what's your vote...

A: Headboard: Kirk Brummel, Pillow: Quadrille, Window: Victoria Hagan

B. Headboard: Quadrille

C: Headboard: Victoria Hagan

when the hubbie leaves me at home (he went to pick up tay from camp- yippee), i play....here is what i just finished playing around with..tay's pitiful room doesn't even have a picture on the wall (i went on bed rest right after we moved here and then had a newborn). it's really embarrassing...even tay makes comments about it! so here is what we are working with- two twin beds, pillows, and a window treatment. help me with this depressing room; then maybe i will finally do something about it :) so what's your vote??!!

*the monogramed shams were something i had done before we moved here...don't know if they will stay or not.

Funding funnies

Image from Pacific Northwest National Lab

We are trying to train our young son to ask for things politely. However, recently he's learned to demand things in typical toddler diva fashion, i.e., "I want X!"

My husband, also an academic, started a game to train him out of this. Whenever our son said something like, "I want cheese!" my husband would reply, "I want funding!" or "I want a million dollars!" Just this week the boy started getting the hint, so as soon as he heard "I want a million dollars!" he would immediately reply with, "Can I please have some cheese?"

Recently they were playing pretend with some food, and my husband said something like, "I want juice" and without missing a beat my son shouted, "I want funding!"

HKHC Visioning Series

Check out our posters for the upcoming Visioning Series...and come check out each event! Click on each poster to get a closer view...

girl time.

two of my bff's are in town for a couple of days and i couldn't be more excited...on our agenda: pool, pedicures, and lots of catching up and laughing. but right now, i'm off to make whole wheat pancakes w/ fresh fruit :)

btw, did you see these fun desk chairs on design*sponge?? how can that not put a smile on your face??!

*images courtesy of poppy & leo, style notes, D*S

ICVSS 2010: some trivia

If you think that summer schools are only about lectures and posters, you are certainly wrong. Well, I also did not expect that I would get drunk every night (it was not in Russia after all!). On the first night I convinced people to go to the beach for night swimming, but on the next day I realized that it was not a really good idea, because lectures started at 9. Eventually, we did not go to bed early for the rest of the week.

I would like to thank "Marsa Sicla" people (Fig. 1), you were the great company!

Fig. 1. The Marsa Sicla company. Left to right: Richard, Ramin,
Nicolas, Xi, Vijay, Clément, Aish, me. Sandra is behind the camera.

Actually, there was a reason why we had such a close-knit company. On the Fig. 2 you can see the map of the region where the school took place. The school was hosted by Baia Samuele hotel village (inside the blue frame on the map). The cheapest accommodation at Baia Samuele costed €100 per night, so some pragmatic people scared a different accommodation up. It was in a neighbouring hotel village, Marsa Sicla.

Fig. 2. ICVSS location map. View ICVSS_2010_MSvsBS in a larger map

In a map it looked pretty close, but in practice it turned out that there were a lot of fences (blue line)! Officially, we had to walk along the red route (~2.5 km, partly along a highway) through the official entrance. Moreover, we had to leave the village for lunch (since there were buffet), otherwise we would have been charged €30 per meal. To control it they wanted us to leave our documents at the control post (bottom blue tick on Fig. 2). Thus, we were supposed to walk 2.5 km four times a day. But we found a better solution.

Although the fence was equipped with a barbwire, we managed to find two shortcuts (green ticks). One of them led through ever-closed gate (Fig. 3), which were suitable for hopping over. So, we used the green path usually. It made the way two times shorter. Moreover, we did not have to leave Baia Samuele for lunch, since we weren't officially there. Sometimes we even had free lunch, that finally proved that the no free lunch theorem is wrong (joke by Ramin).

Fig. 3. Hopping over the fence.

Well, the lunch was really great. But this was not really a question of food, the main reason not to leave Baia Samuele was of course socialization, which used to be active during lunch (and also Internet access at the conference centre :). If we knew about such situation before booking the apartments, we would probably followed the official accommodation recommendations. However, we had a great company at Marsa Sicla too. But because of "unofficial night programme" I had to (almost) sleep during lectures. Most of guys was on their last year of PhD, so they considered the school as a vacation. But I really wanted to learn a lot of stuff. It was really difficult to perceive any information when you had not slept enough time. Surprisingly, I somehow managed to pass the final exam, but I feel I need to look through the lecture slides again, reading up some papers they refer to, otherwise the scientific part of the school will be useless for me.

