Today we prepared for our trip to Paris, and in the process organized our storage room. In a box with things from our stay in New Jersey I found some Mighty Leaf tea, so we're having a nice cup of chamomile.

There are always a lot of small things to prepare (don't forget to return that library book, pick up the dry cleaning, last minute shopping) and I really like it that we're not getting up at a crazy early time to get to the airport. Our flight is at 8.05 pm tomorrow, from Charlotte.

During the last few days I studied about ordering meals in restaurant, and reading menu's in French (la carte, not le menu). I'm all set to order some cuisses de grenouille.

Tonight is the start of our vacation! Sasha is presenting one of her papers at an economics conference in Paris next week, and we're making a nice holiday out of it. Sunday evening we'll leave from Charlotte, NC to Paris and we'll stay for about a week in the City of Light.

We're really looking forward to it. We've been in Paris once, in 2004, when Sasha was already in the States and I took a high-speed train from Amsterdam when she came back from Cameroon.

About seven months ago I started studying French, and this will be a fun opportunity to practice my new skills.

Amsterdam Stories USA is a road movie in the making by Dutch filmmakers Rob Rombout and Rogier van Eck. The documentary is a portrayal of small-town America that follows the Dutch migratory flow through 16 North American towns, all named Amsterdam.

The filmmakers are making four visits to the States, each in a different season. They are now on their winter trip to "Amsterdams" in Montana, Idaho and California. The 4.5 hour documentary is expected to be released in mid 2012.

Visits to Amsterdam, USA

We caught up with the filmmakers while they were in Nevada. So far, they have visited about half of the 16 Amsterdams they plan to visit. They are on their way to California: "We're meeting standup comedian Sven Amsterdam there, in an Amsterdam bar", says Rombout.

Rombout: "Before we arrive, we try to find a local radio station in the town where we'll work. It gets you introduced to the city, and people start hearing your name. In general, we stick with the local media: local papers, local radios. 'Amsterdam Stories USA' a sort of passport for us. We don't have to go through the whole introduction phase when people know that we are working on this project."

"Everywhere we go, people will at first ask: 'Why film here? There is nothing to film here!' But after a few days stories always come up. We usually focus on one or two characters in each town." Van Eck: "We'll stay four or five days in every place we visit; the rest of time we're on the road. During our travels between Amsterdams we also make portraits of people we meet."

"We're now in the second part of our trip. In our first trip we visited the North East, from Upstate New York to Virginia. Now we're doing the West Coast."

Not looking for clichés

"We're not looking for Dutch clichés like tulips and wooden shoes. The movie is a road movie, with stories of Amsterdam in the USA as a connecting element", explains Rombout. "The only real nostalgic Dutch part will be the beginning of the film, which we shot in the Holland Society of New York."

"It's a trip through the lesser-known America; off the beaten track. We're looking for the interesting, the unusual. The unpredictable is interesting!"

"In this way, our film has a different perspective than a book like 'Holland, USA', which was explicitly looking for Dutch roots in the United States. Film is more emotional than a book, and we tend to focus more on individuals rather than groups. It's a radiography of the small-town America, a road trip through the unknown America."

Stories

Rombout: "The most 'Dutch' Amsterdam we have been so far was in Montana. Many of the founders there were immigrants from Friesland and Groningen. It was a closed, isolated community. The original settlers were deeply religious people.

"I've made several movies about sailing, I like to think of live these little places like on a ship: isolated and far away from everybody. The smaller a place is, the better material for a film it becomes."

Along their journey they stopped in Great Falls, Montana where they met a 19-year-old girl who was working as a barista and talked about her difficult economic situation since the crisis. They filmed her outside in the falling snow as she described her dream of going to Africa to help the people there.

"Our favorite Amsterdam? That would be Amsterdam, Ohio. Number two Montana, or perhaps the one in Idaho. We were there in the middle of the winter — very desolate."

"About 15 people live in Amsterdam, Indiana. When we interviewed the mayor, he got visibly angry about 'those people!' It turned out that he was the only one in the village who participated in the 2010 Census. The official registration of the town was thus 1 person, so now there was no funding."

"This is typical, I think. People in small villages, with a conservative-anarchistic mindset: 'we'll take care of ourselves'. Our movie starts at the East Coast, which is of course more densely populated, and where you'll find the 'human aspect' of things. It ends in the wide open landscapes of the American west."

Movie production

Rombout and Van Eck both live in Brussels, Belgium, and speak French together as Van Eck is born in Paris (from Dutch parents) and speaks better French. They've produced movies in Belgium for almost 30 years. "The Belgian TV and a French film fund are financing us. We didn't get any response from the Netherlands. Perhaps they feel it's a little embarrassing?" They travel through the States with Collin Bannon and Trevor Cohen.

The film will be broadcast on several TV stations back home and on film festivals. Says Rombout: "We're hoping that perhaps we can get the film on PBS in the United States. In addition, we hope to create five or six screenings in or around some of the community's where we've been. We hope that our movie will create some sort of connection between these places."

