Hi guys!
Have you heard about most recent adventures of the Economics Department this Summer- Esin and I travelled to an international conference in Turkey- the Euro meeting of the Society for the Study of Emerging Market Economies. After working for about 2 months on never ending papers, it was time to wrap up results and present them to the opinion of the academic community. I was already in Bulgaria- a neighboring country of Turkey, where are still have most of my relatives and I was planning my trip out of there.
"Planning" in this case should be understood loosely. After sending the kids to a grandma somewhere in a Balkans village area and placing my full concentration on an instrumental variable procedure, my research inspiration got broken up by an unlikely event- my 3-year old laptop (those of you in research understand that this is like a long term friend, since I spend with it more than with my family and friends combined) would not start. I hopelessly pressed the button again and again and finally decided to resort to installing Stata on another machine that was suffering from low hard drive space and find a converter program for all of my Microsoft Office 2007 documents, since the software was unavailable. It was then that my wish got granted and Windows 7 started coming up to life on the otherwise black as no light in the tunnel black screen. The final set of results for my paper still had a chance!
In the last day an half I did not dare closing the lid on my laptop. It stayed running day and night and since, (of course!- what's the fun in doing something you are completely prepared for) the power point slides were not ready yet when I left for the airport, I refused to turn it off for the entire trip. The presentation slides got (of course!) done (what's the point of doing any work, if you are not completely prepared) around 4:30am next morning. At 8:30am I presented our brand new paper about the air pollution impacts of sectoral FDI inflows, in which controlling for simultaneity between income, FDI and pollution, Merih Uctum and I find that most sector's FDI are actually reducing, not increasing air pollution. The paper was well accepted. My laptop (still with the lid open) faithfully served as the session's computer after the session chair did not show up.
The rest was a trivial conference experience with a lot of sessions, meetings and- did I say trivial? This term should be understood loosely as well. There is nothing trivial about Turkey. I started experiencing Turkey from the first flight- from Sofia to Istanbul. Imagine my sheer American surprise when they served me a full dinner on a 1-hour flight. The food was excellent and abundant. Suspecting the same may happen again on the flight from Istanbul to Milas, I was preparing to reject it, but I miscalculated how hungry one gets after getting lost at Istanbul International Airport. (If I ever write "Conference traveler’s Guide to the Galaxy", one of its first advises should be "never change flights in Istanbul"). The airport is close to being completely out of from signs, and where they exist they either point to an ambiguous direction or they count the gates backwards, such as "Gates: 110 to 101". At the return flight, following the signs for International Departures, I discovered the administrative corpus of the airport.
So, I guess Turkish people have invented a way to cope with the energy loss associated with such an environment or it could be that they are keeping it this way purposefully, so they can compensate it with food!
At the conference and down south in Bodrum, the food was over the top. Melons are sweeter than honey and Aegean See Bass is an addiction. If you expect to see me in good physical shape after this summer- don't!
Istanbul is the Balkan's New York- a complete melting pot. It is truly a city of mosques. They are beautiful and majestic. I bought 3 huge books to read about Antique cities in Turkey and about Byzantium. The trip even inspired me to learn more about the ancient sites spread around Bulgaria- sites I have always taken for granted.
Finally, my laptop lasted until the end of the trip and died a hero upon my arrival back in Bulgaria. When I had an engineer do an autopsy on it, he discovered that when its motherboard got exchanged by the manufacturer, since their entire laptop series were sold with defective motherboards, it got exchanged with some other model's motherboard that was not matching the configuration completely and was missing some heat conductors, for example from the video card to the fan. So, I literary burned it out! And yes, I should have said this at the beginning- IT WAS NOT MY WORK COMPUTER; IT WAS MY OWN. The Dell is sitting safely in my office. But I guess, this is a good test for any brand- let me have it for a few days of Stata regressions!
This was my first blog ever and I only did it for the Economics Department. Do not expect me to do it often.
Did you have a Summer full of papers and food too?
Nadia Doytch
ndoytch@newhaven.edu
(July 28, 2010)
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