cat /proc/claus

I was talking to a friend who was couchsurfing in my place these days. She said she doesn’t like Skype, because since it is mostly free for the caller/callee, there is this semi-obligation to talk to the other party, all the time, for a long time. According to her, phone calls and letters cost money and effort, and so the communication becomes less forced, and more important. She has similar dislikes for e-mail.

I don’t think I fully agree with her regarding Skype and E-mail, but for some points I see where she is coming from. Myself, I have been noticing something similar in the social network Facebook. I started my account on facebook a few months ago, and my inicial idea was to have it as an outlet to messages to my day to day flesh friends here in Japan. While at first I resisted a little bit, eventually though, many people whom I have only a passing acquitance to made it to my contact list. While there are positive points of having a wide variety of people in your social network, it does change the way I see the network, and how I interact with it.

Mixi has adressed this issue a bit - you can set “levels” of friends, and set up certain information to only show up to certain levels of people in your network. But thanks to social engineering, I wonder how effective this would actually be. All you need is one “friend”, who is closer to someone you don’t really want hearing your rants than she is to you, for her to quickly spill the beans to your “friend”, and hell break loose again.

I know, there is no expectation of privacy in the internet, but that does not prevent me from lamenting it.

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On another, and lighter note, today I saw “Whisper from the heart” “Mimi wo sumaseba” again. That is a small and simple movie that always strike a deep chord into me. Every time I see it, I find out new things, like a good old book, and I also feel myself reflecting about what I want in my life, and how can I get to it. This seems an appropriate moment to do so.

Recently I have read a news article at ACM’s website about the ICPC, which reminded me why I usually hate the media. How facts are casually distorted in order to make the truth “sexier”, sometimes even when it is not needed to.

The ICPC is a programming contest hosted by ACM. In it, students from all over the world get together to try and solve a large number of very hard programming problems in 5 hours. Each team has 3 students and one computer, so the contest involves not just the ability to read a problem, figure out which algorithm will solve it, and implement that algorithm correctly in a short time, but also how to best manage the single computer among the three students (you have to figure out and write down most of your code in paper before sitting down to program to save time). The participants are the best teams of their respective local competitions, young people with a great knack for maths and programming. The contest itself and the associated events were really fun.

However, obviously this was not enough for whoever wrote the article. They had to say things like that “the participants did the work of a traffic controller”, or that “the contest challenges participants to solve real world problems”. Really? Maybe the contest has changed a lot in the last 5 years, but the problems where all mathematical problems (longest path, geometric problems, search, constraint satisfaction, etc) with some “stories” thrown into the mix to test the players reading comprehension. *Sigh*

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On the other news, this week will be dedicated to writing my second journal paper, to complete the publication requirements for my PhD at the university of Tokyo. Allegedly I managed to get enough data for the publication with last week’s experiments, now comes the inglorious tasks of transforming all of that in an interesting and engaging document which won’t be criticized too heavily by the all mighty anonymous reviewers. I only have one week until the deadline of 31st, and I have a lot of other stuff to do in the same period, so I’m getting a bit worried that I won’t be able to make it. But if I don’t make it in time, I can still submit it for another, non-Special Issue Journal, a few weeks later - with the negative side that the lack of a fixed, externally imposed deadline would reduce my motivation.

(why am I posting in my blog instead of working? I’m trying to amp myself into writing mode by sitting down and writing here instead of reading a dozen different news and getting anxious - like the news I just blogged about above :-P).

Today is the election day in Japan. This particular election is actually a pretty big deal, because for the first time in many years, the opposition party actually has a chance to take the Liberal Democratic Party out of the Japanese Government - the LDP has been in power for almost 55 years now, since the end of American occupation of Japan post World War II.

I am by no means a political analyst, I’m much less informed about Japanese politics and economy than I wish I would be, so I will only mention a few loose facts and observations that have been bugging me.

