Things people say

Growing up trilingual deprecated (in Germany)

2012-01-28T05:04:00.001-08:00

I just learnt from an acquaintance who's bringing up her 5 year old boy trilingual (Hindi, English, German) that the speech therapist he goes to has told her that she made a mistake to bring up her son speaking three languages, because "three is too much." These speech therapists are supposed to have gone through rigorous training before they are allowed to go out into the real world to improve, I mean, screw up, people's lives. This is a very practical profession with very real consequences for the real world. How could such uninformed ideas enter this specialist profession?

In the meantime, the mother is thinking of weaning her son off of Hindi, "because it's useless in Germany" (said the German speech therapist).

This reminds me of a recent German reviewer of one of my research projects that I submitted to the DFG (the proposal was rejected, and despite DFG's loud proclamations that they always send reasons for rejections, and completely contrary to anything I've ever seen in the case of the NSF, I never received a single sentence explaining why the project was rejected). This reviewer had a major objection to the project (as far as he expressed it to me): why are you working on Hindi? Why Hindi? Why not some other language more relevant to Germany, like Turkish?

Another time, a reviewer of an experiment involving German we submitted to the CUNY sentence processing conference in the US. The reviewer asked: why are you working on German, why not English? (To which my co-author replied: Because English is a bastardized version of German.)

And an Indian student of mine once went to a German high school to talk about her research on Hindi, and the school teacher asked, why should our tax money pay for work on Hindi? Why indeed.

Everyone's sitting in their little well, looking out and seeing their tiny circle of sky, and they think that's all out there that's relevant.

Dialysis: month 3

2012-01-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

The list of things to carry with me to dialysis is growing fast:

1. Extreme Isolation headphones (to block out the sound of all the TVs, the loud conversations, the dialysis machines themselves).
2. Custom ear plugs to use in addition to 1 above.
3. Laptop.
4. Adaptor for laptop (using R for four hours will cause the battery to run out).
5. Backup reading material.
6. Slippers and pajamas.
7. Book holder to keep notes upright while typing.
8. Portable reading light to read by, since they turn all the lights off.
9. A shawl to cover my shoulders when they open the windows to get some fresh air in.
10. Some writing material.

That is a lot of stuff; I have had to make a checklist before I leave for dialysis.

I'm going to have to buy a new, bigger bag. I just got done buying a specialist bag from x-over, which is the only bag I ever found that slings over the left shoulder (I can't use my right shoulder to carry bags, because of my shunt).

I have also learnt how to avoid bloodbaths when compressing my shunt after they remove the needles. I frequently miss the site of the needle when they pull it out, which leads to blood everywhere (yes, it was a real shock the first time round---blood gushes out of the shunt like from a fire hose). But I've become better at guessing where the site is. It seems I'm the only one who screws up the compresses, nobody else ever has an accident. I guess they're veterans.

Dialysis is, so far, not so bad. What's annoying is the lack of basic lighting and the lack of a basic surface that one can work on. The table they provide is for eating--it has ridges on the sides, making it impossible to type with the computer on the table. There is one directed light just above the bed, but just behind the head of the bed, so I get nearly zero light. There's a reading lamp to compensate for this, but the lamp's arm is too short, so I cannot get it near a book I'm reading. There are really only two ways to read: with a portable reading lamp (not as easy as they make it look in ads), or on the computer. As a result, amazon's Kindle books are making a killing thanks to my new status.

How not to sell stuff

2011-12-28T23:57:00.000-08:00

So I went to a "Bioladen" near my apartment to buy decaf coffee that's made using a better process than "standard" decaf; also, this coffee is Fair Trade coffee, so I decided I will support them by buying their coffee even though it is more expensive than the standard stuff. But that coffee's not in the shop. I ask the lady at the counter if she can order it for me, and she says, sure, let me take a look. She looks in her secret book (she will not allow me to look with her) and offers me a Fair Trade coffee, but (and here is the big but) I have to buy 12 packets of 250 g each. I cannot order two or three. So I leave, and order the same coffee over the GEPA website.

