thoughts unclear? If the referee thought your contribution to be small, is it because you failed to describe it properly? "

"I resubmitted my paper and received a report from a different referee. What is going on? Answer: The original referee may be incapacitated (for instance, he died or became a Dean). "

And do put yourself in the referee's position.Make sure that the paper is written clearly with no unnecessary techno-babble and is free of typographical errors. Don't submit a first draft and get a colleague to check your paper before you send it off.

Right. Now all I have to do is finish that paper I have been working on for six months. It will be too late for the REF but I still need to finish it and get it published!

Hidden taxes

Hello. My names is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

Yesterday's blog which discussed the problems of the Greek economy reminded me that I was talking to the students in my macroeconomics lecture last week about the role of fiscal policy in a recession. I mentioned the view of the Korean born Cambridge economist Ha-Joonn Chang (the author of the excellent book "23 things they don't tell you about capitalism"). A recent Guardian piece just after the budget quoted him as saying "Anyone who is reasonable, which actually excludes most people in the current government, would agree that it makes sense to run more debt in the short-run to recover faster. You cannot get out of this kind of massive debt crisis without growing." (Guardian, 23rd March 2013).

It is as if Keynes had never debunked the old Treasury View that public spending will always crowd out private spending - or to turn it the other way around that a reduction in public spending will somehow automatically stimulate private spending.Lots of ordinary people, and politicians,just don't seem to get it that when you cut back the income of households they will cut back their spending leading to a downward multiplier effect. And in a liquidity trap monetary policy doesn't work. As we have seen the banks are just holding on to the extra money they have been allowed to have because they don't have the confidence to lend to businesses in the face of what looks like it will be a triple dip recession. As Paul Krugman has said - there is no confidence fairy. What is it about austerity economics that people find so compelling? I suppose it is a kind of masochistic need to punish ourselves.

And if you look more carefully at what the Chancellor is doing the picture isn't quite what it seems to be. Despite the increase in the personal tax allowance and the cut in the top rate of tax, the overall tax take for the economy is going up, as it has to in order to finance the growing debt. This is mainly due to an increase in indirect taxation, and what economists call fiscal drag. As the threshold at which people enter the top rate of tax is going to be allowed to rise by only 1% anyone right up on the threshold who has an increase in income above 1% will get sucked into the higher tax band. This is an example of what some commentators call a "stealth tax". The politics of being Chancellor of the Exchequer revolves around keeping these things out of the public gaze.

I asked my students how much tax they were paying. Why, nothing, they said. We don't have incomes high enough to have to pay any tax. "Oh" I said "so you don't buy beer, petrol or energy - or football shirts" I added as my gaze settled on a student in the front row wearing a brand new Arsenal shirt. I pointed out that as well as VAT there was an insurance premium tax (assuming that students who drive are actually properly insured!) and lots of other special indirect taxes and duties. I asked them what proportion of the total tax take they thought came from indirect taxes of this type. Most thought around 20%. But according to an estimate prepared by Grant Thornton reported in a piece in the Sunday Times by James Charles, it stands at around 42% (Sunday Times, Money section, 24th March 2013). And the Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated that in order to service the increasing debt payments the government will need to raise taxes by the equivalent of 2p on the basic income tax rate. Of course it won't raise the money this way. Instead it will be done via a mix of fiscal drag and various increases in indirect taxes. With the economy only predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility to grow by only 0.6% this year and 1,8% in 2014 additional tax revenue won't come out of households' increased incomes so it will have to come from these less obvious sources.

At the end of the lecture I asked the students to keep a diary of their spending over the next week and to see if they could calculate how much indirect taxes they were contributing to the exchequer. It will be interesting to get the results.