I'm packing, and it's snowing. Well, it looks like it just stopped, but it's supposed to snow on and off all night, and it's real snow, not mixed with rain or anything. I'm tired, and happy, and nervous.
Some new favorite spots in Stockholm after my week with Lindsay:
+Yasuragi, this incredible Japanese spa a little ways outside Stockholm. Technically it's in a town called "Saltsjö-Boo!" We spent literally nine hours there lounging in the hot springs, pools, sauna, drinking tea, eating fruit. Overall, a pretty exceptional Thanksgiving.
+The Iglo Ljuscafé in Södermalm, a few blocks from the apartment I move into next month. Kristin told me about it, and it's definitely going to be a weekly spot for me during the long dark Swedish winter. Inside it's so bright it hurts your eyes and you can see all your pores with horrifying clarity. Also they make yummy smoothies and teas.
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Some of the things I'm most looking forward to about being back in the US for a week, in no particular order: meeting Lucy, a burrito in California, seeing the animals and meeting the miniature goats (especially the pregnant one), watching a basketball game not at 5 in the morning, an entree that doesn't cost thirty dollars, getting to run outside in Berkeley, stretches of daylight that last more than 7 hours.
My 4 interviews are: Cornell, Brown, USC, Iowa. I'm hoping I start hearing from the other schools this week but they are probably still recovering from their pumpkin pie.
I will be taking 9 flights in 8 days:
Stockholm to London, London to New York, train to Providence, Boston to Oakland, Oakland to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Chicago, Chicago to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Cedar Rapids to Chicago, Chicago to London, London to Stockholm.
I have a gray suit, a new Danish scarf from Birger et Mikkelsen that Lindsay and I both bought at NK, Jake's ipod with a battery that doesn't drain instantly, many many books that Lindsay brought over for me, and some xanax. Now I have to go to sleep and wake up at 4 in the morning.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Nätverk
Nätverk is the Swedish word for network.
This afternoon at CHESS there was a talk given by a guy from Harvard, whose work is in health care policy, sociology, and medicine. The talk was called "The Spread of Health Phenomena in Social Networks" and it was really, really interesting. He focused mainly on the work they've done looking at the spread of obesity in social networks - they recently had that paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine - although they've also looked at other things like smoking, drinking, happiness, and banana eating. They've basically used all the data from the Framingham Heart Study (and the other Framingham studies) to construct elaborate representations of the participants' social networks.
As part of the studies, which started in 1948 (at least the heart one did, which is the most famous), people were tracked every four years and information that was recorded included things about who their friends, families, and neighbors were, and because these Framingham studies were so large (and Framingham so relatively small, I suppose) there ended up being a huge amount of overlap such that these guys were able to make very detailed (although of course incomplete in many ways) maps of people's social networks. And then they're working on all sorts of incredibly elaborate statistical and mathematical methods for working with this network data to look at how things like obesity spread. They've found significant clustering, i.e. patterns within social networks that are not random, which suggests transmission and a type of social "induction" that is independent of other confounding factors. He had this incredible phrase about "peaks and valleys in sociotopological space," and part of the modelling they did was based on this degrees of separation thing that some physicist did for work on some gene. Anyhow, it was a fascinating way of looking at how there are all sorts of strong effects that people have on one another, sometimes in ways that are intuitive but sometimes in ways that are quite unexpected. We talk all the time about how obesity is (or might be) an epidemic, and this work of his in particular really speaks to the transmission and contagion aspect of what we think of as epidemics.
Someone asked a question at the end about possible implications for prevention in the case of the obesity work, for example, and I really appreciated his totally straight-forward response that he and his colleagues consider this purely social science research right now and as such there don't need to be implications all the time. This reminded me of the conversation I had with Ilona on the way back from the conference in Helsinki, which was really helpful to me. Basically, we were talking about clinical work versus research, and I was explaining how important it is to me to get to do clinical work because I don't think I would be happy just doing research for a variety of reasons. The way my mind works, I always look both towards the underlying causes and mechanisms, as well as the specific implications and uses, and with a lot of both social science and more biomedical research, often there is very little information about both ends of that spectrum. And obviously it's not because people are lazy or poor researchers, but rather it can be a feat just to demonstrate that correlations exist or that there seems to be some sort of causal effect. It's much harder to pin down actual or even possible mechanisms, and it's difficult to predict or suggest policy or practice implications. I have a tendency to get overwhelmed and frustrated with research. That was one of the things I found with my psychology work at Columbia, and I realized that it was too personally frustrating for me to be involved with work that is fascinating and brilliant but that often seems to have little to no ties to the actual world, or to policy, or real changes.
