Author Archives: Anand Sarwate

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson passes away

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Lorraine Hunt Lieberson passed away at the early age of 52. I have a recording of her singing Harbison’s Due Libri di Motteti di Montale which is really beautiful, and was hoping I’d get a chance to see her at SF Symphony sometime soon, but I guess my chance is up.

via Alex Ross’s blog.

reimbursements, grants, and oversight

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Monday brought news of an investigation by the government of accounting (mal-)practices at Yale. It’s basically a news bite, but the upshot is that Yale has a lot of grant money and doesn’t keep track of it very well, probably because they play fast and loose.

Shift the focus over to UC Berkeley, where getting reimbursed for anything is like squeezing water out of a stone. The money is there, but according to an email I received on the grad student list, “the advisor, the GA [grant administrator], and someone from ERSO [the office that handles research support] are all required to sign off on a travel reimbursement.” The end result is that it can take 3-6 months to get reimbursed for a conference trip, which you have to pay for out of pocket. For an international trip, that gets pricey fast. The proposed solutions are to implement a corporate credit card, provide greater access to the university travel agent, and so on. I think this is how MIT does things, but they’re a private school.

The real question is how to build an efficient reimbursement system that allows graduate students, who spend most of the grant money (on travel and equipment, etc), to be reimbursed efficiently, with enough oversight to avoid problems. The main problem at Berkeley seems to be that the PI on a grant actually doesn’t have control over their money. It should be feasible to pre-allocate a certain amount of money before a conference happens and earmark it for those reimbursements. As long as the total submitted request falls below that level and nothing is particularly suspicious, the student could get reimbursed from those funds.

For example, I’m going to Seattle next week for ISIT. I’ve bought my ticket, reserved my hotel room, and have a sense for the per-diem expenses. My advisor should be able to tell the grant administrator “set aside $250 (plane) + $240 (hotel) + $160 (incidentals).” I might end up spending more than that if I have to take a cab from the airport, but that would certainly cover the bulk of my expenses and that way I wouldn’t be $640 in the hole for 6 months. I know there are other solutions, but this should be more simple to implement than getting a corporate credit card and all of its attendant problems.

computer science publication habits are deadly

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Over at Lance Fortnow‘s Computational Complexity Blog is a discussion on the IEEE Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) conference, which is one of the two “major” conferences in theoretical computer science. Apparently an undergrad at MIT has 3 papers in FOCS, which is somewhat unprecendented. This sparked a long argument about the nature of conference publications and how they are used to measure grad students viz. applying to faculty jobs, and so on.

What is interesting (to an outsider) is that CS Theory and CS in general has this “conference publication is everything” culture. In most every other academic field (from various kinds of engineering to performance studies) conferences are expensive to attend and the real results appear in journals. One exception is the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference to which grad students go for job interviews. Personally, I think a lot of this FOCS/STOC vs. SODA pissing contest would get sidelined if journal publication became the norm rather than the exception in CS. Or am I missing something here?

tracks : raising a ruckus with bears!

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This is for an old friend with whom I’ve fallen out of touch. Hopefully they’ll like it.

  1. It’s Oh So Quiet — Björk
  2. Karmacoma — Massive Attack
  3. Cafe “La Humidad” — Roberto Goyeneche
  4. The Upward March — The Bell Orchestre
  5. Sappho — Dave Douglas
  6. Hey-Hee-Hi-Ho — Medeski, Martin, and Wood
  7. Sister Kate — The Ditty Bops
  8. Mission to Moscow — The Hot Club of Cowtown
  9. Back In The USSR — The Beatles
  10. She Turns Me On — Jim’s Big Ego
  11. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight — Bob Dylan
  12. The Two Women — Paul Kotheimer
  13. “Uh-Oh, Chango!”/White History Month — Don Byron
  14. Too Late — Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek feat. RES
  15. Raga Tilak Kamod – Shruti Sadolikar Katkar
  16. The Wind That Shakes The Barley — Dead Can Dance
  17. Hora Ca la Ursari — Taraf de Haïdouks
  18. Stay Loose (Lyrics Born remix) — Jimmy Smith
  19. Rebels of the Sacred Heart — Flogging Molly

