désolé, if someone is prayin' then I might break out I was right. This is hard. I'm referring to my paper writing for IPE - "can developing countries catch up to developed countries?" There is a ton of research on a zillion aspects of this, so it's even difficult to narrow down the focus and decide which points to cover. I've got a bit written already, so I'm feeling okay about it, but it's a tough slug.

Oh yeah, what I've read so far isn't terribly encouraging, either. One study that I just finished reviewing basically says that even though the World Bank has these stats showing improvements in developing nations, that these are misleading because the World Bank changed the way it calculates key figures and you can't compare the new numbers to the old ones. Great, eh. Oh, and another study says that although we're seeing all this crazy growth in China and India, if you remove them from the numbers, there's not much improvement in other countries at all. Oh, and add to that the increasing disparity between rich and poor even within the poorest of countries, and the picture is looking pretty grim.

And I started out this paper intending to demonstrate that the LDCs ("less developed countries") COULD catch up with effort and time.

The good news is that after 52 of the last 64 days being rainy ones here in Ottawa, we have sun and blue sky today, and it's forecast to stay that way for the week. That's a relief.  | ¶ 12:31 p.m.