I just finished reading two books by Geraldine Brooks and highly recommend them. Both books are fiction inspired by true historical events. In both cases, Brooks manages to vividly recreate the periods in which the plot is taking place and bring them back to life. The research that goes into her books is really impressive.
The first book is Year of Wonders. It is based on the story of the little village of Eyam in Derbyshire, England in 1666. That was the year plague swept through the village devastating it. The story tells of how the plague entered the village and its effects on its inhabitants through the story of Anna Frith, a housemade at the village's rectory.
The second book, People of the Book, was published just this year. It is based on the story of the Haggadah of Sarajevo. The Haggadah is the story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and is read on the eve of Passover (with a lot of food and a minimum of 4 glasses of wine weaved in). The history of this Haggadah goes back to 15th century Spain and has an amazing story of survival through Venice, Vienna and Sarajevo (at least). One of the most interesting aspects of its story is that the acts (often of heroism) to save the Haggadah were typically carried out by non-Jews -- Muslims or Christians, who appreciated the value of the book. The book portrays vividly several periods in history some of which had Christians, Muslims and Jews were living in peace together (Spain, before the inquisition). It's really a great read (regardless of one's religion). And yes, there was even a Halevy involved in this book's history!
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
A "Web Moment"
I'm sure each and every one of you has had at least one "web moment", where the power of the web simply jumped out at you. It may have been after a web-search yielded an amazing result, or realizing that you're driving to a dinner meeting at http://... using directions you got from online maps, and checking traffic conditions on the web from your car. (I do realize, however, that there is an entire generation out there who has no idea what the heck I'm talking about, and equates the pre-web world roughly with the 19th century).
I (or rather, my dad) had such a moment yesterday, when he found a document on the web, signed by his father in 1956, that he had no idea existed.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, collected a database of people who were killed in the holocaust. They asked anyone who knew holocaust victims to report their details and contribute them to this database. I found the web site for searching that database (thanks to Yair Kurzion), and told my dad about it.
His task was not easy. Searching for a Levy in database of Jews is like searching for Smith in a phone book of a big American city, and even restricting the search with the first name and the city of origin did not help a lot. But magically, he pulled up the first result and found a document signed by my grandfather (who passed away 40 years ago). My grandfather had reported the death of his brother and sister, who were both deported from Thessaloniki, Greece to the gas chambers in Poland in 1942, along with the vast majority of the vibrant Jewish community of that city. Fortunately, my grandfather, who was a Zionist at heart, left Thessaloniki in 1933 for Tel-Aviv to later be part of the creation of the State of Israel.
I (or rather, my dad) had such a moment yesterday, when he found a document on the web, signed by his father in 1956, that he had no idea existed.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, collected a database of people who were killed in the holocaust. They asked anyone who knew holocaust victims to report their details and contribute them to this database. I found the web site for searching that database (thanks to Yair Kurzion), and told my dad about it.
His task was not easy. Searching for a Levy in database of Jews is like searching for Smith in a phone book of a big American city, and even restricting the search with the first name and the city of origin did not help a lot. But magically, he pulled up the first result and found a document signed by my grandfather (who passed away 40 years ago). My grandfather had reported the death of his brother and sister, who were both deported from Thessaloniki, Greece to the gas chambers in Poland in 1942, along with the vast majority of the vibrant Jewish community of that city. Fortunately, my grandfather, who was a Zionist at heart, left Thessaloniki in 1933 for Tel-Aviv to later be part of the creation of the State of Israel.
Friday, December 28, 2007
My Dad is 80!
My dad turned 80 this month, and we celebrated the event with a workshop and reception in his honor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel. The full set of pictures from the event can be seen here.
My dad is a professor of Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute. After fighting in the Israeli War of Independence, he was finally able to focus on his studies. He completed his Ph.D in a little less than 2 years(!!) in 1955 at Syracuse University in New York (fortunately, because that's where he met my mom). When he's asked how he did that, he simply shows the picture below.
