cat /proc/claus

So far, I have been able to live on non taxable income (scholarships, fellowships, etc). So I never had to learn much about how taxation works. But now that I am working “for real” (not that I dont consider PhD to be real work), I had to learn how the income tax (among others) work in my case.

As a Brazilian working in Japan as a professor, I actually have to option to pay either the brazilian or the Japanese income tax for two years. If I keep working in Japan for more than two years, then I have to pay Japanese I.T. anyway. It seems that this time limit varies with your job and nationality (probably based on international agreements).

So I since I have a choice, I had to research a bit. As for the tax amount, it is basically the same in both cases (around 20% of my salary). If I choose to pay taxes in Brazil, I need to send a notice to the japanese tax office about my decision, and pay my brazilian taxes directy to the brazilian government, yearly. On the other hand, if I decide to pay Japanese Income taxes, they will be deduced automagically from my salary, and I need to submit a form to the brazilian embassy stating that I have moved out of the country (along with a bunch of other info).

Since the values are about the same, I decided that it made more sense for me to pay the Japanese Income tax, since I should be staying here for the medium term. It was also generally less hassle. I was quite surprised about how much information about this is readily available online, though.

So I started my work as an assistant professor yesterday.

The first day was quite uneventful. No big introductions or nomikais (whew!). My supervisor said hi and talked to me for a bit, then the secretary took me around the department and had me sign a large bunch of paper. I got a formal “you are hired” speech from the dean. Then I was shown my own room.

It is a large room, with a great view of Mount Tsukuba from the 8th floor. It is also completely barren and dusty. I felt like the beginning of a “harvest moon” game, when you are left at an abandoned plot of land, to make the best of it that you can. To be honest, I was quite excited about all this — harvest moon is exactly my kind of game.

Today (the second day), was a bit more interesting. My supervisor had some more time, and used some of it to explain what is expected of me in more details. It seems that my job will consist of providing support and managing the G30 initiative in the University of Tsukuba. In more concrete terms, I have to provide intensive courses for the students in the G30 major (for starters Machine Learning in October, High Performance Parallel Computing in December). Also, I have to try and attract more students to this course, both in the university of Tsukuba and other universities in Japan (through long distance classes, etc). Finally, I have to boost the goal of the G30 program to turn Tsukuba into a more International university, by attracting more foreign students, and trying to promote cooperation with other universities abroad.

It is all still a bit nebulous to me, but I can see that I will have a handful.

Oh, research? It seems that I can do pretty much whatever I want in that regard - as long as I find the time to.Today I already took part in an impromptu research discussion about one of the master students projects over coffee, and tried to sell EC to him.

Plans for tomorrow: Cleaning my office by removing the logs and large rocks from it :3

After almost one year and a half living in Rio, tomorrow I’m boarding for Japan. I’ve been hired as an Assistant Professor at the G30 Computational Science Program at Tsukuba University.

I’m looking forward a lot for this move. For me, more than any “january first”, this signals a new year. Moving has always been accompained by a rush of productivity and energy, and I have been planning to use these to start (or re-start) a number of projects that were on the back burner. The things I want to do in this new start include: Going back to the Gym, getting better at Starcraft, Learning to program indie games, reading more technical books. Not to mention updating all my websites

This last year in Rio was great from an academic point of view. I had a very interesting research project, with awesome work mates. I will miss that. But I also look forward to my new position. The prospect of having students under me, and a bit more of academic freedom gives me all sorts of ideas to work with.

(This post is dedicated to my friend, Fernando)

One thing you get used to, when living abroad in an area plagued by earthquakes, is explaining to despairing parents why when they see on TV:

“MAG (very high) EARTHQUAKE IN (some place), TSUNAMI WARNING WAS ISSUED!”

They should not immediately announce to their friends the world is ending, and call their son urgently to return home.

Let’s start with the Tsunami warning. In principle, EVERY earthquake where it’s center is in the ocean issues a Tsunami Warning. The earthquakes are not observed directly, and it is just good practice to be aware of the possibility until it is confirmed. Of course you must take precautions. In my experience, though, most of these warnings are soon removed.

Now let’s talk about the Magnitude. A Magnitude of say, 7, is very scary, and indeed indicates a very strong quake. But it hardly tells the whole story. Location, Location, Location. Remember that as energy spreads, its energy is reduced, at an exponential rate. Not only that, Different rock compositions can help or hinder the spread of the seismic wave, to the point of in certain cases forming an “echo” bowl where the waves go back and forth until they die out (in Japan known as “long-period earthquakes”. So in the end, the Magnitude at the epicenter says very little about how the actual effects of the quake in areas farther away.

A better guide to report earthquake on inhabited areas would be a network of sensors that measure local shaking, such as the one provided by the earthquake in Japan. For example, the following image was taken from weather.yahoo.co.jp:

The X marks the place of the actual quake (a Magnitude 5.6 one) the different circles show how strong the quake was felt, according to the Japanese Quake Scale (about which I spoke a while ago). Notice that the white and light blue circles were barely felt, and the dark blue circles were on a “wow, a quake, haha!” level.

Why is this important? Peer and Family pressure are powerful tools. During the big Fukushima Earthquake this year, many foreigners in Japan who were in places not affected by the quake at all (such as Kansai) were urged, and eventually forced to leave Japan unnecessarily due to their preoccupied families. These relatives were bombarded every day by irresponsible media that, due to either laziness or malice (or both) gave an incomplete and exaggerated picture of the already very serious catastrophe. This has shown that, when it comes to natural disasters, we usually have to do our own homework in order to properly access risks and take decisions.

Most pop bands all over the world are made of hand-picked pretty boys and girls, with little, if any, attention being paid to actual music quality. Well, if that is the case, why beat around the bush? Ebisu-Muscats is a new Japanese pop-band composed only of AV (adult video) porn stars.

If you want people that will fire up the loins of your audience in your band, better go straight to the professionals, right?