Anyway, Ilona was trained as a pediatrician but chose to go into research, which is really interesting to me. One of the things she said was that she really values her medical training because it really helped her become the kind of thinker who focuses on intervention and action. She also made some really nice points about the importance and benefits of public health type research even when it can't necessarily illuminate all the mechanisms or implications, i.e. no one would ever get anything done if you had to figure all that out before publishing papers and giving talks, and that it's important to do the best you can with incomplete information. She made an analogy to medical situations, the idea was that we try to treat cancer even though we don't totally understand exactly how those cancer cells are functioning. We do our best with what we have and what we do know.
Now it's 3:45 and it's dark out, which makes it hard to stay motivated even though the seminar was the first concrete thing I did today. At least I now have a nice person at Harvard who invited me to come visit if I get offered an interview there (I did get one at Brown, which is semi-exciting, and I haven't heard from anywhere else yet which has put me into a constant state of panic). Also, it snowed this morning, and it was pretty. And now I need to keep translating Swedish disease names, then go to the Sturebadet to do some running so that I don't fall off my marathon training schedule before I've even started.
This afternoon at CHESS there was a talk given by a guy from Harvard, whose work is in health care policy, sociology, and medicine. The talk was called "The Spread of Health Phenomena in Social Networks" and it was really, really interesting. He focused mainly on the work they've done looking at the spread of obesity in social networks - they recently had that paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine - although they've also looked at other things like smoking, drinking, happiness, and banana eating. They've basically used all the data from the Framingham Heart Study (and the other Framingham studies) to construct elaborate representations of the participants' social networks.
As part of the studies, which started in 1948 (at least the heart one did, which is the most famous), people were tracked every four years and information that was recorded included things about who their friends, families, and neighbors were, and because these Framingham studies were so large (and Framingham so relatively small, I suppose) there ended up being a huge amount of overlap such that these guys were able to make very detailed (although of course incomplete in many ways) maps of people's social networks. And then they're working on all sorts of incredibly elaborate statistical and mathematical methods for working with this network data to look at how things like obesity spread. They've found significant clustering, i.e. patterns within social networks that are not random, which suggests transmission and a type of social "induction" that is independent of other confounding factors. He had this incredible phrase about "peaks and valleys in sociotopological space," and part of the modelling they did was based on this degrees of separation thing that some physicist did for work on some gene. Anyhow, it was a fascinating way of looking at how there are all sorts of strong effects that people have on one another, sometimes in ways that are intuitive but sometimes in ways that are quite unexpected. We talk all the time about how obesity is (or might be) an epidemic, and this work of his in particular really speaks to the transmission and contagion aspect of what we think of as epidemics.
Someone asked a question at the end about possible implications for prevention in the case of the obesity work, for example, and I really appreciated his totally straight-forward response that he and his colleagues consider this purely social science research right now and as such there don't need to be implications all the time. This reminded me of the conversation I had with Ilona on the way back from the conference in Helsinki, which was really helpful to me. Basically, we were talking about clinical work versus research, and I was explaining how important it is to me to get to do clinical work because I don't think I would be happy just doing research for a variety of reasons. The way my mind works, I always look both towards the underlying causes and mechanisms, as well as the specific implications and uses, and with a lot of both social science and more biomedical research, often there is very little information about both ends of that spectrum. And obviously it's not because people are lazy or poor researchers, but rather it can be a feat just to demonstrate that correlations exist or that there seems to be some sort of causal effect. It's much harder to pin down actual or even possible mechanisms, and it's difficult to predict or suggest policy or practice implications. I have a tendency to get overwhelmed and frustrated with research. That was one of the things I found with my psychology work at Columbia, and I realized that it was too personally frustrating for me to be involved with work that is fascinating and brilliant but that often seems to have little to no ties to the actual world, or to policy, or real changes.
Anyway, Ilona was trained as a pediatrician but chose to go into research, which is really interesting to me. One of the things she said was that she really values her medical training because it really helped her become the kind of thinker who focuses on intervention and action. She also made some really nice points about the importance and benefits of public health type research even when it can't necessarily illuminate all the mechanisms or implications, i.e. no one would ever get anything done if you had to figure all that out before publishing papers and giving talks, and that it's important to do the best you can with incomplete information. She made an analogy to medical situations, the idea was that we try to treat cancer even though we don't totally understand exactly how those cancer cells are functioning. We do our best with what we have and what we do know.