Thus, I finish posting about ICVSS. To conclude, I want to recommend everyone to visit such summer schools, because they are the best way to enter into the community.

HKHC Goals

Many of you may be wondering what it is we do. Here are some of our primary goals:

1. Engage the community in a dialogue about healthy eating (HE) and active living (AL) policy, and what it means to you

2. Promote HE and AL policy and environmental change in the City of Buffalo

3. Work with the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board for AL matters

4. Conduct a citywide assessment of policy conditions, physical and environmental landscape, and organizational capacity with respect to HE and AL - what does Buffalo look like right now? What are our assets? What are we missing?

5. Support the development of a Food Policy Council

6. Determine additional needs of HE and AL community in Buffalo

Now is the time to get involved! Contact Jessie at jhersher@bnmc.org to learn more.

What is Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities?

Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities - or HKHC - is a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that focuses on policy- and environmental-change that increases opportunities for physical activity and healthy eating -- leading to better overall health.

Why is this important? Good health goes beyond "not being sick." Good health includes eating right, getting enough exercise and feeling good about ourselves.

We, HKHC Buffalo, want to continue the conversation about healthy eating and active living in Buffalo. We want to hear from you - the residents of the City of Buffalo - about what makes a healthy community. We hope to hear from all ages, and will have activities and sessions geared towards youth and adults. We are getting ready to kick-off with our first event in the coming weeks so watch for more information!

You can also check out more about HKHC at the national level at http://www.healthykidshealthycommunities.org.

ICVSS 2010: Have you cited Lagrange?

Yeah, I have. :) Before the beginning of the summer school we received a homework assignment from Prof. Stefano Soatto. We had to read the three papers and discover the roots of ideas exploited by the authors. Such connections are not obligatory expressed by references. As a result, one had to get a tree (or, may be, lattice) with a root in the given paper. Since the task was not accurately formulated, most of us chose just one paper and made a tree for it. Later it turned out that all three problems (optical flow estimation, multi-view stereo and volume registration) have the same roots because they lead to the similar optimization problems and we were supposed to establish that connection.

I (like most of the students) had a limited time to prepare the work. All the modern research in optical flow is based on two seminal papers by MIT's Horn & Shunk and CMU's Lukas & Kanade, both from 1981. During the last 30 years a lot of work has been done. It was summarized by Sun et al. (2010), who discovered that only small fraction of the ideas give significant improvement and combined them into quite simple method that found its place on the top of Middlebury table. Since I had no time to read a lot of optical flow papers, I discovered a lot of math stuff (like PDEs and variation calculus) used in Horn-Shunk paper. Just as a joke I added references to the works of Newton, Lagrange and d'Alambert to my report. Surprisingly, joke was not really understood.

There were only 21 submissions, one of them was 120 pages long (the author did not show up at the seminar =), the tree depth varied from 1 to 20. I was not the only one who cited "pre-historic" papers, someone traced ideas back to Aristotle through Occam. The questions about the horizon arose: it is really ridiculous to find the roots of computer vision at Aristotle works. Since the prizes were promised for rare references (the prize policy was left unclear too), some argument took place. Soatto did not give any additional explanations on the formulation of the task but let the audience decide which references are legitimate in controversial cases. Eventually, I was among the 5 people whose references were considered controversial, so I needed to defend them. Well, I suppose I looked pretty pathetic talking about Newton's finite differences which were used for approximation of derivatives in the Horn-Shunk's paper. Surprisingly, almost a half of the audience voted for me. =) Also, my reference to the Thomas Reid's essay was tentatively approved.

Finally, there were no bonuses for the papers that could not be found with Google, and the whole $1000 prize went to the Cambridge group. To conclude, Soatto (among other) said that nobody had read any German or Russian papers. After the seminar I told him how I tried to dig into the library (it is described here in Russian), he answered something like "funny, it is hard to find them even for you!"