With a service attitude like that, how long can this shop last? This level of non-accommodation of a customer is the norm in Germany; it happens all the time, with variations, when I go shopping.

Wait Gain

2011-12-08T11:23:00.001-08:00

One of my doctors told me the other day that I need to gain as much weight, and force myself to eat even if I don't want to, because the dialysis removes lots of amino acids from my blood (cool fact: every 15 minutes my whole 5 liters of blood is passed, bit by bit, through the dialysis machine, or more precisely, the artificial kidney). This can mean only one thing: I would become fat. I can exercise only so much in a week, and I am not supposed to lift heavy weights (so no serious weight training allowed). Clearly, I don't want to become fat; think of all the clothers that would have to be replaced.

Anyway, turns out it was a misunderstanding, as another doctor informed me later on. The first doctor was assuming I'd lost a lot of weight in the course of arriving at kidney failure. But this is not true; I've been at 60 kilos (plus or minus 2) for 27 years. So I get to stay at 60 kg or so.

Transplant waiting lists

2011-12-04T12:21:00.001-08:00

An interesting thing I learnt last Friday during dialysis was the distribution statistics for transplant waiting times. The average waiting time is supposed to be about 5 years (source: a Charite informational meeting in 2010), but no source I ever found reveals distribution characteristics. The doctor on Friday told me the answer: it's a uniform distribution ranging from almost immediately after starting dialysis to 10 years or so. Also, there is no data I ever found that tells you average waiting times by age group (I assume age matters).

So I could be waiting for a kidney for no time or ten years. Given that average survival for cadaver transplants is about 10 years (probably an oversimplification), the optimal outcome would be 10 years of dialysis and 10 years of a transplanted kidney. That would cover my entire remaining working life. One other reason to wait another 10 years for a transplant is that it's already possible to grow kidneys custom-built for a specific person. They just don't get big enough to be useful, yet. Who knows what'll be possible in 10 years? See this post on tissue engineering. It makes sense to wait; a custom-built kidney from my own cells would apparently need no immune suppression, which is the big downside with getting a transplant.

Dialysis week 4

2011-11-30T13:40:00.001-08:00

Things are finally beginning to improve a bit. I'm getting used to it for one thing. But more importantly, I'm actually feeling better; in fact, I haven't felt this well for a few years now. The doctors have been telling me I'll start to feel "great"; I was skeptical when I heard that, but it sounds more and more plausible that dialysis can actually make you feel better. The last four weeks, I've only felt exhausted the day after dialysis, and (paradoxically) couldn't really sleep much. All known side effects of dialysis, apparently.

Another great plus is that I convinced the sister to let me work on my computer while being dialyzed (initially they refused to let me use my right arm because it has needles stuck into it). This is a great alternative to reading a book or writing on paper, which is what I've been doing. The thing with sitting on a bed with one hand essentially immobilized is that it's hard to (a) hold a book (try holding a book up, however light, for four hours), and (b) hard to write---there is a food tray on a trolley they provide as a writing/reading surface, and it's not easy writing in a tray (in fact, it making writing painful, since your lower arm is being cut into by the edge of the tray). Basically, nobody has put much thought into providing a workspace for a dialysis patient getting dialyzed. There's a good reason for that: almost every other patient in the dialysis center is watching TV *for four straight hours*. (Can you imagine what it would do to your mind if you spent 13 hours a week watching ridiculous programs about how so-and-so's girlfriend stole someone's best friend's sister's boyfriend.) Just looking at the usage patterns, it makes no sense at all to think about a work space for dialysis patients.

So I carry a book holder, one of those things that holds up a book for you. That works. I still have to work out how to hold up a notebook to write on. The laptop solves many of these problems; the screen holds itself up, and the keyboard is right there where it's supposed to be. Absolutely perfect. All I have to do is make sure I don't move my right arm too much, else the needles move around inside the veins, and I am told that's super painful (I am very careful).

