Allkort

Allkort is a Swedish term for a credit card. Or so I believed. When I opened my bank account, I applied for a credit card. A week later, my credit card was delivered by post. So far so good.

Then I tried to pay by this credit card. It didn't work.

The card was rejected. I called the bank up. They said I needed to activate the card. So I asked them to do it.

Then I tried to pay by this credit card. It didn't work.

In Britain, debit cards are clearly different from credit cards. That's why I applied for a credit card. My Swedish debit card, however, can be used as a Mastercard. So I actually don't really need a credit card.

So I just left aside the useless credit card.

Today, I need to visit my bank to obtain my ID card. The ID card is an essential item in Sweden because you are often asked to show it when you pay by credit/debit card. (You also need to show it when you rent a DVD, or so they say. I don't watch DVDs, so I don't know for myself.) It takes 4 to 6 weeks to issue after placing an order either at a post office (which is almost non-existent in this country, by the way) or at a bank.

When receiving my ID card, I ask the bank staff why my credit card does not work. They say,

"Because you don't put any money on the credit card account."




"What?"




I'm totally confused. By definition, you can use a credit card when you don't have money, can't you?

The bank staff at the desk cannot answer my question in English. She asks for help from her colleague. And I learn this. You can use your credit card by transfering your money in the standard bank account to the credit card account. (And the money in the credit card account earns a higher interest rate than the standard bank account.) You can also use your credit card by applying for a credit limit with your income statement as proof of your payment ability.

In Japan and in UK, when I applied for a credit card, I could immediately use it without applying for a credit limit. The credit limit is automatically provided. And there was no such system as depositing money in the credit card account to use the card.

I don't know if this applies to other Swedish banks as well. So I cannot generalize this to Sweden as a whole, especially because my bank appears to be the worst one in Sweden. (I couldn't choose because it's almost part of my employment contract.) But I didn't know that the system of using credit cards could be different from country to country.

Luna Sea's back. X Japan's back.

By visiting a tiny bookstore selling Japanese books and magazines in Stockholm today, I learn that Luna Sea, my favorite rock group since my secondary school days, will hold a gig on the Christmas Eve this year, 7 years after they broke up. The gig is aptly titled "One Night Dejavu". This news was actually released last September. I just didn't know it until I found the September issue of a magazine at the bookstore. (This bookstore sells Japanese magazines with a few month delay.)

X Japan, another favorite Japanese rock group of mine since my secondary school days, will soon release a new single "I.V." for the first time in 10 years after it broke up. The new single is featured in the ending credit of US film "Saw 4".

These news bring back my memory during those days, which I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with. These rock groups mean a lot more to me than you would imagine.

Added on March 28, 2008
Luna Sea's gig on December 24, 2007, can be seen in this post.
X Japan's gig on March 28, 2008, can be seen in this post.

Proof of Impossibility Theorem: Step 2

This is a sequel to the previous post.

Ray Fisman, an economist at Columbia University's business school, empirically proved the following. (These are quotations from Fisman's column at Slate.) In choosing whom to date with,

Finding #1: "Men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition—a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date. When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better."

Finding #2: "Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men."

Finding #2 is a serious threat to my marriage perspective. In Stockholm, there are very few East Asian women. What's worse, an additional finding says,

"East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference."

So the precious East Asian women in Stockholm are likely to date with white men. (Of course, this assumes external validity of the finding. What happens in U.S. is the same as in Stockholm.)

Proof of the Impossibility Theorem moves one step forward.

Finding #1, on the other hand, implies that the smartest and most ambitious women and the dumbest and least ambitious men are left out. This could be a good news for me, because I'm an outlier. I don't mind dating with a woman who is smarter and more ambitious than myself. But for some reason, finding the smartest and most ambitious women left out in the marriage market is extremely difficult in this world. (The only explanation of this seems to be that the smartest and most ambitious men are smarter and more ambitious than the smartest and most ambitious women, but I don't want to go down this line of reasoning.) Or I'm probably the dumbest and least ambitious man in the world, especially in terms of communication skills.

