groenester

After the Energy Hour, the Energy Year!

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 03:20:55 GMT

As I usually say at the beginning of a new post, it has been a while since the last time I wrote anything :) Today I plan to talk about three things: compact fluorescent lights, organic food (again), and the Energy Hour.

The first topic is a simple one: compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). According to the "Green Book", this significantly reduces the amount of energy used for lighting, and also saves money (something I don't care that much about, but it certainly doesn't hurt). I am happy to say that I finally replaced all my lightbulbs by compact fluorescent ones yesterday. I got the GE lightbulbs, with an output equivalent to 100 watts (the highest available, since I also want to preserve my eyesight as long as possible). They are available at both La Verde's (MIT Student center) as well as Economy Hardware, among other stores :)

This article in the New York Times discusses some of the limitations of CFLs; despite the concerns about mercury level and actual longevity, I believe that CFLs are the way of the future - sure, they require some more work to reach the strictest standards yet stay affordable, but doesn't every new technology?

Now, as promised, I am going to come back to some issues surrounding organic food. There are reasonable doubts about scalability (can we produce enough organic food to feed the continent?), the benefits for the environment (especially because a lot of organic food leaves a big carbon footprint due to being transported from far away), and the health benefits. The following three articles (all from the New York Times) shed some light on these questions: Article 1, Article 2, and Article 3. I highly recommend reading them, but for those of you who are too busy to do so, here's a summary. Article 1 talks about the idea of "traceability" - the ability to pinpoint the exact farm (and farmer) that was responsible for producing the organic product you are consuming. This new trend aims to reconnect farmers and buyers, as well as serve as an additional "quality control". Article 2 is about healthy eating habits and their independence of the kind of food that is consumed (organic vs. non-organic). Finally, Article 3 describes the recent initiatives, both at the government level as well as at the corporate level, related to promoting organic agriculture. I feel that NYT provides a reasonably diversified coverage of this (and many other issues), so I recommend subscribing to their website (which is free!).

The last topic I am going to touch on is energy conservation. I am writing this right after the yearly Earth Hour (which took place from 8:30 to 9:30 PM, and was a global act of solidarity in the fight against global warming). I was pleasantly surprised to see the majority of our neighbors' windows (I am currently in Montreal) go dark during that period. However, there was still some rather vehement discussion about the existence of global warming on the Facebook page for the event (type Earth Hour on Facebook to find it); while I definitely enjoy a good discussion on such an important topic, the arguments offered by the skeptics were quite misinformed and unconvincing (e.g. "Well, we humans don't know much, so how can we be sure that this is for real?"). That said, although symbolic gestures are important, one hour is not enough to make a difference - what we really need is to always keep energy consumption in mind in our daily lives. [I make a similar argument about Valentine's Day, by the way.]

So, here are some concrete things I plan to do in the next year in order to reduce energy consumption and increase efficiency in my life and the life of those around me. I will educate myself on ways of cutting energy use (such as replacing lightbulbs, turning off electronic devices when not in use, and using solar power), and then help educate others by writing in my blog and also talking about it to the residents of my dorm (if everything goes well, I will become its Environmental Chair next year). I will also learn more about renewable energy sources (the recent documentary "Energy Crossroads" is a good start), and try to switch to those to the extent possible. Finally, I will learn about how energy is related to other environmental issues. In this way, next year will truly become the "Energy Year" :)

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:25:41 GMT

Dear readers,

I must apologize for not having written anything for such a long time. I have been thinking a lot, and did not want to write anything before I could formulate my thoughts in a clear way. But I finally realized that they will be refined as I write them down, and hopefully your comments will also help me bring more clarity to what is now a very disorganized state of mind.

Before I go on, let me start with the good news: in my last post, I wrote about my plans to start composting; well, this week I finally acted on it, and dedicated a coffee container (the coffee was left over from a previous roommate - I don't drink coffee myself) to collect the compostable part of my trash. Once it gets full, I will take it down to the composting bin, and start again :)

Another bit of good news has been my discovery of the Harvest Coop just a five-minute bike ride away from my dorm. This is a store that specializes not only on organic groceries, but also on local produce and products, and many of the items on sale there are both organic and local! I was a little bit taken aback by some of the prices, but (as I had argued earlier) the positive effect on my conscience seems to make it all worth it. Among the other things that I discovered there was a brand of chocolate that is both organic and fair-trade (previously I had to decide between these two properties, as the store I was shopping at for food did not carry an option combining the two). You can find out more about this chocolate here.

However, my discovery has not been limited to grocery stores. Yesterday, two of my friends had a birthday party at a restaurant/bar called "Craigie on the Main". I was really pleasantly surprised to find out that they made a specific effort to make their food organic and local, and even some of their wine was organic. Granted, the prices were not the most affordable, but they were not unreasonable either. I should also mention that I have spoken to several people in the past few weeks who disputed the benefit of organic products to the environment. Whether or not their arguments have a basis I need to investigate this question a little bit further. I do believe, however, that as the organic industry grows, more stringent standards will be put into place for organic certification, whether through self-regulation or government regulation.

And, indeed, it is the people that I have spoken to in the past few weeks that have perhaps been the biggest source of joy in my life. Some of them were supportive of my efforts, others a bit more (constructively) critical. Let me summarize the most important of my interactions here.

I was very fortunate to attend the screening of a documentary called "King Corn" recently, and I met someone from the Working Group on Recycling (WGR), that I have since decided to join. The WGR works primarily with faculty and staff, but also other members of the departments at MIT, to educate them about recycling and broader environmental issues and to implement new measures. Like the other university down the street, MIT has also decided to implement the so-called "single-stream recycling" starting sometime this year (pilot projects are currently underway). I am very excited that it will become much easier to recycle now, which, I hope, will stimulate more of the members of our community to recycle whatever can be recycled instead of throwing it out. I have learned quite a few things about recycling, but I will leave those for a later post.

I was also very fortunate to attend the screening of another documentary, "Energy Crossroads", at our dorm, where I met the dorm's environmental chair (a position on the dorm student council whose responsibilities span the whole spectrum of environmental initiatives). We had a great post-movie discussion, and I believe that there is a lot of potential synergies for having more environmental initiatives at the dorm level.

Of course, not all people I talk to are like-minded. Some of my close friends have already pointed out that I was becoming a little bit more aggressive than usual in trying to convince them to start changing their own lives "for the greener". Others pointed out the need to "pick my battles" (I am still sorting that one out, hopefully I'll address it in one of my future posts). Last but not least, I have received both support and constructive criticism from a very special person whom I shall not name. I am very grateful for both, because feedback is crucial in the kind of initiatives that I undertake; my hope is that nobody remains indifferent to them!

I haven't said a third of what I had planned, but that's my punishment for not having written for so long; I am hoping (although I know better than to make promises) to keep writing on a more regular basis from now on. But please comment a lot, and let me know if there is anything specific you would like me to address. As much as I like to tell myself that whether or not anyone reads what I write is secondary, I am always happy to see what kind of responses I get!

Home sweet home

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:02:47 GMT

Wow, it's been over a week since I've posted anything - that's not a good sign :) On the plus side, I did accomplish a lot of things in other areas of my life, and now I will be able to focus on "greening" it a little bit more than usual.