Now it's 3:45 and it's dark out, which makes it hard to stay motivated even though the seminar was the first concrete thing I did today. At least I now have a nice person at Harvard who invited me to come visit if I get offered an interview there (I did get one at Brown, which is semi-exciting, and I haven't heard from anywhere else yet which has put me into a constant state of panic). Also, it snowed this morning, and it was pretty. And now I need to keep translating Swedish disease names, then go to the Sturebadet to do some running so that I don't fall off my marathon training schedule before I've even started.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Shine like a star! Riga 2
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The Freedom Monument. Built in 1935. Guarded by two soldiers, with flowers at the base. I read that there was a joke during the Soviet era that the monument was a travel agency because anyone who put flowers at the base would get a one-way ticket to Siberia.
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The French embassy, in such a pretty building. The American embassy was right down the street and it was hideous. Just so plain and grim and bunker-like.
Riga 1
Snowy Riga. Odd angle from the tiny windows in my hotel room.
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There seem to be many stories about the black cat house. The guy who owned it and who put the cats up there was rejected from some powerful guild, so initially he designed the cats to be turned around with their tails up and their backsides facing the guild building across the street as an insult, but the guild members sued and he was forced to turn them around into non-offensive positions. Also I think the sculptor fell to his death putting the cats up there.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Old Stockholm Town
More pictures from Stockholmskällan.
Sveaplan, where CHESS and the Wenner-Gren Center are now, in 1959.
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Östermalmstorg and the entrance to the Östermalms Saluhall, the beautiful food market, in 1888-1889.
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And, my favorite - Sturebadet, my gym, in 1902. It looks basically identical today, except there are cardio machines running along the balcony, and it looks like those windows up on the left open up to the light, which they don't anymore.
Sveaplan, where CHESS and the Wenner-Gren Center are now, in 1959.
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Östermalmstorg and the entrance to the Östermalms Saluhall, the beautiful food market, in 1888-1889.
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And, my favorite - Sturebadet, my gym, in 1902. It looks basically identical today, except there are cardio machines running along the balcony, and it looks like those windows up on the left open up to the light, which they don't anymore.
Riga
Flying into Riga this morning was beautiful. It was the first snow in both Stockholm and Riga, and last night it snowed all night starting around midnight, although by the time I left for the airport in Stockholm at 5:45 am it had all turned wet and slushy and rainy. But in Latvia it snowed all morning and part of the afternoon, true snow for hours before it turned to rain. The stretches of snowy pine trees by Arlanda, so dark green they are nearly gray, were very stark and pretty. And now, Latvia. From what little I have seen, the old city is absolutely gorgeous, with such elaborately detailed and ornamented buildings, so much art nouveau, and it was quite a contrast from the drive from the airport. The effect was definitely magnified by the white-grey sky and the snow, but it was very, very Baltic/post-Soviet feeling. Dilapidated buildings and crumbling walls mixed with factories and shiny new glass buildings, an SAS Radisson billboard that was so old it was completely illegibly faded next to a gleaming new Ermengildo Zegna billboard, and all of these incredibly beautiful pastel Scandinavian-style wooden buildings, with those familiar yellows and pinks and greens, but totally faded.
On the agenda for tomorrow: the Occupation of Latvia Museum, the Latvian National Museum of Art where there's an exhibition of young Latvian painters called Candy Bomber that sounds cool, St. Peter's Church & the Dome Cathedral, the bizarre "black cat house," all the art nouveau/jugendstil buildings, etc. Then I'm going to see an American movie at the multiplex in nearby Coca-Cola Plaza. On Monday morning I am doing something very cultural and going to a spa for a facial/sauna.
Museums I think I might skip: Latvian University Museum of Computing Science, and Latvian Fire-Fighting Museum.
Now I'm in my cozy room watching Musharraf declare martial law in Pakistan, and soon Jake will broadcast the latest Office episode to me via Comcast On-Demand and good old Skype, but if I was really brave I would be down in a casino playing poker with the children of Russian oil tycoons.
On the agenda for tomorrow: the Occupation of Latvia Museum, the Latvian National Museum of Art where there's an exhibition of young Latvian painters called Candy Bomber that sounds cool, St. Peter's Church & the Dome Cathedral, the bizarre "black cat house," all the art nouveau/jugendstil buildings, etc. Then I'm going to see an American movie at the multiplex in nearby Coca-Cola Plaza. On Monday morning I am doing something very cultural and going to a spa for a facial/sauna.
Museums I think I might skip: Latvian University Museum of Computing Science, and Latvian Fire-Fighting Museum.
Now I'm in my cozy room watching Musharraf declare martial law in Pakistan, and soon Jake will broadcast the latest Office episode to me via Comcast On-Demand and good old Skype, but if I was really brave I would be down in a casino playing poker with the children of Russian oil tycoons.
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