Hereditary Seats

One of the big problems I hear about japanese politics is that of “Hereditary Seats”. There are a bunch of reasons for the hereditary seats, from very strong support networks that get passed down from one generation of politics to the next, to restrictions to election publicity that makes it difficult for new/budding politicians to get their name out. The results is that some families have been in power for up to three generations now, forming literally a “ruling class” in japanese politics. Fortunately, this seems to be coming around, as some of those “feuds” are suffering defeats around the country.

Young indiference

Another big problem I see in Japanese politics is that a terribly large part of the young population was alienated to it. In a TV program a few years ago, I heard interviews with college-aged Japanese saying that “I’m abstaining from this election because I feel I’m still too young, politics is better left for adults” - as a result, the elderly in Japan (who already compose a pretty high part of Japan’s population) held an even greater weight in the elections, which meant that topics like unemployment and work reform would take second stage in politician discourse over pension reform. (OTOH, one of the reasons that the ruling party is taking such flak is that they screwed up pension reform hard a few years ago). Fortunately, this seems to be beginning to change - this year I have seen a number of advertisements in the trains calling young people to vote.

No Criticism

Somewhat related to the previous point, in Japan, comedians never, ever, make jokes about current political events, or political figures. They may have have done the most bizarre/astounding thing ever (like the defense minister saying that Japan was prepared for an alien invasion, the Finance minister drunken antics, or the Prime minister saying that poor people shouldn’t marry), you’ll never see a comedian on TV harping on these gold mines. I was talking about this with a japanese friend the other day, and she told me this is because comedians fear the negative repercussion to their careers if they make jokes about “powerful people”.

As silly as it may be, I think this is a pretty serious problem actually. It is the politicians that should be afraid of the people and the ability of the media to show the skeletons in their closet and make them public, and not the other way around. This “fear of offending/showing ridicule”, may contribute, in my opinion, on the fact that Japanese Youth is so distant from politics - like the comment I quoted above, they feel politics to be “too serious” for them. Another example, a few years ago I participated in a talk show in Japanese TV, which got together a bunch of Japanese and Foreign 20-somethings to talk about society problems. They told us that the show with the theme “participation of young people in politics” would be canceled because there would be elections 3 months later - do you want any BETTER time to talk about participation in politics on TV?

Treatment of foreigners

Finally, I’m really looking forward for a DPJ led government. The LDP has a very poor record on its relationship with foreigners, with the government refusing to see immigration as necessary or
even beneficial to Japanese society, and taking cheap shots at foreigners every now and then to get some points with the population. The DPJ has a much more interesting position in this - They usually add text about foreign plans and rights in their fliers - which would be weird for a campaign promise, since foreigners have no votes, so I can only imagine that they actually mean it.

Looking forward to the results tomorrow.

I’m getting absolutely tired of this computer screen. For the past month I have been trying to write an article for a specific journal at the request of my professor. The biggest problem is that I JUST had a paper accepted in another journal, so I didn’t really have any new results to publish. I had to set up new experiments in a hurry to test for some theories and methods we were thinking about, but everything was rushed and slapped together with spit and glue.

At least, the deadline is two days ahead of me - I only have about 60% of the experiments completed. I have spend most of the previous week writing the “meat” of the paper and trying to fix the experiments, but by now I have mostly given up, and I’m just trying to write a paper which is good enough not to be thrown out at the first round of reviews, and do the real fixing in the second submission. This is extremely demoralizing.

At the moment I have finished all the coding that I’m willing to do, and run the experiments and see what comes out. I can’t wait to take my life back into my hands; so much to do which is being wasted away by the stress with this paper :-/

Small thought of the week.

After years of Vending machine development, why haven’t they ever tried making drink vending machines that dispense the products a little bit higher? And if they did, why didn’t it take off? Anyone else ever thought about that?

I wonder at those japanese obaasans having to crouch down all the way to the ground every time they want some tea from the vending machines. At least I get annoyed from time to time.