Before going on, I will briefly summarize my results from trying to change my paper consumption patterns, especially in the area of money. I have opted out of receiving direct mail at home, and also took the opportunity to opt out of getting marketing calls at home. I changed my phone service provider (more details about that later), and chosen not to receive any more paper bills. I also closed my account at a bank that insisted on printing out receipts every time I withdrew money from the ATM, but kept my account with the MIT Federal Credit Union which is flexible in that matter. Of course, the receipts were not the only reason to close the account - I was also not satisfied with several other features - but they provided the extra motivation I needed to act. Finally, I have completely switched to online credit card statements for the one credit card I still own. The one thing I did not manage to do was to opt out of receiving paycheck stubs by mail (the money gets directly deposited into my account) - apparently, it is my employer's policy that pay stubs need to be sent to the employees, and can neither be turned down nor even picked up.

And now, the things I have been working on in the past week (without writing about them): they are from chapter 1 of "The Green Book" called "Home". This is one reason for the title of my post, the other one being that I am spending most of this week home with my parents (thanks to the US Thanksgiving holiday), and will try to see whether I can make any changes there as well.

As usual, I am only listing suggestions that are relevant to my situation, and performing my own analysis; whether or not these would work for you is really up to you to decide!

For the "Kitchen" subsection, which I worked on last week, the suggestions were as follows:
1. compost (keep kitchen scraps from fruits, vegetables, and coffee grounds in a composting bin)
2. food waste (use perishable ingredients before they spoil, measure carefully, save leftovers)
3. microwave (keep microwave clean to maximize its energy efficiency)
4. refrigerator (keep the refrigerator door closed)
5. storage containers (store food in glass or porcelain containers instead of using plastic)
6. trash bags (use leftover paper or plastic bags as liners for the trash can)
7. water filters (install water filters on the faucets instead of buying bottled water)

Out of these, 1 was the most troublesome. I know very little about composting, and would much rather avoid the hassle - but I am also aware that I am wasting a lot of good resources by doing that. Luckily, we have a large composting bin in our dorm; all I need to do is separate the compostable parts of my trash, and then take it downstairs to be composted. I have not yet started doing this, but will give it a try as soon as I return from my break. By the way, I have recently heard a presentation about an absolutely mind-blowing project on zero-waste management; you can find the details here. Maybe, just maybe, I will one day get trained in doing this sort of thing!

I had already been doing 2 (sometimes taking the risk of eating recently, or even not so recently expired food items rather than discarding them) and 5 (the reason behind 5 is actually that chemicals can transfer from plastic to food to body and may cause health risks, although hard evidence for the health risks is difficult to find). Instead of 6, I have been trying to reuse my plastic bags for packaging (and packing) in the past, because our trash bags get automatically replaced by the dorm maintenance people. I have also started making a conscious effort to avoid taking plastic bags at the grocery stores - some of them have reusable environmentally-friendly cloth alternatives, and I now bring my backpack for carrying groceries to those that do not. As a result, my plastic bag "collection" has stabilized at its current size, rather than continuously growing.

I have made an effort to clean up my microwave (which has become somewhat dirty over the years that I've had it), although I did not try measuring the improvement in energy efficiency. It is definitely more pleasing to the eye now that it's clean :) For the refrigerator door, I have also started limiting myself to two uses per meal: one to take all the things I need out of the fridge, and one to put them back in. This requires foreseeing what will be consumed during the meal, and may not be possible when I have visitors (especially since I tend to take more and more things out of the fridge as the meal goes on, as those who have visited me have noticed). However, even then I try to limit myself to opening the door no more than three times per meal.

This takes care of 3 and 4, and leaves us with 7. It turns out that the tap water in Cambridge is sufficiently clean and a filter is not necessary to purify it. I used to consume a lot of bottled water, but I have since decided to use only tap water (which I boil in a kettle if necessary). I do occasionally use bottled water when it is given for free at a seminar that I am attending, but even then I prefer carrying my mug around and using that instead.

That's it for today, stay tuned for more subsections and also the results of my experiments at home (or, more precisely, at my parents' home)!

A brief post

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:23:25 GMT

One of the best "green tips" I've seen so far was the following one: get enough sleep! Here is the explanation: If you get enough sleep (which usually means sleeping more), you will consume less energy, both in terms of electricity usage and food intake. And of course, the benefits to your health are invaluable! So I am going to follow this advice and call it a day - although I hate to break my promise of posting my plan for the week tonight, I really do need to get enough sleep because I have an important day tomorrow. And if you're reading this late at night, I would suggest you do the same :)

Finally, a post!

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:02:51 GMT

Dear readers,

I would like to thank those of you who have expressed your impatience to read the next installment of my journal. I have been rather busy for several reasons - the US elections (in which, though I was not participating, I helped monitor the vote counting process with a non-partisan NGO, Black Box Voting ), a new research project (this one deals with the malaria genome, and I am REALLY excited about it), and last, but not least, an unusually eventful personal life :) But I have always had my journal in the back of my mind, and I am happy to be writing again (although the timing for doing so is not ideal). The title of today's post is a variation on "Finally, a plot!" - allegedly ordered by an unsatisfied writer to be written on his tombstone...

Before I continue, I would like to make a couple of general comments. First, I am very happy about the results of the US elections. While I did not have a strong sympathy for either of the candidates, partly due to my unwillingness to learn more about them, I do think that Barack Obama's much stronger commitment to environmental issues really made the difference for me. I do hope that the opportunity to make a change on this front will indeed materialize into real change. The second comment is that, as a rule, I will avoid doing "negative publicity" on my blog. That is to say, I will commend those (people, companies, organizations) who do good things for the environment, but I will never explicitly mention the name of those who do not. In some cases (like the elections comment above) that will be a purely formal omission, but in others, it will actually be a significant one. The reason for doing that is because I believe in the maxim "Hate the sin, not the sinner" (found in the Bible, among other sources). Any entity that has made mistakes in the past can always make amendments, and I do not make myself the judge of "bad behavior" precisely because I have hope that such amendments will be made. If you find it strange that I do not mention the "offenders" in my blog, now you at least know why.

And now, it is time to make good on a promise I have made last time: to tell you about the implementation of my simple steps to make my life more environmentally friendly in a specific area. This time, it was everything dealing with money (and paper consumption in general). I am happy to report that I have implemented all the changes I mentioned last time, and it was a fairly painless thing to do. In addition, as I will describe below, these changes brought about other changes by a chain reaction, so that other areas of my life have been improved as well.

First of all, I removed myself from all the direct marketing lists, at a cost of only $1. I did so by going to the Mail Preference Service and filling out 4 simple forms: one for credit card reports, one for catalogs, one for journals and magazines, and one for other direct marketing. From now on, I will no longer receive any unsolicited mail in my inbox, which will not only save a lot of trees from being used for paper, but also will save me time in opening the offers and taking them to recycling!

While I was at it, I've decided to examine the other sources of mail in my inbox. I receive monthly statements telling me how much I have earned - since the money is directly deposited into my bank account, I believe I could dispense with that (and I will try to do so tomorrow). In addition, my MIT Federal Credit Union credit card account is managed both online and via paper statements (my bank accounts are already paperless) - which is also superfluous. My phone bill also comes both in paper and electronic form - but I actually decided (for a different reason) that I no longer needed to receive service at my home phone, so I've canceled that. I will continue to monitor my inbox, but for now it seems like I've managed to significantly decrease the volume of paper mail that I receive.

The second thing was ATM receipts. I do not get any from MIT FCU, but I do automatically get one every time I withdraw money from my account at the other bank I am a member of. The main advantage of the other bank was that of convenience - it has ATMs in many locations around Boston and the US, while MIT FCU's ATMs are only located on MIT campus. However, there were several other disadvantages, besides the ATM receipts. Every time I withdrew more money than I had in my checking account (but less than I had in my combined checking and savings account), I had to pay a $10 transfer fee (which was not the case with MIT FCU). And furthermore, I got a lot of marketing calls offering me various products and services in addition to the ones I currently have; and that started to get unpleasant lately. For all these reasons, I've decided to simplify my life and only keep my MIT FCU account. As for ATMs, most places accept debit or credit cards nowadays, and MIT FCU actually allows its members two free withdrawals from other banks' ATMs per month. So with just a little bit of planning, I will be perfectly fine!