Proof of the Impossibility Theorem moves one more step forward.

Customer Services

I didn't know that asking help from customer services is the most difficult thing for a person who lives in a country whose native language he/she doesn't understand.

My broadband connection at home has failed since two days ago. Since making a phone call to the broadband provider's customer service just ends up in an automated message in Swedish (which of course I don't understand), I emailed them writing my request in English yesterday.

Within an hour, an auto-reply message came to my email inbox, which is of course written in Swedish. I initially thought this was just an indication that they received my email. So I didn't try to ask somebody Swedish to translate it for me.

One day later today, no further response. I asked a Swedish colleague at the workplace for translating the auto-reply message. She said, "You need to click this line in the message to confirm your email message."

So I clicked it today, which took me to a webpage which is of course in Swedish. I asked the colleague again to translate it. It says that this is your inquiry number and they will respond shortly.

Fixing the broadband connection is, therefore, delayed by one day.

Dark winter has begun.

After coming back from Boston, the summer time has ended in Sweden.

Which means that the sunset time is now 1 hour earlier.

After 3pm, the sky starts darkening; by 4:30pm, darkness prevails. It's early November, but I'm here in Stockholm.

Temperature does not exceed 5 degrees celcius these days. A couple of days ago, the landscape was covered with snow when I woke up, this winter's first snowfall in Stockholm.

I've decided to wake up early and go to bed early so that I can maximize the exposure to the sunlight, from dawn to dusk.

Welcome to dark winter in Stockholm.

Zurich

I fly with Swiss Air to Boston because it allows me to stay in Zurich for 8 hours on the way back. Just wanted to see what one of the 10 most livable cities in the world is like.

Going to the city center from the airport is extremely easy: it takes 11 minutes by train. When I bought a ticket to Zurich city center at the counter, I was told (before asking) which platform and what time the next train to the city center departs. The way back to the airport is also easy. Just need to find an airport mark on the list of train departures, which tells you which platform you should go. The signage at the city center station (Zurich HB) is also clear enough.

Lunch at Adler's Swiss Chuchi, a cheese fondue restaurant every travel guidebook appears to mention, is a mixed blessing. Fondue with cube tomatoes tastes certainly great. But the amount of cube tomatoes is tiny, and I end up just eating melted cheese topped on cubic bread. A bit boring. And very expensive: with a 500ml bottle of mineral water, it costs 30 Swiss franc or 20 euro. And I feel unhealthy as I didn't eat vegetables properly.

A stroll on Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich's counterpart of London's Bond Street, Tokyo's Omotesando, or Milan's Golden Rectangular, is for sure elegant. Unusual for such an expensive shopping street, the atmosphere is rather laid-back with trams going back and forth in the middle of the street. But at the end of the day the list of shops is the same: Gucci, Prada, Dior, Tod's, and so forth. Way too many bag and shoe shops, of course mostly for women. Boring.


Bahnhofstrasse

Having latte macchiato (there's no "cafe latte") with creme brulee at a cafe by Confiserie Sprungli, Switzerland's most famous chocolatier, is truly refreshing though entering the coffee shop is slightly intimidating.

There are several nice views in the city, but overall central Zurich appears to be a place for the rich. Next time I should explore the area north-west of the Zurich HB station, the former industrial area transforming itself into a bohemian district.


Lake Zurich


A view from Munsterhof square

Chez Henri @ Logan International Airport

Dine Boston Cafe, a restaurant just in front of the security check gate in the Logan International Airport (Terminal E) seasonally features some meals by a chef of a Boston's local restaurant, a very admirable initiative given that nobody wants to end their trip to Boston with uninspiring meals at the airport. This season's featured restaurant is Chez Henri, serving French meals with Cuban twists. Fresh oysters slightly topped with chili and vinegar sauce for a starter, and beef steak with tomato and basil sauce accompanied with crunchy and spicy French fries for the main, beautifully puts an end to my four-day stay in Boston.

