Monday, October 11, 2010

MIT Economics in the spotlight

After Ester Duflo received the prestigious Bates medal this Spring (link) today MIT got another strike by having Peter Diamond appointed as one of the three Nobel laureats in Economics (link).
This is great! and I am happy that the department is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Let's just hope that the media hype does not take over (in terms of TT criterias and other areas where it should not belong) like in the case of neighboring schools.

Monday, October 04, 2010

Research and teaching fellowship in Kyrgyzstan

FELLOWSHIP- 4 Teaching & Research Fellowships, OSCE Academy in Bishkek, KG

4 Research & Teaching Fellowships at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Application Deadline: 5 pm, October 15, 2010

The OSCE Academy in Bishkek is a public foundation designed to promote and enhance the principles and aims of the OSCE in the Central Asian region, enshrined in its fundamental idea of comprehensive security. Located in Bishkek, the OSCE Academy is strongly embedded in the wider Central Asian academic and political context and follows a distinctive regional approach in its activities.

The Academy is looking for four Teaching and Research Fellows for the following graduate level courses:
1. Cases in International Relations
2. Foreign Policy Analysis
3. Political Economy
4. Comparative Politics: Democratization Studies

Interested applicants should submit their CV, a short summary of their research project, and two letters of reference from people familiar with the candidate's academic work to Ms. Aigoul Abdoubaetova by e-mail: a.abdoubaetova@osce-academy.net by October 15, 2011, 5 p.m. Bishkek time.

The OSCE Academy in Bishkek is an equal-opportunity institution. It operates on the principle of non-discrimination. All recruitment decisions are taken on the basis of best qualification of the candidates, with consideration of regional and gender balance.

More info: http://www.osce-academy.net/en/opportunities
Scholarship for Eastern Europeans

Herder Scholarship Awarded for Excellent Students from CEE/SEE
sponsored by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation

The scholarship is aimed at Central and Eastern European students under the age of 30 and Central and Eastern European PhD students under the age of 35 (PhD students over 30 should give an explanation in their application letter), who wish to complete an academic degree in Vienna.
The final stage of a degree, a higher degree or PhD at a Vienna university is sponsored in the fields of European studies, the cultural sciences, humanities and social sciences, the fine arts, music, architecture as well as agricultural sciences and forestry.

The amount of money paid out is 920 € per month. The duration of sponsorship can be up to one year.

Eligibility: Applicants must have a sufficient level of German skills.
Deadline: November 30, 2010
Contact: Hélène Ericke, Scholarship Programme Administrator
Tel.: +49 (0)40 33 402 11
E-mail: ericke@toepfer-fvs.de
Internet: http://toepfer-fvs.de/herder-stipendium.html?&L=1

Friday, October 01, 2010

How to achieve Zen-writing style

Economists love to brag and even implement a very concise style of writing which tends to avoid stuffy arguments, behind-the-bush stories and all those wonderful things that some of us (me included) enjoy sometimes. However, what life and the job market experience teaches you is that "THE STORY" matters. So, how to refine and distill something appealing to you into a good publication? Well, that for all those young PhDs out there to discover. And this article as well...as a base for refining your intellectual outflow.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Stata 32bit vs. 64 bit - Try it for free!

Stata offers free upgrade for Mac users from 32 to 64 bit. This is significantly faster as Stata itself is trying to show with this comparison:
--------------------------------------------
command 32-bit 64-bit
-----------------------------------------
sort 2.00 1.64 seconds
regress 0.88 0.80
-----------------------------------------
timings from 1.4 GHz AMD Opteron 240
running 64-bit Windows.
---------------------------------------------
Obviously you need to have a copy of Stata 10 up and running (IC, SE or MP) and then you can download and upgrade free to 64 bit version. Remember to update afterwards your Stata.
The 64 bit upgrade can be downloaded from: http://www.stata.com/support/updates/stata10/mac/
Installation is a banality like most Mac Apps.
Have fun!

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

New Stata 11

The new version of Stata (11) ships July 27. Among the new features: Multiple imputation, GMM (both linear and nonlinear models), competing-risk regressions, multivariate time series, unit root tests and marginal analysis, topping a new interface and fonts.

Order at: www.stata.com

Monday, June 15, 2009

Closure or a new Start?

It is done. The thesis itself. Putting the pieces together and transferring everything from Scientific Workplace and a couple of files from MS Word proved to be easier than anticipated. The final output looks great and I am thinking now to switch totally to WindEdt or maybe TexMacs, rather than SWP. Once you master the code, it comes easy; plus the net is quite full with examples and wiki pages. Now it is time to chill a bit. Until the defense and the subsequent paperwork that I will have to clear in a couple of days before my trip back home.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

LaTeX, Bread and Butter

That's how my Facebook twitter sounded like a couple of days ago. And yes, it was actually like that, except the bread and butter part, of course. Not that I would have minded them, it's just that I am more like a "coffee with milk & a banana" type of person.
So, yes, about two weeks ago I slowly started to migrate my work from Scientific Workplace and Word to LaTeX. Initially I tried to get support from people here at RPI, but they all seem to have magically disappeared and to this day, I only exchanged a couple of emails with a person that was nice enough to care. Of course, no help there.However, motivated by whoknowswhat I started to dwell in to it myself and look for online resources to deal with it. There are some nice websites (just google your question) that will get you a long way but in my case, just like yours, I suspect, the problem is the actual understanding of how LaTeX really works. Like the fact that &, % or _,are not accepted in a sentence unless they're treated as special characters or in math mode. Various stuff like that I would have liked to learn from somebody rather than searching the web and applying the old try& fail techniques. Oh, well, now it doesn't matter. 150 pages of nice LaTeX output awaits to be defended, printed and deposited in the library. I almost forgot all the trouble that I went through just to insert some graphicx or tables in my thesis. And two weeks is not a bad performance at all considering the slope of the learning curve involved:)