Social Democracy in Unexpected Places

Columbia University is one of the places in the world with the highest concentration of Nobel Laureates. It is second in Wikipedia’s list of Nobel laureates by affiliation, and just recently in 2006 Columbia faculty won two Nobel prizes (for Economics and Literature).

I would be crazy not to make use of this as much as I can. And so of course I went to a public discussion on “An emergent India: Prospects and Problems” between Prabhat Patnaik, apparently a renowned Indian econonist, and Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize 2001), whom even I had heard of. It was interesting! They were both entertaining and interesting speakers (unlike the moderator, who only mumbled and had to be constantly reminded to speak into the microphone). Of course everybody was duly impressed by India’s GDP growth rate (although Patnaik didn’t completely trust the figures) and had a lot of economic insights to share, but what I did not expect was this outburst of unmitigated social democratic opinions from both speakers. They criticised the growing disparity between the living standards of the reasonably well-educated urban population (about 250 million people) who benefit from the rapid growth of the IT industry and the unskilled rural population (about 800 million), where literacy among adult women hovers around 50%, 35% of the population live off $1 or less per day, and 47% of children below the age of five are malnourished. They applauded China for preventing an imbalance of the same magnitude by maintaining high prices for domestic agricultural products, which they do by manipulating currency exchange rates in order to avoid introducing import tariffs and pissing off the WTO (clever people, the Chinese). And they openly advocated raising taxes on the use of environmental resources and imported luxury goods in order to finance improved education at all levels. (And Stiglitz looked positively sly when he said that the WTO doesn’t want you to tax luxury imports, but “we’ve found ways around this in other cases too”. :)

Having lived in Western industralised countries all my life, my primary exposure to the economy of India so far has been whenever they closed down factories over here and moved the jobs to Asia. I’ve always felt that this is a strategy that might eventually backfire; there is a lot to be said for the excellent infrastructure and social stability that European countries offer. But I had no idea what “social stability” really means before they mentioned today that there has been a wave of suicides among Indian peasants, who live less than an hour away from the major IT centres, and peasant riots in rural China are frequent. And it’s an interesting perspective that if the movement of jobs from Europe and the US to India is because European and Indian workers compete with each other for lower labour costs, then one would expect that the wages in India would go up, but they don’t. Instead, they analysed the current trend towards lower wages and the “renegotiation of the social contract” as an effect of capital being able to move, while labour cannot (and hence the negotiation position of the capital anywhere improves). So: Labourers of all countries, unite! Who would have thought I’d have to go to New York to hear this?

Speech acts in Mac ads

Whoo boy, am I ever behind in blogging. In the past few weeks, I have been doing a number of really fun things (looking at Mozart manuscripts at the Morgan Library, visiting a wolf reservation in New Jersey, seeing the Museum of Natural History, doing a day trip to Philadelphia), and I promise I’ll find the time soon to post about them.

For now, however, I’d just like to point out the new “Get a Mac” ad. It’s really nifty: They use speech acts to make fun of Vista’s security features. Who ever said that pragmatics would never pay the bills?

Exploration below Columbia University

Having submitted my ACL paper, I’m staying home for a couple of days to get rid of my cold properly. This allows me to websurf as much as I want and consider it relaxing and productive for my healing process, rather than mere procrastination.
One rather nifty thing I just discovered is a series of articles in the Bwog, the official weblog of Columbia’s undergraduate student magazine. They have been exploring the underground tunnels below campus (Part 1, Part 2) and posted pictures. This is quite neat, because one of the buildings above the tunnels they report on is actually the one with my office in it, and I have been in (the most harmless areas of) some of the tunnels they mention. I had no idea they stored uranium there and there were the remains of old railway tracks to discover.

Free food

I’ve been sort of stressed in the past days because I want to submit a paper to ACL. The deadline is Tuesday afternoon next week, and until two days ago, I did not have an implementation of the system that the paper is about.

