Ranking education is not an easy job

I came across this article about ranking PhD programs in the States. Very good writing at least. http://chronicle.com/article/Too-Big-to-Fail/127212/

the president's speech, at facebook

President Obama had a town hall meeting at facebook last week. One question he answered was about the Dream Act. He mentioned a lot about high-skilled immigrants. I tried to write down what he said.

Here is it:"If we've got smart people who want to come here and start businesses and are PhDs in math and science and computer science, why don't we want them to stay? I mean, why would we want to send them someplace else? So those are potential job creators. Those are job generators. I think about somebody like Andy Grove of Intel. We want more Andy Groves here in the United States. We don't want them starting Intel in China, or starting it in France. We want them starting it here. So there is a lot that we can do for making sure that high-skilled immigrants who come here, study -- we've paid for their college degrees, we've given them scholarships, we've given them this training -- let's make sure that if they want to reinvest and make their future here in America that they can."

Killing your cell phone

I am reading Dr. Randy Pausch's time management talk again. He suggested to kill your TV. I think, we should also kill our cell phones if we really wanna do some wonderful technically and/or academically.

I haven't been carrying a cell phone since i became a graduate student. I only use a prepaid cell phone when traveling out of the town. Why would I need a cell phone if I lock myself in an office all day long?

Top one sin of cell phone: it interrupts the stream of thinking. I like to wire myself in while working.

Cell phone also gives you the excuse to change schedule. I like to stick on schedule.

I do not mean that you don't have to communicate, but, for technical or academic things, you can use methods that won't interrupt you, such as email (check only at  breaks), scheduled meeting, scheduled conference calls.

Also, i don't like to chat with friends if i have nothing serious to discuss - this may sound very mean or cruel to a lotta people. But, "smart people say because they have something to say; foolish people say because they have to say something."

According to Randy's talk, cell phone has another two bad outcomes - messy desktop and one thing extra to focus.

Unless I am listed as someone's emergency contact, will I carry a cell phone with me daily.

Public or Private? Is it a proper question?

In some countries, they have very high public (government) involvement in many things, from universities to airlines. On the other hand, the American private free-market business model is criticized for pursuing practical outcomes too much while neglecting long-term benefits - for example, it's very hard to find the environment like School of Athens in an American university.


I don't have time to write a long article to discuss it right now. But a week ago, I saw an article like this. http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/229400837

3.2GHz and 3.6GHz, no big difference?

I had an interesting discovery about my AMD Phenom II X6 1090T CPU. I threw a very CPU intensive job to it. But the time (measured in Linux command ``time'') spent to finish the job was the pretty much the same when the CPU works at 3.6 GHz and 3.2 GHz (I played a trick in AMD Cool'n'Quite setting in my BIOS and verified the frequency for the core running my job by cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -i "cpu Mhz").

So, I am wondering why. I do not think it is because of the bottleneck at the memory. My program only uses 3% of the memory which in total is 8 GB.

Chinese peasants: there could be another peasant revolution

I saw this report a while ago on USA Today. It's about Chinese peasants. I visited China in 2008 and 2010, and I was stunted by the poverty of lower class there - they can't afford too many essential things to live, including health care and clean living environment. The government squeezed every penny out of its people, leaving them very little. So I was wondering how long the gov can squeeze its people like that.

And then, i saw this report on USA Today. One sentence really shocked me, said by an interviewed peasant: "If the government fails to solve the peasants' problems, there could be another peasant revolution."

I really could not understand why the Chinese gov does not show any interest in reformation, e.g., giving people more freedom and maintain a fair free market. If they keep what they are doing now, a revolution could happen in a foreseeable future.

Here is the full report: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-03-25-chinaland25_ST_N.htm

Democrats saved the NIH from latest budget cut

I just saw this news on Huffington Post - and i don't believe it is a lie because the new budget proposal is a public government document:


"They also prevented Republicans from slashing funds for the National Institutes of Health: The agency will absorb a $260 million cut, rather than the $1.6 billion cut sought by House Republicans. "


How dare Republicans try to cut $1.6 billion for NIH? They don't want to find cures to diseases to save Americans' lives?

PS: Do Republicans forget this sentence in the Declaration of Independence, "and to secure these rights, governments are established among people" when they cut funds for improving local community on medical service, clean water, law enforcement, highway, etc. ?

