Noise Emissions

When I came to the U.S., I wondered every day how people tolerate the continuous noise everywhere. Loud cars, air conditioners running all the time, trucks big and small on and off the campus... only very rarely is one of those particularly atrocious transport vehicles on the campus replaced by an electric one. Somehow, silence is not a value here.

(In fact, during my last visit to British Columbia in 2008 I invested two or three days just looking for a place that has no other noises but nature itself. It didn't work. Even in the most remote valleys I tried, there was always at least the hum of some distant plane.)

So I wondered whether there is any country anywhere that has noise emissions regulations, any rules that would govern how machines and devices are to be constructed in a noise-minimizing fashion, sanctioning their operation licenses. Indeed, Germany (and probably some other countries, too) has some laws that regulate noise immissions for workers and in habitated areas (workers have to wear protective gear, and home residents can force noise sources to be shut down), but this doesn't protect the average pedestrian on the street. I don't know of any place that has laws that apply to the engineering side of the equation - making devices quiet before they're built, instead of banning loud ones.

Now it seems that even places like Kenia have noticed that people need to be protected from excessive noise levels. I would not be surprised if neither Germany nor other European places, not to mention the U.S., actually cared about or legislated noise reduction in public places.

USA: Arrival, First Thoughts

In order to ease the tension which many of my dear readers might (or actually do) feel when looking at the curious blank in this blog with no news in sight, finally there's an update. It's not a particularly detailed or artistically valuable update, but it may provide some consolation. To some.

So, in the meantime, I have arrived in the USA, more precisely in Baltimore, Maryland, to spend one year as a postdoctoral research fellow here. (Actually, since I haven't graduated yet, I'm technically a "visiting full-time student", but luckily - or hopefully - a paid one.) The LCSR (Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics) at the JHU (Johns Hopkins University), more precisely the ERC-CISST (NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology), has received me well, and I'm trying to accomodate to the local customs. It's still not clear what my definite assignment will be, but I'm working hard to understand the intricacies of real-time 3D elastography imaging and shift estimation strategies in spectral elastography. Sigh.

Getting used to the country, frankly, is not easy.

One of the strangest things for a newcomer is that everything is running on credit-based principles.
Need to rent an apartment? Get a reference from your previous landlord.
Need to apply for utilities? Show a credit card.
Need a credit card? Show some utility bills. It's circular and arbitrary, but probably the only way to do things.
Need to open a bank account? ("Say, could you explain to me what's the difference between a checking and a savings account? We don't have these at home." "Why, it's what they say. One is for checking, one for savings." Duh!) Show some proof that you actually live in the place you claim to live. How to do so, that's up to you - one option is to present a letter (might be empty, just the envelope counts) which has been delivered to your name to that given address. Duh!!

What's more depressing is the general 2nd-rate-ness of everything. The other month when I've been to Canada, one B&B landlady there who had immigrated decades ago from the Netherlands said she wonders why the world doesn't hang to the one side where Europe is, with all the stuff the people over there have.
At that time, I didn't really understand that properly, I just had a vague idea. That was in Canada. In the US, the issue is much more pronounced. There is generally no feeling for the need to do things "just right". Contrary to... Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, everything is done ad-hoc in the US. It's not even the arbitrary by-law culture like what's prevalent in Canada, but rather a general lack of standards here.
It is just one example, and a technical one, but the underlying problem is hinted at by the comment of an American colleague of mine who told me that "while the US pride themselves on being so technologically advanced, the cell phone system - just to name one example - is crap. Coverage is patchy, dropped calls abound, and there are incompatible system standards between providers".
It's been only a week here, but my current impression is that the free-market approach to everything simply doesn't work. It's a failure. With no standards, even no meta-standards on how to agree on standards, everybody is out on his or her own to arrange things to work. A subtle feeling I had several times in Canada is showing up here in a much more massive way - no standards means an increased overhead to get things done, people are less willing to pay for it, and the infrastructure - both technical and societal - goes down the drain.

