East Lansing Art Festival

The East Lansing Art Festival was last weekend. I am quite happy when my annual research trip to Michigan State University coincides with the fair, as it did this year. Stalls are set up on the side streets of East Lansing centre. On the North side of the main street (East Grand River Ave) are the high class artists and on the South the more mundane. Of course, there are some in the grey area that get sent to one side or the other. I got a few things from the artists that really stood out for me:

The bowl is from Aslakson Pottery. Even though I make pottery myself, it is not crazy to buy wheel thrown pieces which I don't do myself (I only hand-build). Anyway, it was a shape and decoration that I really liked. The leather wallet with the ginko leaf is from Mike Barnes. I am fond of ginko trees: there was an old one on UC Berkeley campus that I remember as a kid (my mother was a graduate student there and so I went with her). The tie-dye shirt was from one of the nameless South side vendors. I really like tie-dye (maybe from my Berkeley days) but am bizarrely picky about the colours and pattern. This one worked for me. 

There were a number of other great things there. The one other stand-out was the guy selling extra large (up to 2-3 inches), incredibly ornate marbles: Larry Zengel of Hot House Glass. I really, really tried to think of a good reason to spend $50 on a giant, fantastic marble but just couldn't find one. This may be one of life's great regrets. 

Good Deed

I am learning to play the guitar. Six weeks in I can play a few guitar riffs (from "seven nation army" and "smoke on the water") and play a few chords. I can play one chord per bar for "let it be" and "the house of the rising sun" at a dirge pace and sing along. I started playing with a friend of mine who asked for joint lessons for his birthday and am really enjoying it even if it is clear I am not a natural.

For the last several years I have been spending a month every year at Michigan State University working with Keith Promislow, with whom I have had successful research collaborations for the last 15 years. He is also a personal friend at this point. I come out to visit to find new things to work on together. I usually stay in a glorified dorm room (with a kitchen) on campus but this year there was nothing like that available so I am in a long term suite at a local motel.

I didn't want to bring my guitar with me on the trip, but I also didn't want to lose momentum on playing so I looked into renting a guitar here. I found the store, "guitar centre" which seemed promising but when I e-mailed about a possible rental, I heard back from the manager that they did not rent guitars. However, he said that he had an old guitar that he could fix up for me to use. So I have a guitar to use at no cost. It was waiting in the store for me to pick up when I arrived. It always makes me feel good about the world when strangers help you out expecting nothing in return.

Recommendation: Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun (anime)

Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun is translated as "Monthly Girls' Nozaki kun" and is an anime available on Crunchyroll (a streaming service for Asian content), based on a Manga. It is a charming show that my daughter pointed out to me. Shoujo manga is a type aimed at teenage girls. The show is entertaining because it hits at three levels: it has standard shoujo tropes; it lovingly parodies standard shoujo tropes; it gives a behind the scenes glimpse into the manga business. The title character is a high school boy that writes shoujo manga commercially, though few of his classmates realize it. The main female character is Chiyo, who has a crush on the clueless Nozaki and ends up being part of a team that produces the manga.

Recommendation: Wonder Falls

I recently rewatched the single, short season of Wonder Falls which we have on DvD. This was a charming show from 2004 that was cancelled early in its run (like many of the series we liked best - but listing them all would not make this a short post). The series follows the young woman, Jaye, who develops psychic powers tied to conversations she has with inanimate objects shaped like animals (stuffed bears, lawn flamingos, monkey figurines, a cow shaped creamer). For such a short run they develop a number of very entertaining story arcs with Jaye, her family, friend Mahandra, and love interest, Eric. Caroline Dhavernas hits the right notes in her role as the quirky main character, and she is very easy on the eyes, as my father would say. Although the show was cancelled early, they knew it was coming and the main story threads are wrapped up in a satisfactory way.  I am curious about what  ideas the writers would have had for season two.  I do recommend that you watch this series when you are in the mood to be entertained.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderfalls

Caltech Drivers

Most professors do some travel for their research. You might visit a department at another University, where you give a seminar talk and meet faculty there with related interests or with skills you don't have to solve part of a problem you are interested in. It is possible to answer really difficult research questions if you have the right collaborative team with overlapping skills. Such trips (as well as conferences) are a way to build up contacts to put such a team together. There is a certain component of these seminar visits of "showing off" your own work. If the people there like the work you present in your seminar, they will be more likely to work with you and your graduate students (and possibly hire them later), referee your research articles favourably and support your career by recommending you for research grants and promotion. This is an accepted form of self-promotion and we are, in general, happy to hear about new work in our field from visitors.

