Movies

I went to the movies here in Japan with a few of the other women working here. We went out for okonomiyaki, the actual word for the Japanese fritters we'd posted about here, and then went to see Benjamin Button.


This is my ticket stub. The line above the date and time is the movie title. It says Benjamin, the Button part was ripped off when we went in. As you can see, my seat was 7K8. Your seats are assigned in a Japanese theater. You choose what section you'd like to sit in, and they print out tickets for you in that section. It cost 1,200 yen, which is roughly $12. This is the cheap price - the last show of the night is 1,200 instead of 1,700. Matinee shows aren't cheaper here, just the last show of the evening. The movies coming from America are all subtitled. Australia is coming here soon, and I may go to see that on a Wednesday, because Wednesday nights are Ladies Nights at the theaters and it's only 1,000 for a ticket.

Popcorn and drinks cost roughly the same, 1,200 for a large popcorn and soda, though the soda is smaller. They sell nachos and hot dogs, but no candy. They also sell ice cream, tiny little 1-scoop sized Hagen-Daaz containers. Most of the movies I've seen in the theaters have ended with the audience clapping. I hate that, because, well, there's no one around to hear your appreciation except the theater employees, and they're probably laughing about the fact that you're clapping. Here, no one clapped, and it made me happy. Two cell phones did go off, and the people got up and ran out of the theater. They didn't silence their phones and walk out to take the call, no, they just got up and ran out while ringing. Strange.

Benjamin Button is a pretty good movie, though very long. I enjoyed it. It's very interesting to have the subtitles, even though I can't read them very well. I picked up a couple of things and found some times when what they said wasn't what was translated. Very interesting.

Wow.

It comes in a bottle here. A $5 bottle of wine, but a bottle nonetheless.

It's typically sold as a boxed wine in the U.S., for about $1/liter on sale for those of you not in the know. I wasn't expecting to see it here of all places.

Earthquake

We experienced our first authentic Japanese earthquake this morning. It was quite a small one. We both woke up but we weren't even sure that it was an earthquake until we asked around and then checked the internet, as the house shakes that much when a truck drives by or the wind blows. The Japanese service that tracks such things says that it was a 1 on the Richter Scale in our location, and a 4 at the epicenter a hundred miles south of us. It was very much a non-event for the locals but a little exciting for us.

4th Year Robots

At KTC, the fourth year students have a four hour Creative Experiment class every Friday morning. In this class, they design, build, wire, and program rather large line tracing robots. The point of these robots is to guide a visitor to the main desk. They don't actually use these, but it's a pretty good project for the students. They have to make a robot that will follow the line, give some sort of "follow me" motion when started, and some sort of "hey, you're here" motion when it arrives at the main desk area. These robots are very stylized, and the students spend a heck of a lot more time making a theme and beautifying the robot than your typical 19 year old American boys would. This year, there were seven groups, each with a different design. There's a battleship, peach, pyramid, turtle, car, pig, and penguin.

I didn't get good video of most, or pictures of all of them, but they'll be shown off again. Here's a picture of the battleship. It's at the front desk area, so it stops and the guns rotate about. Pretty cool!

There's a couple more videos if you want to go to Flickr to look at them.

This is a pretty nice project. The kids all have to make a line following robot, which is pretty basic, but then they have to add the other mechanisms to it. That's where the design work comes in. They get to learn how to make what they're envisioning a reality. The penguin has an air pump and gear system that makes the wings flap and the party horn in its mouth work. The pyramid has a pretty nice mitered gear system to make the sides open. The battleship has by far the most intricate system for manipulating the guns. It's really cool to see the students sketch out their ideas, make a design, and then refine as the year goes along.

Map of KIT

Check out this fine map of KIT with important locations marked.

More Onsen Pics

My boss knew a guy who was taking pictures at the onsen for the faculty magazine, so we got a few more, including one of us on stage wearing pajamas in front a bajillion people making the toast to officially start dinner. Pictures aren't great but then I'm just not that photogenic.