One evening during the dinner we talked about Russia, and Vijay told a lot of interesting stuff (like the guy who developed ChatRoulette is now working in Silicon Valley). He remembered Stephen Boyd who is known for his jokes about Russia. I said that I watched the records of his amazing course on Convex Optimization. It turned out that Vijay (who is now a PhD student in Stanford) took that course, and he promised to tell Boyd that he has a fan in Russia. (Or, maybe in Soviet Russia fans have Boyd =).

continued here

the house is a little quieter....

okay A LOT quieter, now that my biggest kiddo is off at camp for the week....

it's amazing how easy it gets w/ a baby when the big sister is away. warren and i feel like we are on vacation! we went on a long walk, visited w/ friends and drank wine, cooked a yummy dinner, watched a strange movie, cleaned the house (and it stayed that way), slept in a little...and now i can actually sit at the computer and have time to do things while the baby takes his AM nap.

it's going to be a nice week....BUT i have to admit, i already miss my girl...

*images courtesy of style beat, i heart you, donna giffith, poppy & leo, oh hello friend

ICVSS 2010: lectures and posters

I returned from my eurotrip yesterday and now I am ready to start a series of posts about International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS 2010). Generally, I enjoyed the school. That week gave me (I hope) a lot of new knowledge and new friends.

The scientific programme of the school included lectures, tutorials, a student poster session and a reading group. Lectures occupied most of official programme time and were given by a great team of professors including Richard Szeliski, renowned Tomasso Poggio and enchanting Kristen Grauman. I am not going to describe all the talks, but feature the ones that are close to my interests. You can find the complete programme here. Unfortunately, no video was recorded, but I have an access to all the slides and posters, so if you are interested in anything, I can send it to you (I believe it does not violate any copyrights).

Wednesday was the day of Recognition. Kristen Grauman gave a talk about visual search. She covered the topics concerning specific object search using local descriptors and bags of words, object category search with pyramid matching, and also discussed state-of-the-art in the challenging problem of web-scale image retrieval. Mark Everingham continued with a talk about category recognition and localization using machine learning techniques. Localization is reached using bounding boxes, segments, or object parts search (like finding eyes and a mouth to find a face). Sure he could not avoid to mention importance of context. He also explained the PASCAL VOC evaluation protocol.

The tutorials covered some applications and did not really impress me. Poster session was a great opportunity to meet people. Some posters were really decent, for example Michael Bleyer's poster on dense stereo estimation using soft segmentation, which won a half of the school's best presentation prize. The work was done with Microsoft Research Cambridge, they formulated a really complicated energy function based on surface plane estimations and minimized it with Lempitsky's graph-cut based fusion-move algorithm (2009). More details could be found in their recent CVPR paper.

The problem with the poster session was that lecturers did not attend it, although they could really give a great feedback. My presentation was in the last day of the session after the not-really-popular reading group and in the room upstairs (its existence was not a well-known fact :), so many people preferred to spend that evening on the beach. The school audience was quite heterogeneous, there were a lot of people from medical imaging, video compression etc., so I had to explain some basics (like MRFs) to some students interested in my poster. There were also really smart guys (like those from Cambridge group). There was a bit of useful feedback: someone recommended me to use QPBO for inference, and I should probably consider it.

Since the speakers did not attend the poster session, students had to communicate with them informally. A roommate of mine, Ramin, who does a crowd analysis, caught Richard Szeliski and asked him about local descriptors in video that operate in 3D image-time space. Szeliski told that it is a promising field and even remembered Ivan Laptev's name. During our tour to Ragusa Ibla I asked Mark Everingham (who is probably the closest of all speakers to my topic) about 3D point cloud classification. He said it was not really his field, but it should be fruitful to analyse clouds not only in local levels, and stuff like multi-layer CRFs could be useful. During the last 2 years there appeared a few papers that exploit that simple intuitive idea and incorporate shape detectors with CRFs, but it usually looks awkward. Well, may be smartly designed multi-layer CRFs might be really useful. It is funny, when I told Everingham that I'm from Moscow he replied that it was great, Moscow has a great math school and remembered Vladimir Kolmogorov. So, our education seems to be not so terrible. :D

continued here

Parkour Visions Summit and Talk

On August 13-15th, my friends Rafe Kelley and Tyson Cecka are hosting a parkour summit at their Seattle gym Parkour Visions. For those of you not familiar with the sport, here's a description from the Parkour Visions site:

