15
Aug
2016

Academics are the same everywhere ;-)

Today and tomorrow are the public holiday of Obon, a time that people take off work to honour their ancestors with their families. I’m working, because I have a very limited time in which to do my project, and I’m finding – judging by the lengths of the job queues – that the university supercomputer that I’m using is busier than on a normal day.

I suspect that a lot of Japanese academics, visiting their families and freed from the responsibilities and interruptions of their offices, are using the time to get on with research – just like at home!

Young person looking at an early IBM PC-compatible.

Waiting for computer time. Image from Bundesarchiv collection, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Posted by simon in Working in Japan
11
Aug
2016

Technology and travel

Today is a public holiday in Japan, and the campus was nearly deserted. I was still there, because when you only have six weeks to complete a project, you can’t take too many days off! This has been a delight, because the supercomputer has not been as busy as usual. I’m now back in my hotel, and thinking about how much easier this trip is now than it would have been ten years ago, in two specific ways:

One is smartphones and the technology of the apps on them. With Google Maps, I have little fear of getting lost in a place where I can’t read the signage, and with a combination of that and a local app, I have a good handle on public transport, without needing to read Japanese maps or timetables. With Google Translate, and in particular its ability to read text from a photo, I can usually take a pretty good guess at what a label or notice is saying. It’s also replaced my need for a phrasebook; I have one in my bag, but mostly just google the translation instead.* This causes much laughter as Google gets it wrong, but also understanding as Google gets it close enough. More mundanely, it’s nice to always have the ability in my pocket to show somebody pictures of home – photos from Orkney are a great icebreaker.

Sign saying "Translating prohibited" in Polish, with a translation into English directly beneath

Original image CC-by by Flickr user Roland

The second change is in communications. There’s an important meeting happening at my home university in Edinburgh today, and I’m planning to connect to it via Skype in a few hours time – which is why I was musing this topic in the first place. The time zones are awkward, but otherwise it’s no different to connecting from the Orkney campus as usual.

There would be bigger changes if one went back further, of course. Twenty years ago I’d have been reliant on guidebooks, leaflets, tourist offices and so on – there wouldn’t have been the plethora of information on the web (although even now it isn’t ubiquitous in English). And of course the prevalence of English is in itself another change that makes life easier for brits, in a mildly embarrassing way – albeit one that has not come to Japan so much as many other places.

 

* Other mapping and machine translation packages are available.

Posted by simon in Working in Japan
08
Aug
2016

I’m still here!

I’ve been a bit quiet, haven’t I?

Sorry.

The truth is that I’ve been really busy. During the week, after some initial delays with getting access to computing facilities, I’ve been working pretty hard to catch up on my planned schedule of work. At the weekends, I’ve been out having adventures, and I do have a post drafted to tell you about last week’s – but I want to wait until I have photos ready to go with it, and that is suffering from lack of time for photo processing during the week – since it’s obviously a lower priority than my research!

Please be patient; I will write more – both about work and play – in due course! In the meantime, here’s a blurry phonecam picture of me with SpaceGodzilla (actually, the original suit from one of the movies) at an exhibition on the art of daikaiju:

Me, posing next to the orignal SpaceGodzilla suit.

Posted by simon in Working in Japan
26
Jul
2016

One week in

A view of university buildings among treesSo, I’ve been here a week now. I’ve done a lot of settling in, a certain amount of figuring out systems, a decent bit of useful work, and a little tourism.

I’m on a small campus here which consists almost entirely of research institutes – so there’s little or no undergraduate teaching. In that respect it’s a little like home… except that “a small campus” here means around 100-200 academic staff, still an order of magnitude greater than Orkney! The first thing I noticed when I arrived was that the campus is noisy, and not from anything man-made: trees and bushes here are loud, filled with cicadas (or similar. I’m no biologist). In summer in Kyushu, you can hear green space coming! Beyond that it’s fairly ordinary university-campus buildings, although the presence of the QUEST experiment is rather cool.

I was told before I came that “the language of the lab is English”. It’s interesting to see what that means. It means that the staff can speak English, and any foreign students use English as a mutual language. The Japanese masters students understandably avoid it as much as they can, except when forced to use it in occasional meetings and presentations. It’s brought home to me something that I’d thought about before: what an advantage people from English-speaking countries have from the start as they go into academia. For the Japanese students here, use of English is a prerequisite for an academic career, and becoming proficient is an extra burden on top of their subject-related study and their research.

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Tourism count so far

Temples: 3
Castles: 1 (ruined)
Museums: 2

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Posted by simon in Working in Japan
16
Jul
2016

Nagasaki Marine Festival

Today I visited the Nagasaki Marine Festival at the invitation of the Nagasaki Marine Industry Cluster Promotion Association*.

This was an event aimed at the public, lasting for the three-day weekend that is in progress here, aiming (I think) to raise the profile of the Nagasaki marine technology industry while entertaining and informing people. There were a host of exhibits on renewable energy, sub-sea survey, seamanship skills, vessels for oil & gas exploration, etc., and plenty of activities for kids.

Japanese teacher helping Japanese school student with soldering.

A teacher helping with soldering. Photo: Author.

I found myself “helping” (so far as one can via Google Translate) a small group of high school students to troubleshoot a home-made ROV that they had built. I felt very pleased when I suggested a bodge to test something, one of them tried it, and suddenly thrusters started turning. That facial expression is priceless, and is a reason that I enjoy the little teaching that I do.

 

* Japanese organisational names that are directly translated into English often seem to come out a little long, unwieldy, and formal. They are, however, very precise.

Posted by simon in Working in Japan

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