One last thing worth mentioning is that the excess of marketing calls I have been receiving led me to look for a way out. It turned out to be quite easy! All I needed to do was to visit the Do Not Call Registry , and after five minutes I was removed from all telemarketers' lists. I am actually quite happy with this chain reaction, as I am now going to be less likely to be disturbed when working, as well as protect the environment!

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post, in which I discuss the next area of my life I will try changing!

A different perspective on money

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:11:15 GMT

After venturing into the realm of economics yesterday, I would like to start today's post by making one additional point. Although, as the quote goes, "in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice", the one-dimensional view of utility adopted in economics may be in part responsible for the one-dimensional evaluation of a company's performance, namely, how much profit it makes. Hypothetically, seeking to maximize not the profit (a one-dimensional measure), but a vector only one of whose components is the profit could lead to a more inclusive account of a company's performance. But right now, let me look at money in the concrete sense of the term, and consider the environmental impact that its use in our daily life has.

Here are some of the simple things that "The Green Book" recommends in chapter 10 (note that since I am currently not investing or buying stocks, I am omitting all recommendations related to these):

1. Checks: Use electronic checks instead of paper checks.
2. Electronic payments: Pay your bills electronically.
3. Electronic tax refund: Take advantage of getting your money back electronically from the IRS.
4. Online banking: Receive your bills, make payments, and check your account balance online.
5. Paperless accounting: Try reconciling your bills with software, not a paper check register.
6. Tax forms: Get your tax forms online. It's simpler, and you can file faster.
7. Withdrawals/deposits: Don't tale a slip. Use an ATM rather than a bank teller.

1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 are the changes I am going to adopt this week. If they turn out to be sensible according to the scheme outlined in my earlier posts, I will adopt them in the future. I have already largely converted my banking to online banking, but I still use checks from time to time. I often forget to tell the teller to hold the receipt when I go to the bank, and some ATMs insist on printing out a receipt even when I prefer not to have one. And there are definitely bills that I handle on paper, such as my phone bill. I will hold off on 3 and 6 until tax season, and I am actually not so sure 6 is a great idea - I still feel that it may be advantageous to have a record of your income tax in paper form. But I will come back to these sometime in April (assuming I actually file my taxes on time, which was not the case last year).

I will report on the effects and the results of adopting these changes at the end of the week. Oh, and for those not living in the US, the IRS is the Internal Revenue Service.

The world makes money go round

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:37:24 GMT

Well, it looks like I am going to discuss economics sooner than I thought. I need to clarify what it means for me to say that a change I am adopting is financially sound, because it is very easy to lead myself and others into confusion if I do not.

Although I have only had one formal post-secondary course in economics, and that was a game theory class, I believe I do have a good "intuitive" understanding of it. Granted, if a person who has never studied mathematics claimed to "intuitively" understand it, I would probably not take them very seriously, but I believe that a lot of economics is largely grounded in common sense, which we all share to some extent. The reason for this disclaimer is that I am about to make a criticism of economic theory which may have been addressed by researchers, or even dismissed as irrelevant, but which I believe is important and even at some level fundamental.

As far as my (limited) understanding goes, economic theory models humans as a rational being (an assumption which may be questioned in and of itself, but that is not my goal - John Ralston Saul does a better job with that than I ever could), and therefore, one that attempts to maximize their utility function (which quantifies the benefit derived from an outcome). So far so good. But now, the utility function for any specific outcome is a single real number, which allows us to compare any two outcomes and say which one is better; in mathematical lingo, we have a total order on the set of all outcomes. What I would argue, though, is that there may be different kinds of benefit that need to be considered for each outcome, and that the utility function should be a collection of several numbers (vector-valued rather than scalar-valued). In that case, there may be pairs of outcomes that cannot be compared; mathematically, we do not have a total order on the set of all outcomes, but only a partial order.

For instance, consider a simple example from computer games (which I haven't played since primary school, but have watched many of my friends play). Suppose for simplicity that you have two resources, lives and points. Suppose you are deciding whether to undertake a maneuver that will result in getting 100 extra points at the expense of 1 life. If you only have 2 lives until the end of the game (which is several levels away), but lots of points, it would be wise to refrain from the maneuver; on the other hand, if you are at the last level and 50 points away from your personal record, then this is a good idea regardless of how many lives you have.

What this example illustrates is that the 2 outcomes (outcome 1: forgo the maneuver; outcome 2: go for the maneuver) are not necessarily comparable; which one is better depends on where you are. Granted, this is a somewhat contrived example, but the point I am trying to make is that this happens to us a lot in everyday life, and more than one decision could be "a best one" (in a partial order, there could be several maximal elements). Ideally, we would like to benefit on all levels (get extra lives AND extra points in the computer game; be environmentally friendly, healthy AND save money in real life). However, when that is not possible, we (as a rational player) need to choose an outcome which is no worse than any other outcome (as opposed to better than all other outcomes). And which one we choose could depend on many factors, such as previous history (how many lives/points we had in the computer game), our values, our beliefs...

By now, you probably see where I am going with this argument. In every change that I attempt to implement, I will evaluate the costs and benefits in terms of all the factors I mentioned: environmental impact, morality, health, comfort, and economics. But it will not always possible to benefit on all levels; if several options are available, I will choose the one that I like best (and try to give reasons for it, though these reasons may be more or less rational). And when you are making the decision for yourself, you should also choose the one that you like best, which is quite likely to be different from the one I like.

As an example: switching to organic food was definitely beneficial in terms of environmental impact (though some people have questioned that, and I will come back to this point later), morality (it felt good for me to be able to do something for the environment by making a simple change in my consumption pattern) and health (the effect was at least neutral; though some claim organic food is healthier than non-organic food, this is not 100% clear to me). It was marginally disadvantageous in terms of comfort (I now need to spend more time shopping for food because it's not always easy to find the organic products as there tends to be fewer of them), and clearly disadvantageous economically (as the cost of organic products is currently between 1.1 and 2 times higher than the comparable non-organic ones). So both switching and not switching were "best" decisions; the reason I chose to switch was because in my situation, spending an extra hour shopping and an extra 100 to 200 dollars on food per month was easier than having to live with the knowledge that I am (potentially) unnecessarily harming the environment when I could avoid it. But if, say, I had been on a very tight budget (like some of the people reading this may be), the economic factor would (and should) take the upper hand!

As an afterthought, now, two months after I switched, I spend almost the same amount of time shopping for food as before, and I have been able to make up for the extra expenditure by going to restaurants less often and by cooking for myself more often. I doubt it could have worked out that way if I had made the opposite decision. So it seems that, after considering things on a longer-term perspective, my decision was the only best one, even though it wasn't originally!

Had we but world enough and time...

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 04:02:37 GMT

Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that my research is starting to become interesting again; the bad news is that I did not have the time to compute my carbon footprint as I had originally planned to do today. But instead, I will provide a list of good reading materials (or, at least, materials that I have enjoyed reading) on the subject of the environment.

First and foremost, you must see the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" if you have not already! It should be available on DVD, and I am almost sure (too lazy to check) you can get it on NetFlix.

