Mountain Biking

My research includes reading and thinking about statistical models for social networks. But it's good to hear about some of the ideas from the authors themselves; straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. It's nice to hear their line of thinking, which often doesn't come across properly in conference articles. Blame it on last minute nature of these submsissions. Regardless, it's interesting to see where lines of thinking overlap and diverge, with the goal of finding questions that are both important and unanswered.

The highlight was meeting other grad students who have similar interests. Some of them are like me - just getting done with classes - and others already have a handful of papers under their belt. Nerdy conversations can't be helped since that's the common denominator. When discussing people's university experience, I was reminded to be thankful for an advisor that is supportive and attentive and knowledgeable in my area of interest; some others are not so fortunate. Second, it is rare to have such a great research group with a ton of expertise on models and algorithms that are closely related to the stuff applied to social networks; other students are often on their own.

I joined three others to rent mountain bikes. The trails were world class. (I didn't take any pics, but I found some helmet-cam footage.) A few main gravel roads criss-cross the no-cars-allowed park. From these, one can access "green" trails: a mix of dirt crushed gravel that were wide enough for a wheelchair. You could really get moving on these because the turns were easy and predictable. From these one can access dozens of "blue"-rated single track. Obstacles included huge granite slabs and boulders and rocks (no problem for the double suspension bikes we rented). We sometimes crossed one-foot-wide wooden bridges that passed over swampy areas and banked around trees, both sounding and feeling like an old rollercoaster. I never sought out the "black" trails, but I know they were above my abilities.

The other guys with me were equally cautious at first since none of us had spent a ton of time on mountain bikes. By the end we were rocking and rolling enough to wake up the next morning at 7am and do it again for a couple hours. Now I see why this is one of the Meccas of Mountain Biking.

On the way to Whistler

It has been a few years since I have placed words on this small piece of the interweb. I am still not 30 and I still (by most standards) have yet to obtain a "real job". But a new adventure deserves new updates.

The general gameplan: a week in Whistler, 3 weeks in Italy/Paris, and a few days in Washington DC on the way back to Orange County. I have nerdy events at each location: talks, conferences, etc. Emma and I also plan to hike through the Dolomites for a week or so before checking out Venice for a few days.

I am on a bus from Vancouver to Whistler. The highway sits right where a set of dark green mountains meet the water. A few small islands, rising steeply and entirely covered with trees, seem like a perfect getaway for a lifetime of solitude. At one small bridge we passed a stream with water so white that I chuckled in surprise. Some of the mountains have granite faces that rise several hundred feet into the air, and others reveal snow-capped peaks only when the clouds shift just right.

Seeing such natural beauty is a bit of a shock when coming from the well manicured suburban sprawl of Orange County. I am almost unable to enjoy it, out of fear that it may not last, that people will find it and ruin it.

The conference is about the statistical modeling of social networks. Over the next few days I plan to hear some things I (should) already know, learn some things I didn't, meet people who have thought about my interests for many years, meet other excited grad students, and think about how I can contribute.

I also would like to rent a bike and check out the scenery.

Paris

Once we had arrived in Paris and had taken the train from the airport to Gard du Nord (train station featured in Bourne Ultimatum), we were supposed to call our hostel so they could arrange for someone to meet us at one of metro stops. We had a few minutes left on an old phone card but after 30 minutes of trying different combinations, we still weren't able to get anything but a strange-sounding busy signal. So we went on my hunch of which station we were aiming for.

Navigating the metro was easy, and there was no question we were the local hippies. People were well dressed; we were not. People smelled good; we did not. Once we got there, nobody seemed to be looking for a Chris DuBois. I tried asking the older lady at the metro help desk if she knew of our hostel; she proudly, while keeping eye contact, 'No comprandt' - or something like that - and quickly went back to her work. I think it's French for, 'I'm a snooty bitch' but I'm not sure because I never have studied French. I swear I saw a smirk.

I finally just went for a short walk around the metro station while Emma watched the bags. Our landing site was sweet. Total Europe. Little restaurants on the cobblestone corner, with people sipping coffee from tiny cups. Four story apartment buildings with well styled facades, their ground floor often times having a flower shop or a bakery. And within minutes of looking for a sign saying 'Lucky Youth', I swanky French business dude came up and said, 'Are you looking for something? You look very lost.' He let me use his phone to call the place, translated a little bit for me, and we chatted about Tanzania (he had worked there for 3 years a while back). Booya.
So I figured this would be a good story to relate a few main items:

• There are quite a few beautiful people in Paris, and far more beautifully dressed people.
• There are snooty people in Paris, and there are people hoping to be so nice that they overcompensate for this notoriety.
• The architecture in Paris is awesome, and the apartments are a big part of it, giving the impression that the city only allows this cool, 19th century look.

Once we got settled, we immediately began exploring. Our hostel was really a flat with 6 bunk beds, and we were the only ones there. It was located in Montmartre, so we quickly checked out the local tourist attraction, Sacre Couer. It's huge. And it's got a great view of the city. (That wiki link has a great panorama.) We strolled by the front steps on the way to dinner (which were featured in Amelie), and a few hundred people were chilling on the steps enjoying the view - with a bottle of wine each - and listening to a dude with a guitar and an amp. Not a bad scene.

We also checked out the nearby plaza and got some awesome . A dozen artists were sketching portraits of tourists. We hit up the Salvidor Dali museum; we were sufficiently weirded out.

Both in Montmartre and our next spot, Hotel de Champ du Mars, we really enjoyed the gradually exploration of our surroundings. And the thing that was key in this, the thing that I could talk about for a while, was Paris' newly installed public bike system. For 1 euro a day, you get a card that lets you take out a bike from any of 300-400 stations scattered across the city. The first 30 minutes for each bike is free and it's 1 euro/hour after that. This made incredibly easy to first check out the nearby bakery, fruit store, Japanese restaurant (we had hankering for miso soup... it happens). Then we were able to check out the nearby destinations, which we only really knew about because their buildings were drawn bigger on our free tourist map. Les Invalides? No idea what it is, but let's bike there and check it out.

What was amazing, and I'll never forget this about Paris, is that we would be biking along and around each corner there would be another huge, monumental building. Each would easily be the historical highlight of an United States city, and there were dozens of them!

We did plenty of museums. In general it took me about 3 hours to become weak-kneed and blurry-eyed from hunger and too many pre-impressionist, impressionist, and post-impressionist paintings. The Lourve was especially ridiculous and intimidating with all the amazing crap it has. Paintings that are 15 feet tall and 30 feet wide. We also went on the first Sunday (free admission) so it was pretty stressful not getting trampled by the thousands of people going towards the Mona Lisa. I got a cold sweat at one point. The highlight was the Winged Victory, an Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the crown jewels - which such big gems they looked fake. We went to the military history museum; as you might expect from the French, there was a big emphasis on the style of garments in each period and a glossing over of how easily they were pummeled in World War II. We were much more relaxed when we moseyed over to the Rodin museum, a garden with some awesome bronze casts like the famous Thinker and Gates of Hell. And I would definitely recommend the Museum d'Orsay, too. It's got a bunch of Monets and stuff, and the museum itself looks way cooler.

Paris was impressive and totally overshot all my expectations. It was a great clincher to an amazing trip. But there's no place like home.

Kicking it in Zambia

We apologize for the radio silence, but it's nice to be able to sit down and have plenty to write about.

We've been in Lusaka staying with a family: Bruce and Linda Wilkinson, their 6 yr old (brilliant) son Isaac, and their college-grad intern Kelley. The faith-based family has been here for 3 years and have been generous hosts.

In comparison, our story sounds selfish. We've been traveling the world, checking out the sites, racking up the tourist points. No regrets.

Bruce came to Lusaka after being very high on the NGO ladder at World Vision, a global organization that oversees impossibly large amounts of aid. Now he's running RAPIDS, a new Zambian group which empowers a network of 15,000 volunteer caregivers with the materials they need to help those suffering from the effects of HIV/AIDs. With their $30 million, 5 year grant, they pull together dozens of different organizations (ranging from government to faith-based) in order to distribute both stuff and knowhow; it’s a huge operation for Zambia, but small peanuts compared to his previous stuff. What’s more impressive is the private money he’s helped bring in – an additional $37 million, some of it as gift-in-kind, e.g. bandaids and bikes.

Not surprisingly, the bikes story is one of my favorites here. The owner of SRAM heard the volunteers had trouble getting around to all the people who needed help, and they designed a cheap bike that was a bunch stronger than the bikes they have here. Partnered with the Indian car company Tata, they produced $2 million worth of these bikes, and RAPIDS distributed them. They look the same as the local bikes, but they are far better at handling the weight of a second person on the rack, like when they need to go to the local clinic. (When lent to family members, the bikes are also better at transporting 100kgs of coal, also a common use for bikes around here.) They have served the volunteers well, providing both an incentive and a valuable asset.

What’s the rationale behind all this effort? About 20% of Zambians within Lusaka have HIV/AIDS, and 16% in rural areas. An entire generation seems to be missing in some areas, and there are many grandmothers who are simultaneously caring for 5 grandchildren and 5 non-biological orphans. Poverty, drunkenness, prostitution are all problems; healthcare, livelihood, and education are the focus for most of the hundreds of aid groups here. We were able to tour two of RAPIDS’s caregiver centers with the Accenture consultant who was here helping check things out. She was here to provide 3rd party advice/affirmation that the program model is ready to be expanded to other countries and settings.

Linda started working with a group of widows. After hearing their heart-wrenching stories, she worked with them on several microenterprise ideas, finding success with a project where they knit (awesome-looking) purses using recycled plastic bags. Now about 50 women are making a living through this program. They work together, share ideas, and Linda and others sell the bags in the states. This laid the groundwork for several other initiatives that take place on the same property, including a school for 300 orphans, a group of single moms who make and sell salted peanuts and soy milk, and a young women’s club. We’ve spent several days there. More information is at chikumbuso.com, and more is coming every day as we help them put stuff up.

Kelley just graduated from UC Boulder and is the hardworking intern who has the neverending todo-list. She’s been super kind to lead us around and point us in directions where we can help, and we’ve had a great time hanging out. We just went to a concert last night, which was a blast. It was a woman with attitude from Ivory Coast who blasted lyrics to funky rhythms and danced with some acrobatic, African-influenced moves.

Kate, their eldest daughter, just arrived last week. She’s in a graduate program at Columbia studying foreign development. She hopes to take Chikumbuso and make it huge. I’d agree it’s close to being ready.

There is a lot to say about the last few weeks, but the last two days should provide a good representative snapshot. We woke up, ate some pancakes, and drove to Chikumbuso. They have a pedal-powered soy bean grinder that makes the mush needed to make soy milk; I pedaled for a while. Emma helped two clinic volunteers administer HIV testing to 30 of the kids; two were positive. We helped tag the bracelets the widows had made, so that they could track who had made what. We taught division to the 5th graders who just begun learning it that morning; I tried using some of the dirty soybeans to help with the lesson, and tried to show the relationship between multiplication problems and division problems. Some kids really caught on with using the multiplication table on their shabby binders, some even were somewhat familiar with long division, and some kept grouping tally marks – even when they had to draw 169 of them.

In the afternoon, we taught basketball. Yes, I know: I have touched a basketball only a handful of times since 3rd grade. Emma “jumped” right into it, though, and we got the kids psyched up about passing, shooting, and defense. The fitness part included jumping jacks, squatting, and pushups. The kids couldn’t stop laughing. We’ve done 3 sessions already, and today we bought two brand new basketballs. The other one had exploded from the abuse of bouncing of the rocky schoolyard.

Last weekend we took a 7 hour bus ride down to Livingston to see Victoria Falls. They were huge. There’s a little walking trail directly across from the top of the falls. When the wind was just right, the ‘mist’ from the falls was heavy enough to feel like somebody was standing over you and dumping buckets on your head. The bridge over the Zambezi just below the falls connects Zambia and Zimbabwe, and there’s a bungie jump operation on it. I signed up for the ‘Big Air’ package, which included the bungie jump and the swing. Free falling causes heart attack-like symptoms. Free falling was a good once-in-a-lifetime experience, if only for the reason I now know what a heart attack must feel like.

Being here and talking with Bruce has given me a chance to think about values, aid in Africa, behavior change, and ways that Africa could become better. I’m not sure I’ve changed any, but things are a bit clearer; all that is for a different post or a long conversation. The kids are also dang cute – which I’m sure Emma will cover in her post.

Summary: The Wilkinson family has certainly changed many people’s lives for the better. We have been lucky they agreed to put up with us for these few weeks.

Journey from Dar es Salaam to Lusaka, Hour 49 of Train Ride.

As you might have guessed from Emma’s posts, the safari was badass. As she mentioned, I couldn’t tell a stump from a lion, or a piece of machinery from giraffe, so I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut and defer to our guide’s uncanny ability to spot wildlife. If it was worth seeing, he’d let us know.

In Ngorogoro Crater, I kept feeling like we were in Jurassic Park, and when we’d get into thicker parts of the forest, I’d half-wonder if a team of raptors had gotten loose. Once in the Serengeti I couldn’t get Circle of Life stuck out of my head (the main theme song from Disney’s The Lion King).

A short explanation about dik diks. Earlier in our trip when we had been looking into safaris, I had been browsing some of the Africa books and flipped to a page about animals. The picture of a dik dik looked so hilarious I decided that I had to see one in real life. Imagine a deer, then shrink it until it’s about 1 foot tall, then put little stubby horns on it, kind of like Hollywood puts on actors that play the part of devils. Seemed like a little mythical creature. So on the third day, I finally got some Where’s Waldo skillz and spotted a dik dik standing just off the road. They were as ridiculous looking as I imagined. Success!

After seeing all the wildebeest, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look for signs of chase. I wanted to see a cheetah or a lion aim straight for the thickest part of the pack, or a team of hyenas corner a youngling. But with the food source so plentiful, these hunters had no need to work that hard for their food.

The crater was incredible, but the Serengeti’s landscape was stunning in its own right. Small outcroppings of granite speckle the plains. (For Disney generation, think of the big rock that overlooks everything at the beginning of the movie. For nerds, apparently these are big bubbles of granite. The outer layers expand and contract with daily temperature fluctuations and, with time, erosion causes some cool boulders to appear. The large flat areas are from volcanic ash from later eruptions nearby, and the resulting top soil is too thin to support anything but the grass.) These outcroppings form cool oases (sp? Plural of oasis) of vegetation and wildlife.

We stayed at posh lodges. Four course meals and a big buffet for breakfast. Combined with good weather? It was a great week.

Right now I’m living in the gentle-rinse-cycle known as the Tazara train, which connects Tanzania with Zambia. Our first class cabin has most the African pleasantries we’ve come to expect. The fan’s broken, as is the lock on the door, and the lights work occasionally. Maybe 1/3 of people play with our door’s handle as they walk by, checking to see if it’s unlocked. They could easily open it if we hadn’t jerry-rigged a $4 bike lock around the inside. We are very grateful to not be in second class seating, since they’re sitting four-to-a-seat, babies on mothers’ backs, with no place to lie down for 2 days straight.

The train stops often, sometimes for 20 minutes and sometimes for 4 hours. It keeps you guessing, and we often wonder if the train will ever start again. On some of the hills, the train was brought to a creaky crawl slower than walking pace, and I put it at 50/50 whether or not we would start rolling backwards. On the downhills, you’re thrown against the wall when there’s a heart-wrenching jerk of the entire train car, causing a few bruises and choked food.

We forgot to bring Subway for our first meal and were pretty bummed about our mistake. We brought some snacks like cheese and crackers, a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, but we wouldn’t have been able to make it without the $3 fried chicken and rice they serve onboard, along with the Tusker beer. Dozens of others take advantage of the beer in the dining car, and they often open our door enough to poke their face in to say hello as they stumble back to their room. We hung out it in the dining car for a while, until our chairs broke from the sudden jerking.

We never really know what time it is (I lost the watch in Thailand), so we’ve been whittling the days away between card games and naps. Sometimes we ask how much longer, and usually double that is closer to the truth.

Emma’s been the victim of some brutal allergies; the first day I woke up and could barely see her over the pile of toilet paper she had used throughout the night. She also looked like she’d been punched, with left eye almost swollen shut with a beautiful purple tint. Teasing her about it was quickly discouraged.

The bathrooms are sketchy enough that I’m holding out for something better. We’ll see if I can last.

For all the hilarities, the view has been unforgettable. Blue sky, expansive grasslands spotted with shrubs, small fields of dead corn, the occasional dirt path and grass-roofed hut, sometimes a village or even a dirt road. The young kids wave and run alongside the train every chance they get.