Da's Entropy

Blog moved

2007-12-19T14:32:00.000-05:00

I have migrated my blog to http://wangda.wordpress.com
Please update your subscriber accordingly.

Thank you!
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Life is an opportunity to do something.

An interesting proof of Menger's theorem

2007-12-01T15:11:00.000-05:00

The proof is in

The Hahn-Banach theorem, Menger’s theorem, and Helly’s theorem

from What's New (Terrence Tao's blog).

I subscribed to his blog a while ago, but most of the time I have to skip his posts as I don't really understand the title.. but this one is of some interest to me as I did some study in graph theory this summer and used Menger's theorem in a proof.

In his post, Terrence has given a new proof to Menger's theorem by using a game-theoretic argument. I still need to spend more time later to understand the details, but this idea again, shows the beauty and unity of mathematics!

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Goodbye ETS! Again!

2007-11-11T12:34:00.000-05:00

OK... I need to say Goodbye to ETS again because I just took TOEFL this morning -- though most graduate school does not require TOEFL for students who get their bachelor's degree in an English speaking institute, but one reputable one insists that only students who get their bachelor's degree in a US college or university could be exempted from TOEFL. As I am applying for that school, I took TOEFL.

And I hope this will be the real end of my dealing with ETS...

And I am aware of the fact that this blog has not been updated for a long time --- that's because blogging has a very low priority in my schedule and recently I have been consistently getting higher priority tasks (the starvation problem in Operating System).

And it is very likely that I will continue to be very busy until X'mas. So check back after that and I may have a summer + fall semester summary here.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Goodbye ETS

2007-08-15T23:49:00.000-04:00

Just received my GRE score today and got to know my AW score is 5.0 (out of 6), which is quite acceptable for me. So finally I don't need to worry about this, which is good.

Recently I have been moving as my parents bought a house and it is such a hassle... most of my evenings and weekends are devoted to cleaning up and organizing stuff.. hopefully I can get over this soon...

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Midterm Review

2007-07-28T22:44:00.000-04:00

More than half of 2007 has passed, and it may be a good time to review my resolutions for 2007.

Do well in MAT357 Real Analysis and ECO100 Economics (2006 Spring)

I worked very hard for MAT357 and the result turned out to be good, and I indeed learned a lot from the course. Working on a homework for a whole weekend was a pain during the term, but somewhat memorable in retrospect. Specials thanks to Jay, Sheng, and Andrew for all the enlightening discussions.
ECO100 was pretty easy and I seldom attended lectures after the first test due to the low entropy rate in lectures. But I did get a good understanding on the basic stuff and result was satisfactory too.
Status update: DONE.

Perform well at Altera

It was a memorable 12 months. I learned a lot, worked hard and had lots of fun there.

Status update: DONE

Take GRE

Status update: DONE (awaiting AW score for final approval)

Have a good summer research experience

The work in Professor Kschischang's group is very fun and so far I have made some progresses. But more to be done before any real achievement.
Status update: IN PROGRESS

Get my driver's license

Status update: TBA

Pick a good design project topic

I choose Universal Portfolio, under the supervision of Professor Wei Yu. We have a very strong group, consisting people with strong technical or business background. I am very optimistic about our final result.
Status update: IN PROGRESS

Do well in the 2007 Fall

I am looking forward to it!
Status update: TBA

Make profit in Forex trading

Nope, no profit so far. And my trading is in a dormant state as I don't really know how to make profit consistently. I may resume this when I get more time and more experienced.
Status update: DEPRECATED

In summary, so far not bad. But there is at least one more important task --- apply for graduate schools and I will work hard on it too.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Tentatively, I am done with GRE

2007-07-28T16:02:00.000-04:00

Yes, I am tentatively done, and will be finally done with it if my AW score turns out to be OK.

I went to the test center at 1, and after certain registration stuff, I left all my belongs to a locker , went into the test room and started the exam.

At the beginning, there was a whole bunch of crap such as how to use the mouse, keyboard, etc. Then the test program started to gather certain information about the examinee. Interestingly, when asked to input my school name, the University of Toronto did not appear in the Canadian school list, while others like Waterloo, McGill or even Lakehead, Laval were all there. So I skipped that page.

Soon writing started and the issue topics contained one that I had practiced before, so I chose that one. The argument was something full of holes and very easy to attack. Hopefully I have done well in the AW part.