Secondly, a few books that I found really useful (in fact, I will be using some of them to guide my exploration of the ways in which I can make my life greener):
1) "the green book" (not to be confused with "Het groene boekje", a reference on Dutch grammar) - speaking of Dutch, for those of you who wondered where my username comes from, it simply means "green star" in Dutch; I originally chose it to represent my dedication to the international language Esperanto, which has the green star as its symbol, but it seems fitting enough even now.
2) "Fifty simple things you can do to change the earth" - the 2008 edition is highly recommended!
3) "Coming Clean: Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal" - a little bit less focused on the individual and a bit more policy-oriented, but nevertheless a very interesting book to read

Finally, a few websites (in addition to the calculator I referenced yesterday):
1) Creating a greener home
2) Environmentally-friendly travel
3) Environmental funerals(!)
4) Environmentalism (Wikipedia)
5) Deep ecology (Wikipedia)

The last one of these is about a philosophy that I do not necessarily endorse (I prefer not to endorse any fixed philosophy, in fact), but that is nevertheless interesting to think about.

Oh, and regarding the comment on the high cost of organic food (thank you for that!), I plan to address the question of the economics of an environmentally friendly life sometime next week!

Who am I, and where am I coming from?

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:11:41 GMT

I decided to make the title of today's post end with a question mark, instead of an exclamation mark like the previous two. I am only going to provide a partial answer to both questions this time, but these answers will hopefully give you some context.

I am an MIT graduate student in course 18 (aka Mathematics for the non-initiated). I've been here for 2 years. I live in the one of the newest dorms, known as S&P; I have a suite-mate (i.e. we each have our own room, but share the kitchen and the bathroom). All utilities (electricity, water, heat and Internet) are included in our rent. There is a recycling bin just outside our door, and both garbage and recycling are picked up daily (except on weekends). I do not own a car (that would be quite useless in Boston anyways), and I seldom take the airplane; most of my regular trips to Montreal (my previous city) are either by bus or by sharing a ride.

Although I have had some interest in environmental issues since my early years (a TV interview from the mid-1990s shows me give a highly improbable answer - "Ecology" - to the question "What's your favorite subject?"), I only starting becoming conscious of the impact an individual can have on the environment in the past 4-5 years. I have only been committed to making a difference in my own life for the last year or so, and until now it has never been a highly-prioritized activity in my already busy life. However, I am finally getting to where I am now because of both the mounting tension between my convictions and my lifestyle as well as the desire to act before it is too late.

Let me enumerate some changes that I have already implemented in my everyday life. None of those has been particularly difficult or time-consuming, and I would be happy to advise anyone who would like to make similar changes in their own life. Of course, the real question is what more can (and must) be done, and this is what I will be addressing in all my upcoming posts.

1) Transportation. After largely relying on walking and the Boston public transportation system in my first year at MIT, I now own a commuter bike that I use to get around campus and the city. I do occasionally take the M2 shuttle to get to the Harvard Medical School campus, and I also have a Charlie card for the rare occasions on which I use the Boston public transportation.
2) Paper consumption. I use both sides of the paper to write on, and any one-sided paper that I produce gets used for my printing needs (or as scrap paper). I don't purchase any printer paper outside of that. I recycle all the paper that I no longer need and that is "full" on both sides.
3) Electricity use. I have (finally) trained myself to turn off the light whenever I leave the room, and I also turn off my laptop whenever I am about to leave for 1 hour or more (otherwise I set it to Standby mode). I try not to use the thermostat whenever possible, instead letting my body adapt to the temperature (provided it is not extreme) and opening the window if needed.
4) Food. I have recently completed the switch to organic food (something which I will definitely come back to in a later post), and I have stopped wasting food by buying more than I would need as I used to do in my first year here. I am trying to become vegetarian, but as I am not ready to complete the change at once, I am currently consuming meat once every 4 or 5 days. I also carry my own cup around, which allows me to avoid using plastic cups almost entirely. I mostly cook for myself, although I will usually eat at a restaurant one or two meals every week.
5) Water use. I drink water from the tap (no more bottled water). I also carry water with me in a plastic bottle, although I should really switch to a metal one. I have a glass that I use to pour water in for brushing my teeth, and I also try to wash fruits and vegetables by filling a bowl with water rather than letting water run. I boil water in a kettle to make tea from leaves.

There are of course many other factors to be considered, but this is a good overview. I wanted to provide my estimated carbon footprint, but the calculator at Alcoa is currently not available, so I'll probably do it tomorrow.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step!

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:03:54 GMT

Well, I am glad to be keeping my promise and adding another post to my journal. Today I will continue to explain what I would like to achieve through my series of (hopefully regular) posts. But first I would like to make a digression (or, as my friend Ruben would call it, open brackets).

You have probably heard the expression that gave the title to today's post many times. I believe it comes from ancient China (so "mile" should really be replaced by "li", an ancient Chinese unit of distance). I definitely have had my share of exposure to it, but I only began to understand it fully this year. I read Gandhi's autobiography called "My experiments with truth" (a must-read). One thing of many that struck me is how, throughout his life, he sought to improve himself in all ways possible. Now, my own record of "self-improvement" has been shaky at best, and I now think I understand why. I have usually tried to change things by a sudden act of willpower, rather than gradually approaching my goal.

For instance, my lifelong battle with lateness had so far led to no appreciable result, as I constantly kept telling myself "all right, today is the day that you will stop being late all the time". I would keep it up for a few days, but inevitably fall victim to my old habit and despair, just to restart the vicious cycle some time later. I had almost given up and even decided to accept the fact that I am late "by nature". But my approach has now changed, and I am starting to see results already - I am now approaching this problem with a plan that lets me keep track of the small improvements I make every day. Leave 5 minutes early for class; don't plan things one right after the other unless it cannot be avoided; plan to arrive 5 minutes early to account for unforeseen circumstances. As a result, I can proudly say that I have reduced the number of late arrivals by over 50% this year, and I will continue working on it until I get as close as I can to being a punctual person - of course, since that's no fun, I'll probably still be late once in a while just for the heck of it, but that's a different story :)

Another example is the 6-month long marathon training I just went through. Another expression I had often heard was "it's not a sprint, it's a marathon" - well, the marathon is much more than just a race, it is also a very long process of preparation, both physical and mental. Although some people may be able to run a marathon with little preparation, common mortals like myself do need to take a marathon very seriously. I was running to raise money for a charity called Asha for education, in whose cause I strongly believe (by the way, I donations are still being accepted until this Sunday; just click on Asha), and that certainly helped my motivation. In the end of all this training, I was able to successfully complete my first marathon ever, in Lowell, this past Sunday. If someone told me last September that I would be able to one day run a marathon, I would not have believed them - but now, it has happened. So yay for all the early morning runs, the long runs on weekends, the Clif shots, and my wonderful teammates - but most of all, for persistence and slow, gradual improvement which was the only way I could achieve it!

So what does this all have to do with protecting the environment? Well, quite a lot, in fact. My approach will not be to make radical changes once and for all; instead, each week I will try to implement 1 or 2 simple changes to my lifestyle that are environmentally friendly (main criterion) as well as sound from the point of view of morality, health, comfort, and last, but not least, economics (i.e. my budget). And I will document each of those changes in my journal!

But before you decide to go somewhere, it is important to know where you are. This is why I am going to attempt an evaluation of the degree of "greenness" of my current lifestyle... tomorrow!

Be the change you wish to see in the world!

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:00:01 GMT

I don't remember the last time I posted here. When I first came to MIT I had the intention of posting something new every week; the week quickly became a month, then several months, and finally I abandoned the journal altogether. I abandoned it because I felt it was more interesting to experience new things than to write about them. However, the idea of returning to it has always been at the back of my mind. And now, I have finally found something that I would really like to write about - I don't want to make any promises with respect to the frequency, but I will do my best!