Equus

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(by Peter Shaffer) Equus is one of those famous plays that I never read but could probably fake knowledge of it. It’s the story of a young man, Alan Strang, who is put in a psychiatric hospital after blinding six horses. The play centers around the doctor, Martin Dysart, and his attempt to unravel the cause of Alan’s actions. Dysart has his own neuroses — a distant wife, a recurring dream about carving up children, and he constantly questions the morality of his job. Alan, for his part, is deeply suspicious of Dysart’s objectives, but eventually opens up. Dysart interviews Alan’s parents — a very religious mother and an atheist and overbearing father. He elicits from Alan flashbacks and dreams and eventually pieces together a psychosis in whose logic the blinding of the horses is inevitable.

The original stage directions are given in the version I have, so you get a real sense for the theatricality of Shaffer’s writing. That is, I think, the strongest point in the whole piece. What bothered me was the cleanliness of the psychoanalysis. It’s appealing to think that even the most horrific events have rational antecedents, that we can make acts of cruelty into acts of passion, and while this story may exemplify that approach, I got the sense at the end of the play that I had witnessed a particularly clever sleight of hand. It’s a very neat case study. However, apart from that, we have the effect of the process on Dysart himself, which Shaffer teases out in a really beautiful and true way.

It’s definitely a play worth reading and I’m sure worth seeing as well. I’ve heard there’s a movie version, but I think the play is too theatrical to be suited to a realistic film, so I think I’ll give it a miss. I’m sure it would only accentuate the things I didn’t like about the script and eliminate the theatricality by using real horses or something.

voice lessons

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I had my first voice lesson in a long time today. I have a ton of stuff to work on, but the good news is that I can sing A-flats with few problems. It’s just that my larynx and diaphragm and everything else mostly refuse to cooperate. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to practice and improve in the next week around all of the Verdi Requiem rehearsals and concerts.

livejournal syndication

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So thanks to Darcy, I believe, I have a syndication feed for this blog on livejournal. Unfortunately, the way livejournal is set up, you can comment on the post directly within livejounal, so that the comment will not show up on the main blog. I have no idea how many comments I have missed (probably not many), but if y’all livejournalists could remember to comment on the main blog, that would be cool.

I looked around for quick (< 5 minute) fixes for this, but haven’t found one yet. Maybe when I’ll have more time I’ll look again.

Mahler 8 : favorite moments

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We just finished 4 performances of Mahler’s 8th Symphony, the “Symphony of a Thousand.” It’s the end of the subscriber season, and what a way to go out. Although the review was not as favorable as I had hoped, but you can’t please everyone. I think that this is one of those pieces that most audience members experience, especially those who haven’t looked at the score before heading to the concert hall. Here are some of my favorite moments from the piece:

  • The opening, naturally.
  • The violin (and later also viola) solos on “infirma nostri corporis” and “uns bleibt ein Erdenrest.” They’re so independent of everything else and just plain bizarre that I instantly fell in love with them.
  • The tenor line on “ductore dic te praevio,” which is completely buried in the texture. No matter how hard we sing, nobody will really hear us. It’s depressing and fun at the same time, like tilting at windmills.
  • The choral opening of the second movement on “Waldung, sie schwankt heran.” Again, one of those creepy, almost musically alienating moments.
  • The women’s chorus on “Jener Rosen.” It’s just so pretty, like the Knaben Wunderhorn songs.
  • The Mulier Samaritana solo. I heart Stephanie Blythe. That plagal cadence at the beginning is so… resonant.
  • The Mater Gloriosa solo. I don’t know what the effect on the audience is, but she was right behind us and it was great.

Next up : Verdi’s Requiem. I’ll always remember this Mahler though — what a trip.