Dialysis week 3

2011-11-21T20:37:00.001-08:00

So, dialysis is not quite as easy as the first two weeks indicated. There's a thickish needle (it's double-barreled, and so thick it's called a catheter---catheter sounds much more scary than needle). That has to be stuck into the shunt vein. You can stick it in fast or slow; the nurse yesterday stuck it in slow and easy; this is painful. Unfortunately, the pain stayed for an hour or two, which was not much fun. Then, when they remove the catheters, you have to press down with a compress to stem the bleeding. The last two times I missed one of the puncture wounds---blood all over. It's pretty unnerving but one gets used to it (the second time was not as bad as the first---the first time my blood pressure shot up).

What bothered me more was the fact that when I missed the puncture, and started to bleed and called out for help, the sister in charge was already cleaning up and had her gloves wet (presumably water). She comes up to me with wet gloved hands and pulls out a sterile compress, folds it (making it also wet) and compresses it onto the puncture. Huh? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a sterile compress, to wet it with non-sterile water (I hope it's water)? I wrote to the doctors about this, waiting to hear what they think.

So, I was a bit shaken by the last two sessions. I now see the advantage with home dialysis: you have complete control over how things are done.

I've had such episodes in India, only then it was deliberate corner-cutting. Once, back in 1984, a technician switched catheters on me and used a previously used one that he had used on someone else (there was a side business he was doing, selling unused catheters; every patient has to bring their own catheter, which he would then pocket and resell). Nothing happened (i.e., no infection), but it could have ended badly for me. I complained to the doctors, they were not surprised, but I doubt anything came of it.

Another time, in Hyderabad, I had to get a blood test in some clinic along the road (my mistake to go there) and they tried to switch needles on me, tried to use a used one (I caught the switch and called them on it---they pretended they had done nothing, but then used the new needle).

Also, in Delhi, they'd make each patient bring their own sterile needle, and then pull it out of its sheath and put it on the (non-sterile) table. Huh? What's the point of a sterile needle? Even in Berlin, sometimes nurses who draw blood put their finger (ungloved) on the needle itself, raising the possibility that the now-unsterile base of the needle is going to go into my vein. I've complained about that, but I don't know what was done about it.

The damp compresses are nowhere near in that range of carelessness, but I'm reminded of my close calls back in India. In India, I had a more fatalistic view of things; the odds were so heavily stacked against a patient, one has to just accept that something will go wrong.

But perhaps my expectations are falsely high in the west: I'm reading an astonishing book, Complications, by a surgeon, Atul Gawande, which spells out in gory detail of all the fuck-ups he and others did as a young surgeon (and he's clearly as good as it gets). Fair warning: you need nerves of steel to read this book (esp. if you are a patient yourself). Although Gawande's mistakes are in a totally different category than the ones I outlined above (he's learning his job, and how else does one become a surgeon except by just doing it and making mistakes?), the wet-compress problem seems like complacency has set in.

I wonder if it's even possible to retain high formal rigor all through one's career as a nurse or whatever, or whether carelessness setting in is inevitable.

English native speaker?

2011-11-12T12:19:00.001-08:00

My five year old son is an English native speaker, he speaks German but not as well as English. He had to take an English language test for entry to a bilingual school in Berlin, but they told my wife that they didn't consider him to have enough English. Reason? He hesitated when they asked him to do something or the other. They consider him to be a German speaker even though they did not test his German (and his scores for German from the Kita puts him at the lower bound for German competence). Another reason they classified him as a German speaker is that I have a German passport. Obviously, if one of the parents has a German passport, German must be his/her native language. That's completely self-evident.

The arbitrariness of such decisions is sometimes too much to bear. This school doesn't even have an adequate process for detecting a bona fide native speaker of English correctly?

I should add that Atri went to another school the week before, and there he "passed" the test. I love randomness, but why does *everything* have a noise component? It seems like the entire course of his life could be set by the toss of a coin. No wonder the Hindus came up with the fatalistic "whatever happens is for the best." It's a coping strategy.