The topic of most (if not all) my future posts will be one that I have not started caring about until fairly recently, and that is, protection of the environment. Only about 4 years ago, I was one of the biggest skeptics regarding global warming - not so much its existence, but its importance. After all, so many other issues needed attention: poverty, disease, armed conflicts, and the list could go on. But I realized that it is impossible to ignore global warming, no less than it is possible to ignore any of the other issues - they form a complex network that, as I have come to believe, can only be resolved via a combined approach. This is why I intend to occasionally treat the other problems as well, especially to display the relationships that exist between them and environmental problems.

So what made me a believer in global warming? The first step was watching "Inconvenient Truth", a wonderful documentary featuring Al Gore and providing compelling evidence for the urgent need of acting on this problem. After that, I mostly educated myself through reading books and articles in various newspapers. I am going to post a list of "suggested readings" for those who are interested at some point, but one really amazing resource is a booklet called "Fifty simple things you can do to save the earth". I originally read the 1990 edition, but I just travelled to Berkeley (where it was published) and got my hands on the new, 2008 edition.

And what made me decide to write about global warming in my journal? Once again, it's Al Gore's "fault" - this time, it was his keynote address that I just heard this afternoon at Harvard. It was both inspiring and uplifting, and I'll post a link to it as soon as a video of it goes online. But this was only the drop that fills the cup - I have been intending to address the question "What can I do as an individual to make the impact of my actions on the environment a positive one?" for some time now.

As you can see from the title of this post, I am strongly influenced by the thought of Mahatma Gandhi; although I feel that the role of legislation and government is extremely important, I also believe that any real change can only start from the bottom up, as opposed to from the top down. This is why we as individuals must do everything we can to address the problem in our own lives; only then will we have the moral power to demand that the government implement measures to protect the environment on our behalf. That's it for now, I'll write more tomorrow!

Leonid.

It's been a long time...

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:21:22 GMT

since I last posted on my blog here. This post, however, will not be very informative. I will do my best to write an informative one in a couple of weeks. But today, I want to jot down some of my thoughts on machine translation, a problem which has interested me for some time now.

Machine translation (aka automatic translation) is essentially the translation of a text from one (human) language into another by means of an algorithm (and in practice, by means of a computer). As a field of research, machine translation has been around since the late 1940s, but by my evaluation, despite a great number of partial successes, no decisive progress towards the goal of reasonable-quality independent (as opposed to human-assisted) translation has yet been made.

The first question is whether this state of things is due to the limitations of our understanding of the problem, to the limitations of our technology, or a combination of both. The answer is not clear. After reading some original papers from the early years of the field (up to the late 1960s) I have come to the conclusion that given the technological resources available at the time, some impressive results have been achieved. However, efforts towards imparting what one calls "world knowledge" to a computer have apparently reached an impasse. This is not surprising, because most of this knowledge is normally taken for granted. This is well illustrated by the example given in Bar-Hillel's famous paper: "The box is in the pen" (where one normally understands "pen" as "playpen"). The semantic ambiguity can apparently only be resolved in light of the knowledge that boxes are (in general) much larger than writing utensils, so the only meaning that "fits" here is "playpen". Accordingly, the (Russian) translation would be "Коробка (лежит) в манеже".

The second question is what is reasonable to expect from a machine translation system, and what is not. It has to be pointed out that even human translation is not "perfect" (and sometimes not even adequate). An interesting discussion of this topic (in Russian) can be found here. If you do not read Russian, you can translate the page with Google, although my experience with this service so far has not been very satisfying. It is my sincere belief that, although the current dominant paradigm in machine translation, statistical machine translation , used notably by Google, is certainly promising, the ultimate solution to this problem will combine statistical methods with other, more "direct" methods. My answer to the second question would be that it is reasonable to expect the output of a machine translation system to be readable by a fluent speaker of the target language, without knowledge of the source language, and to convey over 90% of the information content of the original text.

This answer, however, brings me to my third and final question: is there a simple yet meaningful way of evaluating the output of a translation system? One could argue that nothing is better than human evaluation; perhaps this fits the meaningfulness criterion, but not the simplicity one, as human evaluation is known to be costly (much costlier than CPU time, at any rate). The current most popular evaluation technique is known as BLEU score. It is very easy to define.

Let an n-gram (where n is a natural number) be a subsequence of n consecutive words. Now suppose we have a reference translation R and a translation T to be evaluated. The evaluation proceeds as follows: for n in a certain range (usually from 1 to 4), compute the fraction of the n-grams of T that also appear in R. Then take an average of these fractions (usually the geometric average) to obtain a final score between 0 and 1. This will be the BLEU score of T with respect to R. If there are several reference translations R_1, ..., R_k, then the BLEU score will be an average of the BLEU scores of T with respect to each R_i. This is simple, but is it meaningful?

I have the feeling that oftentimes, the BLEU score is not very meaningful. In particular, it does not allow one to differentiate between different types of mistakes; even worse than that, a translation which differs from R in only the last word will have a much higher BLEU score than one which differs in several words; however, in the second case, this may simply be due to synonymy, while in the first case, it could be that the main verb of the sentence is replaced by a preposition (making the whole thing ungrammatical). One possibility that I was considering as an alternative was the following one:

Let O = f(I) be the output of a translation system on input I. Assuming that the system is deterministic (in particular, makes no use of randomization), that the system is bi-directional and that O is in a standard format, one can compute I' = f(O), the "back-translation". Then, by a simple bioinformatics-style alignment of I and I', one could compute a performance score for f on input I. However, this is a bit too simple to work, and here is an illustration (f = Google):

I = "Fare thee well, and if forever, still forever, fare thee well."
O = "Стоимость проезда тебе хорошо, и если навсегда, по-прежнему навсегда, тариф тебе хорошо."
I' = "Fare thee well, and if ever, remains forever, fare thee well."
R = "Прощай, и если навсегда, то навсегда прощай."

So the back-translation is quite close to the original, yet the translation is extremely bad ("fare thee well" is translated as "the fare [cost of a ride] is good to you"). Thus, my method would not be as good at evaluating this translation as the BLEU score. Arguably, poetry by Byron is not the best input, but it was the first thing that came to my mind. So the question remains.

One last point before I finish this post: machine translation, while important as a theoretical problem, is not a goal in itself. The development of translation systems and other language processing tools will hopefully lead us to the realization that all languages deserve a place in the "global village", even those that are only spoken by minority populations. Furthermore, such developments should also allow speakers of those "minority languages" to get a greater access to the wealth of information available in today's world, and encourage them to make a contribution rather than feeling excluded. A short article with suggestions of how this can be done is found
here. Until next time!

Leonid.

Junctural metanalysis

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:57:33 GMT

Dear readers!

I just realized that I haven't posted any updates this month... that is not a good sign! However, I will do my best to keep up the biweekly posts, and you should be looking forward to my February review, which is coming up this week :-) Today, however, rather than talk about my latest news, I am going to look at a different topic - namely, the linguistic process of "junctural metanalysis".

Until just a few minutes ago, I did not know that this was the appropriate name for the phenomenon which I am going to describe. Despite the complicated name, it is a very simple phenomenon - one takes a sequence of (one or more) words, and breaks them up into units (called "morphemes") in a different way. Now, a morpheme is not to be confused with a word; morphemes are the smallest units of meaning, which are (thought to be) contained in our internal lexicon. A word may contain one or more morphemes; for instance, the word "bathrooms" contains three morphemes: bath + room + s. As a side note, people often look at me weird when I use the word "bathroom"; it seems that (at least in some parts of the US) this term cannot be used to mean "a (public) washroom". But I digress.

