Rise and shine

Day 9 - aboard the Xinjianzhen, approximately 33°N, 128°E, 2553km traveled (note the *correct* spelling - Julian)

I awoke this morning to an impressive roar. I guess more accurately I reawoke: I had first been roused at 6:30 by our cabin mates stirring and it took a while to get back to sleep while trying to block out the sounds of someone retching in another room. Whether it was brought on by seasickness or alcohol mixed with too much karaoke I'm not sure; we left the shelter of the Seto Inland Sea around midnight last night but the sea is still calm. We're still near the islands west of Nagasaki but the next land we see will be China.

So I awoke again to the sound of an angry mob, people having a shouting argument, a crowd cheering on a sporting match, and a rowdy game of charades all rolled into one. Or so I thought. What other explanation could there be for the level of noise being generated this morning by our fellow passengers? When I got up to have a look though, all I could see were people sitting round tables, chatting away, and waiting for breakfast.

Determined to get some more sleep--it was only 7:30 and there's no need to make a long day on a boat even longer--I stuck my earplugs back in (honestly, they barely helped) and... the public address system kicked in. Long message in Mandarin. Long message in Japanese. Finally, the message in English: "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Information Desk is open. You are welcome to use it." At 7:30 in the morning?

As my head hit the pillow again, the system crackled back to life and we were soothed awake by a 20 minute medley of elevator, classical, and music box music. Right, let's get this busy day started then, shall we? :-)

Ruth and I are working our way through our Japanese themed literature at the moment: Eric Lomax's The Railway Man, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, and James Clavell's Shogun, all based on recommendations from friends. I have the advantage, having already finished Clavell's gripping 1000-page novel about Samurai culture last year. I think Ruth's currently trying to read two books at once. I think we've found all three have been interestingly informed by our week in Japan and vice versa, actually: Shogun added to our appreciation and understanding of Bunraku performance in Osaka.

Bunraku theatre

Day 8 - aboard the Xinjianzhen, approximately 33.7° N, 131.5° E, 2153 kilometres travelled (note the English spelling - Ruth here)

We're currently on the ferry between Osaka and Shanghai; we're two of three westerners on board and get peculiar looks from most of the passengers. Why I'm not sure: they are the ones jogging round the canteen and singing karaoke in their pyjamas. It's going to be a long 48 hours.
Back to the food; we succeeded  in our Tenkatsu mission, joining 20 others waiting in line outside Katsakura Kyotoekibiru on the 11th floor above Kyoto station. It was worth the wait for a delicious feast of pork tenderloin, rice, finely-sliced cabbage and a sweet spicy sauce you make yourself by grinding sesame seeds with a pestle in a special rushed bowl and adding the various ingredients on the table to your taste. It made up for the trauma of offal stew - almost. [Almost? It definitely did - Julian]
Apart from the food, there have been a few other highlights of our week in Japan and our trip to the National Bunraku theatre in Osaka was definitely one. Bunraku is a form of puppet theatre with three-quarter scale puppets each controlled by three onstage puppeteers, and along with Noh and Kabuki is one of the main forms of theatre in Japan.
We just went to the second half of the performance, which was still 5 hours long! It was an enthralling story about Samurai, with love, betrayal, deception and sacrifice as the main themes. Within an hour the puppeteers had disappeared from our consciousness and all we paid attention to was the puppets who moved with such grace and precision that they seemed renal. The narrative is told through a mixture of singing and chanting by a musician who sits to the side of stage; for the first twenty minutes it was really grating and I thought it was going to be the longest 5 hours of my life, but the skill of the narrators in conveying the emotion of the puppets was incredible.
Highly recommended if you ever get the chance - it's as good as Avenue Q, but very different!!

Pig offal for dinner; Matcha green tea Kit Kat for dessert...

Day 6 - on a train from Hiroshima to Kyoto - 1305 km traveled

We've had some terrific food in Japan so far. One highlight was a bento box picnic enjoyed with thousands of tipsy locals under the cherry blossoms in Ueno Park, Tokyo. Hanami, or cherry blossom watching, is an important event during the few weeks in spring when the blossoms are in bloom. The national weather service provides bloom forecasts and junior employees are sent in the morning to lay out blue tarps and claim precious space in the parks before they fill with people walking, photographing, drinking, eating, and enjoying each other's company. The blossoms are a pretty powerful symbol for the fleeting beauty of life.

Another delicious meal was traditional Japanese tapas-style pub food shared in a small bar with a Japanese friend in Tokyo and some friends of a friend visiting from Norway. We munched on grilled skewers, a pork stew, and edamame beans and washed it all down with beer and huge glasses of plum wine and sake--they pour until it overflows into the saucer because if it's overfilled it can't be underfilled!

