ladamic's blog research on information networks and non-researchy random musings

2012/06/24

Superwomen

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 13:06

Everyone’s read the Anne-Marie Slaughter piece in the Atlantic on why there are so few women on the upper rungs of government and corporate ladders. Most of the discussion of the piece I’ve seen is about work/life balance, etc., but what resonated with me is Prof. Slaughter’s insight that the women we aspire to be (Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, etc.), and who advise us that we can have it all, are superwomen. I agree, except that I think we don’t have to look at the upper rungs to find them. I run into them all the time. And here are my observations from the field:

While the rest of the world sleeps soundly, the superwoman steadily advances science.

Late into the night:

It's 11pm, do you know where your stack of work is?

or the wee hours of the morning.

When even the squirrels are still sleeping.

If she has volunteered for an especially critical task, the superwoman does what must be done:

If she is deprived of sleep for another reason, well, that’s just another opportunity for the superwoman to advance science:

Unlike the rest of us, the superwoman does not need to catch up on sleep. The superwoman never naps…  well, almost never.

And when duty calls for her to save another part of the world, the superwoman flies back on the weekends to take care of her responsibilities back home.

To the superwomen out there: you’re all my heroes. And to the supermen, you have my admiration as well!

2012/06/21

dress

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 23:05

A while ago I commented on how I haven’t practiced dressing up too much. Apparently Visa’s fraud detection algorithms have detected this.

dress[click on image to see bigger version]

 

2011/12/23

Reading to distraction

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 04:51

On a recent visit to NYU I accidentally activated an alarm by exiting through the wrong door. As I sheepishly retraced my steps back toward the security guard, he admonished me ‘Didn’t you read the sign on the door?’. Actually, I try very hard not to read signs. That little voice in my head likes to read them to me. In my undergrad house at Caltech, I’d sometimes get up from working on a problem set to go to the restroom: ‘I wonder if I approximated the functio… “PLEASE PROP DOOR OPEN WHEN NOT IN USE” .. uh… what was I thinking?’. I tried to move the sign or dispose of it altogether, but it would reappear in the same spot shortly.

Recently my attempts to think on the way to and from lunch have been foiled by the brilliant “Thanks to Berkeley” campaign. As I walk down Berkeley’s shady paths, I’m greeted by smiling faces telling me all that they can do thanks to their fine university. Staring at the ground is a pity in such pretty surroundings, but it did pay off recently when I had to step over someone sprawled in the middle of the path, possibly protesting something, possibly not.

Perhaps my most pathetic repeat reading is that of art posters specifying the artist and the exhibit featuring the work, e.g.:

There are studies recording a higher incidence of traffic accidents within viewing distance of attention-grabbing billboards. But who is keeping track of the many small crashes our brains experience when exposed to reading material?

2011/12/16

Girls who like boys they want to be like

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 20:53

[Information nutrition label: facts supported by data: 0, relevance to research:0, international affairs: 0, politics: 0, personal story of no generalizability: 100%]
How many of us can trace some interest, hobby, or even career choice to a youthful infatuation?

I encountered Ivan in my grandmother’s kitchen in Split. He had requested an extra strong shot of Cedevita (a powdered vitamin drink), and my aunt obliged by filling the glass half-full with powder. He brushed his floppy hair aside, downed the fizzy concoction, grimaced, and laughed. That vacation he rang the doorbell a few more times, while I sat around writing poems about him and how I wished the doorbell would ring. On the one visit to his apartment in the building next door, he showed me a fantastic self-portrait he had painted, and some exercises he was doing in art school. He was 14. I was 12.

The following year I was again in Split, but just for an evening. Ivan and I wandered around the old city, eating corn on the cob bought from a street vendor. Ivan was so funny, I nearly peed my pants. Maybe I even did pee my pants. When we got back, I dug up the poetry I had written for him. He listened, amused, and when I walked him to the door, he leaned in for a kiss. I momentarily panicked and closed the door in his face, which was the last I ever saw of it. He and his mom moved the next year, possibly related to the collapse of their 2nd floor balcony on New Year’s Eve, when everyone had piled out onto it to watch the fireworks.

The reason I mention Ivan is that he nearly made an artist out of me. Not only did I increase my Cedevita intake,  but I started painting in earnest. Every once in a while, I would pull out a photo of Ivan’s self-portrait for inspiration. In the following 1.5 years I painted enough for a small portfolio that gained me admission to 2 art magnet high schools in NYC. I opted for Stuyvesant HS instead, and pretty much abandoned my interest in art for a while. But it was a close call. Ivan went on to become a professional illustrator and published a graphical novel (as Google tells me).