However, today was a pretty good day. Part of this is that I’ve made good progress with the writing. But on top of that, just when I was kind of getting bored and unhappy with the paper and also getting hungry, I discovered some leftovers from a project meeting in the pretentiously named “lounge” of our floor:

Isn’t it pretty? See, one of the things that I really like about American universities as opposed to German ones is that free food is readily available, and although I did not undergo the rigorous training that makes American-schooled graduate students extra sensitive to free food, I’m not going to pass up an opportunity like this if it comes up and licks my face. Yay for Columbia. (However, there have been rather frequent reports recently about mice settling down in the CS offices here, and I can only begin to imagine how a mouse must react to a table full of yummy food like this …)

iPhone

In other news, I am as excited about the Apple iPhone that was announced on Tuesday. It’s teh shiny, and it seems to me that Apple has managed to make the programs that should work together smoothly work together smoothly.

But still, the phone is not what I had hoped for. What’s the point in making it run a mobile OS X if you can’t write your own applications? Why do I want wireless on a mobile phone if I can’t use it for Skype or something similar? Is it really necessary to lock me into a single possible carrier (Cingular), which happens not to provide a sufficiently strong signal in my apartment? And if it’s supposed to be a computing platform and not just a dumb but portable extension of my PC (which was Palm’s classical philosophy), why don’t I get the chance to attach peripherals? It would be so cool to have a USB port in the iPhone that I could use to attach a keyboard or an external hard drive or stuff like that. Don’t tell me that this would raise the power consumption by all that much.

But really, I am annoyed at Apple for claiming to know what’s best for me. The iPod was a masterstroke, because it did one thing and it did it well. The iPhone is a more ambitious thing, and at this point I don’t see how I would spend $500 for a mobile web browser with a two-year contract (considering that I already have a phone and an MP3 player, and it really isn’t that important to me to have them inside the same device). It is applications that define the true value of a computing platform; I would be less excited about OS X if it didn’t have things like OmniGraffle and Quicksilver and Parallels and Delicious Library and the Unix command-line tools and everything that I can imagine to need, and considering that the phone probably won’t have any of these, it’s really not so interesting to me.

Shape note singing

I have seen quite a number of strange events since arriving in New York, including such gems as Reverend Jen’s Anti-Slam and Nerd Nite. But tonight’s performance of The Subliminal History of New York State, Part 1 takes the cake of the weirdest thing yet.

So, remember when I mentioned that Roosevelt Island — the island in the East River between Manhattan and Queens — has a really colourful history involving the crumbling smallpox hospital and a mental hospital that has now been rebuilt into a luxury apartment complex? Well, there’s a woman called Carrie Dashow who made a sort of, um, art or something about it. Her point is that Roosevelt Island is really a sea monster that eats dogs and wants to break free and swim up the Hudson River, except that the people built the Queensborough Bridge across it to tie it down and installed the pneumatic AVAC underground trash disposal system (this is actually true) to avoid feeding the monster with trash.

I hesitate to say what kind of art it was, because it involved Carrie reading from her book, showing pictures on really old-school slides as well as hand-made signs that the audience had to read aloud, distributing little props like toy plates and cutlery, and shape-note singing of some of Carrie’s poems, composed and arranged by a guy called Jesse who was also present. Shape-note singing sounds like a fun idea initially because everyone basically sightreads the music, and so I thought perhaps I could pick up some more mad singing skillz. But, oh. The music and arrangements sounded rather antiquated and not that exciting — apparently shape note singers don’t like thirds –, but actually this was quite appropriate for the sea monster theme. It was the style of singing that really bothered me. Some experienced shape note singers complained in passing about the “pitch police”; I can only assume that this denotes people who actually care about precise intonation and aren’t satisfied with the feeling of community that comes from singing together. I suppose it’s important that people like the guy who started all his notes about a fourth lower than intended shouldn’t feel left out; and it’s actively encouraged to slur from one note to the next, a practice that is a huge no-no in every other form of singing I’ve ever been involved in because it makes you sing everything flat. But what does flat even mean in a setting where they don’t even use a tuning fork and instead estimate the approximate note they should start the song on? Anyway. What they lack in intonation and careful balancing of different parts they make up for in enthusiasm and sheer volume.

I’m not linking to any of the people involved in the event, because they were really nice people, and I don’t want them to find this post and be offended. They don’t deserve that. But I guess it was a mistake to spend two hours at the “shape-note singing workshop” before the main event. Just coming to the show and sightreading everything would have been just fine for me. This way I felt like I wasted two hours of my life, and I almost didn’t stay for the main show. I’m glad I did, because the songs are better in the context of the rest of the story. And they were nice people; I hope I was polite enough in explaining that I couldn’t come to their weekly shape note singing congregations because I don’t have time for another hobby, because I really appreciated the spirit of the invitation. But I think I’ve seen enough of shape note singing for a while.