Update:

Next, my son went to the third school on the list, and this time he got 94%, which was regarded as performing "extremely well." I just can't understand how he can be considered a non-English speaker in one school and a clear native English speaker in two other schools. Doesn't this mean the selection process is flawed? A further issue is that Atri often uses German words for things that he encounters often in his German Kindergarten but not at home (e.g., Kerzen). Code-mixing is totally normal in bilingual or multilingual settings. So it's normal that a bilingual kid cannot think of the corresponding English word on demand. I wonder whether testers in Berlin schools understand this.

Incidentally, one cannot ever contest the result of a decision like this; if they decide your son is a native speaker of German in a particular school, he's going to be classified as such at that school, even if he is disadvantaged for the rest of his life (I recently learnt from a prof specializing in child education that it's critical that the kid learns reading in his primary language). No second opinions are possible. Isn't that amazing?

Basically, Germany stumbles every time it hits a multilingual setting, where everything is fluid and nothing is "purely" X or Y. Multilingualism lies outside the German experience. I hope this changes one day.

First day of dialysis

2011-11-10T03:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I had my first dialysis after 27 years of being free from it. Here are some photos (below). It wasn't as big a deal as it seemed like; if things stay this way, it seems like a minor adjustment to one's life. So now I'm going to go three times a week, and be locked into this machine for four hours or so each time. A spiffy black mercedes comes to pick me up and bring me home; the only downside is the racist drivers. Already on the first day, the first one told me that I didn't look like a professor (perhaps a nice succinct summary of my German experience), and the second one going home told me all about the "little Taliban" (the Turkish population) that is ruining Germany. I frequently encounter this in Germany: first people are surprised I am not on welfare; then they tell me how great I am compared to these other brown-skinned people. (Once, I was standing outside a public toilet, waiting for my wife, and a man tried to give me 50 cents for managing the toilet as he went in.)

Why are Berliners so hostile?

2011-11-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

I can't figure out what the reason is that Berliners are so... hostile and unpleasant. Here are three examples.

1. today: we (my wife, child and I) happen to be in front of the Asia Gourmet takeaway in Hauptbahnhof. We ask for two sets of 4 mini-spring rolls, not noticing that they come obligatorily with noodles. We ask the guy to remove the noodles, saying that we'll pay full price, as if we were buying the noodles (8 Euros). "Geht nicht," says the server. We insist (it costs him nothing! in fact, he saves money on this deal!), and he gives the spring rolls to us, but says nastily, "Nächstes mal, besser lesen." He could just as well have given the spring rolls to us without comment (or even, god forbid, with a smile), but no; there has to be a nasty comment accompanying the hand-over. The guy wasn't German, by the way, he was east Asian. This attitude is more of a feeling, a way of being, in Berlin. You live here long enough, you turn nasty.

2. Some months ago, Deutsche Bahn. My students and I get into the train from the first class side and are standing by the door. A conductor comes along and tells us to move to the second class compartment. I don't mind that at all, except it's the way they talk. It's nasty and hostile, with an unspoken fuck you. What's the deal? Why is it so hard to say the same thing politely?

3. A year ago, a road-side ice cream shop near our apartment. We buy an ice cream for our son (then four), but we'd already bought two coffees for ourselves. Our son sits down at the chair outside the shop to eat, and we also sit with him. Suddenly the ice cream shop owner comes running out of his shop SHOUTING at us to get the hell out of his shop, because we bought our coffee elsewhere (he doesn't sell coffee). We say, OK, we'll stand outside the perimeter of the shop chairs (these are on the pavement), but he SHOUTS at us again to leave, we can't even stand there. Our son gets so upset he throws the uneaten ice cream into the garbage can and we leave. Wow. He could have asked us to leave POLITELY and WITHOUT SHOUTING AT US; but no, of course, not. This is Berlin, after all.

