The following observation in Grant McCracken’s musing on the qual/quant debate in business echoes an uneasiness of my students in globalization class:

The numbers people sneer at the hopeless imprecision of a world without numbers. The concept people believe that anyone who waits for the world to manifest its intentions in numbers will have waited too late.

In class, it wasn’t just that sometimes the data we analyze or use to measure the extent or impact of globalization are sometimes several years old, but also that much of our academic writing on the subject is outdated by the time it reaches press.

Nevermind the implications for a field like political science, which seems to be creeping ever more steadily toward the quantitative end of the qual/quant spectrum.

This is a nice video about today’s college students.

When you get ready to read your course evaluations? I do. Even if I think a class went well and am happy with my students’ overall performance, I’m still oddly affected by even one harsh or cruel comment–like a punch in the stomach. I don’t get them often (and usually have a good guess as to which student made the comment, especially if they make the same grammatical errors that I’ve seen all term in their papers), but they still are like a right hook out of left field. (How’s that for mixing metaphors?)

Anyway, just read my comments from summer school, and there were no sour grapes or right hooks. Instead, I got:

Great teacher. I really enjoyed the structure of class. Being able to discussed what we read was a big help in understanding the material. I think that I also learned more critical reading skills in understanding complex material.

and

Professor Dion was an amazingly effective teacher and really helped explain complex material that I never would have understood on my own. I felt like I was really learning beneficial and pertinent material in this class that would help me in the ”real world.” This course was challenging but also very rewarding!

and

I felt like I learned a lot in the course without the addition of unnecessary stress. In other words, though the material was challenging and the reading was time consuming, it seemed very proportional to what I was actually getting out of the class.

That just goes to show that students sometimes do want to learn and like to be challenged, at least at Tech anyway.

I’m just relieved because these will be my last set of course eval scores to be added to my tenure packet.

You should check out my buddy’s mp3 blog. He also has a record store in Austin that I have yet to visit.

My mom really likes watching The Golden Girls. She leaves it on late at night. Having sat through a number of episodes over the last couple of years, I have come to realize that the Golden Girls were really just the women from Sex and the City in their retirement years.

Samantha Jones becomes Blanche Devereaux.
Charlotte York becomes Rose Nylund.
Miranda Hobbes becomes Dorothy Zbornak.
And finally, Sophia Petrillo becomes Carrie Bradshaw.

I could go through several specific similarities, but sitting and watching a couple episodes of each would probably provide more compelling evidence.

Have just had this paper accepted for publication in Comparative Politics.

Inspired by Chris, I thought I’d share.

My book

My delicious

…with this advice from Google:

And then keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn’t end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

The plans to reopen Johnston H.S. as a new school have been approved.

Today I am turning in the last pieces of my tenure file to be sent to external reviewers. (I am burning *8* CD copies of my file as I write this.)

And, I received a UPS box filled with cookies and a thank you note from one of my best and brightest undergrads from the last two years.

I know who is going to go home and have celebratory homemade cookies and milk!

Update: The cookies are personalized!!!! She’s going to UGA for law school–hence the black and red, but I’m not sure about the shape. Bulldog maybe?

Update2: It’s the head of a gavel. The handle broke off.

I’m scheduled to get a new GT laptop this fall. Given the spyware that OIT installs on machines that log into the domain, I started thinking about getting one of these or these (back when there was a Linux option–WHERE DID IT GO!?!?!?!?!). Since I get lost without a right click and am baffled every time I’m forced to interact with a Mac, I was leaning toward the Linux option (which has now apparently disappeared!).

The only thing keeping me from Linux was the lack of a PDF editor. Perhaps by the time there’s another small PC option that comes with all the drivers preloaded for Linux, there will also be a PDF editor.

Really?

Though you can’t find a link to it on the APSA page, you can find the searchable program here.

It’s official. My alma mater is officially the worst school in Texas and will be the first to be closed for noncompliance with required improvements in educational testing outcomes. It was probably failing when I attended, too, though the liberal arts magnet probably camouflaged the failing test scores. This was my district school–even without the magnet. Now, students from the neighborhood I grew up in attend Akins HS.

While I really disagree with some of this blog’s posts (as discussed here), this one has a good warning for students today. I find that too many students feel they can effectively multi-task, that somehow multi-tasking makes them work better. Instead, I’ve found that students with laptops, especially in my grad methods class, tend to have more problems with the material. Or maybe the effect is spurious–they are on their laptops because they have already disengaged from the material.