Boston

I find Boston similar to London in many ways: dimly-lit interior spaces, uncomfortable metro trains, smelly booze pubs, the difficulty to eat salad in restaurants, etc. The cityscape of Boston is better than that of London: Boston has at least got this pleasant, red-brick covered street-scapes.

Marlborough Street, Back Bay

But I see stupid demonstrators blocking city traffic here as well. The presumably picturesque Copley Square was spoiled by politically-charged Americans shouting their ideology. (Boston Public Library was an escape from all this.)

Cambridge, a neighbouring town where Harvard and MIT are located, is a weird place. From central Boston, take the red subway line and the first station is Kendall/MIT. The area is Tokyo-ish: super-modern high-rise residential buildings without any hint of tradition. But it seems to be the place where you can find some hidden gems (like The Blue Room, Toscanini's, List Visual Arts Center---see below). Stata Center looks rather ugly, though.


Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

The second station Central is in the area with many immigrants: the atmosphere is a bit like London's Brixton. I smell of ganja. Then the third station is Harvard, where I feel rather uncomfortable and sometimes even depressing. Perhaps because I'm never comfortable with the mainstream or what the majority believe is true.

In the end, I didn't try hard to explore the city because I didn't feel like doing so (I didn't visit downtown Boston). Given that Boston is called the Athens of America, maybe I'm fundamentally disinterested in what constitutes America.

Toscanini's

Having a dinner until late last night and checking out by 9:30am, I'm hungry but don't fancy the hotel's mediocre breakfast. I walk around outside the hotel, finding this nice neighbourhood cafe at 899 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge.

Freshly squeezed organge juice and warm bread puddings with maple syrup and soft cream cheer me up. The window-side comfy sofa seat receives the morning sunlight, with fat b-lined chillout music as background. Waitresses and a hippy-looking cafe owner are nice and pleasant. Around 10:15am, there is a long queue of people presumably living nearby. They also serve a variety of coffee, brunch menu, and "the best ice cream in America" according to the New York Times (so reads the sign on the cafe window). If I were a PhD student in Boston, I would definitely come here for a weekend brunch.

List Visual Arts Center at MIT

A free-to-enter gallery of contemporary video installations in the middle of MIT campus is a pleasant surprise if you think MIT is all about technology geekiness. Each of white-cube style exhibition spaces features one video installation with a comfy leather bench in front of the screen.

I find one interesting installation (entitled "Hor-champs" by Stan Douglas, 1992). In a rather spacious cubic space, a double-sided video screen is hung diagonally at the center. One side shows a free jazz band's performance in a standard TV style: the camera mostly focuses the main saxophone player with backing trombone, bassist, and drummer just occasionally shown. The other side of the screen shows the video shots usually discarded: the bassist and drummer while the saxophone player plays the main melody or the saxophone and the trombone just standing while the drummer or the bassist is playing solo. It captures my interest because this is how I often listen to music: the vocal or the main guitar is just background for me; my ears focus on the bass line or the drumming rhythms. So I like this installation.

Boston Public Library's courtyard

A conference for development economists

For the uninitiated, here is an example of how a large-scale academic conference (with participants more than 100) proceeds.

It begins at 8am when breakfast (just sweet bread and cakes with Starbucks coffee and Tropicana orange juice) is served for an hour. Participants chat with their freinds based in other universities or meet with new researchers who may become their collaborators in the future.