The economical downturn is playing its part, too. One of the first TV shows I watched here was about "how to get rich on the housing bubble collapse", i.e. how to find out early which households will be subject to foreclosure and eviction next, and how to get into it and get your share from this household's financing failure by buying them out and basically evict them yourself. "Isn't it immoral if I speed up that family's eviction?" "No, absolutely not! See it as an act of sympathy of showing them that you care, and that you help them on their way out."
Although the university and the village I am living in now seem somewhat isolated from this, the signs of recession seem to be everywhere. Currently it is just housing, just finance, but soon it will intrude everybody's life, I fear. The incredibly high annual US federal deficits were in the hundreds of billions under Bush. Since I came, first a huge bailout of one financial institute for over 80 billion dollars made headlines, only to be followed a few days later by this federal support to the financial sector of 700 billion dollars. What's going on? That's almost 3,000 USD of new debt for every US citizen in just one week, which doesn't include the now-standard annual deficit yet.
Somehow, Germany has managed to break even on its own new annual federal spending over the course of the last few years. Partly it is due to the fact that several interlocking laws are prohibiting excessive spending (like the Maastricht treaties or the Grundgesetz larger-investments-than-debts rule). Here, there seems to be no such thing. The current administration is spending completely without second thoughts, in a totally immoral way, amounts of money which are impossible to recover anytime soon. Especially not when the economy is crashing, which I guess it will with oil prices rising, and oil becoming a scarce commodity. This will completely choke off America's flow of economy.
Probably I'll need to get a car, but I'm looking for cheaper and cheaper ones, since it seems probable that under the given circumstances, I'd need to write it off completely in one year's time.
It doesn't look good here. Frankly I wonder whether I have arrived here into the last good years of the US.

Luckily, Mt. Washington (where I live now) is a diametrally different thing. This village is exceedingly green, with average lot sizes of probably far in excess of 2000sqm, very many very old trees, few cars (and most are Volvos), a very small and very safe-looking "downtown", lots and lots of American squirrels, birds, and cicadas. Everybody (almost everybody) votes Obama and eats organic food. Bus and light rail connect directly to JHU and Baltimore downtown (which is best to be avoided, however). It's sunny, the backyard deck is surrounded by huge trees, a small forest of bamboo, cicadas are chirping incessantly, and the people are very nice. A small paradise.

So, all in all, it's a mixed bag. As always.

What's in Store: PhD, EMBC, and JHU

I have effectively logged out from this blog, most social activities, and private life in general in the last weeks and months.
This is a result of a whole cloud of different tasks floating around me in a very non-structured manner, soaking up all available energy.

• Aug 1:
  The most urgent task right now (and thus the most intensively tackled, according to the Earliest-Deadline-First scheduling paradigm) is finishing the pre-final version of my PhD thesis and handing it in to my supervisor.
  


• Aug:
  Right after that, a huge amount of miscellaneous stuff needs to be dealt with, all related to finishing and closing up a 6-year DFG-funded project, applying for follow-up project funding, packing my stuff at the UBT, and moving out of Germany, including handling all the official, organizational, and private matters.
  


• Aug 16-26:
  Second, it's the next conference where part of my (and my project partners') work is to be presented, in Vancouver, Canada. It will be a huge conference (the 30th EMBC), with an appropriately high pressure to whip up a good presentation. What's more, there'll be my next supervisor (for my post-PhD time work) giving a workshop talk, which gives the whole thing added value (and added pressure).
  Besides, I still need to find out whether I can postpone the Canadian Permanent Residency activation to some time later this year, or early next year. This would relieve me of a lot of organizational stuff at the time of landing now.
  


• Sep 15:
  Scheduled beginning of my next work appointment. Completely unexpectedly, the one of my bunch of applications I had sent out several months ago - in frightened anticipation of the time after my current PhD-research assistant appointment at the UBT - which fired and blossomed into a work contract is at the place I had expected the least.
  A telephone interview with Russell H. Taylor and Emad Boctor of the ERC-CISST at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD/USA scored me a visiting student (at first) and postdoc (after PhD graduation) position there. It'll last one year, and encompasses work on an ultrasound-related project in cooperation with a German Fraunhofer institute.
  Needless to say, I am more frightened of this assignment, in this lab, with these faculty, and these people, than I was when I had no appointment in the pipeline at all.
  

