My HeyDay

Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful


Bartender in Hollywood (II)

I can´t stop feeling myself like a bartender who just arrived from Arkansas to Hollywood, chasing the dream of becoming someday a film star.

But instead of L.A., it´s D.C. :)

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Washington Institutions (I)

I´m gonna change the focus of this blog. It´s gonna be still a selfish approach to myself, yeah, but I understand that this is not going to be interesting for a majority.

In the last half a year, I have been stepping in every single international institution in Washington. The experiences inside those vast complexes (the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank, to just cite the well-known) have been amazing. Many prejudices fell, others were confirmed, but the experience is being awesome and I think it´s worth to share.

Let the next posts deal with the hot topics those big institutions of global rule are dealing with, the working of the big machines, the gossiping in the international scene, and let me to draw how I think our future is gonna be in this rock floating in the space. Yeah, my secret dream was to be a fortune-teller, like any economist/political scientist proud of such a name. :)

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¡Al fin! PhD Comics Viaja a España

Lo mejor: la fiesta de cumpleaños que dura 8 horas (¡qué grandes las tradiciones ibéricas!) y la conversación durante la fiesta:

- "Our King is Useless" (lit. "un inútil", seguramente)
- "But we love him anyway!"

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El "Dream Team" del PSOE

Menudo jugadón. El PSOE está preparando su programa electoral para 2008 y ficha a varios tops de la economía (Joe Stiglitz), relaciones industriales y globalización (Torven Iversen), medio ambiente (Wangari Matthai), energía nuclear (Helen Caldicott) y cambio climático (el barón Nicholas Stern), política educativa (Marie Duru-Bellat), economía europea (André Sapir), Cambio tecnológico y científico (Jeremy Rifkin), ciencia política (Guillermo O´Donnell y Wolfgang Merkel), economía del conocimiento (Maria Joao Rodrigues), republicanismo cívico (Philip Pettit), e incluso lingüística aplicada a la política (George Lakoff).

En total, tres nóbeles y varios especialistas que realizarán aportaciones en los comites sectoriales o revisarán las propuestas temáticas que presente el PSOE para reformularlas. Lo más interesante de todo esto, casi, es fijarse en los temas estrella de su programa:
(1) economía globalizada (post-Solbes),
(2) medio ambiente y cambio climático,
(3) educación, i+d y economía del conocimiento,
(4) todo esto barnizado y presentado con el ingenio de los politólogos y los lingüistas políticos.

¿Impresiones?

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"Ante la ignorancia...

... el petulante responde haciendo broma de la falta de conocimiento o de las carencias en la expresión. El inteligente escucha, trata de entender cuál es el punto" (Pep, 6/11/07)

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The Day I Became a "PhD Comics" Character

Today I became one of those PhDComics characters. I was so pleasantly working at home, gathering data and finding sources for the dissertation, when I received an email from my fellows at NYU telling me about a job talk close to my research topic ("Taxation in Latin American Democracies").

1.) I downloaded the paper, and then I saw the title:
Inequality and Redistribution Across Two Centuries: The Path-Dependent Politics of Taxation” (in Latin America)
2.) I ran downstairs in panic. I tried to breath. I walked upstairs again. I then started to read the paper, almost half a dissertation (if not entirely one).


3.) I remembered from PhD Comics what to do in this kind of situations. So I grabbed the paper and started to read it. It was pretty interesting. It was pretty close to my findings, to my approach. Probably we drawn the same expectations about the data from the same literature. We had similar intuitions. We both shared that pessimistic-but-try-to-solve-the-puzzle-please approach to the source of inequality in the continent. I read more and more the masterpiece...



4.) I checked the conclusions... They were quite strong, but leaving a loooot of room



5.) Then I imagined potential solutions for our overlapping... ;-)

6. And I also learned the lesson! :-)

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Before and Now

When I was a kid, I wanted to:

- Learn how to make friends easily and stopping being so shy,
- Travel to the places I fantasize in the World Atlas.
- Be a Scientist.
- Be Stronger.
- Help Others.
- Design Games and VideoGames.

Twenty years later, I´m proud about:

- Being able to make new good friends easily. They are the best treasure I have.
- Being traveled to 220 cities, and lived in 4 different countries and three continents.
- Being kind of (social) Scientist.
- Helping others when I can.
- That nice, simple videogame ("Asteroids 2.0") I coded when I was 13, and about being senior editor in a videogames magazine some years ago.

But still... I´m weak. :P

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Microsoft Effect on Facebook

Maybe it´s totally random, but since Microsoft acquired a 1.5% stake on Facebook, the popular website is down or failing a lot.

"Where Do You Want To Go Today?"

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Día de Muertos


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Poldavo (Alex). Get yours at flagrantdisregard.com/flickr

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