I have experienced similar kinds of things in the US, Japan, and in India (but nothing like the shouting ice-cream man), but it's really about the frequency. India (rather, Delhi) is the worst of all places I know. But compared to the US and Japan, the level of unpleasantness in Berlin (Germany?) is amazingly high. Asia Gourmet is never getting me again as a customer, and I will abandon Deutsche Bahn---the Microsoft Windows of train travel---in a heartbeat if their monopoly on train travel is ever broken. That ice-cream shop was never visited by us. At this rate we'll have to stop going out of our apartment and order everything over amazon or something (duh: we'll have to deal with the DHL guy then).

Note-taker

2011-07-17T07:39:00.000-07:00

An incredible new tool for partially sighted people:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201104155

From: Dreams from my father

2011-05-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have powerand that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.

From: Dreams from my father

2011-05-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

"If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family."

Are students overworked?

2010-10-09T00:58:00.001-07:00

A Spiegel article on student work-overload.

What being an optimist really means

2009-09-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

"My mother's an optimist. She's always hoping for the worst."
Heard in a Columbo series (1st season)

Batch replacing a big deal in Mac OS X

2008-10-19T07:45:00.000-07:00

Used to be that in the old linux days one could just use the commandline tool rename to mass-replace filenames with new ones. Amazingly, Mac OS X does not have this utility. Seems like you have to pay more and more for less and less.

After searching for a source code copy of rename (and no, I didn't want to write my own, simply because I know this script/program exists), all I found was MassReplaceIt. It works, but replace was so much easier to use.

Citation statistics

2008-07-06T04:02:00.001-07:00

Here's a great article on citation counts (h-index etc).

And if this article inspires you to find out your own h-index, and you don't have access to Web of Science, google "scholar index".

Replicable analyses

2008-05-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

I plan to store my published data and code here: thedata.org

And an interesting book to read on data management is here.

Vengeance in (German?) academia

2008-05-12T02:23:00.000-07:00

Recently I had occasion to experience the petty politics of academia that one reads about in novels. And then I came across this article in the New Yorker, and I now understand that what politics in academia is really about: pigs.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_diamond

Früher war alles besser

2008-04-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of experience that is so cliched that people usually dismiss it as fiction.

My wife, child and I were standing at the Bochum train station yesterday morning, on our way to Berlin, and we got talking to an old couple. About five minutes into the conversation, the woman started telling us about how bad times had gotten to be: she had her money stolen by three black women. The husband (he had served in the German army during WW2) piped in with a wistful smile: "you know, that was the great thing about Adolf's time; such a thing would have never happened." Burn those mean green mothers from outer space.

Releasing published data

2008-02-10T06:06:00.000-08:00

In my so-far short career in science, I have asked a grand total of four people to release their published data or a model that they had written. Of these four, only one gave me the data. Of the others, the one whom I asked for a model refused, saying that model was over 10 years old and he could not easily find the code. Another said the same for their data (which was published in 2002): lost, or hard to recover. A third did not answer the email (although they did answer another one, so my email probably did reach them), which I take to be a refusal.

I wonder if this is normal? Why do people not release their data? Why/how do they lose old data? It's a mystery that something so important as data, or a painstakingly built model, can get lost so easily.

How to run universities (German Uni Presidents, please read)

2008-02-09T00:40:00.000-08:00

How to run universities:

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=182

Germany for Germans

2008-02-04T02:42:00.000-08:00

Here is a great website with some interesting statistics, unfortunately old and outdated:

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1995/Germany.htm

If someone knows any more recent reports I would be interested to know about them.

My experiences in setting up and managing a psycholinguistic lab

2007-12-01T23:46:00.000-08:00

I have found some good advice here.

One important issue that I found nothing on is authorship and author-order criteria in psycholinguistics and linguistics. A useful discussion appears here and here. Some of my lab members have been assigned the task of preparing official guidelines for my group, which I will publish on this blog once they are available.

A further interesting issue is research-project management, but I haven't found any interesting discussions yet.

Should I be a fox or a hedgehog?

2007-09-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

Should one be a fox or a hedgehog?

