Throughout my mission as an advisor to the Cambodian Minister of Education, Youth, and Sport since February 2020, I have written several notes and reports, as requested by H.E. the Minister. Some were in French (our primary communication language), and I have written others in English, given the target audience, which was not always francophone.

Throughout my mission as an advisor to the Cambodian Minister of Education, Youth, and Sport since February 2020, I have updated a journal on all my main activities.

The Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport (MoEYS) is developing relevant strategies to address structural and financial challenges, but the scale of the education system necessary for a very young population requires much more significant efforts from public authorities.

In the previous articles, we have discussed the global challenges in education and the situation in the primary and secondary educations. This article will discuss the challenges for higher education and research.

In response to the challenges we discussed in the previous article, the government’s Pentagon Strategy prioritizes education reform and aims to implement educational reforms focusing on eight priorities, namely:

1. School reform programs;
2. Teacher development;
3. Digital education;
4. Science and technology education;
5. Improvement of school health conditions;
6. Youth development;
7. Increasing the number of centers of excellence in higher education;
8. System strengthening and capacity development.

In this context, considerable challenges concern the overall and institutional level of the education system:

After twenty years of civil war, Cambodia faced the challenge of completely rebuilding its educational system. France’s contribution was essential in this process, particularly in specific fields such as medicine – more than 1,000 Cambodian students have completed their internships in France, with an average of nearly a hundred applications currently – and engineering: The Institute of Technology of Cambodia is one of the flagships of the Cambodian university system. French assistance also enabled the implementation of training programs within universities.

I have spent the last four and a half years in Cambodia as an advisor to H.E. Hang Chuon Naron, the Cambodian minister of education, youth, and sports (MOEYS). This extended mission commissioned by the French MEAE and managed by Expertise France has truly been a fascinating experience.

I wrote this small tutorial in French to help you use R-Project and major databases on growth econometrics.

I have created a new course module for our doctoral students on LaTeX, LyX, bibTeX, Zotero, beamer and knitR (connection of LaTeX documents with R-project). The webpage of this course gives pointers for installing and setting up a LaTeX system for scientific writing and communication, as well as tutorials in French.

I have updated LyX to the beta 2 of the new version (2.1) that is in preparation. And now I get strange bibtex messages for my old beamer files…

If you are trying to install the Macports version of ipe, after having installed OSX Mavericks, there is a big chance that the build will fail. There is a solution already developed by MacPorts developers as a patch file downloadable from this page. You can directly download this file following this link.

If you are getting disconnected from your Wifi network after having upgraded to OSX Maverick, maybe you are having the same problem as me. Indeed, after having upgraded my laptop to Maverick, it started to cycle between connection and disconnection to my Wifi router. After having searched the internet, I have remembered that I have created a small script, some years ago, to automatically deactivating Wifi when I connect to the Ethernet cable the laptop, following this nice and useful trick.

I have finally had some time to play with knitr, an R-project package written by Yihui Xie to correct some shortcomings of Sweave. knitR is much more convenient than Sweave, and it integrates beautifully with Lyx (there is a module for knitR in recent versions of Lyx), ggplot, and tikzdevice in R.

I am exploring the possibility of using Hazel to

Another problem that the combination of Hazel and FTP has allowed to solve is the easy inclusion of images in my blog.

Textastic is a magnificent text editor for iOS. And I have just discovered that it also handles Markdown very graciously.

As I have explained in my last posts, I am trying to craft a writing chain that would allow me to write in Markdown and easily convert this readable text to Latex and PDF. I can even download the final PDF file on my iPad using a Dropbox folder.

So, I am learning Markdown using iAWriter and I have discovered a very nice tool for previewing my text as it will be typeset, once converted: Marked. Marked uses MathJax for previewing even your equations, written following the standard proposed by Multimarkdown.

I have been looking at ways to edit LaTeX files on the iPad. There are already interesting LateX editors, but I find them quite heavy to use yet, and LateX files are not very nice to decode on the small screen.

When you generate a public link to an image file living in your Dropbox, it generates now a link to a viewing page.

Google scholar also does bibliometrics now, on researchers (you can easily get your personal Google Scholar page, with all your references and citations indexed by Google), but also now on journals, even in several different languages. The following link will, for example give top 20 journals containing the word “econ” in their titles: Top 20 economics journals in English and Top 100 journals in English (all areas)

My laptop is equipped with a Core i7 processor with 4 cores that can execute in parallel 8 processes.

So, my new laptop runs OSX Lion. I have been able to migrate my data from the old laptop (but the automatic process provided by the Migration assistant was a failure, Apple support had to help me to do it manually).

Penn World Tables (PWT) is a very nice data collection on economic growth.

I propose here some small graphical interfaces created with Platypus for ipe, the very nice graphics editor for Latex:

After having tried other solutions for my pdflatex graphics, I am reconsidering again ipe (see my earlier post about this very nice and useful program that allows you to put latex instructions in your drawings).

I have just discovered a very nice tool. I was looking for a solution that would allow me to include software installed via MacPorts in my Applications menu. I was looking for more than a simple symbolic link to a bash script. Something nicer, with an icon and some interactivity. Then I have found a reference to Platypus on a forum.

This time I will write on my first impression about a gorgeous teaching tool that I have discovered thanks to a TED video by Hans Rosling: Gapminder.

As I have written in my initial switching post, one of the softs that i am missing under OSX is the magical PowerPro (PP) program for Windows.

My switch to Mac is now complete and I very rarely start Parallels Windows 7 VM. One of the major difficulties I have met with the MBPro is the eye (and brain) strain caused by the very reflective screen of this laptop, when I work outside, under high sun light. Apple indeed does not propose a matte option for the MBPro 13’. Since I have used anti-reflective filters for my PDAs, I knew that such a solution exists. After having done some research on the Net, I have ordered a Nushield DayVue Screen Protector that I have received today.

I am starting to migrate to Mac OSX my working environment. I am an old Linux user for my servers but I have never been completely convinced by the Desktops for Linux (mainly KDE and Gnome) and gone back to Windows with the introduction of its first usable version (XP). I have deliberately missed the Vista wagon, and have not been impressed by Windows 7. Being tired by the quirks of XP, I wanted to adopt a more reliable and modern interface. OSX seems to me to comply with this demand, and the Unix that is behind the interface is quite a standard one, quite easy to understand for a person used to Linux. I am a happy camper concerning the very well thought interface of OSX.

ChkTeX is a LaTeX utility for… checking your Latex syntax.

LyX is a nearly WSYWIG front end for Latex. It constitutes a very credible open source alternative to my other preferred (commercial and quite expensive) Latex editor (Scientific Word).