There is a spectrum of prestige for such travel, although even very good researchers do some travel at the low end. That is, you let someone know you want to visit their department and ask them to invite you to give a talk. You organize and pay for your own travel and accommodation (from a grant or your own pocket) and e-mail people there to set up meetings while you are there. Volunteering to be a speaker is often very welcome to seminar organizers as they try to fill their schedules with interesting talks. At the more "distinguished" end you are invited to come and they make the arrangements and pay. Even higher up (rarely, maybe never, in Mathematics) they fly you first class and give you a fat honorarium for coming to speak.

The highest end experience for me has been the Caltech Driver service. Caltech is a small, private school with a large endowment and a very high research profile. They have made a conscious decision to maintain a fleet of university vehicles and staff of professional drivers. I had this service on my recent trip, when a driver picked me up from UCLA and after my visit to Caltech I was taken to the airport. On a previous visit, I had the unique (for me) experience of arriving at LAX and being met by a Caltech Driver with a "Wetton" sign. It is a real luxury to have this service in the LA area where getting around by rental car or transit is quite stressful, especially if you don't know the city.

I will never be UBC's ambassador to UCLA

I am just back from a trip to Los Angeles during the UBC Reading Week (Spring Break). I spent two days at UCLA and two days at Caltech. I talked with colleagues I have known for a number of years and I gave seminar talks at both places. It was a good trip: my work was well received (or they were just polite) and I heard about a number of interesting ideas that were new to me.

When I am in Southern California I try to eat Mexican food when I can. I know of one good Mexican restaurant in Vancouver (Tio Pepe's on Commercial Drive) but in general that is something in the LA food scene we don't have much of up here. After my UCLA talk on Tuesday when I was on my own and had time to spend before my Caltech driver came to get me (that is another story) I wandered around Westwood Village until I found a likely restaurant. I had a nice meal of that Mexican slow cooked pork (carnitas) and a couple of margaritas.

Still with time to spend, I started walking around again. I began to feel ill to my stomach, in that way you recognize may need to find release. It could have been a stomach bug or simply that I ate too much rich food I was unused to. I had checked out of my hotel that morning, so had no room to return to. Campus was too far away. I mentally consulted my dead mother, who has advice on (almost) any situation. Actually, her advice to me has improved steadily since her death and in general she is more compassionate. In this case, I remembered she had useful perspective even when she was alive: that involuntary bodily functions were never something to be embarrassed about, that trying to suppress them was unnecessary and unhealthy. I found a quiet, dark street with some side shrubbery and after some pacing back and forth found release there.

If you read a news report about a UBC professor embarrassing himself in public near the UCLA campus, please don't forward them my picture.

Interviewing for Academic (Professor) Positions in Mathematics

Our department has advertised several faculty positions this year, two in Applied Mathematics. I am on the committee of about eight for these two positions. One is in my area, Scientific Computing, and one is in Fluid Mechanics. We had about a hundred applicants for the scientific computing position, of whom four we could invite to interview. I made a first pass through the applicants, dropping any without significant research papers or in the wrong area. In the first pass, "significant" only meant that they were in journals I recognized as good in the field or was unsure of. Examples of good journals in my field are the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Scientific Computing, SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis (more theoretical), and the Journal of Computational Physics. The applicant field was deep this year, so these criteria were met by about half the applicants. Looking more closely at the publications and letters of recommendation got me to about ten that I took to the committee. We discussed the relative merits and came to our list of four to interview. Some demonstrated or potential for teaching ability is also considered, but as a secondary criteria. This is the reality at most research universities like UBC.

Of course I cannot go into the specifics of candidates for this search or any other. They came to UBC for two days. They met with the head of our department and a representative of the Dean of Science. They met with faculty members in Mathematics and other departments. In these meetings, we got a chance to hear some details of the research and got a sense of whether they would be good colleagues. Of course, these are top people, who are likely to get other offers elsewhere, so part of all this is to make them have a good impression of UBC. They gave a research seminar and were taken out to lunch and dinner by different groups. It was a while ago that I interviewed myself, but I remember it was high intensity - both exciting and exhausting.

This week, the committee will meet and make a recommendation to the department on acceptability of candidates and for those that pass that bar, the order in which job offers would be made (continuing until one accepts). The department votes on the committee recommendation and makes a recommendation to the Dean of Science. If the Dean approves, offers go out.

I gather this is all more effort in interviewing that for a job with equivalent salary in Industry. At least in part, this is due to the potentially long term commitment we expect to make to faculty members at UBC. We expect any junior faculty member to get tenure after five years or so. The expectations for tenure are actually quite high but with this careful hiring practice, most new UBC hires make that level. At that point, they are guaranteed employment for the rest of their careers. Of course, nothing is really guaranteed. Tenure can be revoked in cases of gross incompetence or misconduct and some kinds of criminal activity. Again, after all the care at hiring, these cases are very rare.