"The film will be ready in middle of 2012; we're now working on a trial version. We initially signed for a movie of 140 minutes, but we think we'll actually create a film of four to five hours."

The film is part of a trilogy. Rogier and Rob produced "Amsterdam via Amsterdam", to critical acclaim. After 2012, they plan "Amsterdam, Black and White", about New Amsterdam in Drenthe, the Netherlands and Amsterdam in Transvaal (South Africa).

http://www.amsterdamstoriesusa.com
http://www.robrombout.com

Last week I finished a very interesting book, Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce. For those of you interested in such matters, I can recommend this short paper by researchers at Google: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" (PDF). It makes the case that simple algorithms and models that scale well will outperform sophisticated algorithms and models that scale less well, given enough data.

This is particularly important in the field of human language processing, where two developments are intersecting. First, there is the availability of vast corpora of text harvested from the internet. Second, algorithms such as MapReduce can now provide near-perfect up-scaling of computational power. That means if you double the amount of computers available to an algorithm, the algorithm can now run at (almost) exactly at twice the speed. That provides the scalability needed to deal with these huge data-sets.

This is in contrast to older approaches in the field, where researches tried to model hand-coded grammars and ontologies, represented as complex networks of relations. As the article points out, this dichotomy is an oversimplification, and in practice researches combine "deep" approaches with statistical approaches.

From the article:

"So, follow the data. Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data. Represent all the data with a nonparametric model rather than trying to summarize it with a parametric model, because with very large data sources, the data holds a lot of detail. For natural language applications, trust that human language has already evolved words for the important concepts. See how far you can go by tying together the words that are already there, rather than by inventing new concepts with clusters of words. Now go out and gather some data, and see what it can do."

Cool stuff, and fun to read about.

Economic ties with the Netherlands support more than 700,000 American jobs, according to a new report by the Royal Dutch Embassy. Trade and investment between the USA and the Netherlands pay dividends in imports, exports and job creation in both countries.

The Dutch are the third largest investor ($238 billion) in the United States, after the United Kingdom and Japan. In turn, the USA is the largest foreign investor in the Netherlands, with investments of $472 billion. Using data derived from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau, the report calculates that exports to the Netherlands and investment by Dutch companies such as AkzoNobel, Heineken, ING, Philips, Randstad, Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever supported more than 704,000 jobs in the United States from 2008-2009.

A state-by-state-breakdown of Dutch investments and trade

The report provides a state-by-state breakdown of Dutch foreign direct investments and trade with the Netherlands. The three states benefiting the most from this economic relationship are Texas, California and Massachusetts. The report includes a clickable map of the United States with state specific information on Dutch investment and trade.

Dutch Ambassador Renée Jones-Bos: "The report makes clear that many American jobs are the result of trade and foreign investment. While not underestimating the importance of emerging markets, this report shows how important existing economic ties are and continue to be for growth and recovery. Our strong economic bond has been forged by four centuries of shared ideals, business values and a commitment to entrepreneurism."

A Heineken representative in the USA added, "The United States has been an important export market for Heineken since the repeal of Prohibition", stated Dan Tearno, Senior Vice President and Chief Corporate Relations Officer for Heineken USA. "The company’s United States presence is a significant part of its history, its heritage and its success".

AkzoNobel also noted its commitment to the U.S. "A strong, vibrant relationship between the Netherlands and United States has - and will continue to be - vital to the long term success of our company," said Erik Bouts - managing director of AkzoNobel's U.S. Paints Business. "As the world's largest paints and coatings company, our U.S. interests are significant in terms of revenue generation, employee base and AkzoNobel shareholders. And recent announcements like becoming the primary paint supplier to Walmart's 3,500 U.S. stores with the Glidden brand provide not only near-term job creation, but more broadly, evidence that AkzoNobel has a bright future in the U.S."

Texas, California and Massachusetts benefiting the most from Dutch-American economic ties

Economic Ties between the USA and the Netherlands reveals interesting data on the role of the Netherlands as a contributor to the economic engine of every state. For example, while New York City ranks fifth for jobs supported by Dutch industry and exports to the Netherlands, it’s in first place of the American cities that trade with the Netherlands.

In Texas, Dutch foreign direct investment and Texas' exports to the Netherlands supported 100,062 jobs from 2008-2009. The more than 60,000 jobs supported in California are part of the Dutch foreign direct investments in the state that account for $5.8 billion or 5.3% of total FDI to California. The Netherlands are the fifth largest investor in California. Dutch ties support 51,410 jobs in Massachusetts, which is equal to 8% of the population of Boston. Massachusetts received $3 billion in Dutch foreign direct investments, which comprised 11.6% of total FDI to the state.

Economic Ties between the USA and the Netherlands: Allies in Open Markets for Mutual Prosperity
A report by the Royal Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C.
http://www.economicties.org

Today is Sasha's birthday.

Happy birthday!

Tomorrow it will be 75 degrees, according to the weather forecast (24 in Celsius). Pretty amazing for February.

My little nephew Jasper is doing well; Ettie told me he has gotten his second tooth.