"The essence of Parkour can be stated simply: it is the art of overcoming obstacles as swiftly and efficiently as possible using only your body. The fundamentals include running, jumping, and climbing, and we build on these fundamentals to improve our ability to pass over, under, around and through obstacles with more complex movements. Parkour is a system of fitness training that improves strength, speed, agility, co-ordination, stamina, endurance, and precision. It offers a full-body workout at any level of experience, and improves your ability to move, to harness your confidence, to change how you see the world. Parkour practitioners are called traceurs."

The summit will include seminars on strength training, injury prevention and rehab, and nutrition, as well as parkour jams, a roundtable and a dinner. I'll be giving a talk titled "Natural Eating for Sustainable Athletic Performance" on Saturday, August 14 from noon to 1:00 pm.

Registration is $40 for the whole summit. You can read a description of it here, and find a link to the registration system at the bottom of this page.

The google gossip trade

Photo by Sklathill

The NYT has a fantastic article in this weekend's magazine on something I have been stamping my feet about for years. It is about how the permanence of our digital lives (a lack of ephemerality) is significantly affecting our physical day-to-day lives, often in adverse ways.  (I unfortunately don't have the time to summarize the article - please go read it, it's very well written.)

Our world has not only become a panopticon, but it is a permanent, indexed, fully searchable one. This is not merely your employer seeing a photo of you being goofy at a party, this is a permanent record of your daily existence of which you increasingly have absolutely no control over.

The right to anonymity and ephemerality of action is something we take for granted when acting in the physical world. The problem is that the digital world does not in any way reflect these assumptions. Not only is everything you do online often fully archived and linkable to you, but with the advent of social media everything other people post about you is too.

There are a ton of papers in the literature about how online activities we believe to be anonymous are not at all. Seemingly innocuous and anonymous net activity can reveal one's search queries, social security number, phone number, sexual orientation, political views, travel plans, oh, and, one's real identity when they thought they were anonymous. I think I meet a new researcher mining Twitter for gold just about every other day. The fact is, computer scientists are clever folks, and coming up with these kinds of algorithms is quite easy.  And they're the good guys/gals.

Being a private person, I find these papers terrifying. But when I talk to many people about it, they say, "I don't care. I have nothing to hide." This is a selfish and, frankly, privileged attitude to have. For people living in countries with authoritarian governments, anonymity is often the only path to freedom. Imagine the Underground Railroad or hidden Jews during the Holocaust being successful with 24/7 video surveillance, with automatic face tagging being posted to live feeds on Facebook. Or more recently, imagine someone using these techniques to out Iranian green party members. They'd be killed. And I don't think the counter-argument holds; I doubt such a permanent panopticon will suddenly engender good behavior.

One of the best things about our freedom as human beings is that other people quickly forget our stupid, embarrassing moments. People don't always know who we are everywhere we go. We can take many risks freely. But, increasingly, neither our technology nor our legislation is supporting us in this. And that, in my opinion, is very dangerous indeed.

ILMU ALAM: Soal kuis bab 4 dan 5

Belajar Komputer | ILMU ALAM: Soal kuis bab 4 dan 5: "download disini: http://www.scribd.com/full/34581145?access_key=key-2h5pj0yw736hd4rcbuis"

good morning sunshine....

if only my house looked this put together and beautiful when i woke up!!

*images courtesy of this is glamorous, little emma english home, unknown

Disconnected connectedness

NPR had a nice interview yesterday with the author of Hamlet's BlackBerry, William Powers. In the interview, Powers talks about how several information upgrades in recent history (Roman cities and papyrus, the printing press, and now the internet), and how, always, society struggles to cope.

Photo by YlvaS

Academics are of course no exception to feeling overloaded. I am presently at a conference, and yesterday chatted with a friend. She said she struggles with staying present in life. Even while we were outside walking in a beautifully wooded area, she said she is always thinking of the next project, the next paper, etc.