The other week, I had the absolutely fantastic and unique opportunity to meet Prof. Taylor here in Germany, and discuss the pending project work and spend some personal time with him. I learned a lot about the ROBODOC, life in robotics, academia, and especially in JHU (and here), which I could not have learned anywhere else.

Now I hope I can live up to the expectations. Which are high. Needless to say.

April Action Hero Figures

This April 2008 was chock full of events which usually would fill at least... several months of an only moderately boring life.

• 23: The number of months that the processing of my Canadian Permanent Residency application took. Applied in May 2006, based on my comparatively easy biography I had expected it to be finalized even below the median duration of 18 months. Now, finally, I have a visa which allows me to "land as PR immigrant" in Canada to get a stamp, a PR card, and lots of rights and obligations as befitting a Canadian PR. Like, well, living and working there. Now I need to show up at a Canadian port of entry before Feb 2009.


• 11: Number of semesters I have been immatriculated at a German university, including this. Yes, I have become a student again, in our terms a "Promotionsstudent". This entitles me to get cheap food in the mensa.
  Besides, I can maybe register as a student for attending a conference now, if any paper of mine should get accepted in one during this summer.


• 6: The number of "serious" conferences I have attended personally so far. Currently, one publication of mine is under review for a conference in August.


• 1: The number of weeks I had to frantically prepare that submission. Incidentally, also the number of rejections I got from (other) conferences so far.


• 385: Dollars to pay for a student registration at that conference, in contrast to 750 for a full (non-student) registration. I hope these savings will convince my boss to be generous.


• 4: Number of months I have before leaving UBT, and also before finishing my doctoral thesis. Suddenly the remaining time became very definitely limited. As I kept sending out applications for positions last month, I tried one which seemed very ambitious to me.


• 12: Number of applications sent out.


• 1: Number of telephone interviews (last week) and, 15 min later, offers for employment as postdoc. The whole process is not yet at a stage where I want to disclose the identity of the hiring institution openly here, but I can safely state that it is a very prestigious university, and a very well-known supervisor who is eager to hire me. The ambitious application didn't misfire. More details when the offer is made and signed.

Smørebrød

Finally, Smørebrød was sold last week... to some couple who'll care well for it, since they owned an 850 before already.
I managed to transfer a plethora of things to ShabuShabu before leaving Smørebrød - from a glass teardrop and a paper fertility fetish (protecting from accidents) to an orange warning vest, one million city guides and street maps, and a pair of starter cables.
Smørebrød always served us well, and carries a lot of good memories away with it.

Iceberg

Today was an extremely bad day. The incident below was just the visible, physical tip of the iceberg.



And two of my car sharers. But they're not to be blamed.

BT Harold Tribute: Encounter across the "Age Divide"

High School students stunned, Scientists seem more distanced

In a recent encounter across the "age divide", the UBT's leading robotics scientists were on display and visited by a group of BT high school students, curious to learn about the habits of victims to prolonged exposure to Computing Science.



After an initial phase of mutual mistrust and silence, the group gradually warmed to the idea of interacting with the elder individuals of what one day may become their own species.



"We were totally stunned by the professional way of these robo guys to actually display colorful and moving pictures on what seemed to be a late-20th-century cathod ray youtube," said a speaker of the young individuals.

"Them dudes can make pictures walk!", another one was overheard to say.

The UBT's leading robotics scientists, however, were less excited and fell into a catatonic state of motionlessness while being on display, only to awaken when called upon to perform some tricks of their own. Sources believe this can be linked to a highly unusual period of sensory and drug deprivation, intended to keep up "a good image" towards the outsiders.

BT Harold Tribute: Terrible Findings

Terrible Findings inside Scientist's Head

A sneaking suspicion turned ugly reality last week when one UBT's leading top robotics scientist's head was examined for trauma caused by prolonged exposition to colleagues' influence.



Upon closer inspection of what initially promised to be the light at the end of the tunnel, the terrible finding of a turned-rogue meme sneakily lurking atop a neuron star showed up.




(disgraceful close-up)

Understandably, the top scientist asked not to be identified. As a responsible news provider, we are happy to oblige.