Also in Tokyo, we had Ten Don--massive fried prawns on rice--at a tempura restaurant, seated with our shoes off on tatami mats. And in Hiroshima we enjoyed Okonomiyaki, a local creation consisting of a savoury pancake piled with layers of noodles, cabbage, bacon, cheese, green onions, fried egg, sticky sauce, and unknown secret powders. You sit around the edge of a giant grill and the food is cooked in front of you and served on the grill just by sliding it towards you. Amazing! Don't knock it 'til you try it.

It was all going well until last night when we accidentally ordered the house special: offal stew. It wasn't as awful (ha!) as I expected--Ruth disagrees--but my imagination wasn't happy with it and after working my way through about half I was keen to settle it with something more normal... like matcha-flavoured Kit Kat of course; it seems there are all sorts of odd varieties here to try.

I still need to get a good sushi fix and we're on a Ten Katsu mission tonight.

Open-source and Copyright Links

I recently came across a couple of links of relevance to our ESUG panel discussion last year – Ignorance is Not Bliss (slides) (video) – about open-source copyright and licensing.

The first, Can you contribute to an open-source project, is a concise and well-written summary of the main issues around the ownership of software intellectual property.

The second presents the contents of a Fair Use Symposium published in the Journal of the Copyright Society. I haven't really had time to dive into these, but they should provide interesting reading for anyone with questions about what constitutes "fair use" of a Copyright work.

More wolf packs

Everything is organized. Helge Nowak and I will be running a Wolf Pack Programming workshop at XPDays in Hamburg. The workshop is on Thursday, November 25th and runs from 9:30am to 12:30pm.

Almost simultaneously—yes, we were double booked!—Jason Ayers and Michael Lucas-Smith will be running their own workshop at XPDays Benelux, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Theirs will get under way at 3:30pm.

Last week, Agical hosted a workshop in Stockholm as part of their monthly Geek Nights. Attendees included Scrum's Jeff Sutherland and, as usual, the event generated lots of interesting thoughts and discussion. A number of the participants did not have their own laptops and, as a result, most people were working in pairs at shared computers; we were amazed by the "heads down" behaviour and reduction in pack communication that this change seemed to cause. The enthusiastic response to the session netted several invitations to run further events in Scandinavia, so keep an eye out for more in the upcoming months.

Impressions of Stockholm

After just over a day in Stockholm, the city seems wonderful. The architecture reminds me somehow of Vienna, while the surrounding water has a distinctly Venetian quality: dividing and yet simultaneously tying the place together. The sun has been shining and the crisp air, cold enough to require bundling up, has me thinking of Christmas and longing for a mug of mulled wine and an open fire.

Aside from a lot of walking, I've had a couple of other highlights. The first was a delicious meal last night at Bakfickan ("The Hip Pocket"), the low-end of a set of restaurants in The Royal Opera House. The prices aren't exactly low-end but, having grown accustomed to London prices, I didn't find them too shocking. I chose Swedish meatballs in a flavourful cream sauce, served with some of the best mashed potatoes I've ever eaten, sweet lingonberries, and deliciously refreshing pickled cucumber. I washed it all down with a bottle of Landsort Lager, which turned out to be surprisingly tasty as well. The chocolate mousse, ordered in a flurry of food excitement, didn't quite manage to live up to the rest: despite a lovely delicate flavour, the mixed-in crunchy chocolate bits made for a strange texture and the mousse itself was a bit heavy. Still, with great atmosphere—including a conversation about Opera with the friendly Swedish gentleman at the bar stool next to me—and friendly service, I consider it £30 well spent.

My other recommendation is the Vasa Museum, just over the bridge onto Djurgården. This well-thought-out museum was built over top of an old navy dry dock and houses the imposing wreck of the Vasa, a 37-meter warship, which foundered and sunk on her maiden voyage in 1628. She was raised, almost fully intact, in 1961 and restored. The museum is well laid out, with a wide range of interesting exhibits about the ship, her sinking and restoration, and life onboard a ship and in Sweden in the 17th century. The museum is particularly commendable for having avoided the trap of adding flaps and drawers to make the exhibits "more interactive", opting instead to use good presentation and just the right level of detail to make them engaging. A hands-on computer exhibit on the top floor does an excellent job of explaining the forces involved in the stability (or instability!) of a floating ship.

Tomorrow I turn my attention back to work for a few days before heading on to Oslo.

Computer Adaptive Testing and the GMAT

Back around Christmas, I had a few weeks free and decided to prepare for the GMAT exam, a "computer-adaptive" standardized test required (or at least accepted) by business schools around the world. With university application deadlines looming, most of the testing sessions were already fully booked, but I managed to find a mid-January test date just a few hours' drive away.

I'll start by saying that I finished university eight years ago, so—ignoring a few intense weeks of German classes—it's been a while since I "studied". And it was about half my lifetime ago that I last wrote a standardized test: you know, with those sealed envelopes, bar-coded stickers, big machine-readable answer papers, and detailed instruction books reminding you to use a #2 pencil and "chose the BEST answer". If, like me, you haven’t written one of these in a while, you may be surprised by how much has changed.