Among the most cut, are $400 million for community medical centers, $1 billion for HIV and prevent-disease fund, $1.6 billion for clean water and other projects in local community and Indian tribes. I thought Republicans are very religious. Which religion in the world does not tell us to respect human lives and help others for a better life?

Synctex with TeXMaker to jump between your LaTeX source and PDF output

Do you write long papers in LaTeX and want instant jumps between LaTeX source and PDF output? For example, you notice a typo in your PDF, and you wanna go back to LaTeX source to fix it without locating it in your ``eye power''?

I recently start using a new LaTeX IDE called TeXMaker. It displays LaTeX source code and PDF output side-by-side, allowing you to jump instantly between them, via synctex.

Here is a video someone made to show you how it works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfRdyUIkqls

You simply go to Options -> Configure Texmaker -> Commands. Then add --synctex=1 into the PDFLaTeX command options. Click OK. Now right (secondary) click on either your LaTeX source or PDF output and select "Jump to blah blah". Check the result!

You need TeXMaker 2.2 or later to do so. On Ubuntu Linux 10.10, the TeXMaker version is 2.0. So u need to download later versions from TeXMaker download page. The latest version is 3.0.

Giving readers of your papers easier lives

Many papers are very hard to read. One reason is that they use vocabularies or math notations that are not very recognized by readers.

For a paper on knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR), the targeting readers are mostly AI researchers who may not be necessarily working on KRR. They may work on automated planning or robotics. If your vocabularies or math notations do not match their education background, they will feel very difficult to understand your paper.

In the end, if you really give them a hard time, they will simply send your paper to a shredder.

Then what is the purpose of writing an AI paper that researchers on other AI fields cannot even understand?

And, KRR needs applications. The knowledge is from our common sense, maybe for a particular field, e.g., physics. The reasoning is assist us the better use of common sense knowledge. What if a biologist wants to use your work to help his research? You wanna scare him away in a way worse than how you treat other AI researchers?

A compromising solution, may be, to provide two different ways of saying one thing. One is preferable by people in your field, very precise and professional. The other is understandable for any college science/engineering graduates. High school students cannot understand Einstein's paper about the Theory of Relativity. But they can understand the simplified version on their textbook.

Do you like a dictionary that explains words in advanced words?

When Steve Jobs asked his team to make an easy manual for Macintosh, his team said, it's easy, high school English level. Steve, said, no, i want elementary school level English.

A few days ago I saw a joke. A customer rated his Windows laptop as 1 star because it didn't come with a Windows manual - he used to be a Mac user.

You shall read Knuth et al.'s minicourse for technical writing

When i am reading papers from one field, i cannot finish a page in an hour. I can read a single sentence for 10 times, and i still don't understand what that sentence means. The worst part is, that i couldn't remember what their papers say after a week.

Tonight, I suddenly felt that it was not my problem. It's because they like to introduce new "awkward" notations, and they don't like to use the daily meanings of words.

By awkward, I mean not following conventions. For example, in math, a superscript, most often, means the power. In the authors' language, it could mean something has nothing to do with power.

By daily, i mean the meaning most people will come up in mind when hearing/seeing that word. What's the purpose of using the 5th or 6th meaning of a word (unless it is its meaning under the technical context)? For example, why do they use the word "reduct", an obsolete word in modern English (according to Merriam-Webster,  Wiktionary and my Firefox spell checking)? Can they use "reduce" or "reduction"?

To verify whether i was wrong, I googled out Knuth et al.'s Minicourse for Technical Writing. Right, it's not my problem.

For instance, point 6: "Think of a dialog between author and reader" Well, I completely cannot feel any dialog from sentences without "we" or connections.

Another rule related to this point is, point 12: "Motivate the reader for what follows." Well, i cannot think about what's next if i can't even follow.

Another example, point 16: "Display important formulas on a line by themselves." I really hate people squeezing formulas into lines with English, especially when formulas are more than half line width long. 

Last example, point 13: "your sentences should flow smoothly when all but the simplest formulas are replaced by 'blah' or some other grunting noise." This is very important. Please give every new notation you introduce a name, intuitive ones.

So, i recommend anyone who is writing papers with a lot of math to read that doc, which is published in 1987. A copy is here:  http://math.stanford.edu/~rubin/110/mathwriting.pdf
You can google "Knuth Minicourse on technical writing" if that link above doesn't work.

A note: The word "reduct" is called "reducing agent" or reducer in modern chemistry.