Category: Uncategorized

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!

I’ve just been busy and am about to get busier. Today, I polished off revisions to an article that had already been conditionally accepted for publication and to a book chapter for an edited volume under contract. Now if only I could get comments back on that other paper out under review at a place that shall not be named for fear of jinxing everything.

I still haven’t resumed normal browsing of the news in Mexico. Luckily, Greg has been keeping the ball in the air with his coverage of the tortilla issue. I did read somewhere, however, that Calderon had made an agreement with producers to control the prices of tortillas. Since this is a voluntary agreement, the administration has said it’s different from the official or mandated price fixing of tortillas that ended in the late 90s or early 2000s.

Soon, though, readers can expect to be bored to tears with excerpts and discussion of my book manuscript! Yay! Something to look forward to… she says with a wink.

This post could be about me. I have very little in common with David Brent, and in fact, he makes me cringe. However, those that know me well will know that I find it hard to tell short stories.

Hi. My name is Michelle. And I am an anecdotalist.

Happy new year all. We arrived back from Austin early Saturday morning, and I’m not really ready yet to face the new semester. I have a ‘to-do’ list a mile long, but I’m not alone in that.

I can’t imagine when I’ll get around to posting again, so in the meantime, enjoy this image of a sign hanging in a South Austin bar-b-que restaurant. I grew up south of the river, and east of the Interstate. The latter is perhaps a bigger social blunder than the former.

This paper about the role of international financial insitutions (like the ILO and the World Bank) on social security policy in Mexico has been conditionally accepted for publication in Global Social Policy. The revisions are not extensive and should make the paper a much stronger article.

Now, this means that I’ve fallen below Munger’s 3 under review rule. Drats. Must. do revisions. quickly. and get something. else. out the door. soon.

When I send out my book ms, will that count as 3 at once?

Hmmm….

Dear grad students,

Thank you very much for recognizing my contributions to your academic and professional development. I am very proud to be the first faculty member to receive the INTAGO “Friend of Graduate Students” award for my teaching and mentoring activities.

I know that my classes can be demanding and difficult and that I have high expectations for you and your work. I know that statisitcs, and even IPE, has not always been easy.

I’m glad you feel I’ve made a positive contribution to your graduate experience. I enjoy teaching you all and wish you all the best in your studies and beyond.

My very best,
Michelle

Our advisor for undergrad international affairs students stopped in to tell me that the other day, she asked a young woman what she wanted to do when she grew up. That young woman said she wanted to be just like me! She wanted to travel, do research, and be a professor. I haven’t taught more than a handful of undergrads in several years (I was in Mexico and since have taught only MS classes), but it was nice to hear that I have made an impression on at least one young woman. It’s a good reason to promote diversity in University classrooms, because you’ll note that she didn’t just want to be a professor, she wanted to be like one of the professors she could identify with and imagine herself becoming.

You have to wade through many, many inane comments before the interesting ones that begin on November 30, 2006.

Update: Thanks to Chris, you can go straight to the pedigree discussion.

I’ve been reading this book that combines a little history of computing with a discussion of the open source software movement. Brian has a stack of other books he’s reading for a research paper that I’ll probably wade through, too.

Among the several tidbits that struck me as interesting was the advice: “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow,” which apparently first appeared in this book. You can read ESR’s discussion of the advice here (halfway down the page at #3). In any event, the short version is that you should plan to throw out at least some of what you code because you’ll end up doing so anyway.

This seemed particularly interesting to me last night just after I answered umpteen emails and class discussion board posts from my graduate students as they busily sought to finish the drafts of their first regression papers for my methods class. If I could get students to understand this principle, perhaps their research projects would be less stressful. Perhaps they would also really re-write rather than superficially edit their drafts before turning in their final papers.

In my experience, the paper I first write for a conference and the paper that ultimately gets published in a journal are often very different. Parts have been substantially re-written and even some of the data analysis re-done.

Students, however, seem to cling to their text and results and won’t let go, even when they need to. They just can’t bring themselves to delete a whole paragraph, even though it doesn’t belong in their paper. I suspect that the paragraph may have been difficult to write in the first place, and that’s why they are so attached to it. The same thing happens with their regression “models.” They resist letting go of a bad model sometimes because they’ve gone to all the effort to write it up.

In my methods class, they turn in their projects in parts (first the lit review, then the data description, and then the data analysis) before they revise and complete the final product. In my experience, students seldom do the amount and type of re-writing necessary to turn very rough drafts into solid final papers. And, though I provide extensive comments, they still can’t or won’t re-write. My comments often ask them how a paragraph relates to their research question, or to explain how the critique they are making is important to their overall argument. I tell them that such questions are part of a dialogue we are having about their argument/paper and that they should work on making sure their papers are coherent wholes.

To many students, revise seems to mean, “fix the obvious grammatical errors.” In some cases, it may be a question of time. In other cases, I suspect it’s because they really don’t understand that revise means substantially rewrite , or knowing when you write something the first time, you should plan to throw some of it out. So, how can we get our students to be less wedded to what they write and more willing to re-write, especially when they are learning a new method and way of writing? How can we convince them that it is to be expected that they’ll “throw one away.”

As the time nears for the swearing in of Mexico’s new President, the PAN’s Felipe Calderon, the situation is not looking good. Earlier this month, the PRD’s Lopez Obrador had himself sworn in as President in an unofficial ceremony. Yesterday, a small fight broke out in the Congress (for the leftist version of events) when members of the PRD tried to take control of the dais and the PAN stepped in to stop them. This is not the first time there’s been a tussle in the Congress, though I can’t find the link to my earlier post about another shoving match that occurred during the desafuero period.

Lovely.

And now, in a display of…. what? determination? stubbornness? Members of each party are planning on camping out on the dais until the swearing in.

I wasn’t too crazy about the choice for the new Bond. But I have to admit I was wrong.

Various anonymous bloggers have been discussing why they blog anonymously, or why their blogs do not reveal their identities. Greg points out that men tend to blog under their names and women tend to do so anonymously. Then, he suggests that I’m the only non-anonymous, female political science blogger. (Say that three times quickly.) Perhaps.

I wouldn’t dare speculate as to why others blog, and some political scientists explain for themselves why they blog.

For myself, I’ve discussed why I blog and the pros and cons as I see them regarding the ways that I blog.

I don’t get as many hits as Chris from folks looking for the political science rumor blogs, but I thought I’d provide a related public service announcement in the interest of political science productivity.

It seems that the rumor blogs can suck a lot of potentially productive time from candidates and faculty. If you find yourself checking the rumor blog comment threads more than once a day, I suggest using either co.mments or co.comment to track the comments. I prefer the former, but understand that the latter has more market share. Each will require a little time to set up your comment tracking but not nearly as much time as obsessively re-checking the rumor sites for new entries.

I just finished this really short book. Though some of the experiences are more specific to those at predominantly teaching schools, many of them (such as figuring out how to get students discussing or how to understand department dynamics) are more universal for new faculty. I’d recommend the book to new faculty or advanced grad students. Some parts might also be good for senior faculty, some of whom can easily forget what it’s like to be a newbie.