The GMAT, like a number of other admissions tests, is now administered exclusively by computer and the test centres even have palm and iris scanners, which are used any time you enter or leave the room. Unlike most computer-based tests, though, which stray little from the well-worn paths of their pencil-and-paper siblings, the GMAT uses a computer-adaptive process undoubtedly conceived by a singularly sinister set of scholars and statisticians. This process is complex and has a number of interesting implications but basically it works like this: when you get an answer wrong, the questions get easier; when you get an answer right, they get harder. The theory is that by adjusting the test to your ability, the computer is able to rate you more precisely against people of about the same level.

The material on the test is not really that hard. It's no walk in the park either, but it mostly limits itself to stuff you learned (then unfortunately forgot) in high school. Everything else about the GMAT, though, seems designed to maximize stress:

• The test is long. Nearly four hours long. There are three sections 60-75 minutes long, with a short break between each.

• The test is timed. Ok, what test doesn’t have a time limit? But this one has a clock counting down in the corner of your screen, taunting you to pick up the pace. Worse than that: you'll probably actually need all the time because the questions keep getting harder as you get them right, remember? The challenge on this test is not usually solving the problems, but rather solving them in time.

• The breaks are timed. Again, not surprising, I guess. But your break is only eight minutes long and, if you’re not back, the next section simply starts running without you! Inevitably you spend the entire break worrying about how many minutes you have left. Since you need to scan your palm and iris at the beginning and end of each break, your trip to the bathroom is not going to be leisurely.

• Erasable notepads. No pens or paper are allowed, presumably so you can't smuggle out questions. Try working out math problems quickly on a laminated card with a dry-erase marker.

• You can't skip a question. Remember that the questions get harder as you get them right and easier as you get them wrong. This means that the next question you see is largely determined by how you answer the current one. The computer needs an answer to the question, so you can’t skip it.

• You can't go back. Similarly, since your current position is determined by your earlier answers, you can't go back and change them. So if you're used to finishing early and then checking over your work, you'd better start unlearning that habit.

• You don't know the difficulty level of the questions. Is the test feeling easy because you really know your stuff or are you simply earning yourself easier questions by choosing a lot of wrong answers? The only saving grace here is that you're so busy madly answering questions that you don't have many brain cycles left to worry about this.

• Some of the questions are "experimental". About 25% of the test is made up of new questions being tested on you to determine their difficulty level, but of course you don’t know which. That's right: that really hard question you just spent 5 minutes working on because you were sure you could solve it... doesn't count!

• You are heavily penalized for not finishing. Right, ok, so you have a fixed time, you can't skip or come back, and you can’t predict the difficulty of the remaining questions. But if you want a decent score, you still need to pace yourself to answer all of them. Remember that countdown clock? You have about two minutes per question–so keep an eye on that average time! Oh, and the clock counts down but of course the question numbers go up, so you’d better get real quick at subtracting your time from 75 (you’ll be working out your average question time every few questions).

• Data Sufficiency questions. These nasty little buggers are, I think, unique to the GMAT. Given a math problem and two statements, you are asked whether the problem can be solved using either statement, both statements, or both statements together. You don't need to work out the answer to the problem but you need partially solve it several times with different information and keep each attempt separate in your mind. Don't think that sounds tricky? Try searching for "sample gmat data sufficiency questions" and try a few. I think I got only about a quarter of these right on my first practice test.

You have to admire the brilliantly evil minds that came up with this thing. The experience for the test-taker is four hours of pure, non-stop stress. At least that was my experience: my brain literally didn’t stop whirring. The adaptive process pushes everyone to their limit, challenging them to keep their feet under them and ensuring that they're sweating right until the end.

The test designers have really optimized the experience around their own needs: the test is easy for them to grade, minimizes cheating, allows new questions evaluated automatically, and measures something in a pretty precise, consistent way. I’m not entirely certain what it measures, but I’m pretty confidant that people who are generally smarter, better organized, faster to learn and adapt, and better at dealing with stress will obtain a better result.

As a company selling a product, it might seem odd that GMAC (the company that runs the test) can get away with optimizing the test for their own needs. But, although it may appear that the test is the product you’re buying, I think what you’re really buying is the report that is sent to the universities. The cost of this report just happens to be $250 + study time + four hours of stress. If GMAC had competitors, they might be forced to optimize for the test-taker but, as a virtual monopoly, the motivation just isn’t there.

The challenge with the GMAT, I think, is really learning an entirely new test-taking strategy. I used a couple of books (Cracking the GMAT, by Princeton Review and The Official Guide for GMAT Review) to first understand the test and the differences in approach that were required and then to practice as many questions as possible of the specific types that appear. Doing computer-based practice exams is, of course, also essential given that what you’re learning is the test-taking strategy more than the material.

I emerged from the exam feeling absolutely drained but energized by the rush of tackling something so intense and coming out on top. In some ways it was fun but I have no intention of rewriting it any time soon. :)