Then the Verbal part started. It seemed the so called GRE Blue Bible (寄托蓝宝书) has a pretty good coverage on the words for the Computer-Based Test, at least after working on the book, I knew most of the words in today's exam and made some educated guesses for the rest. The reading was kind of tough, but manageable. I ended up finishing the section 3 minutes earlier.

After that was the Quantitative part, which mainly consisted high school level math questions. I was quite careful when answering those questions as generally Chinese people get full marks in this section and there is no way to recheck answers after you submitted them.

When everything was done, there is an voluntary test section and not interested in writing one more issue, I skipped that after taking a glance at the topic.

Soon the final score came out after I confirmed that I wanted to report my scores. The score for the Quantitative part was 800, and the score for the Verbal part was 190 marks above my general expectation of 600. The result was definitely satisfactory and I have to admit that I am pretty lucky today.

Feeling relieved, I walked back home. It is good that I am done with GRE for now and can focus on something more important and fun -- summer research. Hopefully my next blog post can bring some more exciting news.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Google Calendar: Graduate School Application Important Dates

2007-07-14T20:03:00.001-04:00

My friend Tom has created a Google calendar that has important dates (mainly deadlines) for graduate school application in the field of EECS for Fall 2008. If you are interested, you can subscribe it here to view all the events (given that you have Google Calendar):

And everyone is welcomed to add events to it. Just email me and I will add you to the editor list. The list currently only contains a few deadlines so there are still much room to contribute :)

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

What matters? (from Nan's blog)

2007-06-26T00:36:00.000-04:00

Got the post below from Nan's blog at http://sunnansunny.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!AC3B92D470C58072!931.entry

I find it very insightful and fully agree with what his advisor said. And I think it takes time and effort to reach that kind of level.

What matters?

今晚和老板聊天，开始是讨论我的一些想法的可行性，后来是关于博士论文题目，他对学术界的点评，包括教授、杂志，再后来老板开始谈他的人生经历，告诉我对于确定博士论文题目不用着急，即使花上一年的时候找题目，也完全不是问题。好的开始是成功的一半。我摘录一部分写在下面。

My advisor:
"Some of my friends had to stay for one more year in order to go to college, but it turned out that it did not really matter."
"When I was force to join the Korean army, I thought it was really waste of time. I can read more books during that time, but it turned out that it did not really matter."
"When I was in Caltech, I met so many problems about finding the proper advisor and Ph.D. topic. I wasted two years and almost decided to quit. I even started to think about being a lawyer. But it turned out that it did not really matter."
"You really don't need to worry about your Ph.D. topic..."

Me:
"So what really matters?"

My advisor:
"Actually, what really matter is enjoying the moment."
"You know, Being No.1 will only make you happy for a day, after it, you won't feel happy. If I become tenured professor today, I will definitely be happy maybe for a week, but after that, I won't feel happy. Life continues going on. What makes you constantly happy is enjoying the moment, working hard and making contributions to the society..."

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

NSERC USRA 2007 Starts

2007-05-08T19:50:00.000-04:00

Today is my first day, and obviously I am not working very hard, as I am writing this blog at this time. But I will gradually improve :)

I met with Prof. Kschischang this morning and we talked about my project over the summer. It will be a topic on network coding and it sounds really interesting. I think it will be a fun problem to work on.

Meanwhile, I also need to acquire some stuff to get started. Graph theory is useful for any general networking research, and I will read some tutorial papers on network coding too. There will be a lot to be explored and hopefully I can achieve something.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

PEY Finished

2007-05-08T19:42:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was my last day at Altera Toronto, meaning that my PEY (Professional Experience Year) is finished.

It was a speical year, as I took a break from school and worked in an industry setting. I have learned quite a bit practical stuff, got to know how a business operates, as well as gained some insights into the whole semi-conductor industry. I also had lots of fun there and made quite a few friends. Though there were still many things could be better, I don't regret spending this year at Altera. On the whole, it has been a good year.

Now is the time to delve into summer research...

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Finally, done Real Analysis final!

2007-04-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

The most stressful semester, and the most stressful exam in my college life, is history now.

However, there was not much relief for me when the final was done. It was a little bit unbelievable for me... "Am I done? That's all?" That was probably my feeling at that time.

I did a lot to prepare for this exam --- I asked for a week's off from work, and study day and night for it. Real Analysis is a beautiful, profound and intriguing subject, which makes the process less painful, but there are also pressure and frustration acting in an opposite way. Sometimes I get reminded about the days I prepared for the Chinese National Matriculation Examinations --- I can feel that pressure level was similar... You can say either I have great pressure recently, or I didn't have much pressure when I entered that critical exam a few years ago.

