A lot of interesting things, some of them very disappointing, happened at the
Luria conf.
The big disappointment was the failure to get an interactive web connection
or any streaming. Vis a vis the web connection, everything that could go wrong
went wrong. CUNY's server was down for three days. The electricity at Moscow
U Psych faculty was turned off for a day, the first day of the conference.
The guy who was supposed to test with CUNY left for vacation. The Russians
were worried about money that they believed had to paid to someone in new
york, but neither Joe nor I understand what they were talking about, and
money was available in sufficient amounts for any scenario I could think of.
The Russian organizers simply could not imagine what streaming was and never
got help to find out. They had their hands full just getting printed programs
and registrations and taking care of foreign visitors.
This foreign visitor gave a talk which is at luria.ucsd.edu twice-- once at
the main conf in English, once in Russian at the new Pedagogical University
headed by Rubstov.
To me, personally, the most interesting talk was about Luria and use of the
twin method where new materials have been turned up from the 1930's and a
talk by Eugene Sokolov on general and specific memory, a talk by Eugene
Subbotsky on magical thinking in Britain and the USD (which is coming out in
British J of Dev Psych). I spent a lot of time completing gathering of material
for the luria web site we are amateurly putting together which kept me away
from a lot of the action.
The closing ceremony was very interesting. They arranged for about 100 students
to submit papers and gave prizes to the best students in several categories.
Seems like something the ch-sig might want to adapt.
I have followed the discussion on readings which I will attend to beginning
tomorrow. There was a lot of interest in an international course and it turns
out that a number of Russians follow xmca via internet and hope to start up
their own, internal version.
The Russian edition of Nature of Human Conflicts appeared in Russian in time
for the conference and was met with a lot of interest. But it costs an arm and
a leg in rubles.
I managed to catch a nasty cold going in and out of the metro in constantly
different kinds of cool weather but the metro is virtually the only way to
travel in central moscow these days. The traffic is horrendous, even by,
say, New York or SF standards.
We still have not figured out how to get a voting mechanism which will keep
Nate out of the Chicago mafia but we are working on it. Good advice never
turned away.
The weather in San Diego compares quite favorably with that in Moscow, I
re-discovered.
Achew.
mike
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