Mein letzte Tag bei iFQ

Room 77 doodle

Yesterday was my last day at iFQ. It has been a fantastic year because it allowed me to re-start my research career after that dead-end stint at the Ministry of Incompetent Management. Even more importantly, many colleagues have become my friends. No organization is perfect, but iFQ has attracted a bunch of great people.

Intellectualz

So after work, we all went to a bar in Kreuzberg to celebrate. Haiko Leitz knows all the good burger places in Berlin and he guided us there. "Room 77" is a funky hangout for all the bobo hipsters with their Macs. How hip? Because it is a hangout for members of the Pirate Party (a cyber-anarchist Federal political party), you can also pay with Bitcoins. A guy in the corner played guitar and sang some Tom Waits. They make a delicious hamburger (Christian Klode also described the texture as "fluffy") and serve it with thick country-style french fries (pommes des landes).

Haiko conducting a seance with the ghosts.

I was glad to be able to sit for a spell and sip Jamesons with Kalle Hause. Despite having moved on the weekend across the country with his family to a new apartment, he was as mellow as if he'd been surfing all the time. Pei-Shan Chi took silly photos of us (Daniel Sirtes makes brilliant serious-funny faces), and Nathalie Huber showed up to play along with the boys.

Daniel and Pei-Shan

Photographic evidence of the evening is provided for your amusement. I really hope I will be able to see all these super people again. Can it really be true that I am leaving in two days?

Christian & me

Weinachts special on TV

Flipping through the channels the other night we stumbled across a Christmas special. I sat transfixed as the most painfully awkward people I have ever seen lip-synced to traditional German music played on synthesizers.

Now, I must preface this by saying that Canada has done more than enough to pollute the airwaves with sappy singers. From Anne Murray to Michael Bublé (to say nothing of Celine Dion), the Great White North has produced hundreds of forgettable songs that sold a zillion copies each. There's tons of good music in Germany too: The whole summer is a series of huge open-air rock concerts. Just not on TV around this festive season.

To describe the Christmas special as "cheesy" is like saying that Mount Everest is "pointy". Musically it sounded like artificial syrup being poured over processed cheese and then topped with a sprinkling of saccharine. Christine even pointed out that the performers were not even provided with microphones so that they could do something with their hands. The German word for this is Fremdschäme (feeling shame for others). My personal favourite is Hansi Hinterseer, a former Austrian downhill-ski champion who parlayed a sportscasting gig into a career as the Tommy Hunter of Austria. He's got looks like Sting and talent like Lawrence Welk. As he slowly walked around the faux-snowy mini village set up on stage, singing slowly, the camera panned (yep, slowly) over the audience: a sea of jiggly arms and wobbly chins, swaying in time to a beat that only they could perceive.



I loved it: because the lyrics were so simple and slow, I could sort of understand what they were singing. It was all about love or something: good, olde-fashioned, tradional love.

Icabaren

Today I went to see the Berlin Eisbaren play the Munich Something-or-others with my pal Benni.

Although I have not seen a hockey game live in many years, I must say that I was impressed. We got there a few minutes late and could only get tickets for the standing-room-only "fan zone". This was actually a bonus, as the wildest fans were there, banging drums and chanting rude songs. The wider European ice surface made for less of the jamming and obstruction that one sees in the NHL. The game was faster with less scrambling in the corners than in Canada. Benni was impressed. He had never seen a hockey game before and enjoyed the action.

The national fast-food of Germany is the "Curry-Wurst"

45000 rabid fans packed the O2 arena

Benni likes hockey!

The flip-side is that there were not enough smashing-into-the-boards as I am used to seeing. And for some strange reason there were no fights. Hockey without fighting is a sin (it says so in the Bible). I think the 7 Canadians who play for the Icebaren think they are on some sort of fancy European vacation, because unless somebody gets hurt, they are not upholding the fine Canadian tradition of international pacifism combined with bloodthirsty savagery on the ice. That is why the Zamboni was invented: to sweep up the teeth of players who gloriously sacrificed their smiles for the team. Seriously: the one time there was a hint of shoving-after-the-whistle I was expecting the guys to drop their gloves and start punching each other (it`s only natural). But nothing happened, I am ashamed to say.

Despite the lack of bloodthirsty Roman-spectacle-on-skates, my team won. Notice how quickly I adopt the Berlin hockey team as my own (Senators suck!). The Munich Sissywussies (actual name) were sent home with a 3-to-2 loss. After 12 months of not understanding a ficking thing that is happening, it was nice to be the expert for a change and to explain what was going on.

Checkpoint Charlie

My office is at Schutzenstraße 6a, which is just around the corner from Checkpoint Charlie. I have perhaps mentioned this before, but I now have photos (kindly supplied by my colleague Pei-Shan Chi). We got off the U6 subway at Kochstrasse this morning and passed this relic of the Cold War on the way to work.

Jeff at Checkpoint Charlie

A few steps further on there is a line of cobblestones tracing where the wall used to be. One minute you're in West Berlin, then - hop- now you're in the East. This line of cobblestones zig-zags through the city and it is common to cross back and forth from (the former) East to West Berlin a couple of times on the way to lunch.

The wall was here

In the 'West' looking east. The old guardhouse is still there.

Of course now there is no indication that half the city was Communist just 21 years ago: it looks like a big city no matter which side you're on.

A picture of a US soldier is all that is left to welcome you to the West

Of course this is a very touristy site, so there are Turkish and Eastern European hawkers on the sidewalks with tables full of Chinese-made faux Soviet knick-knacks. What must it be like to work in a factory in Guangdong making replica memorabilia? I wonder if it is the same factory where they make 1950's - themed Americana that is used to decorate suburban chain restaurants in Generica. Consider that there are far more of those restaurants today than there were gas stations in 1957, so all those "vintage" Coca-Cola signs could not have been found at rummage sales. Besides, they build three new TGIFs every week - head office can't wait for someone to find a stash of antiques in a barn.