In any case, I find that students have very poor poker faces when it comes to recreational surfing during class. The amused faces they make while browsing Facebook, YouTube, or their email are clearly not timed to match my occasional in-class wit.

At GT, apparently more faculty are banning laptops from class. This will be the policy in my methods class this fall, especially since very few (if no) students would be able to really efficiently take stats notes on their laptops, given the need for special characters. And, I give them handouts with the slides every week so they don’t have to copy equations but can take notes around them.

I still haven’t decided about my two summer school classes that start June 16.

According to the NYT, more than half of the undocumented workers at an Iowa meat-packing plant are going to be sent to prison for five months before being deported. Some are being put on probation. Imagine the cost of prosecuting and imprisoning those workers.

Meanwhile,

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

See also this news of a sweep in California.

According to La Jornada, the federal election authorities finally resolved the complaints about negative campaigning from the 2006 presidential election. Both the PAN and the PRD coalition were fined.

You can find links to some of the offending ads here and here.

On our way to the Emory library (from which I’m writing this), we saw the Dalai Lama‘s motorcade leaving campus. Brian spotted him in a sleek four door sedan, while I was too busy staring at his security. He was followed by at least two SUVs: one with big security guys in suits facing outward and another in which commando-style guys were sitting in front of each open window (including the rear window) facing outward with some of the biggest automatic weapons I’ve ever seen in real life. Pretty intimidating.

We’ve seen the Pope’s procession before. Though this one was smaller, it clearly had more firepower.

Since graduate school, I have periodically had stress-related dreams in which I’m racing to the airport to catch a plane and have invariably forgotten my suitcase, passport, etc.

Last night, I had a new type of stress-related dream. I was on my way to work, but it was like Disneyland and along a river walk. The bus let me out on this little finger of land (about 2-3 people wide) that extended over the middle of the river. There was a crush of people.

Just as I was turning around to walk away from the edge of the finger and to take the long way around to the edge of the river, a party boat for a loud morning radio show passed under the finger and exploded a bunch of silly string on all of us. The crowd on the finger tightened and surged.

I decided to just jump into the river and swim to the edge, since that would be the shortest route to work.

Once I was in the water, however, I realized that I had my laptop bag and another bag filled with research-related papers on my shoulders. I worried that my data would be lost. I decided to swim more quickly.

As I neared the edge, I noticed someone else swimming and having a time of it. Like Harry Potter in the Goblet of Fire, I had to decide whether to save my data or this person. I decided I was strong enough to save both and with one last burst of energy pushed myself and the other person to the surface.

Once on the sidewalk next to the river, I opened my laptop bag to discover that my laptop was only a little wet and booted up fine (though Windows in my dream was very Disney–imagine puffy fonts and bright colors) and my papers were half soaked, but salvageable and not disintegrated.

So everything was o.k. I gathered my things and continued my way through the crowds to work.

So what’s that about?

Actually, it’s already on the editor’s desk.

Yesterday, I sent off my book manuscript on the development of welfare in Mexico since the 1920s. You can browse chapters online. (Of course, I’m willing to send hard copies to anyone willing to give me feedback!)

Of the most interest to my Mexican readers will probably be the very-up-to-date discussion of the ISSSTE reform in March 2007.

Yesterday, I also re-estimated some equations (with some alternative measures to those we used in the first version–and the new results are even better!!) for a joint paper with one of our grad students and typed up some of the response-to-reviewers for a very simple R&R at JofLAS. I’ll finish the revisions/response today.

And then, it’s on to the next–the R&R at CP, which essentially is only cutting/tightening the literature review. It should be done by Friday, which is good because tomorrow I meet again with my RA to run the data for my new project with Andrew Roberts. He’s going to present a first iteration of the project next month at a small meeting at TAMU. So all weekend is likely to be consumed with “fun with Stata.” Oddly enough, I’m totally looking forward to it. (It sure beats formatting a 30+ page bibliography!)

I’m also sitting on some revised figures to insert into the paper Vicki Birchfield and I presented in early September in Florence. Once she sends me the revised text, I can do some touch-ups to the discussion of the methods, insert the new figures, and it’s off to a journal. Another fun project for this weekend.