From 9am to 10:40 am, five different sessions start in parallel, each consisting of four papers tackling more or less similar research questions. (How similar the four papers are depends on how much the conference organizers put an effort to group a number of papers presented at the conference.) Each paper is assigned 25 minutes. The first 15 minutes is a presentation by the author, followed by 10 minutes questions and comments by a "discussant" who is supposed to read the paper carefully beforehand and by other participants. A horrendously large number of the paper authors cannot clearly talk about the paper within 15 minutes: they take too much time for stating a research question, talk too much about related research in the past, and explain things that are not really important, ending up running out of time and explaining the most important things too quickly with the audience lost in confusion. The discussants then follow the same trap: they re-state what the paper is about (that's the author's job though it can be helpful for the audience when the author fails to explain clearly) and praise the paper superficially, ending up having no time to explain their comments clearly enough. As a result, the audience is not allowed to speak up with comments potentially useful for the author or simply don't know what to say because they don't understand what the paper is about.

After a 20 minute coffee break, the second session begins at 11am until 12:40pm with the same thing repeated. Lunch follows with a box of a sandwitch, crisps, and a fruit served to each participant. Participants chat to each other, talking about which paper was interesting etc. From 2 to 3:40pm, the third session, followed by a 20 minute coffee break, and the final session until 5:40pm.

From 6pm, a buffet dinner begins with poster presenters (I was one of them; that's why I posted this last week) standing next to their poster describing their research. Participants may go to a poster for which they're interested. Or they simply just chat with their friends, possibly on future joint research.

By 8pm, the conference dinner is over. Participants are separated into several groups, each going to a bar etc.

Attending an academic conference is simply tiring unless you are naturally smart. It's difficult to make new friends unless you manage to give smart comments to paper presenters. Young, up-and-coming researchers try to talk to senior researchers by overcoming their intimidation by presence.

But I have learned. It's a matter of getting used to it. This is the second conference for development economists that I attended since I started a job as a researcher. I see several people for the second time. I manage to talk to some of them this time even though I couldn't last time. What's important is to keep attending this kind of conference. It takes time to build a network.

The Blue Room

After an 8 hour trans-Atlantic flight, with a 2-day academic conference awaiting me next morning, I definitely need to have a great dinner with an excellent atmosphere. The Blue Room (1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02139), a restaurant in a rather Tokyo-ish area of Kendall (where MIT campus is located), almost perfectly satisfies my picky expectation. Wood-grilled whole branzino fish, served with pomegranate syrup, crushed olives, herby leaves, and bits of pink grapefruit, is super. A whole baked fish often exhibits a steep decline in the degree of extra pleasure from eating more: the second half of fish meat quickly starts tasting boring even if the first half was gorgeous. The Blue Room's chef knows how to avoid this: serving grilled fish with what tastes continuously stimulating with texture in stark contrast: pink grapefruit.

A dessert (cream cheese flan) is rather mediocre, but the service is extremely beautiful here. A waiter taking my order tells me that baking fish can take at most 35 minutes. When the fish is almost ready, he comes to my table again, saying, "In two minutes." A waitress serving the fish asks me if I have an experience of eating a whole fish (when I reply by saing, "I'm Japanese," she says, "I don't want to make any presumption."). The decor and atmosphere is stylish without being pretentious.

A truely excellent restaurant (and its website is cool).

A Shocker

On the way to Boston, a Greek girl sitting next to my flight seat said to me, "You look 18 years old." When I told her that I'm 30, she looked shocked. I was shocked by her remark, too.

I'm now in Boston to attend an annual academic conference for development economists. Some photos and restaurant reviews etc. will shortly appear on this blog.

How to create a PDF poster with LaTeX

If you are an economist or any other researcher using maths, you should be using LaTeX to write a paper or to create a presentation slide. If your paper is accepted in a poster session in a conference, then what would you do to create a poster involving mathematical expressions? Here's what to do.

1. Visit the beamerposter package website.

2. Download "beamerposter-example.zip" from somewhere in the middle of the page.

3. Extract the downloaded zip file.

4. Open "example.tex" with TeXnixCenter or any other TeX editor.

5. Customize it to your taste.

If you repeatedly need to create posters with LaTeX, then do the following in addition:

1. Create a new directory of your preferred name (e.g. beamerposter) under the directory "C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\tex\latex" or "C:\texmf\tex\latex" (depending on how your MiKTeX is installed).

