00:11
all right hello hello i have arrived to my postdoc place oops
it's just said it's all
so you left providence yeah i left providence i am now in evanston illinois uh with northwestern
university and uh
since then i like i got in tuesday early morning and then
for like two hours and then uh because my pi is leaving the country again the next day
so we only had like one day of physical overlap
yeah and then uh basically yeah all of the all of the you know say hello i'm asami you know i'm
your new postdoc i don't know anything about machine learning please tell me everything
circuit to like all of the labs because basically this lab that the northwestern lab is um
the machine learning people and then in different in when i moved to hong kong it would be different
people that i'm working with it's just the machine learning components come later in the
project so after you get the data yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but like so the northwestern
pi is the machine learning guy so the people i'm getting to know now are basically all the
uh like computer scientists and engineers yeah so how many how many members did you meet
have you met already like well so because this lab is entirely remotable there's only maybe like
three or four people who are physically here yeah and a lot of other people are just working
from home or doing summer internships um so i am not sure how many in total i think
in the group meeting we did there were maybe 10 or so people but i've only met physically maybe
three or four people um yeah speaking of new people how's your how's your making friend
journey coming along it's you gotta follow up you gotta follow up on that
um i request to find new friends right i did um uh consult you on how to make new friends
03:01
when you get older and um i i haven't made any new friends yet i i haven't um
that's that's all right you know it's only been like what a couple of months
no it's not long enough time to make new friends yeah okay um i'm not sure about that because
in the united states it was so easy to make new friends you know you just walk
um in what sense i don't know it's just uh you you bump into someone and we chat about whether
and we become friends and we hang out i don't know it was that or you know you find someone who's
who happened to live in the new in the same apartments and then we become we became friends
so since then and we still in in touch with um oh wow with her so yeah yeah that's never happened
to me yeah so we we um we would go home together chatting about our work like research
so that that was you know we didn't intend to become friends but we happen to
yeah but those are the best kinds you know yeah so but in japan it's so i don't know we're so
isolated with each other do you do not say hi when you when you you know bump into each other
the corridor or it's um sometimes we do say hi but in most cases we don't say
not to strangers you know if you don't know that person we don't
but like if you share the floor you know no it doesn't happen in japan it's so
the environment is so difficult how we how we communicate is so different from
oh so it's it's like they're stranger in a sense that you never had a real conversation
yeah they're not strangers right because you've seen them around yeah yeah yeah but we don't say
much well maybe maybe you should start doing that maybe like if you if you start like you know
play your like i'm back from america card and be like hello after after two years after two years
in this place yeah yeah too too late too late to change the cat up yeah
yeah and um recently i i'm so there's a collaborator who's australian
so he he yeah he would uh come to this research institute
is research institute about once or twice a week and he's also said it's so you know
people are so distant here in japan but he's not he's not commuting from australia right
no no no he's uh he's on sabbatical um okay yeah so he yeah we we have the same impression of um
06:08
yeah well maybe maybe like if you two start being friendly to each other then like
it can it can decimate throughout the entire department
yeah right slowly
it's just between us
it's just between us it's uh it's in we we do have a cafe downstairs so we would
do some brainstorming and we chat about many other stuff but right it's just it's just us
yeah yeah i don't know i mean i don't know why not that not that not that we were super friendly
in like my you know phd institution like i don't i but i knew i knew the people who were
in the in the same floor at least i think i didn't always know their name but they definitely
recognized me and i recognized them and i would you know say hi smile and that's about it sometimes
it's helpful to even because you know you're like oh i need this like copper
copper o-ring does anyone have this
do you have this can i borrow yeah that's nice yeah yeah because one of the um i think
the thing that we could change here i noticed is that we we used to have um like a common
space like a common area where people bump into each other um it's like a coffee room yeah yeah
it's a coffee room so in you know at the school we we were um uh we met it's uh there was a
yeah coffee place um here and there and then um but uh where i work um there's a coffee place
in each lab so there's no common place except for bathroom
it's hard to make the organic connections
so what i would suggest is to is to you know
if people are forced to go to your spot
09:03
right then there's no way you know ignoring each other because right like you cannot just like
oh i'm waiting for my coffee yeah that'd be awkward so people start to chat
yeah that's my yeah that's my idea of you know changing the atmosphere in this place i mean
that's that's not a bad idea although i hate to break it to you um yeah so in my department we
also try the same thing so in our case we already have a common place yeah yeah uh and we decided
that if we get enough responses from this like then you know the department would chip in the
coffee machine yeah and uh and that did elicit a lot of responses so we did get to the you know
but um and then the coffee machine arrived and i don't know if anyone's using it because
i like i don't think it became a thing that it initially wanted to be which is
yeah like a common room with like people hang out and make organic friendships or
like just natural interactions that that hasn't i don't think that that quite worked and i don't
know if it's because just like a quality of you know coffee you know those keurig machine
yeah it's like right nestle but worse yeah it was it was disgusting yeah i i was like dude
this is not gonna cut but um i don't know i don't have a say in the department budget so
um yeah maybe so like if you're gonna do it and make sure you get a good coffee machine
don't don't be like us quality matters right yeah quality is important like if it's genuinely
better than the coffee you're gonna get in your own lab then people have incentive right i see
we need to get an expensive yes great like premier yeah your quality uh like everything
expensive i don't know like single origin organic coffee intelligence yeah coffee and uh oh don't
forget tea some people don't like coffee right definitely we need options very expensive high
quality yeah we want like for sure we want like i don't know like what's the what's an expensive t
t brand like twg like this sounds weird yeah like like yeah you need some expensive t options i
think that's i think i think that like you know if people knew that in this common place there's
gonna be a coffee machine or tea option that's better than what they can buy at conbini then
it's yeah and if it's if if it's on the department the budget on the department
12:01
free coffee no one's gonna definitely yeah okay that's a good great idea of um you know making
yeah i look forward to hearing you i should the new coffee i should discuss with uh you know some
some people some influential people yeah powerful people about this new idea
yeah it's radically going to change the productivity right of the institution
yep so important yeah very important all right i think we talked enough about it
that's it for the show today thanks for listening and find us
at a goday science on twitter that is e i g o d e s c i e n c e see you next time