At Stuyvesant I became infatuated with M., who sat in the row behind me in biology class. I almost never talked to M., except to catch him saying “I play violin” (I purchased several violin concertos on CD, lacking any discernible music ability of my own), “I run track” (I joined the track team, even though gym was my worst subject), “I go to ancient greek club in the morning” (this I only tried a few times because at 8am it conflicted with math team), “now I play the cello” (I augmented my CD collection to include cello compositions). Our biology teacher must have noticed my obvious crush, and paired us off for a quiz on human sexuality. M. knew all the answers, except one; I switched his answer of “semen” to “seminal fluid”. We got a 100 on the quiz, but that was just about the only success I experienced with M. (besides when we compared our 1st report cards and he said “What? Your GPA is 98.7? I though my 98.1 was the highest!”).

At the end of freshman year, my family moved. M. stayed. Although I don’t remember any ancient greek at all, I did gain a greater appreciation of string-oriented classical music, and I actually continued to run track and cross country for the rest of high school in an undistinguished way. M. continued his musical training and plays concerts, but is a physician by day (um, thanks again Google).

I suppose that must be what they mean by “impressionable” when they talk about youth. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be. Liking boys, and then wanting be like them, made sense. But once I knew who I wanted to be, who did I want them to be? By the time I was a freshman at Caltech, I wanted to be a physicist, or a mathematician, or something like that. E., a sophomore physics major and my first steady boyfriend, was acing his classes. I thought he was great, and so did he. When a few short months later, he dumped me for another, I started dating D., who had published papers already back in high school. D. was a more attentive boyfriend than E., e.g. on the occasion of breaking up with me, he told me a couple of jokes to cheer me up first.

Even before their ends, these relationships made me unhappy. Dating conspicuous academic accomplishment comes at a price. Not only did I have to compete with E and D’s homework /extra credit/research assignments for their attention, but it spoiled my independent fun to know that my significant other had the discipline to work all the time while I sometimes wanted to not work. It was also difficult to maintain self-esteem. While constantly thinking about how great they were, I couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t as great. When my freshman progress report for a sophomore abstract algebra class generously said that “Lada is getting used to the level of abstraction”, D’s progress report for a graduate level applied math/CS class said that he was far outperforming the graduate students. Even though E and D were always able to help me if I got stuck on homework assignments, my self-esteem and GPA improved after they were no longer around.

So after ceasing to want to be like the boys I liked, I also stopped liking men I wanted to be (exactly) like. Now I’m married to a man I like to love, and who has many fine qualities I can admire without necessarily wanting to acquire.

2011/11/26

revisiting MIT

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 05:20

Last week, not one, but two people at MIT said that they expected me to be intimidating. The funny thing is that, based on past experience (and by now old and likely inaccurate recollections), I expected to be intimidated — by MIT. The last time I had been invited to MIT was  in ’97.
call from MIT admissionsMIT was the first to contact me about having been admitted. This was ’97, before cellphones, and so I took the call on the hallway phone of my undergrad house at Caltech. In shock, I mumbled something in response. Soon I was off to visit MIT in person.

I happened to have arrived on the evening of a big snow storm.

My student host appeared entirely unfazed by the snow, and was formidable in other ways:

The faculty painted a consistent picture of the work culture:

Just out of curiosity, I recently looked up this faculty member and noted his Nature/Science publications.

That day, even lunch was a bit intimidating. 3 faculty, wearing suit coats, took me  (in jeans and a sweater) to a nice Chinese restaurant, but my 3.5 years of eating dorm food (and ramen and Tommy’s on weekends) had not prepared me adequately for this.

I didn’t end up pursuing a PhD at MIT. The explanation I like to give is that I found Stanford a better fit (more on that in another post), but perhaps I was also a bit intimidated by MIT, just a bit.

This time around, I was visiting EECS rather than physics. Again, people were crazy-smart, and yes, they were working incredibly hard, on very interesting projects. Now, as I did back then, I respect that.

2011/10/23

Office space

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 05:50

This summer I read “Unseen Academicals” by Terry Pratchett, and as usual, he got to the “bottom” of human nature in his satire of the academe and soccer (I’m still not sure those two really fit in the same book, but nevertheless…):

For the past 6 years I have enjoyed having my own office, though I never did attempt to smoke anything on UofM’s non-smoking campus. This semester, 2 days a week, I still get an office to myself, thanks to the kindness of a colleague at Berkeley. And to illustrate Pratchett’s point:

The other 3 days/week I work at Facebook. No office, no cubicle walls. And yet, with the right set of headphones and all the screen real estate, I almost don’t miss having an office, and there are plenty of other things to like there.

Except…

my twitter feed

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 05:49

My Twitter “feed/stream/timeline” has all the latest from the greatest (which is why I follow them), which is also why I brave it only every so often.