Job Description - Lee

I've been working in my new job for a couple of months now and I suppose it is safe to say I now have some idea what my job entails. While the job will evolve along with my language skills and to some extent what I want to do with it, at this time I basically have five main duties.

1) Work with teams in Basic Lab sections in English. Basic Lab is a course that all KIT students take, which introduces them to the scientific method and makes them dream up, actualize, and improve an experiment. Usually, substantial improvement is required to have anything worthwhile, and sometimes science is still really not the result. However, the purpose of the class is to inspire the correct lines of thought rather than real scientific output. Japanese students spend most of middle school and high school studying for tests rather than doing science experiments and writing reports as would be more common in America, so they are behind where one might expect an American class to be in experimental thought and skills. Having read some of the lab reports that Todd was grading when he was in charge of Mechanics of Materials lab at RIT, I wouldn't expect that much from an American class either.

Anyhow, they're trying to do science, and I walk around the room trying to figure out what they're doing, how they're doing it, and if either of those things make any engineering sense. If it does, great, and I move on. If not, further attempts at communication ensue until they either understand my objections or I go and get another teacher to explain it in Japanese. If its something like 'how about you put a cover over the 99% of the photon sensor that isn't recieving laser radiation to have less noise in your results?' I can usually get that across. If my objection is more like 'please don't use higher-order polynomial regression models to describe your crappy data, your standard deviation is way too high to suggest that anything other than a linear model is practical and by using regression like that you're implying that the results are not due to noise in your data but actually reflect experimental fact' I probably need help.

2) Work with teams in Engineering Design 2. ED2 is similar to Basic Lab except that the big project is a low level design project instead of an experiment, and there are a lot more presentations and posters and things. The purpose of the class is basically to team them to work in teams on design projects, which seems a little silly to me because the students are team-working machines as far as I can tell. The 'design' content is a little low, without any analysis or detailed design. Were I in charge of a section of this, I would work them a little harder than the plan calls for and they would get a lot more out of it. On the other hand, they're younger and less experienced then the students of a design project class in the US, by about a year.

My part is to find out about their design projects, help them with engineering content, and to help them put things into English for sharing with students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech in Indiana. Some sections of ED2 are part of a trial collaboration between KIT, RHIT, and Asia University in Taiwan. I set up a new webmeeting rig and software so that we can run better web meetings with those schools, and I help the students prepare materials in English to share.

3) I participate in the translation of Japanese research papers into English. Most of the professors have some level of English writing ability, and a few can consistently write correct English. However, as a native speaker of English, I can add perspective, polish, and a certain level of linguistic elegance to the proceedings, as well as adding in clarifications where necessary. In the near future I expect to become a part of the research that goes into some of these papers, mostly engineering education research, and will probably begin writing some papers in English in the first place myself. I'm pretty psyched to be involved as my Master's of Engineering was more directed towards the practice of engineering in industry rather than research, and getting published a few times will substantially enhance my research credibility if I decide after this that I'm going for a PhD. Also the school may pay for me to go to conferences to present the papers; there is talk of sending me to an international conference in Nagoya (still in Japan) in August.

4) I prepare and present information about the American university educational system that may interest an audience of Japanese professors. RIT is a co-op school, and co-op is generally not present in Japan, so I have been asked to prepare a substantial presentation as a primer to the subject. After that one, they want to know about AP classes, community colleges, transfer credit, and the interaction between all of the above and traditional 4-year degree programs. I'm not sure how many presentations in total I have information for, but for now it rounds things out a little and makes me feel more useful.

5) Learn Japanese ASAP. I'm 1240 / 2140 through the alphabet right now, hoping to achieve some low level of literacy within the year. After I plow through the alphabet I'll put more emphasis on speaking. I can say some things and many of the more common words I've already picked up or had to learn for Basic Lab or Ed2.

The classes I'm involved in and the work will probably evolve somewhat, and they tell me if my Japanese gets good enough they'll probably put me in charge of my own classes, but that is some way off in the future. For now though, I have a job, its pretty good, and I have a lot of chances to learn more stuff. Can't complain. Especially with something like 13 weeks off per year, if I'm reading the schedule correctly.