So, here are some examples of junctural metanalysis which have come up in my own experience.

In English:

whelm (this may actually be a so-called bound morpheme; "You can be overwhelmed and you can be underwhelmed, but can you be just whelmed?")

table (incorrect analysis and pronunciation of "comfortable" as "come for table")

In French:

spère [hope] (incorrect analysis of "j'espère" = "I hope" as "j'ai spère" = "I have hope")

estale [statue] (analysis of "piédestal" = "pedestal" as "pied d'estale" = "foot of a statue")

In Russian:

отводка [illusion, game of the imagination] (from the song line "Так не бывает, это всё от водки" analyzed as "Так не бывает, это всё отводки")

излов [deviation from the straight path] (from the song line "Не замечая мелкого и злого" analyzed as "Не замечая мелкого излова")

and a couple of infamous ones that I won't explain (if you know them, good, if you don't know them, don't bother): эпикругом and вуглускр (both are taken from jokes based on plays on words).

So, if you have (accidentally or knowingly) created some interesting junctural metanalyses, do send them to me. I think they are fun and amusing to look at. Oh, and on a somewhat related topic, an example of "junctural metanalysis par excellence" is provided by holorimes. A few of them are collected here:
Holorimes

Enjoy!

Leonid.

January Review

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 04:59:44 GMT

Dear friends!

Today, on the last day of January, I decided to make an unplanned entry. In it I will review the movies that I have seen, as well as the books that I have finished reading, this month. All opinions are subjective, however, you may find them useful for comparison purposes, or, if you think that your tastes are close to mine, you can take these as suggestions. Feel free to comment with your own reviews! If this post gets lots of feedback, I may make this a tradition and post a similar review on a monthly basis!

Movies:

1) The Painted Veil. One of the few convincing "transformation" stories I have seen. The details were well done, and the two main actors (Naomi Watts and Edward Norton) did an excellent job. I give this movie 8.5/10.

2) I Puritani. Although shown at a movie theater, this was not a movie, strictly speaking, but the broadcast of an opera. My comments can be found in my first post of 2007. If I had to give a rating, I'd go 10/10.

3) Y tu mama tambien (sorry, too lazy to type the accents). An excellent movie by Cuaron, in Spanish. Although quite rich in sexuality, the movie has a deep underlying set of messages, which may not be obvious when you watch it the first time. I had to think about it for a while after I watched it, and that's really what I look for in movies. Rating: 9/10.

4) The Whale Rider. A very interesting perspective on the Maori culture, and the struggle of native tribes to adapt to the modern world, while keeping a connection to their roots. Somewhat discontinuous transitions, but a good impression overall - and food for thought, of course! 8.5/10.

Books (only those that I finished reading in January appear here):

1) Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Not for the faint of heart, this classical work on generative linguistics contains a number of excellent ideas. In retrospective, it is surprising how many of them have withstood the test of time. Not bedtime reading, though :-) 8.5/10.

2) Dino Buzzati, Racconti. Buzzati at his best; the selection of novels reflects his general style very faithfully. His understanding of human psychology (and psyche) never ceases to amaze me; his stories, although usually based on a single theme, do a great job of exploiting the conflict to its climax...and sometimes beyond. Highly recommended! 9/10.

3) Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (gift from TA). The spiritual journey of a young man in search of truth. Written very much in a Buddhist tradition, this story has provided more questions than answers, but by struggling with the author, I have learned some things about myself. This may be a worthwhile reading for those of you who like to do the same thing. 9/10.

4) David Ives, All in the Timing (loan from MM). Excellent collection of short plays, which feature an explosive humor, a great mastery of (the English) language, and some more or less deep reflections on human nature. Out of the 14 plays, my favorites were "The Universal Language", "Sure Thing", and "Ancient History". Also highly recommended. 9.5/10.

Enjoy the month of February, and stay tuned for my upcoming entry!

Leonid.

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 17:48:16 GMT

Dear friends!

Well, so much for my resolution of posting weekly entries... it's already been two weeks since the last one. However, I am not giving up on my resolution; I will just modify it by adding the prefix "bi" :-)

So, you must all be anxious to find out about my latest news, so here it is!

First of all, I am one of the two teaching assistants for a course called Mathematics Lecture Series. It's a course for undergrads, which consists of 10 lectures given by 10 professors (on 10 different topics). After each one, the students get a problem set (MIT term for "assignment"). The TA's job is to give two recitations a week, during which he explains whatever was not clear during the lectures (and that can be a lot, since some professors assume more background than the average student has), to answer all kinds of questions during office hours, and to grade the problem sets. It comes to about 12-15 hours a week; the good thing is that it's only for the month of January, and once it's over, I won't have any TA duties in the spring semester! While this job is tough at times, I am enjoying it because it constantly challenges me, and I feel that I've actually learned a lot myself, both from the lectures and from my interaction with the students. Oh, I forgot to mention, my co-TA is really great, and we complement each other well. If you are curious about the kind of topics that the course covers, check out the course website.

Now, a few words about the latest BSO concert. There were three pieces: "Canonical American Songbook" by Harbison, "Piano Concerto n.20 in D minor" by Mozart, and "Symphony n.3 in A minor" by Rachmaninoff. The first one was a collection of popular American songs with variations, and did not really impress me (it was also rather short). The Piano Concerto was performed by the well-known pianist Radu Lupu. I really enjoyed it - but I was a little bit disappointed with the way that Radu Lupu performed it. Of course, his technique was perfect; however, he seemed a bit too calm, too much in control... he didn't have the passion of, say, Yevgeniy Kisin (who is coming to Boston later this year, by the way!). The melody was extremely beautiful, and very Mozart-like. The final rondo was the most captivating part, with its tempestuous rhythmic pattern. The piece that I liked most, however, was the symphony n.3 by Rachmaninoff. Although I was a little bit tired that day, it engaged me from beginning to end, in a whirlwind of emotions that only great music can create. Hmm... I just realized that music is very hard to describe in words, which is why I'd recommend those of you who haven't heard those pieces to listen to them.

Aside from that, I've been trying to do a little bit of research in my free time. There are also lots of interesting free activities offered during the January semester, from presentations on careers after MIT (a topic that I'd rather not think about right now) to cooking classes. So far the best event I've attended was a workshop on the Psychology of Tennis. It's amazing how much difference a little bit of psychology can make, not just in sports, but in life in general...

I will leave you on that note, as I have to go to another lecture from the series. I wish you all an excellent week, and, once again, don't be shy to post comments! Cheers!

A Happy New Year :-)

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 02:58:13 GMT

Dear friends!

I am greatly ashamed of myself, for not having updated my LiveJournal as often as I would have liked. However, I have firmly resolved to change that in the new year, 2007.

First of all, I would like to wish you all a happy New Year, and a Merry Christmas (as some of you are Orthodox Christians, you will be celebrating it after the New Year, hence the unusual order). I hope that you all find your path in life and move along it!

I was very lucky to spend my break at home, in Montreal. I am actually going back to Boston in a few minutes (hopefully, I have enough time to finish this entry). The break was not particularly productive, but I did get to see most of my friends and also did a lot of reading and thinking, which is perhaps more important.