Regular expressions

If I ever get the chance to teach a class on formal languages, please remind me to use the following cartoon in my slides.

(from xkcd)

Snow!

Also featuring the view from my bedroom window:

And this after we had over 20 degrees on Saturday and I was walking around outside in a t-shirt. The weather this winter is just crazy, I tell you.

No Extreme Singing

Also, because quite a number of people asked me about it: The early-morning singing that we were going to do for some Japanese TV station was cancelled. By them, I should say; there were several dozen chorus members who would have been up for it. In retrospect, I’m glad about the cancellation, because those were extremely stressful days, and I didn’t get enough sleep as it was.

And while I’m posting about cool apartments in New York, I really must talk about the place where we had a (five-hour!) quartet rehearsal on Saturday. This is in a luxury apartment building on Roosevelt Island, an island in the East River with a colourful history of prisons, mental hospitals, and suchlike. Our bass’s brother lives in a three-bedroom apartment on the 12th floor of this building, with huge windows giving you a view over the East River and Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I felt like a tourist for asking him to take some pictures out of his windows, but I just had to share this with you:

I don’t know how he affords this kind of place. He seems like a perfectly cool guy (and gave us lots of good Barbershop advice). But: He didn’t get to see the ball drop from his house. So there.

Five reasons why my apartment rocks, or: Happy New Year!

After four months in my apartment, I am really quite happy with it at this point. Here are some reasons.

1. It is relatively spacious for its price (considering the Manhattan rent scale), relatively quiet (except for the constant hum of some air conditioning unit below my window, the hissing of the steam pipes, and the occasional fire truck), and I can see the sky from several windows at once if I position myself correctly. None of this is trivial in Manhattan.
2. I have stations for six subway lines within a five-minute walking distance, and can get to my office in thirty minutes, to Penn Station in ten minutes, and to my Yoga studio in fifteen minutes without changing trains.
3. I have at least ten places to get food within a one-block radius at any particular hour of the day or night, and several hundred within a ten-minute walking distance. Some of them are simultaneously good and cheap, and the Pakistani or whatever at my favourite deli almost greets me by name at this point. Yeah, sue me, I’m giving in to the temptation of readily available food that someone else cooks for me. I’m also having my laundry washed by the Mexicans on Ninth Avenue because there is no room for a washing machine in this building, and having it washed is not that much more expensive than the laundromat but so much less of a hassle. Thank you, DFG, for paying me so well.
4. I have no pests or annoying insects in my apartment that I’m aware of (any more). This is not trivial in Manhattan either.
5. I can walk to the Hudson River or to Central Park in about ten minutes.

But what’s perhaps the coolest aspect of the apartment is that it is possible to walk up to the roof of the building, and even quite convenient for me because I live on the top floor. This may become nifty in the summer, but it was awesome last night, because my house is one of the few blessed buildings from which you can see the ball drop in Times Square. Here’s a shot from 23:57 or so last night:

This is not the best picture I could have taken, I guess, but you can still see the ball on top of One Times Square, marked by the red arrow. It was quite fun to celebrate the turning of the years on my rooftop, as I met a lot of neighbours (one of whom insisted that we’d really need to be “more neighbourly” this year (2007) and have dinner together or something; he seems nice, so I really should do that), and also I avoided the crowds, which looked as follows even at half past five in the afternoon at the intersection of my street and Broadway, one block away from here. (Half past five! This is six and a half hours before the ball drop! At a temperature of 3 degrees C or so! And there are no public toilets!)

This is a picture from a webcam; I never got to see all these people because by the time I went shopping for the things to put into my fondue around seven (on a Sunday night, but this is America), the police had blocked off access through my street, and you would have had to walk all the way up to Central Park to even get onto Broadway. (Also, I needed proof that I’m actually living here to get back to my house, because they had also blocked off access in the other direction, for “crowd control” reasons. A recent electricity bill did just fine.) What I did see, however, was the people streaming away from Broadway after the ball drop. Here are some views from my roof at 0:30 or so:

And while I couldn’t see the Central Park fireworks from my roof, I did see their reflection in the glass wall of a skyscraper.

All told, a fun New Year’s Eve in New York City. :)