Write-ups

Gluten-free / lactose-free / vegan in Albania (September 2023)

This is based on personal experience during a short trip to Albania, basically the capital Tirana, and cities in the riviera: Vlorë, Sarandë, and Ksamil. None of the information or links below is promotional or paid advertising.

The country is beautiful but at the time of writing has experienced a massive increase in tourism in a relatively short timespan. That may introduce some annoyances to tourists: it is sometimes difficult to find an English-speaker, while you can certainly find many people who speak Italian. In many places, only cash is accepted as a form of payment.

If you are gluten or lactose intolerant, it is best to buy whatever you need in Tirana before venturing into other cities.

Tips for the lactose-intolerant

You can find soy milk in many shops, in 1-liter cartons, even outside in Tirana and sometimes even in minimarkets. Larger supermarkets may even have rice and almond milk, specially in Tirana. Outside of Tirana we basically only found soy milk, but no other vegetable milk products such as almond yogurt, which you can basically only find in the capital. Smaller cartons of vegetable milk, say of 200ml or 500ml can be found in "bio" shops in Tirana such as BioJu.

If you want your coffee with vegetable milk, you will have to bring your own to the coffee shop. Espresso coffee is served in small cups. You can ask for an espresso in a large cup and ask the barista to heat your own vegetable milk. We found only one large chain of coffee shops, named Mulliri, that serves coffee with soy milk (frappes, etc.) and they are only present at the airport and in large cities.

We could not find cheese made with vegetable milk anywhere. One can ask for a vegetarian pizza without cheese at most restaurants, even small ones: they will give you a weird look but serve it.

Tip for the gluten-intolerant

You can find gluten-free products of the "Schär" brand in Neranxi and other "bio" shops in Tirana, and in some large supermarkets such as the "Conad" in the very center of Tirana.

A great place you must visit is Panja Tirana, which is a gluten-free lactose-free bakery serving bread and delicious cakes, pastries, and icecream.

We could not find any gluten-free bread outside of Tirana. In one bakery, we asked someone to translate for us to Albanian, and the baker did not know was gluten was. There are initiatives such as glutenfreealbania.com collecting resources and trying to raise awareness of this issue.

Tips for vegans

There are few dishes in the local cuisine that sometimes are vegan: falafel (if you order without tzatziki), dolma (vine leaves, but ask, because in some cases they have minced meat) and stuffed peppers (which also in some cases have minced meat). In many places, you can ask for spaghetti with pasta with just tomato sauce, or french fries, or white rice, or many salads without feta cheese that are made with tasty local veggies.

Some restaurants that we tried that had nice vegan dishes:

  • Edua in Gjirokaster has nice vegan and vegetarian versions of local dishes.
  • Veggies in Tirana has many vegetarian and vegan dishes, including an amazing mushroom truffle sushi.
  • Gjelber in Tirana also has many vegetarian and vegan options including bowls and wraps.

Finally, let me remark we did enjoy Albania, people are nice and kind, and the mountains and beaches are stunning.

Christmas message

My Christmas message is this: if you measured some quantity with a certain precision (say 2 decimal places) and obtained some trailing zeroes, please don't remove them. Don't mix in a table "0.5" and "0.48". Write "0.50" and "0.48" because that is what you measured. Ho ho ho.

Exteresting

A brief clarification.

When I say something is "exteresting" I don't mean it's not interesting.

"Exteresting" is not the opposite of "interesting".

Something "exteresting" is something interesting for others.

Java Developer sought for developing Open Source ElasticSearch plug-ins


Skills required:

  1. Java development experience of 3+ years.
  2. Familiarity with search engines such as Apache SOLR or ElasticSearch, a significant plus.
  3. Experience in a research environment, a plus.

