Fraud online

It really is amazing how many frauds you get just by putting up a credit card registration page for a conference in Europe. I'm not sure how many of them are financial fraud attempts and how many are travel visa fraud attempts, but it's very irritating and it's getting very tempting just to tell anyone registering from Nigeria or any other West African state to stop taking the p*ss and get lost.

Sigh.

A Year in Provence... Well, Nine Months in Tokyo

The Vice-Chancellor signed off on my request for research study leave next academic year in Spring and Summer terms. This is the formal permission so that's the first (albeit not very high) hurdle overcome to arrange to spend most of 2007 in Tokyo. I've got the invitation from a professor at Meiji University in Tokyo. They've got a visiting scholar scheme which there's a very good chance will fund four months of the visit, now I have to get on with asking other sources for funding for the other five months. Not yet completely arranged, but it's looking very positive.