This is my Nishitetsu IC Bus Card ("Nimoca"):
This is from the student liability insurance policy:
This is from medical exam center:
When it comes to Japanese social systems, always assume efficiency AND cuteness. When I go back to the Philippines I will push for a cute, relatable mascot for the OSG.
They say you'll never really appreciate your own country until you see it from a foreign land. To that, I add that one never gets to appreciate his legal system until he try to explain it to a foreign lawyer.
Now that we're doing some comparative law, looking at "baseline" common law and civil law rules, I'm starting to see what a strange and improbable thing Philippine law is - a civil law tradition with an active Supreme Court engaged in common law style elaboration of substantive rules. Whenever I try to explain the whole thing, they look at me as if I'm trying to describe a linear accelerator and a ham sandwich getting together and producing a fully functional airplane.
Our original plan was to try out places in the fancy "Ramen Stadium" at the top of the mall. Along the way, we met an old Japanese guy who heard our Tagalog and who's been to the Philippines. "Do you like noodles? Go to Ichiran Ramen", he said. Since I have been preconditioned by Hollywood to treat old Japanese men as fonts of ancient wisdom, Ruby and I went to Ichiran. Man, that guy was really wise after all.
Social Network Analysis is very dependent on computation. Because while it's easy enough to visualize and analyze "toy" networks with your intuition, things start getting out of hand once we're dealing with real world actors and their interactions.
I used to collect Social Network Analysis programs - I even thought I could build one myself. Thankfully, the open source movement came into its own before I could commit that folly.
Professor Teramoto is using R for his class. I think that's the best long term solution. R offerings for social network analysis are diverse (there's sna and statnet to start), robust, and open. The barebones command-line interface may turn off a lot of beginners, though. So here's a couple of my favorites alternatives to R:
Studying law as a student. Again.
It should be familiar ground. Except it isn't. Points of departure from my LL.B experience:
Being treated like an adult - no insults, no passive-aggressive sarcasm during recitation ("seminar discussions"). One can be wrong about the fact of a case, the reasoning of the court and still be treated with baseline human decency. You're not protected from consequences to your grade though - that's what being an adult means.
A more reasonable reading load - 2-3 readings per session. Relevant snippets of select cases are already baked into the articles (or distributed in digest form in the teachers' notes), and the selection of cases is thoughtful enough to give you meaningful pattern recognition.
Research orientation - I have my own Westlaw, Lexis Nexis, accounts, and they're not tied to the university's IP address so I can use them anywhere. The program emphasises that the classes are just entry points and that you have to dig deeper on your own - lots of references to "additional readings" in the outlines. And then there's the overarching goal of producing a master's thesis - which is counted more than any subject (or any quarter) of the school year.
Landed in Fukuoka, Japan a week ago. I'm here for one year on a scholarship to take my LLM. The past week has been about setting up shop, getting through the orientations (they have orientations about everything here in Japan). First day of class tomorrow.
First class is intellectual property. Interesting enough. According to the class description, the professor is going to teach it from a social networks approach. Cracking open my old graph theory software and materials.