Description:

  • Our research team has been awarded a prestigious grant from the Data Transparency Lab. The grant is for "FA*IR: A tool for fair rankings in search," which is a new ranking method proposed by our team to avoid discrimination by gender, race, or other protected characteristics. The team includes researchers from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Dr. C. Castillo, Dr. R. Baeza-Yates), TU Berlin (Mrs. M. Zehlike), NTENT Hispania (Dr. R. Baeza-Yates, Dr. Sara Hajian), and ISI Torino (Dr. F. Bonchi).
  • Within this grant, we are searching for a Java developer for writing a series of plug-ins for ElasticSearch (or alternatively, for SOLR) and interact with our research team. The plug-ins will implement re-ranking strategies for queries in which the documents correspond to descriptions of people (e.g., resumes). We have two groups of plug-ins that will implement algorithms parametrized by a configuration file.
    1. The first group of plug-ins will implement a series of criteria that must be fulfilled by every response to a query (e.g., that for every query, the resulting list of documents must contain a minimum proportion of women in the first positions). These criteria will be based on the paper by Zehlike et al. 2017 at CIKM 2017.
    2. The second group of plug-ins will implement a learning-to-rank re-ranking strategy. They will receive a set of training documents, in which the ranking has been manually established, and will learn how to rank new, unseen documents, based on these training documents and criteria of fairness to be established during the research.
  • In both cases, the plug-ins should not be detrimental to the performance of the search engine, i.e., at most a small extra latency can be incurred. We expect that efficient fair ranking plug-ins will be a significant contribution to ElasticSearch, and given that they will be released as Open Source software, they will have significant impact in the huge user base of ElasticSearch.

Location:

  • The developer will meet a team member once per week to report progress. Ideally at least half of the meetings must be in person, the other half can be remote. The team is based in Barcelona and Berlin, so the developer should be able to attend the in-person meetings in one of these cities. A developer based in the Barcelona or Berlin area will be preferred, while a developer located elsewhere is also acceptable.

Timing:

  • The project will start in February or March and end in July 2018 (5-6 months). The first group of plug-ins can be implemented immediately. The second group can be implemented from April'18, as the research of the research team progresses.
  • Bids will be reviewed from February 1st, 2018 and reviewed until a suitable developer is found.

What we offer:

  • Interaction with a team of international researchers.
  • Working on an application for social good, to mitigate or remove discrimination.
  • Contributing to Open Source software.

How to bid:

  • Questions may be asked by e-mail to Carlos Castillo carlos.castillo@upf.edu; please include the word "FA*IR" in the subject.
  • To bid, use this form.
    1. Include your CV with 2-3 recent relevant projects and your role on them
    2. Include your bid consisting of a work plan consisting of 2-3 phases for the project, the estimated number of work hours and timeline for each phase, and the cost of each phase. After the completion of each phase, a payment will be issued.
  • Contracting will be done directly between the developer and the Technical University of Berlin.

Salary and expenses: the total project cost should not exceed 24,000€ -- including all applicable taxes or deductions.

To bid, use this form

I'm turning 40 today! These are some things I've learned so far

Some things I've learned during my 40 years on Earth. I'm not including scientific/technical stuff, just everyday stuff; I'm also not including skills, manners, or basic things such as speaking or reading, which I owe to my parents :-)

The list is roughly in chronological order. Years are only approximate references, none of these lessons I learned overnight, but they all changed my life.

  • 5
  • Books are wonderful
  • Programming is fun
  • Some people are idiots
  • God is a lie
  • 10
  • Science gives answers
  • Majority opinions mean nothing
  • Being different means being hurt
  • Everybody dies even the Sun
  • 15
  • Intelligence is not enough
  • A life worth living takes effort
  • Planning saves money and trouble
  • Lying is avoidable
  • Family brings great joys and great sorrows
  • Romance is tragic
  • 20
  • Romance doesn't need to be tragic
  • Some drugs are great
  • Syntactic correctness means nothing
  • Beautiful code is poetry
  • 25
  • Being permanently unsatisfied is fine
  • Good deeds are punished all the time
  • Evil deeds are rewarded all the time
  • Copyright is bad for art
  • Patents are bad for science
  • Hard work can compensate lack of talent
  • 30
  • Physical exercise is necessary
  • Nationalism is a form of hate
  • Immigration is treated as a crime
  • Animals are people
  • 35
  • Money intensifies personalities
  • Men treat women unfairly everywhere
  • People are often wrong about each other
  • Enlightenment is not a period but a process
  • Billions are essentially slaves
  • Everybody must be treated kindly
  • 40

Thanks to all for your birthday greetings :-)

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