This seems like a terribly stressful way to live.

Powers discusses ways in which his family has "offline time" on weekends, where they spend the entire time with each other instead of computing. Most people I know also seem to have developed certain rules for managing their technology. Like, "I don't use instant messenger at work", "I only check email after 6pm.", etc. This is certainly how I manage things, but perhaps due to occupational hazard I am more used to technology than most, and thus it's easier for me to ignore it.

The trick, I think, is to manage things in such a way that you can attend to the important things (i.e., your co-author needs your feedback by tomorrow), and disregard the unimportant things (i.e., the latest old spice guy video). Sadly all this technology is designed to trick our sensation-seeking brains into thinking every piece of information we receive is equally important, and sets it off into fire-fighting mode every time it dings/flashes/buzzes.

Speaking of which, back to meatspace...

Real Food XI: Sourdough Buckwheat Crepes

Buckwheat was domesticated in Southeast Asia roughly 6,000 years ago. Due to its unusual tolerance of cool growing conditions, poor soils and high altitudes, it spread throughout the Northern latitudes of Eurasia, becoming the staple crop in many regions. It's used to a lesser extent in countries closer to the equator. It was also a staple in the Northeastern US until it was supplanted by wheat and corn.

Buckwheat isn't a grain: it's a 'pseudograin' that comes from a broad-leaved plant. As such, it's not related to wheat and contains no allergenic gluten. Like quinoa, it has some unusual properties that make it a particularly nutritious food. It's about 16 percent protein by calories, ranking it among the highest protein grains. However, it has an advantage over grains: it contains complete protein, meaning it has a balance of essential amino acids similar to animal foods. Buckwheat is also an exceptional source of magnesium and copper, two important nutrients that may influence the risk of insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease (1, 2).

However, like all seeds (including grains and nuts), buckwheat is rich in phytic acid. Phyic acid complexes with certain minerals, preventing their absorption by the human digestive tract. This is one of the reasons why traditional cultures prepare their grains carefully (3). During soaking, and particularly fermentation of raw batters, an enzyme called phytase goes to work breaking down the phytic acid. Not all seeds are endowed with enough phytase to break down phytic acid in a short period of time. Buckwheat contains a lot of phytase, and consequently fermented buckwheat batters contain very little phytic acid (4, 5). It's also high in astringent tannins, but thorough soaking in a large volume of water removes them.

Buckwheat is fermented in a number of traditional cultures. In Bhutan, it's fermented to make flatbreads and alcoholic drinks (6). In Brittany (Bretagne; Northwestern France), sourdough buckwheat flour pancakes are traditional. Originally a poverty food, it is now considered a delicacy.

The following simple recipe is based on my own experimentation with buckwheat. It isn't traditional as far as I know, however it is based on traditional methods used to produce sourdough flatbreads in a number of cultures. I used the word 'crepe' to describe it, but I typically make something more akin to a savory pancake or uttapam. You can use it to make crepes if you wish, but this recipe is not for traditional French buckwheat crepes.

It's important that the buckwheat be raw and whole for this recipe. Raw buckwheat is light green to light brown (as in the photo above). Kasha is toasted buckwheat, and will not substitute properly. It's also important that the water be dechlorinated and the salt non-iodized, as both will interfere with fermentation.

For a fermentation starter, you can use leftover batter from a previous batch (although it doesn't keep very long), or rice soaking water from this method (7).

Ingredients and Materials

• 2-3 cups raw buckwheat groats
• Dechlorinated water (filtered, boiled, or rested uncovered overnight)
• Non-iodized salt (sea salt, pickling salt or kosher salt), 2/3 tsp per cup of buckwheat
  
• Fermentation starter (optional), 2 tablespoons
  
• Food processor or blender

Recipe

1. Cover buckwheat with a large amount of dechlorinated water and soak for 9-24 hours. Raw buckwheat is astringent due to water-soluble tannins. Soaking in a large volume of water and giving it a stir from time to time will minimize this. The soaking water will also get slimy. This is normal.
   