The highlights of the week were two-fold. The first one was my first experience as a translator. I was contacted through friends by a man who is taking care of an elderly religious leader. I was to serve as the translator between him and a Russian doctor, whose reputation as a leader in alternative medicine warranted him an all-paid trip to Montreal to help the religious leader recover from his disease. I agreed, because I wanted to help out and to try being a translator as well. The experience was quite difficult, but also very rewarding, both intellectually and monetarily. For a little over two hours, I bridged the gap between the two people who would otherwise not have been able to communicate. The difficult part was getting all the medical terminology across correctly, but luckily, my recollections of CEGEP biology were sufficient. The experience also gave me an appreciation for the difference in conventional ways of expressing things in Russian and in English.

The second highlight of the week was the live broadcast of "I Puritani" from the Met (short for the Metropolitan Opera). This broadcast was at a movie theater, and it was part of a new initiative by the Met. The part of Elvira (the main female character) was sung by Anna Netrebko, whom I really like for three reasons.

1) she has an amazing voice (a soprano)
2) she acts extremely well, she lives her part on the stage
3) she is very beautiful (here are some pictures: Pictures)

The opera's plot was very weak (I won't give it away in case someone wants to see it), but the belcanto style of singing in it more than made up for that weakness. Three and a half hours of pure esthetic pleasure, interspersed by backstage interviews with Anna, literally made me ecstatic. I have to mention that the movie theater was packed, and tickets were sold out in advance. There will be several more live broadcasts from the Met, so if you like opera, don't miss them! More information on the broadcasts can be found here: the Met.

All right, that's it for now. Next week, I'll tell you about my teaching experience (I did get that TA position after all!), the latest BSO concert, and maybe more. So stay tuned, and don't be shy to post comments on what I have written here. Enjoy!

Elephants, BSO and TA duties

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 21:10:17 GMT

Well, the time has come for me to post a new entry. As promised, I will use it to describe my TA duties, my dorm and the cultural life in Boston, not necessarily in this particular order.

On Thursday, I had quite an experience. I was going to attend my first concert at the famous
BSO (Boston Symphonic Orchestra). What's really amazing about being a student here is that it gives you all kinds of priviledges, from the discount on transportation passes I have mentioned earlier, to 15 free concerts and rehearsals at the BSO! At any rate, as the BSO is on the other side of the Harvard bridge (more about that bridge later), I decided to take the bus. However, the bus just wasn't coming, so I started walking.

As I walked along Mass. Ave (the city's main artery), I understood what the problem was. The road was blocked by... elephants! These were circus elephants that had arrived for shows in Boston the night before. And they were walking down the street, blocking all traffic in both directions, without any hurry. They were really adorable. Unfortunately, I did not have a camera on me so I couldn't take pictures. One thing that I found really cute was how one elephant would wrap its trunk around the next elephant's tail, and sway it gently from side to side. I suppose that this is the way they show affection to one another... does anybody know?

Eventually I got to the BSO. Despite the fact that it was only a rehearsal, the concert hall was full. There was a very good pianist, David Barenboim, and he played two concertos (or should I say concerti): Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Beethoven's Piano Concerto n.4 in G. I found Schoenberg rather difficult to listen to, much like I find modern art hard to appreciate without additional information. But I did find that some parts of it were really powerful. And Beethoven's Concerto was really memorable (I still have the opening theme in my head), despite the fact that we never heard the whole thing (it was, after all, a rehearsal). James Levine, the conductor, gave his crew quite a hard time. I was lucky to get a seat in one of the front rows, right in front of the soloist, thanks to a lady who was holding it for a friend of hers. This brings me to another point: I find that Bostonians are generally extremely nice people!

And MIT students are no exception in this respect. I have the chance to work at the math tutoring center as fulfilment of my TA duties, and it's a very rewarding experience. I work there for 2.5 hours, 4 days a week. Although most people who come there are not mathematics students (they are usually undergrads who have to take math courses to fulfill requirements of their programs), they all appreciate math (with rare exceptions). Their questions are often challenging, and it really makes me happy to be able to point them in the right direction.

If I am lucky, I will get to teach a recitation next semester. This means that I will be reviewing the material for one of the courses in front of a small subset of the class students (about 20 people). In order to do that, I will have to pass by several training sessions this term. Teaching is taken very seriously here, which explains why there are so many procedures to complete before you get permission to do it.

NOTE: This was originally posted as an incomplete entry; unfortunately, I never got to complete it, so I decided to change the title and leave it as it is. Hopefully I will be able to keep my only New Year resolution for 2007, to update my LiveJournal weekly.

Latest news

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 04:03:48 GMT

Dear friends!

It's been a while since I last updated my journal. I'll try to do it more regularly in the future, hopefully once a week. I think that by now, I have quite a few experiences to tell you all about. Hopefully, some of you will find some of this interesting :-)

A little bit about my classes. Right now, I am registered for four classes at MIT and one at Harvard. All but one of my MIT classes are in mathematics (one is in computer science). They are called "Eigenvalues of Random Matrices" (a very interesting topic, bringing together some combinatorics, probability theory and analysis), "Commutative Algebra" (a good class, but a bit slow for my taste, and also somehow not as fascinating as it may have been a couple of years ago), "Combinatorial Theory" (the name speaks for itself, we are doing mostly representations of the symmetric group), and "Natural Language Processing" (perhaps the most exciting one of my classes, because I am fascinated by the topic). My teachers are all extremely nice, although the quality of teaching varies a lot (some are much better prepared than others). Most of the grading is based on Psets (or problem sets, the local term for "assignments"), which are given out on a weekly or biweekly basis. The upshot is that I won't have any exams, but unfortunately this also means that I have to work much harder during the semester. I am seriously thinking about dropping the algebra course. I get the feeling that studying rings brings us very few things that we would not be able to find by studying fields, which are much nicer to work with. On the other hand, I feel that this stuff could be important to know... but I am really not sure. Does anyone have any opinions on that subject?

I should also say something about the course I am taking at Harvard. It is an introductory Yiddish course. Yiddish is the language that has been spoken by the Jews in Europe for many centuries. It has a very rich history and culture behind it. Unfortunately, it has been on a steady decline ever since World War II, for reasons that are easily understood. Besides the fact that I am interested in endangered languages (my interest in that particular topic was born after reading the book "Spoken Here", which you can find at Amazon.com, or at your local library: Spoken Here), it is also the language that was spoken by my great-grandparents. In any case, I am greatly enjoying that course, it's a lot of fun, and the teacher is really young and enthusiastic. The language itself is very similar to German, but it uses the Hebrew alphabet, so I get to remember whatever I knew of both German and Hebrew when I learn it :-).

Something that I enjoyed very much here is the fact that there is a lot of free food around. There are two weekly seminars, given by graduate students in math, which both provide lunch; one is called SPAM, and the other, Puma Grass (the names mean "Simple Person's Applied Math" and "Pure Math Graduate Student Seminar" respectively). There are also undergraduate seminars on a weekly basis, and, most importantly, there is something called Faculty Dinners. The idea is that faculty members take newly admitted students out for dinner to a nice restaurant, and the department pays for it. I've been to three such dinners already, and they not only give a chance to the students to get to know each other and the professors in an informal setting, but also to sample some of Boston's best restaurants. So if any of you decide to come to Boston some day, don't hesitate to ask me for suggestions of good places to get food at here!

Well, that's going to be it for now. Next time, I'll talk about my TA duties, my dormitory, and the cultural life in Boston. Until then, feel free to post comments, and 'zayt gezunt'*!

(*)A Yiddish expression meaning "be healthy" or "be well", used when taking leave of someone.

More on being at MIT

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 03:48:39 GMT

I haven't had the chance to update my journal for some time, but tonight, I am finally going to do it. So far, I have talked mostly about the atmosphere in Boston and at MIT. This time, my entry is going to be mostly focused on the academic aspects of MIT.

