Author: michelle

Anyone? Brian and I are looking for a nice place for dinner later this month. Not for the study abroad group. Any suggestions?

Last night, our study abroud group went to the luchas here in Monterrey. I think the students had a good time, at first. They were worn out by the second to last set of matches and couldn’t hang for the main event. I guess you have to build up your stamina.

People in funny suits and scantily-clad women.

Last night, some of the study abroad group went to a Sultanes baseball game here in Monterrey.

I’m reading the traffic regs for Monterrey and have found that:

Los conductores de vehículos tienen prohibido lo siguiente:…. XIV. Circular zigzagueando….

Rough translation: Vehicle drivers are prohibited from the following….driving ‘zigzagging.’

Mexican laws are so nice and precise.

Updated to add this additional prohibition:

….XXVII. Manifestar una conducta evidente de hostigamiento hacia otros conductores haciendo mal uso del vehículo que conduce…

Or, showing evidently harrassing conduct toward other drivers making poor use of the vehicle they drive.

Also updated: The fines are adjusted according to ‘economic capacity, social condition, education,’ etc.:

ARTÍCULO 139. Al aplicarse la multa, deberá tomarse en consideración, la naturaleza de la infracción cometida, las causas que la produjeron, la capacidad económica, la condición social, educación y antecedentes del infractor. Si el infractor fuese jornalero u obrero, jubilado o pensionado, la multa no deberá exceder del importe del salario de un día. Tratándose de trabajador no asalariado, jubilado o pensionado la multa no excederá de su jornal o salario de un día.

One of my colleagues here at Tech just finished a study on code-switching by bilingual bloggers on the interweb. You can read the full paper here. Here’s a taste of her conclusions:

In analyzing Spanish-English bilingual blogs a few evident conclusions surface. First, and answering the former research question posed at the beginning, yes, bilingual bloggers switch languages when writing these public journals. I speculate that while code-switching has often carried a social stigma in oral production, such stigma does not seem to obtain in informal written expression, especially in such a democratic forum as the Internet.

Somewhere in Central Texas–frantically buying unsweetened Silk, cereal, and violin strings before our trip; dropping $1K on car maintenance; and hanging out in the lobby of the Mexican Consulate to get car papers.

We’re heading to Monterrey by car this week to prepare for the brand-spankin-new Georgia Tech Summer Study Abroad program at Tec de Monterrey, directed by yours truly. The students arrive May 22.

We’ll have a class blog that should be up and running in a couple of weeks so others can follow us on our adventures. I’ll post the link here.

“Dunt, dunt, dunt…another one bites the dust!”

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Some are bound to come back as R&Rs before you have the time or are ready to do the revisions.

I must remember not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

…when I hit the “send” or “ok” key to email or upload a paper submission to a journal. It’s involuntary, I think. I just realized I was (unconsciouly, and all alone in my office) humming this tune as I sent an email submission to the Journal of Latin American Studies.

Do you have a funny thing you do when you submit a paper?

I’m sitting in Caribou, with two young female doctors at the next table. Picture two of these (though less made up). They have talked about:

whether its worth buying new jeans since they will only get to wear them 4 days a month, whether they should wear their white coats (“They weigh, like, 20 pounds. How do you wear your stethoscope?”), and different attending Docs (“He was really good. He asked me lots of questions, and I was, like, always wrong, but that’s ok.”).

One has a copy of pocket medicine. And she admits she can’t follow a recipe to bake oatmeal raisin cookies and left her keys at the counter (someone found them).

I’m afraid they don’t instill much confidence, but perhaps it’s different when they’re dressed up in their nice white coats.

From an article related to the status of women in political science, a reference to this cartoon:

Link to original.

Today, I’m reading about trends in teaching and the pedagogy of political science faculty. [And, not just for fun. It’s related to my presentation on a roundtable on teaching strategies for women at next week’s Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago.]

I came across this lame and somewhat rude statement in an article in the January 2003 issue of PS:

…don’t be obscure, in either your speech or your assignments. Your students are attending the school where you are working because they couldn’t get into the school from where you graduated.

