Without a Traceroute

I hung out with Stefania a bit, but she was sick for the first few days I was there, and then busy trying to get caught up afterwards. She’s kind of amazing in the amount of stuff she does. In addition to her Ph.D. research, she does yoga, soccer, pilates, salsa dancing, bike racing and she’s taking classes to learn German as her fourth language (after Italian, English and Portuguese).

We went to a talk given at EUI by an American sociologist named Kathryn Sikkink from the University of Minnesota. It was fairly interesting stuff, she talked about the impact of criminal trials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and human rights violations on the overall human rights situation in a country. Her work showed a positive correlation between holding such trials and improvements in human rights. It was unclear what metrics she was using as a measure of “human rights”, and I didn’t ask because it seemed like an unbearably n00bish question.
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