The way the PhD program in applied mathematics works is the following: for the first 3 semesters we are expected to take courses, in different fields. After that, we have to pass a qualifying exam, which is usually done orally and administered by a committee of 3 professors. There are 3 topics to be chosen, and each one has to be presented in front of the committee, who can then ask questions. Success in the exam means you can go on to do research (and in particular, choose a research advisor); failure means you have to try again, and the second failure means you are out of the program (however, then there is the possibility of graduating with a Masters degree).

I have given myself a year to figure out what I want to do in terms of research here. The great thing about MIT is that all the areas of mathematics that interest me are found here. On the other hand, this is perhaps not so great, because it puts me in a position where I have a lot of choices. Right now, my options are as follows (in no specific order): bioinformatics (in reply to the anonymous person who posted the unique comment on my previous entry, that still reamins a possibility); quantum computing (those of you who know about it may have heard of Peter Shor, who is a faculty member here); numerical analysis of PDEs (more specifically, those that arise in nanophotonics); and my latest interest, natural language processing (more specifically, automated translation). The choice will not be easy, that's why I need the year.

The courses I am taking this term are varied and not extremely representative of my interests; not all the courses I want to take are offered in the Fall, but my Spring course selection should be a more "faithful" representation. This reminds me: I still need to learn some representation theory (as well as statistics, but only if I have enough free time for that).

But one course stands out from the others, for several reasons. I hope to come back to it in one of my future posts. For now, let me just say that courses are not so important anymore in graduate school; what matters is the research (topic, advisor, and all the things that come with those). By the end of my (hopefully four-year) presence here, I will have to produce a thesis containing original research. Now, there is a question that has been bothering me for a long time: "What differentiates "good" research from "bad" research?". I am still meditating on the answer, but I think I have figured a few personal criteria. First of all, the results of the research should be "fresh", which could mean "unexpected", "new", or just "different". Second of all, they should be "useful" (another term that is very difficult to define). And lastly, they need to "make an impact" (which, once again, is not particularly clear for now).

In any case, without pursuing this question in more depth, I have come to the conclusion that, whatever topic I choose, my thesis will be more of a "proof of my ability to do research" than an actual "discovery" (although hopefully it will contain elements of the latter). In other words (and this may be a very bad analogy), I will receive a license to navigate a bathyscaphe (a means of underwater transportation), rather than actually go explore the depths of the sea.

All right, enough meditation for now. Hopefully my thoughts will clear by the end of the year!

Leonid.

P.S. For those of you who are in Montreal, I will be back September 22 through 25, so call me!

More on life in Boston

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:52:57 GMT

As promised, I am updating the journal. Today, I will talk some more about the peculiar things that I have seen or heard in Cambridge and at MIT. Hope you'll find them amusing!

MIT is one of the few universities in North America with more graduate students (about 6 thousand) than undergraduates (about 4 thousand). During orientation (which, by the way, was quite well organized), we found out that less than 30% of the graduates are female. This was followed by the joke that if a female MIT student seeks a male MIT student, "the odds are good, but... the goods are odd". I won't comment on the truth of that yet.

Every state in the United States, just like every province in Canada, has its own motto. For instance, the Quebec one is "Je me souviens". The Massachusetts one is "The spirit of America". So a license plate normally looks like:

Massachusetts
[Plate number]
The spirit of America

Today, I saw a license plate whose plate number was "STAINS". Anti-patriotic, isn't it?

During one of the orientation events, I asked one of the people I met, who is originally from Massachusetts, what the name of a person who lives in Massachusetts was (by the way, such words are referred to as "demonyms" or "gentillics", according to Wikipedia). Without any hesitation, he answered: "a Masshole". Then he clarified that this normally only refers to drivers... I still don't know the correct answer, by the way, though some people told me it was "a Bostonian" ?!

There was also a sentence in my guide for newly admitted graduate mathematics students that I particularly liked, referring to the weekly gathering: "This is a great time to chat with people, whether it's about quasi-coherent sheaves or Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

One last idiosyncratic thing that I thought I would mention is the following. The MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) provides two main kinds of public transportation: the bus and the subway (metro), the latter usually referred to as "the T". Some of the metro stations are above ground, and the trains are actually tramways and trolleys, which are two types of transportation that I really missed not having in Montreal. MIT offers bus passes at discounted prices to its students. However, the discounts are strange: while a bus-only pass costs $12 and a subway-only pass, $22, a pass for both types of transportation costs... $35.50. And it is not even possible to buy a bus-only and a subway-only pass separately! How strange...

To end on a slightly more academic note, I would like to post the following link, which is a video made by Harvard scientists about the life of a cell. I found it extremely fascinating (I got the link earlier today), and I think that if I had seen it while I was in high school, I may have considered becoming a biologist. Too late now! Biology Video

Until the next update, take care!

Leonid.

Life in Boston so far

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 03:51:39 GMT

Dear friends, mentors, and any of you who, for whatever reason, are reading this now!

Although I have started a LiveJournal a long, long time ago, this entry is the first one that I will actually make here. The plan for now is to use this LiveJournal as a record of some of the more interesting experiences that I am living now in Boston, MA.

First, a few words about how I ended up here. I was born in Russia, and moved to Montreal, Canada, when I was 11. I did all of my high school in Montreal. I also attended CEGEP (sort of a pre-university program that is unique to the province of Quebec, for those of you who don't know) and McGill university (until I received a Bachelor of Science - in Mathematics and Computer Science - in 2006). I was then admitted to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) - among several other universities - for a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics. I visited all the universities to which I was admitted, and after long and painful meditation, decided to go to MIT. Since MIT is in Boston (in fact, to be more precise, it is in Cambridge, which is a city in the Great Boston area), I am here now.

Now, since I expect most of my readers to not know much about MIT, let me tell you a little bit about it. Unlike McGill, the buildings at MIT are designated not by names, but by numbers. The numbering system at first appears to be purely random, but after a while, one starts to see the rhyme and reason behind it. I am not going to go into much detail, but if you are curious, feel free to explore the interactive campus map at this link: Map. The rooms in the buildings all have the building number as prefix, which actually makes the whole system rather convenient.

Also, the word "course" here is different from "Course", the latter being an area of study; the Courses are numbered from 1 to 26 (for instance, I am in Mathematics, which is Course 18). Apparently, the numbers reflect the historic order of the fields of study, but I have a hard time believing that math was the 18-th subject to be added (in my opinion, it must definitely have been among the first ten). And the courses are also numbered; the first two digits are the Course number, and the last three are the course number proper. For instance, this semester, I am taking 18-338 (eigenvalues of random matrices). For those who are curious, here is the Course calendar.

One really, really awesome thing is that most of the past MIT courses are available online, to anyone in the world. This is part of the so-called "Open CourseWare" project, which you can learn more about here: OCW . This seems to be an initiative that is slowly being taken up by other universities. Generally speaking, I often get the feeling that MIT is extremely advanced technologically; however, there are things that are surprisingly old-fashioned, such as the fact that registration is done on paper, rather than online. I guess the purpose of this procedure is to make sure that every student consults their registration advisor before doing anything crazy.

But what makes MIT really special (in my point of view) is the students. Although the professors are widely known around the world for their research, it is the students here who have impressed me most. Every time I have a conversation with one of them (on an academic topic, of course), I learn something not simply new, but also unexpected and different from what I have seen and/or thought about before. That's why it feels like I am doing research without actually doing any research :-) It's a very stimulating environment, and I am extremely happy to be here!!!

That will be all for today, I'll try to update this Journal every few days. Please post comments (including criticism of my writing style, lack of objectivity, etc). Regards,

Leonid.