Ruccs: Fill & Download for Free

It is surprising how democratic the process is on IR. There are 2 primary inputs - reservation requests and the RUCC.The RUCC - the Railway Users Consultative Committee operates at the level of a division upwards. This is where the user community can make its desires felt - not only for passenger halts but also for freight loading /unloading needs. It can also request for starting new train services.Reservation requests in the form of 'boarding at station A' is a clear indicator of incipient demand for reservation quota at station A. This is not the same as a halt but is equivalent for a passenger.Most requests can be handled by these two methods. Requests from people of influence normally value adds to them.

It's actually quite a long and serendipitous story. You could say I got into linguistics as an inevitable choice or as the culmination of a lot of really random events.My undergrad degree is in Mechanical Engineering from Rutgers University. Rutgers actually has a great linguistics department, but I didn't even take a linguistics class while I was there. Nor did I take a psych class nor a class at RuCCS, which is one of the more innovative centers for cognitive science.I mostly stayed on our nerdy engineering campus, taking things like Orbital Mechanics, Thermodynamics and Design of Mechanical Systems plus the occasional history class.The trend, at the time, was for engineers to go work for banks and big 5 consulting firms, and that's what I did. I was living it up in NYC, which is a stone's throw away from the banks of the old Raritan, working for the man.And so it could have remained, ad infinitum, but for one thing.Towards the end of college, I came across a book recommendation on a usenet group about Jazz, rec.music.bluenote. (Thanks to the magic of the internet I'm actually able to find the exact post: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.music.bluenote/Ku9Z14CHI8E/ljaltn7OJWYJ1. Music is art, but there is a lot of math in art (one quick example: Paintings are often broken into thirds or halfs in order to make the image pleasing to the eye). If you don't think there is math in music, listen to J.S.Bach sometime (ever heard of fugues or canons?). Or better yet, pick up the book "Goedel, Escher, Bach", the author (whose name escapes me) draws parallels between the mathemetician, artist, and musician.It's not a particularly detailed book recommendation and I wasn't particularly looking to read a book. But I somehow got in my head that I needed to read this book.Gödel, Escher, BachAnd I did. I guess you can say the book literally changed my life.After a few years of grinding it out as a computer/management consultant in NYC, I realized that that was not my passion. Rather, what I really wanted to do was study something having to do with the mind. And I wanted to go back to grad school.At this point, I started writing to people that I thought could help me figure out what to do next. Professors at Rutgers, graduate students around the country, and so on. I had narrowed my interests down to Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Neuroscience, Philosophy or even Mathematics. That is: Not at all narrow.The main piece of advice I got was that I should really take a class. So I looked at the course catalogues for New York University and the The Graduate Center, CUNY. I think I even considered commuting back to RU in NJ. The class I ultimately picked was a Computational Linguistics class at NYU (Page on NYU), taught by Ray C. Dougherty. The main reasons I picked the class were becauseit was offered in the evening (I was still working full time and left work "early" - 5:30PM - to get to class)it involved computers, which I thought would give me a leg up.My class project, on Finite State Grammars, is awful and completely irrelevant to what I do now. The class itself also didn't teach me much relating to what I would ultimately proceed to do. But, it did give me some sense of focus on what I wanted to study, how to research programs to apply to. Crucially, it provided me with a strong linguistics recommendation letter.Around this time, two other crazy things happened.First, the dot com bubble burst and my company, trying to cut losses, offered an unbelievable temporary furlough. I could take a year off work, keep 20% of my salary, keep my health insurance and have my job back in a year if I wanted it. I opted in in one hot second, which ultimately meant I was immune to the massive layoffs that would start a few months later. It really was a no-brainer decision and I took that opportunity to travel to South East Asia and West Africa (What are your top 10 experiences while travelling?).The other thing that happened, 3 days before my flight was supposed to leave for Dakar, was 9/11.I don't want to overstate the degree to which this affected my decision - at the time I was subletting my NYC apartment and living with my folks to save money. Needless to say the event solidified my resolve to find something I loved to do.In between traveling, I put together my applications and took the GREs. I was still a bit unfocused and applied to, I think, 11 graduate programs. 11 is a ridiculously large number of schools as compared to, say, a u-grad actively being advised on specifically where to apply.The programs ranged from Brain and Cog Sci programs at Rochester and Brown, to Neuroscience programs at BU and USC to Computer Science programs at Rutgers. I think UC Berkeley Linguistics was the one pure linguistics program I applied to (edit: not true: UPenn, too, though I was mainly interesting in the http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/ program.And when I say in between traveling, I mean that. When I was coming home from SE Asia, before leaving for West Africa, I got an email from USC about a visit that would coincide with my flight through LA. I was tan, be-necklaced, but without any nice pants. Or clean shirts.Me, a few weeks before my USC interviewThank goodness for the Singapore airport, where I found some nice khakis and a shirt and was able to rest up in a micro-hotel for a few hours for my visit to the school.My ultimate decision on where to go to grad school was driven very much by practicality. I made spreadsheets. I created weighted formulas. First, I would only go to a program that paid my way (plus stipend), which I didn't get from UPenn and Brown. I would only go to a "top" program. I would, of course, only go to a place that matched my interests. And geographic desirability was important (sorry Rochester BCS). I was honing in on the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program but still waiting to hear from Berkeley - aid was up in the air.The grad chair managed to put together a package for me. At the same time, nailing the decision, my best friend was moving to SF to attend San Francisco Art Institute. Again, more serendipity. And so off I went to study linguistics at Berkeley.Studying linguistics made a lot of logical sense given my interests and background, as well.My family is filled with a tremendous amount of linguistic diversity: paternal grandparents spoke Yiddish and German, maternal grandparents spoke Yiddish and a little Polish/Russian, mom was French, spoke Hebrew and was a translator at the Israeli embassy to the UN and I spoke French and Hebrew.I am good with computers, which have gone hand-in-hand with linguistics since Chomsky and Zellig Harris.And to put it bluntly, Jews have made quite a mark in the field of linguistics (Chomsky, Harris, Weinreich, Pinker, Greenberg, Sapir, Boas, Bloomfield, Jakobson, Labov, Wittgenstein). So, whatever is in their esprit may be in mine.Most importantly, my passion, my interest, was in wanting to understand the mind. I believed language was the best tool to do that as it is one of the most uniquely human of abilities and the most complex (What is the highest or most complex evolved capacity in the human mind?)And so I went in to Berkeley using language as a tool to understand the mind. Interestingly, when I came out, I believe it'd be more appropriate to say that I was using the mind as a tool to understand language.So, with all these signs pointing towards language, was it inevitable that I study linguistics? Or was it the result of lots of serendipitous events in my life: a book, a class, a terrorist attack, an aid package, a friend living in SF? Was I driving my life or was my life driving me?I really don't know.But thanks for asking.

I don’t think all humans like “RUCC” babies, but do enjoy the act of making babies, you know “fornication”, yes even, at old age for some men, it’s all biological, the ticking biological clock for women, which usually clouds their judgement, and some get very bitter and cynical when they can’t have offspring due to their own bodies flaws, after all anyone can offer sperm, you could even buy it these days, I assume this is why you sound so bitter! I’m glad you are not a parent.