I originanly planned to take GRE at May 12, but now there is no way for me to make it on time --- I am far from ready, while not many days are left. So I will postpone it a bit. I need a break --- I will still be busy, but I need some time to think, to reflect, under the state of less pressure.

My work term will end soon at May 7. Before that I need to work hard to get my undone tasks done. After that, I will head for the summer research I have been looking forward to.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Virginia Tech Campus Shooting

2007-04-17T23:41:00.000-04:00

32 ppl was shot, that was shocking. The gunman was so cold-blooded and well prepared for the thing... I can imagine if I were in one of the classroom, how terrible it could be.

U.S. definitely need to control their guns tighter. It is ridiculous to see some people are still using the argument that "you should not ban knives just because it can be used to kill people" on gun. Think about it, this kind of incidents happen only in the U.S, and that's not just coincidence! In China, we have some lonely and aberrant student that kill people too, such as Ma Jiajue, but he used a hammer and killed 4 people --- that was still a lot, but it is much less than 32!! Do you dare to imagine that Mr. Ma had a gun??

Anyway, may all the victims rest in peace!
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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Plunge of global stock markets

2007-02-27T22:33:00.000-05:00

China starts the tide this time, by Shanghai and Shenzhen fell about 8% and 9%... Then Europe, U.S., and Japan all followed suit. Surprisingly, gold and silver price also fell, but bond and oil price went up.

There are a lot analysis around, but I believe the fact that U.S. economy is in trouble (the huge deficit and debt, crash of real estate, etc. ) is the root reason. Take a look at the history, all empires eventually collapse due to their military overstretch, which leads to economic meltdown and eventually fall of the empire.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

An interesting probabiilty problem

2007-02-23T18:33:00.000-05:00

Toss a fair coin n times, what is the probability of having at least k consecutive Heads (i.e., we could have more than k consecutive Heads).

The problem looks simple but once you tried it, you will find that it is not very easy. It is a very good test for your understanding on Probability :), so I strongly encourage you to have a try! And you may encounter this in an interview!

I will try to post the solution later, if I can solve it.
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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Weekly Update

2007-02-16T21:51:00.000-05:00

A few updates......again, I am busy recently.........and will be busy for a while........ sometimes I think I am too busy. For example, Song talked about an interesting algorithm problem on his blog and I thought it is intriguing too. However, I am too busy to do more investigation on that... It is a shame... I think maybe I am pushing myself too much sometimes... I will try to improve that when I am not busy.

So, what keep me busy then?

Work at the company. At least 1/3 of my day is spent there...
Course work. Real analysis is not that easy now... Prof. Pugh emphasize a lot on geometric understanding of concepts, which is quite powerful, but it also takes a lot effort to visualize things. And the midterm is coming soon!
Prepare for GRE. I registered it a few days ago and the test day is May 12. I hope I can finish this crap before I dive into my summer research.
A lot misc. stuff --- forex trading, tax return, do a body check (I haven't done so for a few years ........), get a new pair of glasses.. etc. etc. etc

Meanwhile, I also need to start preparing for Grad School Application. It is a lengthy process...
Cathy is ahead of me on this. She will attend quite a few interviews for dental school in the near future. I wish her all the success in her interviews --- so I can get my free dental care in the future ;)

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

2007-02-03T22:56:00.000-05:00

被点名了....

From Song Wei's blog http://songwei.blogsome.com/2007/02/03/p462/

1.2006你最开心的事是什么？

Have certain achievement that I am satisfied with.

2.2006年最难过的事是什么？

Something made me so sad that I don't even want to talk about

3.2007年最大的心愿是什么？

Do well in grad school application, which is an event in a huge Markov Chain.

4.最大的愿望：

Life time? Do something, have some fun

5.如果现在可以让你随心所欲去旅行，你想去哪？

Wherever, traveling mind-free is great enough so the destination really doesn't matter

6.你最满意自己身体哪个部位？与别人初次见面你会先注意他（她）哪个部位？

Brain/Brain

7.失眠过吗？你用什么办法对抗失眠？

YES. Try to be regular

8.会不会做饭？你希望你的伴侣（or 未来的伴侣）会做饭吗？

Not really...but will be. Yes, we will learn together anyways

9.你最想做哪个动画片角色？为什么？

no idea...don't watch that kind of stuff anymore

10.在你心中我是怎么样一个人？

An intelligent and outright guy, and I can call you dude as I wish :P

11.如果可以重来,你最想改变的是什么？

Learn much much much more math!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

12.觉得自己是个自恋的人么?