2. Download "beamerposter.sty" from somewhere in the middle of the beamerposter package webpage, and save it under the directory you just created.

3. Launch MiXTeX option (Start > Programs > MiXTeX > Settings).

4. Click "Refresh FNDB", and wait for a while.

5. Close MiXTeX option.

(See here for why you need to do this.)

Djurgården

Although my trip to Milan this week was academically very fruitful (sightseeing of Milan was rather disappointing though), the return flight was horribly tiring (the coach to the airport got caught up in a traffic jam, arriving just one hour before the departure time (6pm) and the flight delayed 30 minutes, the cafe at the boarding gate refused to accept a credit card, sandwitches were out of stock on the Ryanair aircraft, and arriving at home at 1:30am with the frige empty). I need to take a break.

If I were in London or in Tokyo, I wouldn't be able to enjoy nature to refresh myself. But I'm in Stockholm now. I can easily go to Djurgården, an island in Stockholm where nature is well-preserved.

Walking along the north shore is a very pleasant experience. Sea water here is mystically tranquil and beautiful (see the above photo which was taken last September).

Arriving at Djurgårdsbrunn bridge, I notice a cafe/restaurant on the opposite shore. Usually cafes and restaurants in this kind of natural place are rather dull or traditional at best. This one, called Djurgårdsbrunns, pleasantly turns out to be different: stylish interior and amazingly great dishes. It's a bit expensive, but paying 195 krona, you can enjoy brunch buffet. Juicy meat (chicken and sparerib), fresh smoked salmon, crispy bread, roast tomatoes and mushrooms in English breakfast style, tasty polenta, crunchy lettuce, etc. If I think this is just about 14 British pounds, it's a bargain. (This is what's good about having lived in London: your sense of "value for money" is screwed up.)


On the way back, I walk on the shore opposite to Djurgården. This side of the creek is also pleasant.






And on the way home, I find yet another nice crockery store in Östermalm: The House of Villeroy & Boch.


I think I fall in love with Stockholm. :)

Milanese cuisine

During my trip, I try to eat Milanese cuisine. One of such is cotoletta alla milanese, deep-fried breaded veal chop. I learn that there is an endless debate on whether Vienna or Milan is the first to invent this style of cooking. But I also learn that the origin of tonkatsu, a Japanese dish of deep-fried breaded pork fillet dating back to the early 20th century, can also be Milan.

I also have a Milanese saffron risotto, which is okay.

Golden Rectangle

A visit to the Quadrilatero d'Oro (or the Golden Rectangle) area is rather disappointing. Along small alleyways line the world's renowned brand shops.

But so what?

Even Viktor & Rolf's store, whose interior is all upside down, is not impressive at all, probably because the materials used for the interior look rather cheap. Worse, when I visit the store, a Japanese couple, a fashion-designer-looking guy with his girlfriend, is having a chat. Am I in Milan?

I guess all the Milanese fashion brands have become too famous and too ubiquitous around the world. An area like the Golden Rectangle is everywhere in the world. That's why taking a stroll around doesn't make me feel any different. Omotesando in Tokyo is much more interesting.

Cimitero Monumentale

Probably the world's weirdest cemetry. Can you imagine the photos below were taken at a cemetry? It makes me think of my tomestone as if I was thinking of my flat interior design.

Obika Mozzarella Bar

For lunch on my own, I follow Monocle 25/25's recommendation: Obika Mozzarella Bar. I try three different types of mozzarella on a salad of tomatoes and spinach. With tasty bread (as a compliment), it's an enjoyable experience though, again as is often the case in Italy, I get bored towards the end of the meal.

After 1pm, the bar becomes busy, popular with office workers in the area.
They have branches in Rome and London (I didn't know...), and are going to open the second place in Milan, in front of touristy Duomo.