He still doesn't understand why it took me an entire 5 years to do my Ph.D, and worse, in a field that uses the term 'science' in a questionable fashion. (When I got promoted to full professor he finally figured I might be doing something right).
My dad's main claim to fame is a 1-page article he wrote during his post-doc. The following makes the point better than I can - it's a quote from Krzysztof Matyjaszewski (a CMU professor) and Axel Muller (professor at the U. of Beyreuth, Germany) in their foreword to the December 2006 special issue of the Journal of Progress in Polymer Science on "50 Years of Living Polymerization":
On June 5, 1956, Michael Szwarc, together with Moshe Levy and Ralph Milkovich pubished an article entitled "Polymerization initiated by electron transfer to monomer - A new method for formation of block copolymers", J Am Chem Soc (1956), 2656.
In this article the term "living polymer" appeared for the first time. It caused a revolution in polymer science.
Michael Szwarc (who was also my dad's Ph.D adviser) received the Kyoto Prize for this work in 1991.
He has worked in many areas over the years, but since the mid-80's my dad has been one of the pioneers in solar energy research, studying methods for chemical storage of solar energy so it can be used any time and transported to less sunny locations. In fact, he published two papers on using solar energy for chemical transformations this year! As a befitting token or recognition, he received an awesome Google solar t-shirt...
And he definitely needs the t-shirt. He still gets up every morning at 6am to either play tennis, or go for a run & workout, which includes running up 15 flights of stairs in the solar tower at the institute!It was a great event, and a wonderful chance to see many of my dad's colleagues throughout his career, some of whom I had not seen since I was a kid. It was also the first full gathering of all the family's grandchildren.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Dataspaces for Veterans
In the U.S. we are marking Veteran's Day tomorrow. There are many ways in which we should be thanking our veterans and making their lives better. I'd like to report a rather unique way.
I recently had the opportunity to visit the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Washington DC and learn first-hand about their patient-record system. I was pleased to see the principles of dataspaces in action, clearly enabling better healthcare services.
The VA provides services to veterans of the American military and has around 150 hospitals, 800 clinics and 200 nursing centers scattered around the country. To support these services, the VA maintains electronic records for all their patients, a system that has won them many accolades in recent years. The system stores the patients' prescriptions, doctor visits, lab tests and other data about each patient. As their patients often move around and receive treatment in various locations, when a doctor views the data about a patient, it needs to be integrated from multiple VA locations. Each of these locations is running their own system. In addition, data about their patients may reside in systems of the Department of Defense (and their healthcare providers) and various drugstore chains.
Clearly, this is an incredible data integration problem. Today they are aware of at least 130 different "implementations" of their electronic record system, i.e., different schemas. Also, given the different local needs of hospitals and clinics, imposing a single schema on all the VA centers would not work. Using a data integration solution at this scale and in such a dynamic environment would be extremely difficult.
Instead, what the VA did is standardize on a very small subset of patients' attributes, namely attributes describing patients' vital signs. Outside of this set of attributes, hospitals are free to develop their own local data organizations. However, the system lets the healthcare providers see all the data even if it's not completely integrated. So for example, if a doctor wants to see what happened to a patient while they were at a remote location, then the remote data may appear as plain text, and therefore the doctor would have to work a little harder to digest it, and won't be able to pose the queries she could pose on the local data. But being able to see the data in some form is infinitely better than not seeing it at all, and the doctors are extremely happy with the system's capabilities.
The VA also demonstrated two examples of the pay-as-you-go principle that is at the foundation of dataspaces. The first was the fact that they decided that vital signs are critical, so their data sources are aligned on the attributes relating to those (effectively, creating semantic mappings involving the attributes of vital signs), and they plan to continue agreeing on terminology as they see fit. Second, they had a culture that allowed for local innovation, class-3 applications, that represented needs at the local level. When these needs were perceived to be important throughout the organization, they promoted them to class-1 applications, and required all their systems to support them.
