Luis Guillermo Natera Orozco

March 31, 2021

🗓 March 2021 [Month in review]

Another month living in lockdown 😔

March is gone. This is a small review of the month, things I did, status updates on projects, interesting readings, and so on.

✒️ Writing

  • During this last month, I continue writing the thesis. Its current status is a draft (v0.3ish). It includes most of the chapters, they are original papers 📄 that have been already published or are under preparation. There is still some writing to be done, as I am missing the final chapter and half of the first one. Now one of my supervisors is reading it. I look forward to his comments and to keep the work going. There is still work to be done, but overall I am happy with the progress. The plan is to submit it by August. 
  • For the last months, I have been working on a paper with my two supervisors and Laura Alessandretti. This month we did some writing, and I hope we are getting closer to have a preprint version. Hopefully by the end of April or the beginning of May. Let's see.

👨‍🏫 Teaching

  • March began with a little bit of teaching. I was a teaching assistant for Orsi's Python Programming for Social Scientists in the European Consortium for Political Research Winter School in Methods and Techniques. Very fancy names. It is always fun to teach intro to Python 🐍 and see how people start using it. It is one of my favorite topics to teach. This was the second time we taught the same course. Both times have been remote. Having an online setup has its challenges, but in the end, I think we have found good tools to teach and debug the problems the students might face. The technology stack is Google colabs with shared folders -so we can see their notebooks-, Codeshare to share code snippets (not so good, if anyone has an alternative, please let us know). Finally, for communication, we used Slack and Zoom. 

📚 Reading

  • This month I finished "Squeeze Me" by Carl Hiaasen. It is a "Florida man" novel. It starts with the disappearance of a wealthy, elderly socialite from Palm Beach during a charity gala that sets off a manhunt by the local police, egged on by the victim's wealthy friends, all members of a social club devoted to supporting the President of the United States. Of course, the ultimate Florida Man - Donald Trump - gets involved and declares that the crime was committed by immigrant hordes. As it turns out, this is far from the truth. The novel involves hungry pythons, the First Lady, the police, and more. It is a good one to take the mind off. Go read it.

🛫 Traveling

  • Not... 🤦‍♂️ We are still under lockdown and curfew, so not big updates on this front. However, with the arriving Spring 🌿 (finally good weather). We have done a couple of one-day trips to hike and bike. We inaugurated the biking season with a trip to Szentendre it was really fun and with perfect weather to enjoy a beer by the river. We are looking forward to having more good weather days, and hopefully the end of the lockdown 🤞
  • To finish this month in review. One of the perks of Spring is to see flowers bloom and have this kind of scenes:

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