2. Pour off the soaking water and rinse the buckwheat thoroughly to get rid of the slime and residual tannins.
3. Blend the buckwheat, salt, dechlorinated water and fermentation starter in a food processor or blender. Add enough water so that it reaches the consistency of pancake batter. The smoother you get the batter, the better the final product will be.
4. Ferment for about 12 hours, a bit longer or shorter depending on the temperature and whether or not you used a starter. The batter may rise a little bit as the microorganisms get to work. The smell will mellow out. Refrigerate it after fermentation.
   
5. In a greased or non-stick skillet, cook the batter at whatever thickness and temperature you prefer. I like to cook a thick 'pancake' with the lid on, at very low heat, so that it steams gently.
   

Dig in! Its mild flavor goes with almost anything. Batter will keep for about four days in the fridge.

Thanks to Christaface for the CC licensed photo (Flickr).

simple things....

i am the first to admit that i get caught up in my daily routine....especially with a newborn and a 3 yr old. last night around 10:00, warren and i just sat and talked- no tv, no computer, no cell phones, no kids....it was wonderful. it's amazing how simple things can be so fulfilling...i highly recommend trying it :)

*images courtesy of bippity boppity boo, ruffled, oak management, tilly & fran

Minger Responds to Campbell

Hot off the presses: Dr. Colin Campbell's response to Denise Minger's China Study posts, and Minger's retort:

A Challenge and Response to the China Study

The China Study: My Response to Campbell

This is required reading for anyone who wants to evaluate Dr. Campbell's claims about the China Study data. Denise points out that Dr. Campbell's claims rest mostly on uncorrected associations, which is exactly what he was accusing Minger, Chris Masterjohn and Anthony Colpo of doing. He also appears to have selectively reported data that support his philosophy, and ignored data that didn't, even when the latter were stronger. This is true both in Dr. Campbell's book, and in his peer-reviewed papers. This type of thing is actually pretty common in the diet-health literature.

I respect everyone's food choices, whether they're omnivores, carnivores, or raw vegans, as long as they're doing it in a way that's thoughtful toward other people, animals and the environment. I'm sure there are plenty of vegans out there who are doing it gracefully, not spamming non-vegan blogs with arrogant comments.

As human beings, we're blessed and cursed with an ego, which is basically a self-esteem and self-image reinforcement machine. Since being wrong hurts our self-esteem and self-image, the ego makes us think we're right about more than we actually are. That can take the form of elaborate justifications, and the more intelligent the person, the more elaborate the justifications. An economic policy that makes you richer becomes the best way to improve everyone's bottom line. A dietary philosophy that was embraced for humane reasons becomes the path to optimum health... such is the human mind. Science is basically an attempt to remove as much of this psychic distortion as possible from an investigation. Ultimately, the scientific method requires rigorous and vigilant stewardship to achieve what it was designed to do.

TGIF

i thought these images were a perfect way to start the weekend....

the last image is my favorite though...he will be one month tomorrow and i couldn't love him more if i tried. although, i started thinking if he could talk, would he say "seriously mom...why did you have to throw me in with such a girly set of photos..."

good thing he can't talk :)

*images courtesy of sanity fair, this is glamorous, house beautiful, where the sidewalk begins, mood board, me

jadeite...

i adore jadeite....the color totally has me smitten. my mom got me started on it. her collection is a lot better then mine. i only have a couple of pieces but i try to use them as often as possible b/c i think it makes my food taste better :)

*images courtesy of only a paper moon, cat faery shari, james merrell

Don't drunk dial the program chair

Part of being able to weather the storms of science is to recognize that generally the peer-review process is a meritocracy, but -
- The world is an unfair place
- Bad things happen to good people and vice-versa

Photo by jaycoxfilm

Sometimes you will have reviewers who miss the point. Sometimes people in positions of power over some aspect of your career (PCs, editors, funding bodies) will make large-scale decisions for their organization which leave you holding the short end of the stick. Sometimes people won't hire you.

In the end, it's entirely up to you to decide how to move forward. Lick your wounds before trying again, vent to friends, go for a jog. Whatever your coping strategy, though, sending an angry, reactionary, uninvited email to the committee is unlikely to help your case, and in general just reflects poorly on you.