2011/08/17

Dinluck

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 04:26

I’m not sure if this is just common among my friends, or if it’s a generally American thing, but it’s tough to get someone to show up to a dinner party without their bringing food.dinner party
It’s hard to complain about this because my friends tend to be really good cooks and I gladly relieve them of the burden of carrying back leftovers.

arrivalBut I can’t help but think about how inefficient this pattern is. And it’s not just the pile of bowls and tupperware that invariably get left behind and must be returned before they mingle too much with the host dishes.

dishesInstead of one person making a trip to the grocery store and putting in time in the kitchen, now there are n=number of parties attending people doing this separately for d ~ n dishes. While it’s true that shopping for ingredients for d dishes takes more time than t1 = time it takes to shop for 1 dish, I think it’s not even close to d*t1. Probably no more than d0.5*t1. Same for cooking. One can easily chop and toss a salad, or stir a pot while something else is cooking. So, really, no need to bring anything… unless, ahem, it’s one of your chocolate desserts, or fun salads, or recipes you saw on that cooking show, or …[Burp].

2011/07/12

Playing the female part

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 15:18

Being a woman in my chosen profession, that’s hasn’t posed any particular challenges. But some activities associated with just “being a woman” have sometimes proved to be a bit beyond me.

A few things I have done only a handful of times:

  • Used a purse (when you can just tap your pockets to check if you have keys + wallet)
  • Worn make-up (the number really dwindles once I exclude Halloween and experimenting in gradeschool)
  • Worn high heels

It’s not that I don’t think all those things look good, it’s just that I dislike forgetting keys, getting make-up remover in the eye, and falling on my face. As a result, I find myself searching for:

  • Pants that have pockets.
  • Shoes you can comfortably walk a mile or two in.
  • Articles of clothing that cover what needs to be covered even if one occasionally ends up sitting on the floor, or riding a bike, or reaching up or down for something.

In principle, this should not be that hard, but in practice… Last week I was shopping at a mall for a dress for someone else (being without pockets, dresses are of limited interest to me). The quest was to find a lightweight, natural fabric dress, that one could wear over a regular bra (meaning one with shoulder straps, and not one of the strapless variants that can only support so much). Hours of searching turned up nothing. The salesclerks suggested wearing an extra shirt under the dresses in order to make them functional (so one stays cool in a summer dress by wearing an extra layer?).

The impracticality problem isn’t limited to just dresses. Here’s an (edited) recent selection of tops from a retailer.

Hairstyles can be impractical as well. Did  you ever notice Detectives Eames or Beckett brushing hair out of their faces while Richard Castle and Detective Goren get to actually observe the crime scene? Naturally, if one always had a hair tie or hat handy, this would not be a problem, but one would need a purse to hold those…

Thankfully, my job does not require the level of sophisticated style that being a female detective on TV does.

2011/06/20

David Attenborough, take it back

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 07:17

Sir David Attenborough and Wandering Albatross Chick

Photo © Ben Osborne.

After having watched many hours of nature shows, seemingly most of them narrated by Sir David Attenborough, I find myself haunted not by their incredible natural beauty, but by scenes whose tragedy was accentuated by Attenborough’s calm commentary. For example, I can’t look at a coot without recalling how a mother intentionally kills one of her chicks in “Life of Birds”.  When I see a polar bear I recall a bear hunting a baby seal. The narrative goes something like “If the mother cannot catch this seal, her two hungry cubs will starve to death”. Then she doesn’t catch the seal. A flock of flamingos or flamingo-like birds is flying up from a muddy lake. Except a few of them can’t lift off, their legs caked in mud. The longer the birds flail about, the larger the weights become. A mother lemur (or some other kind of swinging-in-the-trees primate) is moving in the forest with her young who are performing amazing acrobatics while jumping from branch to branch. Then one of the youngsters falls and lies injured. The mother calls to him, and he cries back, but after some time, she continues on, with his cries growing fainter with distance. It makes me wonder if the cameraman ever sneaks back to free the flamingos from their shackles, or throw a steak to the polar bear, or put a cast on the little one’s broken leg. And you, Sir David Attenborough, do you shed a tear when you’re editing the material later on? Or has nature hardened you long ago?

A couple of years ago, I played a DVD (I forget which one exactly), a present. I watched as a young elephant became separated from his herd in some extremely arid part of the planet. As the camera zooms out, you get an aerial view of the little elephant running all alone in the wrong direction, and you hear “He has no chance. Without the herd guiding him to water, he will die of thirst”.  I turned off the TV and ejected the DVD. For a few years I watched no more nature documentaries.

But with new incentives to watch nature shows,  I’ve been searching for ones that may soften the realities of the natural world a bit. And so I came to watch the strangely-titled 1974 film “Animals are beautiful people” (by the time I reached the scene with animals getting drunk off of fermented fruit, I realized I’d seen it before decades ago). In one of the scenes, a piglet is chased by a cheetah. It manages to get away by finding a hiding hole. But it’s separated from its family. However, the next day its search is fruitful and it is reunited with mom. Which is unlike any of the outcomes I’ve seen in other nature documentaries. Must be fiction. But I’d really rather remember it, and forget the coots.

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress