Autumn in Uppsala

This autumn has been quite beautiful in Uppsala. For one thing, the weather has improved. In August and early September, it seems like it rained every day; in contrast, October has been generally pleasant and sunny. Some mornings have been wonderfully foggy, and my walk to, and wait at, the bus stop is often quite lovely indeed. It has gotten cooler, of course, and a few mornings have seen frost lining the fallen leaves and still-green grass.

But what does it feel like? Well, honestly, it feels a lot like Michigan. For instance, Kanelbullardag felt like a beautiful afternoon in East Lansing. Uppsala University doesn't have a campus, exactly, but there are areas in town that remind me of the tree-lined walk-ways by Michigan State's student union. The woodsy area that our apartment is in reminds me more of Leelanau, the place we'd vacation in northern Michigan, with the cool night air and earthy forest smells and the birch trees and evergreens so close.

I see that I have specifically mentioned that Uppsala reminds me of two places in Michigan in which I have spent a relatively small amount of time. Oddly, I haven't yet gotten a St. Joseph or Ann Arbor vibe nearly as much. St. Joe I associate with farm- and orchardland and squash and apples and the various other bounties of the season (although we're surrounded by farmland here we very rarely see it); in A2, my favorite memories of autumn include grad student life, the insanity of UM game-days and sports season, and the various mysig rituals we had settled into over the years with friends (Halloween and pumpkin carving come to mind at the moment...). I stand by my earlier statement that Uppsala feels like home, but it's still a new home, and I think it's possible, just possible, that autumn in Sweden has made me a little homesick for autumn in Michigan...

Another Long Week

Yesterday at 6 PM the final project in my constraint programming class was due, officially marking the end of my first term at Uppsala, and let me tell you, it came right down to the wire. I hadn't done any real work on the project before this week (beyond choosing which of two problems I wanted to do, reading over that, and thinking about how I might solve it), but I had the whole week to work on it, so I wasn't too worried. The week progressed about like you'd expect:

Sunday, afternoon: Started coding.

Monday, morning: The bulk of the coding is finished, leaving just a handful of small bugs to work out.

Wednesday, approx. 2 AM: One of the small bugs has proved to be completely intractable, and possibly fatal to the whole approach.

Wednesday, morning: Start the day by abandoning problem 1 in favor of the now much more appealing problem 2.

Wednesday, afternoon: Problem 2, attempt #3, mostly finished, leaving just a handful of small, but horrifyingly familiar, bugs to work out.

Wednesday, midnight: Yup, nearly the same intractable bug. Suspicion that I have a deep and abiding misunderstanding of the basic tenets of the problem begins to take hold. Urgent e-mail sent to professor.

Thursday, morning: Professor replies with encouraging e-mail hinting at solution. Further reflection reveals that I don't see what he's getting at, so it's off to his office.

Thursday, noon: Professor has agreed that bug is probably intractable, but wonders why I haven't taken the approach suggested in e-mail, which (a) completely bypasses intractable bug, and (b) is both easier to write and more promising from an efficiency standpoint. After listening to explanation, I am forced to agree.

Thursday, 3 PM: Armed with new approach, attempt #4 is much simpler, and materializes in mere hours. Test run #1 starts.

Thursday, 7 PM: Test run #1 making progress, but still running. Long solution time is theoretically acceptable, but need to run another dozen tests before deadline, now less than 24 hours away. Spouse suggests running tests on her currently idle and oh-so-much-more-powerful computer at work. Forehead slapped and "Doh!" uttered, it's off to spouse's office to start an automated run of tests #1–8, while tests #9–12 run at home.

Friday, 8 AM: Tests #9 and 10 complete, but with distressing results which imply that tests #1–8 should have been structured differently.

Friday, 9 AM: As feared, test #1 not complete. Now forced to wonder why tests #1–8 were left to run in sequence on one of the more powerful computer's 4 processors, instead of running four at a time. Using results from test #9, new test #1a–8a set up to run in parallel.

Friday, 10 AM: Report writing begins (time to remember how to use LaTeX). Lack of any results makes reporting on testing… vague, at best.

Friday, 5:30 PM: Spouse reports that approximately half of all tests completed, which will have to be enough. Results received by e-mail and hastily written up.

Friday, 5:57 PM: Project submitted online.

Friday, 6:30 PM: Met spouse at local eatery to heave big sigh of relief, and consume Turkish food.

Not my finest project ever, but should be sufficient to get the 12 points out of 20 that are required to pass the course. Meanwhile, grades on the exam were posted, and it turns out I did just fine, so no real worries there. Sure am looking forward to a little time off, though.

An Unexamined Life

On Friday I had my first exam here at Uppsala. I'm not ashamed to admit, I freaked out a little bit as this exam approached. I did this for a number of reasons:

• The exams here are each 5 hours long. Of course, as my professor joked, "You have five hours to take the exam, but this exam isn't calibrated to take five hours. It's calibrated to take eight hours." I think that was joke, anyway.
• The University expects that there will be a high failure rate for most exams. This is not as bad as it may at first seem, as you can retake a failed in the next exam period, and the one after that, and so on, until you finally pass it.
• The classes are harder, and the exams are supposed to emphasize original thinking instead of just memorization.
• As I've mentioned before, students have to sign up for the exam two weeks in advance—and that particular deadline passed me by unnoticed this period. Fortunately most of the students in this class also missed the deadline, so the professor went to some extra effort to ensure us all seats. Still, there was the possibility heading in that we would all get turned away.
• Did I mention the "5 hours long" part?

So I wound up spending the better part of a week just prepping for this one exam. I reread all the material, went back over my notes, worked through the homework again, and then I took the four published previous exams for this same class. Basically, I think I studied more for this one test than I typically would for an entire finals week.

But by mid-day Friday I felt pretty prepared. The exam was scheduled to start at 2, and it's a 10 minute bike ride away, so at 1:25 I put on my coat, gathered all my pencils, and headed out to grab my bike. This is when I discovered that on the Swedish calendar, Friday the 17th is apparently cliché day: my front tire was completely flat. OK, good thing I had planned on getting there early. My two options were to take the bus or walk, but I've never walked to campus before and wasn't sure exactly how long it would take (although 30–40 minutes seems a pretty good estimate). So I ran back inside to check the bus schedule, and found that the next bus left my stop at 1:35. Current time: 1:30. Time to bus stop at a brisk walk: 5 minutes. Yipes!

Somewhat out of breath, I arrived at the bus stop three minutes later. The bus, naturally, was about three minutes late, so I could have taken my time. Nevertheless, at 1:38 it was pulling up, and I was pulling out my bus card… well, I would have been pulling out my bus card, if it was in my wallet, where it has been for most of the past nine months. Instead, nothing. What's more, as we had been strictly instructed to bring to the exam, "nothing with memory" (except our heads, presumably), my cell phone (the next preferred method of buying a bus ticket) was sitting on my desk at home. Good thing I grabbed that 100 SEK note on my way out the door!

The bus must have made up some time somewhere, because we pulled into the Botaniska stop right on schedule. I ran across the street and just managed to catch the next #3 towards Graneberg. Five minutes later it was pulling up in front of the Polacksbacken campus, and by 1:55 I was walking in to the Polacksbacken Skrivsal.

The exams are held in a dedicated building, which used to be the gymnasium for the Royal Upplands cavalry regiment back when Polacksbacken was their barracks. Now it's basically one big exam room (the picture above (borrowed from the University website) isn't actually the hall at Polacksbacken, but it's pretty darn close). The letters on the back wall correspond to the rows of desks, and each row corresponds to a class (so all of my fellow students from "Constraint Technology for Solving Combinatorial Problems" had to sit in row B, in between a couple of math classes).

As soon as I found a desk, a woman at the front of the hall stood up and started making a long statement in Swedish (about 10 minutes worth), which distinctly included the word "Constraint" in the middle, but I have no idea what she was saying because no English translation was forthcoming. She probably reiterated a lot of the things I'd already heard about the exams, such as the fact that once the exam begins, no one is allowed to leave for the first 30 minutes. This is because as soon as the first student gives up and leaves the hall, no more late arrivals will be admitted. I meant to see if anyone left at the half hour mark, but by then I was pretty thoroughly absorbed in the exam itself, so I have no idea.

Students are encouraged to bring food and drink, and I honestly don't think there was a single Swedish student in the room not accompanied by at least one sandwich. Personally, all I had was a diet Coke, but I don't like to eat when I'm stressing, so that was plenty. Obviously there's no leaving the building for a toilet break, but there are three little single toilet rest rooms right up at the front of the test hall. There's even a red light on the wall over them, which switches on when all three are in use, so you don't have to waste your time standing around waiting for a toilet. Smokers are not as lucky as drinkers, though—smoke breaks are outside the building, and you have to get a proctor to accompany you.

When not policing smoke breaks, the proctors mostly stalked menacingly up and down the aisles. A couple of times one of them made an announcement over the PA (I'm pretty sure one of these was an attempt to explain the red light system). Also, each professor giving an exam is required to drop by for an hour so that they can answer any questions you may have.

As for the exam itself, there were five questions of varying lengths. After reading all the way through once, I decided to just start at the beginning and work my way through. I felt pretty good on finishing the second question, until I noticed that the time was 3:30. "Not calibrated to take 5 hours," indeed. The third question took the longest, and my answer covered both sides of two pieces of A4, at which point my hand was starting to hurt. Question 4 was OK if I understood it correctly, and question 5 I was only able to answer by violating the guidelines laid out in the problem description, so I guess we'll see how partial credit works on that one. In the end I wound up staying until 6:45, and while I wasn't keeping strict tabs on my whole class, I think I was only the third person out of 25 or so to leave.

Now there's just one more week to go until the end of the period. Until then, it's project time!

Kajor

Picture Source:sweron

While working on the post for Cinnamon Bun Day last week, I wound up trying to work my way through a bakery review at the website of our local newspaper, Uppsala Nya Tidning (UNT). They were rating the cinnamon buns of several local bakeries, and each one received a ranking, a number of poäng, some comments, and finally a number labeled "kajor." This last was new to me, so I flipped over to my trusty Swedish-to-English widget, only to be told that "kajor" was Swedish for "jackdaws." Now, when I say that my Swedish-to-English widget is trusty, you must understand that it is trusty only for words that are not uncommon; it fails a fair percentage of the time when attempting to deal with words encountered on the web. I tell you this so that you will understand that when it assured me that the cinnamon buns at Forsa had earned 3 jackdaws, I naturally assumed that it was mistaken, and I was quick to scoff at its failure in Jennifer's general direction.

Jennifer, however, reads the local paper in another format (this sort of, well, papery format, in which it is apparently available every day), so instead of joining in my mockery of the state of automatic language translation technology, she simply pointed out the restaurant review section in said paper. I'll be darned if the bottom of each review didn't have a row of between one and five little crow icons. Except, of course, that they weren't crows at all, but rather jackdaws.

Jackdaws massing in central Uppsala. Picture Source: woo-hoo and Animal Photos

We noticed the jackdaws as soon as we got to Uppsala. There's no way not to, really: according to recent estimates, there are upwards of 100,000 of them around the city. They're like small crows, but with dark grey heads (a little more rounded at the top than a crow's) and a metallic "chyak chyak" call that's quite distinctive. They are by far the most commonly seen bird in and around the city, and nearly the only corvids (apart from a few magpies and the occasional raven). On a quiet evening it isn't unusual to hear and/or see a flock of a couple hundred jackdaws wheeling about some building top or another in downtown Uppsala, and the fields of the farms around the city are generally full of them most of the day.

Now that we've become aware of the jackdaw as symbol, though, it turns out that those are all around us as well. This afternoon, for example, I was in the city library (I've got finals coming up, I need to procrastinate somewhere). What do I see when I pull out my library card? Yup, jackdaw. Meanwhile, next to the checkout counter, there's a small table where a couple of young women are selling passes to the upcoming Uppsala International Short Film Festival. The name of the first prize in each category at the festival? It's an Uppsala Jackdaw, of course. There's even a local 50 and over hockey team called the Jackdaws. It seems to be a sort of unofficial Uppsala mascot.

Turns out that the bird's symbolic popularity in these parts isn't just due to its numbers. The Nordic jackdaw subspecies is found through most of the southern part of Sweden and Norway, and all of Denmark, while further to the east is a Russian jackdaw subspecies. Both of these groups have a sort of lighter collar at the bottom of their grey hood. There's an intermediate population, with a lot of variation in collar coloring, including a small number with no collar at all, which is found in Finland and in Uppsala, but nowhere else in Sweden. The Uppsala population, though, is almost entirely made up of birds with no collar. All of which is to say, the birds in Uppsala are noticeably different than those in the rest of Sweden, so their local popularity makes sense.

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A royal visit

As I may have mentioned before, everyone in my department gets a scheduling email from our advisor at the start of every week. Tomorrow we will be having a visitor. I quote from the email:

... Carl Philip will come to EBC on Friday (the Swedish prince). He will be given a medal by the "landshövdingen" and there will be some mingel. I was invited to attend, but I dont know anything more about his visit.

Here are my plans for this week:

....

Friday, October 10
13:00 Mingling with the Prince
15:45 Lake metagenomics (<me>, Z.)

I refuse to be impressed by the fact that the prince is visiting our department. I am no particular fan of royalty, and this prince seems to be a little dim. I would rather see either of his two sisters, oldest sibling crown princess Victoria (who sounds a little sharper) or youngest sibling Madeleine (the fun one who does things like wear inappropriate clothing to the Nobel prize ceremonies). At the same time, I am irked to note that he is mingling (where? with whom? we peons have not been told) right before our project meeting; in other words, during the time when we should be busily preparing a summary of what we've been up to this week. You know, working, not living off the sweat of the people's brow. Hmph.

(...don't worry, I'll let you know if I do manage to see him!)

Sweden From the Not-So-Cheap Exam Seats

The first study period here at Uppsala University is suddenly (and somewhat unexpectedly) almost over, and if the first couple of weeks seemed to be moving along a little slowly it would appear that the breakneck speed of the final two weeks will more than make up for it. Despite, or more likely because of, the frantic push in all of my classes to get finished by next week, I have gleaned this week what I expect to be a deep and enduring insight into the workings of Uppsala, namely: everything I expect to be difficult is easy, and everything I expect to be easy is difficult.

For example, my absence a couple of weeks ago left me a little behind, and while I've caught up in two out of my three classes, the last one is proving more difficult. My expectation as a student is that this puts me in a difficult situation, as it's way past the last drop date and I'd rather not start racking up incompletes in my first semester. When it finally became clear this week that I simply wasn't going to be able to finish the work for this class, I went and talked to one of the graduate counselors for the department. His advice? Don't even worry about it! By not finishing I'll earn an incomplete, true, but if I either make up the work later or retake the class next fall that will completely erase the incomplete. What's more, if I never take care of the incomplete, the class simply won't show up on my transcript. Do I need to let anyone know if I don't plan on finishing the class this semester? No. Seriously, there's nothing I need to do. Huh.

Next hurdle: I need to add a class for study period 2, and not only is it way past the registration period, but I'm already signed up for the expected course load next period. I would expect this to involve getting the permission of the prof, maybe filling out a form, some hassle with the registrar… so naturally, all I have to do is send one e-mail.

OK, that's the actually easy stuff, but what should be easy? Well, my assumption is that if I sign up for a course, the University will expect me to take the final exam for that course. Pretty straightforward, right? Nope. Apparently I needed to decide last week which courses I want to take the final for, so that I could register for the exam. In some crazy scheme, the departments have to pay the university for every exam seat they reserve, and they have to do this two weeks in advance (and two weeks is a big part of a six week study period). Does this mean I can't take the final exams for my classes? Maybe, maybe not. Apparently I should go anyway, and if there is a seat available (most departments overbook slightly) I can take the exam. If not, I'll have to wait for one of the re-exam periods in January or August, and take it then. Either way, I won't be the only one: in one of my classes, only 8 out of 32 students signed up for the exam.

Here's another one: registering for classes in the spring semester. I should be able to simply go online, select some courses that still have seats, and be done with it. Instead, I have to log on to studera.nu, the national student website (the one that gave me weeks of headaches when it declared my application invalid without telling me). Every university student in the country has to use this same website to sign up for classes, as a result of which it crashes every single semester. What's more, the course registration pages are all in Swedish. Even more, by signing up for a class all I'm really doing is expressing a preference for it—if studera later determines (using an undisclosed algorithm) that the class is full, or that I screwed up the registration process somehow, it just drops my classes. If all that works, studera will send me a letter by mail sometime in December, asking me in Swedish if I'm sure that I want to take all these classes that I signed up for. Failure to respond appropriately will be taken as a "no" answer, and all my classes will be dropped. No problem, though, I would just register for new classes, right? Actually, in any of these cases, the department just signs you up for whatever classes aren't full, and that's what you get to take that semester. Period.

It's a two year program, though, so I should have it all figured out by the time I'm ready leave.