Just to make it clear, when I walked in the door they did not greet me and say: "Pleased to see you Dr. Halevy; we'd love to show you our dataspace system". What I'm describing is a post-rationalization of a system that was developed over more than a decade. I believe that their loose integration was the key to their success.
I recently had the opportunity to visit the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Washington DC and learn first-hand about their patient-record system. I was pleased to see the principles of dataspaces in action, clearly enabling better healthcare services.
The VA provides services to veterans of the American military and has around 150 hospitals, 800 clinics and 200 nursing centers scattered around the country. To support these services, the VA maintains electronic records for all their patients, a system that has won them many accolades in recent years. The system stores the patients' prescriptions, doctor visits, lab tests and other data about each patient. As their patients often move around and receive treatment in various locations, when a doctor views the data about a patient, it needs to be integrated from multiple VA locations. Each of these locations is running their own system. In addition, data about their patients may reside in systems of the Department of Defense (and their healthcare providers) and various drugstore chains.
Clearly, this is an incredible data integration problem. Today they are aware of at least 130 different "implementations" of their electronic record system, i.e., different schemas. Also, given the different local needs of hospitals and clinics, imposing a single schema on all the VA centers would not work. Using a data integration solution at this scale and in such a dynamic environment would be extremely difficult.
Instead, what the VA did is standardize on a very small subset of patients' attributes, namely attributes describing patients' vital signs. Outside of this set of attributes, hospitals are free to develop their own local data organizations. However, the system lets the healthcare providers see all the data even if it's not completely integrated. So for example, if a doctor wants to see what happened to a patient while they were at a remote location, then the remote data may appear as plain text, and therefore the doctor would have to work a little harder to digest it, and won't be able to pose the queries she could pose on the local data. But being able to see the data in some form is infinitely better than not seeing it at all, and the doctors are extremely happy with the system's capabilities.
The VA also demonstrated two examples of the pay-as-you-go principle that is at the foundation of dataspaces. The first was the fact that they decided that vital signs are critical, so their data sources are aligned on the attributes relating to those (effectively, creating semantic mappings involving the attributes of vital signs), and they plan to continue agreeing on terminology as they see fit. Second, they had a culture that allowed for local innovation, class-3 applications, that represented needs at the local level. When these needs were perceived to be important throughout the organization, they promoted them to class-1 applications, and required all their systems to support them.
Just to make it clear, when I walked in the door they did not greet me and say: "Pleased to see you Dr. Halevy; we'd love to show you our dataspace system". What I'm describing is a post-rationalization of a system that was developed over more than a decade. I believe that their loose integration was the key to their success.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
A Murder Mystery with a Twist
I just finished reading dot.dead, a Silicon Valley murder mystery by Keith Raffel. Yes, a murder happening in Palo Alto at the home of Ian Michaels, a high-tech executive; searching for clues on Stanford campus and running the dish to think deep thoughts and unravel the mystery.
Will Ian Michaels be indicted and spend the rest of his life in jail? Or perhaps he will be promoted to that COO job he's been eying for a while, or even leave his company and start his own? And in the process, how many eligible (or non-eligible) women will try to seduce him?
Read the book and find out. Not bad for an author who used to be a high-tech guy himself.
Will Ian Michaels be indicted and spend the rest of his life in jail? Or perhaps he will be promoted to that COO job he's been eying for a while, or even leave his company and start his own? And in the process, how many eligible (or non-eligible) women will try to seduce him?
Read the book and find out. Not bad for an author who used to be a high-tech guy himself.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
A Trip to the Amazon
You can’t go to Brazil without going to the Amazon. So after giving an invited talk at SBBD 2007 in Joao Pessoa, I headed to Manaus, the capital of the Amazon region (see all photos here). It took 3 flights and some time-zone slalom (while I was flying west all the time, I had to turn my clock forward at one point, and backward at another). I landed in Manaus at 9pm, in the dark. I gentleman named Eduardo was waiting at the airport with my name on sign held up high. We got into a van that started driving towards the docks. It seemed that we were going through some pretty heavy forest in country roads into the darkness of the night (though I was reading a murder mystery during the flight, I tried to keep a positive attitude here).