That isn't to say one shouldn't make a fuss when warranted. For clear cut cases of racism, sexism, cronyism,  etc., such a response may be perfectly appropriate. But in general, if it's just a rejected paper, in the long run it's probably best to just move on and try again somewhere else.

sometimes i find myself wishing i could see the future for one split second....

*images courtesy of unknown, the neotraditionalist, living etc

The elephant in the room

Both GMP and Pika have posts about being frequently barraged about "where they're from" due to having accents not frequently heard in the places they live. Both posts discuss how to deflect conversations when the questioners seem to lose all sense of social graces and just start acting dumb.

Image by movimente

As a native English speaker I fortunately haven't encountered this problem, and the only other foreign language I speak people are far too nice and socially conscious to ask such questions. However, I think the "where are you from?" question belongs to a larger issue, and that is the case of being Other.

When you are Other, due to nationality, gender, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, disability status, parental status, marital status, sexual orientation, (and countless other things), some people find themselves unable to restrain themselves and feel like they must point out that you are Other.

I find this usually happens in one of two ways - either someone is over-the-top direct in their comment, or they attempt to be indirect and bury themselves in the ground faster than you can say "shovel".

An example of the direct case. I am sitting with a large group of male computer scientists. Someone makes a comment about the lack of women in technology, and the sea of male faces turn to me expecting an Insightful Comment about the topic. I don't always have a good answer, and may feel a bit uncomfortable being asked to represent all women, but I generally don't mind because usually these commenters have good intentions.

The indirect case is what drives me nuts. This is when you can tell the person is feeling extremely uncomfortable about The Others, but isn't really aware that they're uncomfortable, and just starts talking talking talking, oblivious to the hole they are digging and the sea of uncomfortable faces around them.

For example, I was once at a conference that happened to have a fair number of women in attendance. Not the majority, or even half, but certainly more than at most CS conferences. At one break I was chatting with a female friend, and this older, caucasian man joins the conversation. He says, "Wow! There are a lot of women here. I'll tell you, I sure feel like a minority at this conference."

Recently I was at a large gathering of engineers. The gender mix was ok (though I'm not sure how many women were engineers and how many were spouses), but the racial mix was pretty abysmal. I saw a few people of east asian decent, and two people of african descent, but that was it.

Early at the gathering I found myself in a group chatting with three caucasian men: Emeritus professor (EP), career postdoc (CP), and my friend. EP asks my friend where he's from. My friend tells him he's from Southern State. EP starts talking about how he visited a city in an adjacent Southern State, and starts talking about how he rode the subway there. Then he says, "It was amazing. I got on the subway, and I was the only white man there. Everyone was black. I felt so uncomfortable."

And he keeps talking. And talking. And talking. And keeps looking over at me to make some kind of comment. Then CP attempts to help(?) this conversation by slightly changing the topic to once while traveling being lost in a bad neighborhood where people were shooting up heroin. Then EP starts to talk about his other travels, and says that his son married "a girl" from a southeast asian country, and how when he visits her family there ("who are lovely, by the way"), he is often the only white person.

At this point I want to punch the guy, but more importantly I don't want the Others at this party to overhear EP running his mouth. They deal with this crap every single day, perhaps are even already dealing with this at this party. So I loudly interrupt his diatribe.

"SO! I HEAR YOU DO OPTICS RESEARCH?"

He happily switches to talking about lasers, and all is right in the world again.

So in short, my approach to dealing with clueless people who seem to be unable to control their mouths is to change the topic, bluntly and directly if need be, back to science, the weather, sports, movies; whatever neutral topic I can think of. If they are so clueless that they don't understand my deflection and continue to make rude remarks about  Otherness, I keep trying to change the topic. If they still don't get it and it's someone I need to interact with frequently, sometimes I'll pull them aside and say, "Please stop talking about X. It's unprofessional and makes me feel like an Other."

Midnight Sun

So, I thought I sucked at running trail races.... well you should see me in a kayak race.

The Yukon River Quest is a 740 km canoe and kayak race from Whitehorse to Dawson City in the Yukon.
Bill Nightingale and I joined on a whim last October not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into.
Karen asked if I looked at the videos on You Tube about Five Finger and Rink rapids along the course, or the warnings on Lake Labarge, but told her I did not because I did not want to scare myself out of it.