Review of eSciDocDays conference

I gave a presentation at the iFQ today for the benefit of my colleagues. In it, I report on a conference I attended on October 26-27, 2011 at the Max Planck institute in Berlin. The locale was Harnack House at what is (today) the Frei Univeristät. It was humbling to realize, as I sat listening to the presentations, that Albert Einstein gave a lecture in the very same room way back in the 1920s.

Harnack House, Max Planck Institute

It was a fascinating conference and I am glad that I was able to share the issues with my colleagues. That's why I love working here. The first half of my presentation is spent just explaining what "eScience" is.

E scidocdays review

View more presentations from jdemaine

That's awesome!

Aohw - Wow!

That's Arianne's saying when she is interested in something new: "Ao-oh, Wow!"

17%

The Durban conference on climate change began this past Monday with a whimper, not a bang. After the let-down of the Copenhagen conference in 2009, expectations are pretty low this time around. As near as I can figure it, the boffins of the international community spent years hammering out an approach that everyone - from coal-devouring China to nearly-seafloor Seychelles - thought was equitable. All that remained were some signatures. With a bit of brinksmanship at Copenhagen, a deal was in the offing. Then Obama flew in and started making side-deals that circumvented the tortuous UN process. Chaos ensued, a face-saving compromise statement was issued, and the subsequent IPCC conference in Cancun was devoted to patching up the feelings of the aforementioned boffins who had just wasted a decade of their lives.

At this point I have no idea what the background story for Durban is. There's someting about rich countries and poor countries and extending Kyoto. Complicating matters is that when all of this jibber-jabber started twenty years ago, it was very clear who was rich and who was poor. Now China has TGV trains and a manned space program, wheras a major chunk of Canada's greenhouse gas emmissions are generated not from first-world economic activity but from distilling petroleum from the wastelands of Alberta.

So Canada is not seen as a leader in this debate. Be that as it may, let us consider what the conservative goverment of Canada did promise to do some time ago, independently of any agreement. Regardless of the outcome of the current conference in Durban, Harper's Junta (trust me; it rhymes) has pledged to reduce the CO2 emissions of the Great White North by 17% BELOW those of 2005 by 2020. This is a good start. And because it is the official policy of the Government, we should all be preparing today for the not-too-distant future when the various policies kick in and we all have to reduce our fossil-fuel use by 17% below what we used 7 years ago.

I was going to calculate what that looks like, but a relevant article by the Pembina Institute beat me to it. Here is Canada's (purported) future:

And this is the future the Conservatives have reluctantly agreed to

Of course, no such thing will happen. Canada will be nowhere near the target of 607 megatonnes per annum in 2020 because we have not even begun to think about how to live on 25% less than we do now. As I have said before, the longer the world stalls for time, the harder it will be to bring this runaway train under control.

Which is why today's column by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail is so infuriating. Instead of moving the debate forward so that we actually do something to achieve our goal for 2020, we get a  dismissal of climate research that wears the guise of a defense of the scientific process. She actuallly sounds like she thinks she is so clever to be doubting climate change.

No one knows with any certainty the exact impact of carbon dioxide emissions, what long-term climate trends will be or the effect of other factors, such as the sun.

For more of this cleverness, I dare you to read the hundreds of comments that follow this article. As with any piece of journalism on climate change, most commentators have a bizarre world view in which climate scientists have conspired to engineer a ponzi scheme of fake data in order to award each other taxpayers' money. Their objections are a mixed salad of conservative invective against anything the government does and a litany of the same urban myths regarding climate change that have been debunked many times before ("It's the sun spots.", "They said it was cooling in the 1970s").

Her statement is correct in one sense: Nobody knows anything with certainty. The beauty of science is that it can be expressed mathematically, allowing us to know very precicely the probability of the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions. This comes after she (unbelievably) brings up the "re-hacked" emails from the original Climategate that were recently released in an effort to undermine the Durban talks. Nine separate investigations have exonerated the climate scientists who were targeted in the Climategate affair. Yet for Wente, that these re-heated emails have not suddenly undermined decades of peer-reviewed research is somehow proof that something is wrong with science. Smarmingly, she wraps up with:

The suppression of legitimate debate is a catastrophe for climate science. It’s also a catastrophe for science, period.

Would Wente write such an article about the debates within proteomics, or graphite photoreactor research? The catastrophe for science is that everybody thinks of themselves as an expert on the weather and politics.

Lesson at Humbolt University

Last Friday and today I gave a presentation (along with my colleague Jasmin Schmidt) at Humboldt University. The director of the iFQ is a professor of Sociology there and he asked us to give a gentle introduction to the field of Bibliometrics for his students.

Note that while the pictures of Humboldt Univ. online are of a grand neo-classical building covered in statues, the place where I was 'teaching' was a mid-century, dirty building next to some train tracks. It was actually more dilapidated than Concordia University (where I did my undergrad), which is saying something.

It was great to be able to talk about my field and I hope I inspired some of the students to try a bibliometric analysis in their studies. The students didn't fall asleep (a good sign) and Prof. Hornbostel remarked afterwards that he liked the presentation, so it was a successful day.

Wissenschaftler ausser Atem

Here are some pictures of me and my running team from the relay-marathon. Here we are before the start of the race. Clemens (far right) ran 12K in a good time. Patricia (red coat) was our team leader and as "coach" was there to make sure we didn't wimp out.

Wissenschaftler ausser Atem

A nice bonus is that I now Ihave a running shirt emblazoned with my running nick-name: Speed Weasel.