Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Back in Jakarta

    JMP here, I’m back in downtown Jakarta with TP.  Please excuse me as I get used to blogging again, I’m quite out of practice!  My music festival ended yesterday with many tears from the kids who were sad to leave their new friends and their "music holiday" as many of them called it.

    What an interesting and rewarding experience it was.  There were about 60 kids from 7-22 years old, although most were in the 11-15 age range.  They were almost all pianists, with some who also played violin and flute and I was quite impressed at the level of playing.  It was really amazing to see these little kids get up there and play some pretty hard stuff by memory at the evening concerts.  I spent my time teaching my three students, helping them learn a few duets for the final concert, and coaching a little chamber music (cello and piano is an interesting thing to coach as a flutist- it made me glad I play a wind instrument for various reasons).  In the mornings I led general music appreciation classes for the kids which basically consisted of using recorders to play together and review some musical concepts.  That was fun except that I don’t know how to play the recorder and had to learn very quickly.  Also, I was expecting to teach the kids how to play the recorder, but they had been playing in school for a long time and were much better than I am.  This proved challenging for the first day or so, but I got it all sorted out and we mainly just had fun together.  I have to tell you though, ten kids playing screechy high notes on the recorder creates a rather hair-raising sound.  After a while I forbid them from playing the highest notes- I think they were as relieved as I was.

    Pretty much every evening the kids played in concerts in our building.  The choir rehearsal room was large enough to set up enough chairs and had a mini stage so it worked well for informal concerts.  Well, they were supposed to be informal but some of the girls were like fashion plates- they kept coming up wearing yet another different party dress or fancy gown night after night.  This was all a buildup for a big concert last Wednesday when they all got to play solos and chamber music at a hall in Jakarta at the Goethe Institute.  It was a lovely hall with a good piano in it (finally- they have a really hard time with pianos here mostly because of the climate, and also perhaps because they transport them in open air mini pickup trucks but more on that later).  Then on Friday we had another big concert in another hall in Jakarta.  This was basically a greatest hits of  Wednesday’s concert plus the choir and orchestra components of the festival.  The kids all did very well and are now seasoned performers, and I think all this practice performing was one of the greatest things about the program.

    Teaching at a summer camp was funny for me for a few reasons.  First off, it wasn’t that long ago that I was a student myself at camps like this.  Also, I was significantly younger than all the other teachers that came.  So put both those things together with the fact that I stayed in a room at the end of the a hall filled with kids and I was a little confused.  Basically I felt a bit like I was at camp but got to hang out with the cool adults all the time (and they were really cool people from the US and UK).  So all in all, a pretty neat thing to do.  I am so glad that I was able to come back here and contribute something meaningful to this program and I hope the kids had as much fun as I did!  I’ve got plenty more stories and thoughts, but I’ll save them for later posts and give TP a break from posting for a while.

  • Prognostication

    When making small talk with regular folks here (soup vendors, satay sellers, taxi drivers, etc.), the question of what I do often comes up.  When I say that I study Indonesian politics, almost without fail the next question is "can you tell me who’s going to win the election in 2009?"  The answer to this question is that I can sort of explain how different candidates are polling right now, but that’s not the same as actually knowing who’s going to win in 2009.  And everyone knows this information.  I’m not shedding any new light on that topic by recounting the same information that everyone sees in the newspaper already.

    But there is a larger point, though, which has been made by Andrew Gelman quite elegantly in the US case.  It’s not clear that using poll numbers right now to say something about elections in the future makes any sense at all.  The question normally posed is something like "if the election were held today…"  But the election is not being held today.  It’s not clear what the response to that question signifies.  Sometimes they ask "in the upcoming elections…," but what this really means is something like "if you could cast your vote right now for the election in 4 months so that nothing else that happens between now and then will affect your vote."  It is probably correlated with what people think about their choices right now, but that may or may not be correlated with what is going to happen 4 months from now (or 9 months from now in Indonesia).  Note, of course, that this does not mean that the polls are meaningless, or that poll results are just noise.  Gelman links to a very important paper of his that argues that changes in polls as elections approach reflect how voters are learning about where the candidates stand; in another paper they find more evidence of this.  So as people learn that Obama is a liberal communist Muslim radical Christian, their answers will change accordingly, and we will basically be able to predict election results based on simple fundamentals that always work like age, race, income, and the national economy.

    Incidentally, I am a big fan of Andrew Gelman’s blog.  Its appeal is probably mostly to academic types, but I like how crabby he is about people who make inscrutable graphs in their presentations of data.