I keep getting berated by senior scientists more experienced than me to become a hedgehog (in fact, I was recently summoned by the Ministry of Education in Brandenburg--my immediate employers--and sternly told to pursue depth rather than breadth). Here are my views on this:

1. Of the total number of hedgehogs out there, how many are at the same status as Einstein The Ur-Hedgehog? I would say, very close to zero.
2. Of the total number of foxes out there, how many have led others to make hedgehog-level advances? I would guess, not close to zero.

But I'm a fox because it's fun, it's what I am, and because I think I make more important discoveries that way than by being a hedgehog. Let others be hedgehogs and let others get the girl and the money. I'm here to enjoy what I do. I hope the Ministry reads my blog.

Scientists admit mistakes?

2007-08-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Scientists admit mistakes--no other profession or calling does that anymore, it seems. Scientists can not only be wrong but can be shown to be wrong very publicly. You examine evidence, you put together a hypothesis that seems the most likely, or least wrong. Then the tests come back and say, "Sorry guys."
New Yorker, July 9 and 16, 2007, p. 79

I had to laugh out loud at this. Or maybe I am just not in science and I just think I am.

List of sad things reviewers and journal editors say

2007-07-04T02:46:00.000-07:00

Journal reviewers (and even editors-in-chief) sometimes say things that are jaw-dropping. Here are some examples (I paraphrase here, of course):

1. The p-value (for some paired comparison) is not low enough to justify publication of the result.
2. A previous experiment showed the opposite result from yours, hence your experimental result is not credible. Variant: do a second experiment, so that our confidence in your result increases.
3. Since the authors do not use a standard method for statistical analysis, and since I do not understand the new method, I recommend rejecting the paper.

We are lucky that we psycholinguists do research that cannot result in anyone actually dying.

On Monte Carlo, Mathematics, and Meditation

2007-07-04T02:43:00.000-07:00

"Monte Carlo...James Bond's smarter lost brother".

"Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute."

Fooled by Randomness, Taleb. p. 44.

Popper and Statisticians

2007-07-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

"He refused to blindly accept the notion that knowledge can always increase with incremental information--which is the foundation of statistical inference."

Fooled by Randomness, Taleb. p. 127

What Popper was like as a person

2007-07-04T02:32:00.000-07:00

"He was brilliant but self-focused, both insecure and arrogant, irascible and self-righteous. He was a terrible listener and bent on winning arguments at all costs. He had no understanding of group dynamics and no ability to negotiate them."

Fooled by Randomness, Taleb. p. 129

On building a ship

2007-07-02T00:12:00.001-07:00

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea".

Quoted in the New Yorker of Jan 22 2007, p. 39. Attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupery.

On beginning writers

2007-07-02T00:10:00.000-07:00

This from a review about a book on RK Narayan. The description is about the problems writers face when they are starting out:

"...the intense period of serious reading; the ensuing time of perfervid first composition, here taking the form of execrable, largely imitative, experimentation; an overlapping period of outsized pride over such compositions; an inevitable period of postal humblings, as submissions are dutifully returned with dismaying little slips; an era of humiliating jobs, to support an ambition that garners no other support."

Experimentalists versus Theorists

2007-05-26T12:25:00.000-07:00

An astonishing distinction in particle physics is between experimentalists and theorists. This is astonishing because how do you do the former without the latter, and the latter without the former?

Interestingly, this division spills over to more harmless areas like psycholinguistics. One prominent psycholinguist once talked to me about "us" experimentalists versus "you" modelers. What a world.

Here is the quote that got me started (New Yorker, Crash Course, sometime in May 07):

Particle physicists come in two distinct varieties, which, rather like matter and antimatter, are very much intertwined and, at the same time, agonistic. Experimentalists build machines. Theorists sit around and think. “I am happy to eat Chinese dinners with theorists,” the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Samuel C. C. Ting once reportedly said. “But to spend your life doing what they tell you is a waste of time.”

“If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it’s not because I’ve forgotten,” Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs. “It’s probably because I hate him.”

There is one dichotomy in linguistics that mirrors the above situation that makes sense, however. Traditional armchair linguists really do tend to theorize in an empirical vacuum. I hate them too.