Archive for January, 2007
Little
By Nana | January 29, 2007 | Topics: Personal | 10 Comments »
ねじまき鳥クロニクル
Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru or The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a book by contemporary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. I discovered the guy only last week in London when I accidentally bought his book. Then I told Airo, a Japanese friend (who btw is my age), how excited I was with the writer and the book, and he went: “Oh, wind-up bird cronicle reminds me of the college time!”. Erm, better a bit late than never;)
Anyway, the book *consumed* me in one go. Once I had started reading, I was not being able to stop. And even when I finished, I just went to the first page again and re-started. Then I realised that it was time to let the book go;)
I am not writing a plot summery here, as I believe no such thing can be written at all. I will just list a few simple passages from the story that have left me moved, impressed, shocked, disturbed, seduced, disgusted, at ease or all that together:
- the passage about the “men with thinning problem” and the nature of hairpieces;
- the one about the nature of pain - plain, ordinary and direct physical pain;
- the passage on skinning a man alive in the episode out of the Japanese historical event from the World War II;
- the one on namelessness of money;
- the passage on finding the answers to fundamental questions in the depths and darkness of a waterless well;
- the one about the prostitute of mind and the power of shared dreaming, latent eroticism and phantasmagorical seduction;
- the stories of consultants of the elements of the body - Malta Kano and Creta Kano;
- and I could actually go on, ending up listing nearly every passage in the book;)
This minimalist-surrealistic account of an unemployed man, searching for a lost cat, fading marriage and mystical self-examination gives the reader a sneak preview of the simplicity and complexity of modern Japan.
HM wrote more than a dozen of books so plenty of excellent reading out there …
By Nana | January 28, 2007 | Topics: Books | 6 Comments »
What I really Hate
so prepotenti vozniki, ki pohodijo plin ravno takrat, k je pred njimi en ovink. Danes zjutri sem naletela na enga tazga pacota in se skor sesula na rolerjih. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Tipo je pohodu gas, lih ko je mel za zavit, tko da ga je na rahlo orosenem cestišču kar malček zaneslo. In jaz sem skušala bit res pazljiva, ker na rolerjih z laptopom na hrbtu zna bit usodno. Ta bučman pa z nekim prepotentnim BMW-jem uleti, in pol kot da bi bil tam znak *Please, by all means speed up!*.
Hmm, me zanima, zakaj ‘pristojni’ takih reči ne vidijo. Ok, to je blo zdej stupid retorično vprašanje, but anyway ….
By Nana | January 9, 2007 | Topics: General | 9 Comments »
2007 ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques
I am happy to announce that the registration for 2007 ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques, organised by ECPR and Faculty of Social Sciences, UL, is now open at this site.
Course list:
Intensive Courses
1. Inferential statistics
2. Basic concepts of mathematics
3. Introduction to spss
4. Introduction to r
Main Courses
5. Mathematical concepts and formal modelling
6. Generating ‘qualitative’ data: expert interviews and documentary sources
7. Comparative survey design
8. The statistical analysis of cross-national survey data
9. Multiple regression analysis
10. Political and policy ethnography
11. Quantitative narrative analysis
12. Comparative research design and configurational comparative methods
13. Network analysis
14. Qualitatively oriented textual analysis
15. Online research methods
16. Temporality and sequence analysis
17. Mixed methods design
18. Multilevel analysis
19. Methodologies of case studies
To find details, please have a look at the 2007 brochure.
By Nana | January 7, 2007 | Topics: Ljubljana Summer School | 4 Comments »
The Reliability of Emails
Did ever happen to you that you had been waiting for an email for months, eagerly, patiently, opening the email inbox every day again and again to finally see that particular email in it? I am sure!
So this is the story of a poor very important email:
I submitted an article to an international SCI;) journal a while ago, and at the confirmation of my submission I was informed that my paper ‘now goes into a reviewing process’ and I would be informed in 3-5 months of the ‘result’.
So the months passed by … junjulaugseptoct … and I thought, sometime at the end of October that would have been appropriate to send an email and ask about the current status of my article. I received no reply, so I tried to send another and another email. Then I thought I was being impatient so I decided to wait a bit longer.
Then, two days ago, I received an email from the journal, saying:
“I am writing again as I have had no reply from you to my October 26th e-mail regarding your paper”
I was staring at the email for quite a while, happy to have finally heard from them and surprised about the October email that I have never received. It turned out at the end that I hadn’t received their email and they hadn’t received any of mine.
Now, in the publication processes, which are already long as they are, this is the worst that can happen. For two months, my article *was accepted* for publication, and I was in the dark.
I am happy that the secretary of the editor was so kind as to send me the email on Wednesday again. I am grateful to her to the moon and back. They could have simply thought I was being an ignorant weirdo, whilst I have been thinking that they are taking waaaay too long to respond. All that just because we take emails as ultimately reliable, as something that absolutely tells whether something was received or not.
Well, I have learned my lesson;)
By Nana | January 5, 2007 | Topics: Research | 3 Comments »
My Postdoc Obsession;)
No, not into shoe fetish, but these are the shoes in which I enjoy so much to tango and especially to dance milongas.
By Nana | January 4, 2007 | Topics: Tango | 7 Comments »