I’m not sure that always assuming your students aren’t as smart or prepared as you is a useful mindset. I prefer to think that if we challenge our students, most of them will step up to the challenge. Of course, it may require more effort or support from the prof if students aren’t very well prepared for our courses. There’s a difference between being smart and being academically prepared. Most students are smart, but not all have sufficient preparation for success in college. And then, there are those that are both smart and well prepared but not well motivated.

But then again, I do have the privilege of teaching undergrads with average SAT scores exceeding 1200, most of whom are smart, well-prepared and highly motivated.

You can finally stop carrying one 2 inch-thick file folder filled with notes and drafts for one project back and forth between home and office. You can finally file that folder until you get reviews/funding news back.

During the same afternoon, you will either unfile or create a new file folder, fill it with printed articles or copies of journal issues off your bookshelves. You will now carry this file folder back and forth between home and office for the next several weeks.

The electronic equivalent entails files, folders, or shortcuts to either files and/or folders saved onto your desktop that can now be filed away in your computer innards. If you’re like me, shortly thereafter, you’ll have cluttered your electronic desktop with new downloaded articles to be read or shortcuts to data and draft folders.

This is like a revolving-Groundhog Day dance, where the projects may change, but the process stays the same, day in, day out.

While I’m busy writing about social insurance in Mexico through the Fox administration, Calderon and others ar working to privatize the pensions of government employees–with some interesting political results.

No links, but browsing the front page of the La Jornada over the last week will give you a sense of the dimensions of the conflict.

Time to do taxes using tax software: over 2 hours

Time to receive state refund once submitted: less than 1 week

Time to receive federal refund: less than 2 weeks

Time to spend the refunds: N/A. The money was already spent before I even filed.

It appears that the time it takes for me to file our US and GA income taxes is exactly equal to the length of the most recent Harry Potter film.

…in which I resolve the source of my stress and end up happy.

My typical stress dream involves preparing for international travel and discovering that I can’t find or have left behind my passport.

Last week, my stress dream was about going through security at an airport. I had taken my rather large laptop out of my big laptop backpack to go through security. The security person told me that I could only take one bag with me on the plane, and that I’d have to leave my B&N tote bag filled with novels and poli sci books behind. Luckily, my laptop backback is huge, so I told the woman that I’d just put the books in my backpack.

So the last part of the dream was me reassembling my stuff on the other side of the security line and carefully organizing all my paperbacks so they would fit in my laptop backpack.

My interpretation? This was a dream about tenure worries and my ability to get everything to fit… poli sci books, novels (outside work life?), and laptop all together.

To having a paper accepted by one of the big 3 with summary comments from two reviews like:

Publish and minor revisions. I think the revisions would be pretty modest and should be easily manageable.

…and…

I think this is a very good and interesting contribution to the literature on social policy in Latin America and the developing world more broadly. I suggest that the author be given the chance to revise and resubmit based on the aforementioned suggestions.

Only to be derailed by reviewer #3. What did I ever do to him or her?

UPDATE 2/15, 2:15pm: I’ve already made the revisions suggested by and addressed the concerns of the reviewers and sent the manuscript on to another journal.

The description of the forthcoming book on pension reform in Latin America, in which I have a chapter, includes this gem:

This section concludes with two chapters with differing views on reform and the role of gender (an important and understudied topic).

My contribution on the role of gender in pension reform.

I use STATA for my quantitative research needs, but have always taught SPSS in my statistics course for our M.S. in International Affairs. I chose SPSS because it’s easy to use and because it was the second most popular statistical package (after SAS) listed in job announcements on monster.com. Today, I received this email from a former international student who has a good job with a large MNC whose headquarters is in Atlanta:

Dr. Dion,

I just wanted to say hello, and I wanted to let you know that I AM using SPSS. :-] One part of my job is to analyze marketing communication effectiveness. We work with few outside companies who collect and provide data for us (they are using SPSS for all their analysis). So, during our first meeting they were VERY surprised and impressed that I know what SPSS is and that I understood their whole presentation.
So, thank you for teaching us how to use that program… the hard work really paid back!