We arrived at the docks and I was handed off to an unnamed man with a motorboat. I was told that it would take 20 minutes to get to the EcoPark. As I was sitting there, sailing in pitch dark (with only the moon in a very southern-hemisphere position to provide a bit of light), the sensation of adventure started sinking in. The boater turned on his flashlight every now and then to see where we are, and surprisingly, 20 minutes later, we arrived at a lodge, and I met Antonio, who would be my guide for the stay. After a welcoming drink and a short hike in the forest to my cabin, I plugged in my cell phone and went to sleep.
In the morning, after a yummy Brazilian breakfast, I went on a forest tour with Antonio and John, and American fellow who is 10 years into his retirement (he’s 48 now) and whose travel plans for the next couple of months made even my head spin. In the forest, we got to see an original cinnamon tree, a tree from which they produce “aborto”, which, as the name implies, is used to abort pregnancies (and is also a useful post-hangover medication as well). I got to be tarzan for a photo and see Antonio make gunpowder from scratch. Really. As we were finishing our forest walk it started raining (ah, get it? RAINforest, in this case pourForest would be more appropriate), and we were thankful it didn’t start earlier.
After lunch, I was introduced to cashew trees (yes, apparently they grow on trees, not at Costco). The barman took the cashew fruit and made a nice drink out of it. Later we went to an area with a bunch of monkeys playing about, including one with a red head and one that was called cappuccino monkey (if you’d see it, you would understand why). We were taken to see a few folks from the local Indian tribes (and ended up in funny costumes, doing their dance), and then spent an hour fishing on the river. I even managed to catch a catfish that I threw back into the water once the photo-op was over. Sitting on the fishing boat was incredibly tranquil, with sounds of the toucans flying about (and the news of the latest Google earnings report coming in on my cell).
I had dinner with a retired Swedish couple in their late 50’s. The husband ran an international company providing interior design services for cruise ships. He admitted that when a good friend of his came to him many years ago with sketches describing his idea for an ice hotel, he told his friend that he was crazy. Fortunately, the friend ignored his advice and did it anyway. (Oriana and I got engaged in that ice hotel in 2000).
The night activity involved a canoe trip on the river, looking for caimans and listening to the night sounds. We saw only the eyes of the caimans from afar, caught a couple of turtles, and heard many frogs. When we returned to the lodge, Antonio thought he heard lightening, but immediately corrected himself – they were only fireworks. Why fireworks, I asked? Because there was a soccer game in Rio between two teams from Rio, and the people in Manaus were very happy with the result. And it wasn’t even a terribly important game. But that’s Brazil for you! Celebrating a soccer victory of a team from a city thousands of miles away in a relatively unimportant game, is still good enough reason for fireworks.
The next morning, before going to the airport, we managed to squeeze in a speedboat trip to the meeting of the waters – the place where the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes come together to create the Amazon River (that then flows to the Atlantic ocean). It was really fascinating to see the two distinct waters (they’re different in color, temperature and PH).
Five hours later I was in Miami, and six hour after that in the bay area. What a transformation!
We arrived at the docks and I was handed off to an unnamed man with a motorboat. I was told that it would take 20 minutes to get to the EcoPark. As I was sitting there, sailing in pitch dark (with only the moon in a very southern-hemisphere position to provide a bit of light), the sensation of adventure started sinking in. The boater turned on his flashlight every now and then to see where we are, and surprisingly, 20 minutes later, we arrived at a lodge, and I met Antonio, who would be my guide for the stay. After a welcoming drink and a short hike in the forest to my cabin, I plugged in my cell phone and went to sleep.