When we arrived in Whitehorse three days before the race to get our gear in order and do a 20km test paddle of our rented kayak, it was mid 20's and sunny. And sunny around the clock since it was Midnight Sun in the north. I have a picture of me standing in the main intersection of town showing the time on my watch (midnight) with daylight equivalent to an afternoon here.

But on race day the temperature plummeted to +8 and rain with river temperatures about the same.

To make things interesting the start line is 400 meters away in the park with a sprint to your boat. Being gentlemen we let everyone else go ahead while we strolled down to the waters edge, and casually got into our kayak. This turned out to be a smart move because we passed people on the water who were trying to paddle and get their spray skirts on or readjust gear that they inadvertently kicked or nudged out of position.

My biggest worry was Lake Labarge because of stories I had heard.
Well the stories were tame compared to the lake.
Five foot waves coming from behind, with a wind that came from the side and a kayak that wanted to act like a submarine.
I had a death grip on the paddle and stroked like a mad man just so I could get off the section of water. Problem is that it is around 50km long.

We made it to the end of the lake and went ashore at the checkpoint. We were both soaked and frozen.
A change of clothes and some hot tea got us back into the right frame of mind.

We were told later that a large number of boats (21) had scratched by the end of the lake. Weather and water conditions took its toll on even the hard core teams.

Now with 12 hours under our belt we would paddle through the midnight sun, finding out the hard way of sleep deprivation. Oh... the things you think you see.

We took a number of short cat naps trying to keep us from falling asleep paddling and rolling the kayak over.

Around noon we decided we had to get out of the boat to stretch only to find a patch of grass that made a nice mattress.

At the second last checkpoint we were told we had 60-ish km to Carmacks and only 4 1/2 hours to do it in. But then a huge black sky rolled in over the ridge with promise of lightning and heavy rain. We may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer but we knew not to be on the river during lightning activity.
The storm was fast and furious and ate up a half hour while Bill and I sat under a ledge.

Now we are paddling our guts out to make the deadline.

Our dash to the finish with everything we have, was to a bend in the river. But turned out short by approximately 2km's. I had miss read the map!

Now we try to keep the power stroke going but as we turn the last bend to the dock in Carmacks a fellow on the dock is shacking his head.

We were 35 hours and 5 minutes. Five minutes over the cut-off time.

They apologised as they cut our race numbers off.

We are officially out of the race.

Over 340 km's we had paddled in one of the most remote river conditions in Canada and we are short by 5 freaking minutes.

Were we disappointed?
No, because we now know what to expect next year.

Lab Leadership

Matt Welsh has a nice post today, "the subtle art of managing a research group". I liked this quote a lot:

"..the book on motivating people gets into the various ways of getting your "employees" (a.k.a. students) to be productive, and talks all about the pros and cons of the carrot versus the stick. Synopsis: If you can get inside the head of an unmotivated student and figure out what they want, you can motivate them to do anything."

Image by Dunechaser

This is definitely my preferred management style, in both academia and industry. For my students, I try to figure out what it is that they really enjoy doing and really want to do, and try to support them in doing it.

Perhaps my most important epiphany, though, has been the realization that different people need to be managed differently. I think a good manager is able to adapt to the needs of their employee/student. And, also, realizing the way you would like to be managed yourself is not necessarily the way everyone else would like to be managed.

For example, my preferred management style (as both a manager/advisor and employee/student) is hands-off-but-available. I absolutely abhor being micro-managed, and equally abhor micro-managing others. However, there have been several occasions where I had to micro-manage someone. There was just no other way - they were incapable of self-directing. (While I think industry tolerates such people, I suspect they would utterly flop in academia).

I love how Matt writes about his advisor using Jedi mind tricks to subtly nudge his students to do things. My advisor does this too, and it's just incredible. I'm very direct - when I'm reviewing someone's work, I simply say, "I think you should do X, Y, and Z." Whereas my advisor can beautifully phrase things in such a way that you never realize until long afterward that you've been nudged.