In the morning, after a yummy Brazilian breakfast, I went on a forest tour with Antonio and John, and American fellow who is 10 years into his retirement (he’s 48 now) and whose travel plans for the next couple of months made even my head spin. In the forest, we got to see an original cinnamon tree, a tree from which they produce “aborto”, which, as the name implies, is used to abort pregnancies (and is also a useful post-hangover medication as well). I got to be tarzan for a photo and see Antonio make gunpowder from scratch. Really. As we were finishing our forest walk it started raining (ah, get it? RAINforest, in this case pourForest would be more appropriate), and we were thankful it didn’t start earlier.
After lunch, I was introduced to cashew trees (yes, apparently they grow on trees, not at Costco). The barman took the cashew fruit and made a nice drink out of it. Later we went to an area with a bunch of monkeys playing about, including one with a red head and one that was called cappuccino monkey (if you’d see it, you would understand why). We were taken to see a few folks from the local Indian tribes (and ended up in funny costumes, doing their dance), and then spent an hour fishing on the river. I even managed to catch a catfish that I threw back into the water once the photo-op was over. Sitting on the fishing boat was incredibly tranquil, with sounds of the toucans flying about (and the news of the latest Google earnings report coming in on my cell).
I had dinner with a retired Swedish couple in their late 50’s. The husband ran an international company providing interior design services for cruise ships. He admitted that when a good friend of his came to him many years ago with sketches describing his idea for an ice hotel, he told his friend that he was crazy. Fortunately, the friend ignored his advice and did it anyway. (Oriana and I got engaged in that ice hotel in 2000).
The night activity involved a canoe trip on the river, looking for caimans and listening to the night sounds. We saw only the eyes of the caimans from afar, caught a couple of turtles, and heard many frogs. When we returned to the lodge, Antonio thought he heard lightening, but immediately corrected himself – they were only fireworks. Why fireworks, I asked? Because there was a soccer game in Rio between two teams from Rio, and the people in Manaus were very happy with the result. And it wasn’t even a terribly important game. But that’s Brazil for you! Celebrating a soccer victory of a team from a city thousands of miles away in a relatively unimportant game, is still good enough reason for fireworks.
The next morning, before going to the airport, we managed to squeeze in a speedboat trip to the meeting of the waters – the place where the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes come together to create the Amazon River (that then flows to the Atlantic ocean). It was really fascinating to see the two distinct waters (they’re different in color, temperature and PH).
Five hours later I was in Miami, and six hour after that in the bay area. What a transformation!
SBBD 2007
I just returned from a wonderful trip to Brazil, where I and another funny looking person, gave keynotes at the Brazilian Database Conference, SBBD 2007. The conference is held jointly with the Brazilian Software Engineering Conference, and had over 600 attendees. You can see all my photos here.
The conference was held in Joao Pessoa (read: John person; apparently he was a poet), which is in the eastern-most point in South (or North) America, the closest place to start a swim to Africa. The venue was a tropical beach resort. I'm not sure when the residents of Joao Pessoa sleep. They seemed to be dancing all night, and at 5am the road along the beach was closed till 8am so people can exercise peacefully. I guess they need all the dance and exercise to burn off the calories from their great food.
Many thanks to Altigran Silva for inviting me and being a wonderful host, to Juliana Freire for all her incredible help and company, and to all my Brazilian friends for their great welcome (yes, my Orkut network has grown exponentially as a result of the trip!)
The conference was held in Joao Pessoa (read: John person; apparently he was a poet), which is in the eastern-most point in South (or North) America, the closest place to start a swim to Africa. The venue was a tropical beach resort. I'm not sure when the residents of Joao Pessoa sleep. They seemed to be dancing all night, and at 5am the road along the beach was closed till 8am so people can exercise peacefully. I guess they need all the dance and exercise to burn off the calories from their great food.
Many thanks to Altigran Silva for inviting me and being a wonderful host, to Juliana Freire for all her incredible help and company, and to all my Brazilian friends for their great welcome (yes, my Orkut network has grown exponentially as a result of the trip!)
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