Should be, but not very.

13.爱人爱到怎样的程度才算是超过爱自己呢？

have no idea.

14.你理想的伴侣应该具备什么样的品质？

smart and interesting

15.谈谈你最近在听的音乐吧．

A lot. Some old songs.

16.你会出于什么样的理由结婚? 或者是出于什么样的理由单身?

I love the girl and want to live with her.

for freedom

17.如果现在你有自由权利可以杀掉一个人，你选谁，为什么？（好像年底不应该问这么邪恶的问题，那么我提供一个可选项，请看问题二）如果你现在可以随便kiss一个人，你选谁，为什么？（哈哈，还是很邪恶）

Kill: a lot ppl are worth killing, but usually killing does not help much.

18.和恋人分手了你会把对方的手机，msn，qq删掉么，如果删掉为什么？

No, so I don't need to answer the 2nd question.

19.如果可以按照自己的想法去实现,你希望在多少岁时结婚,为什么?

Before I finish my Ph.D

20.写下目前在你的生命中最重要最珍贵的三个朋友的名字(恋人不算)

i don't know why three.. friends shouldn't have a rank or things like top 3 "precious" or whatever. All my friends are important to me, otherwise they are not my friend.

I have already asked some ppl to join this kind of game a while ago. So I would not spread it further for now.... but I reserve the right to spread it in the future.

What's New and Exciting in Algebraic and Combinatorial Coding Theory?

2007-01-27T19:05:00.000-05:00

Nowadays, a popular opinion is that "Coding is dead". But it is not. Please see the following keynote speech of ISIT 2006, from Prof. Vardy.

What's New and Exciting in Algebraic and Combinatorial Coding Theory?

Slides and handouts are now available.

Alexander Vardy
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California at San Diego

We will survey the field of algebraic and combinatorial coding theory, in an attempt to answer the question in the title. In particular, we shall revisit classical problems that are yet unsolved, review promising advances in the past decade, elaborate upon recent connections to other areas, and speculate what may lie ahead for the field.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Goodbye 2006, Hello 2007

2007-01-01T22:22:00.000-05:00

A Brief Summary of 2006

Ski Trip
Rank of 2005 Fall (comes out in 2006)
Nortel Institute Undergraduate Scholarship
Montreal and Ottawa Trip with Cathy
Rank of 2006 Spring
Starting working at Altera Toronto
The Adel S. Sedra Outstanding Student Awards
IEEE Canada-Toronto Section Scholarship
Andrew Alexander Kinghorn Scholarship
Point Pelee Trip with Cathy
Fail to take the driving test
First paper

B. Liang, S. Drew, and D. Wang, "Performance of multiuser network-aware prefetching in heterogeneous wireless systems," to appear in ACM/Springer Wireless Networks

2007 Resolutions

Do well in MAT357 Real Analysis and ECO100 Economics (2006 Spring)
Perform well at Altera
Take GRE
Have a good summer research experience
Get my driver's license
Pick a good design project topic
Do well in the 2007 Fall

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Busy Life ends (for now)

2006-12-21T00:27:00.000-05:00

In my last post I said I had been busy, and then I become even busier so I never have time to come here to write something. Now finally I got a few things done and take a break, so the update is here.

In short, the things that kept me busy was work, school (Topology) and research.

At work, our group have several releases to do and we have pretty tight schedule, so we need to work pretty hard to get things out. Luckily the Christmas is approaching so the pace become slower as we are all in the holiday mood now :)

At school, Topology is indeed a tough course. It is not uncommon to spend several hours on a single proof. One homework question even cost our professor 6 hours to solve it.. So it has been very time-consuming. On the other hand, topology is also an intriguing subject, showing the power of abstraction. I learned quite a bit from this course and I hope I can continue this exploration in Real Analysis next semester.

And for research, first there was nothing, then the professor I worked for last summer emailed me, telling me that we have a deadline for the paper at Dec 20, which is the same day for Topology final exam. So in December I need to work a lot on it, to improve the math, finish up the numerical analysis and do simulation, plus some data gathering and plotting.

During December 1 and December 19, I worked much more than 8 hours a day, with a schedule like this: get up at 9, go to work, leave work at about 6pm, dinner, then continue to work on either topology or the research project until 10pm. Then I go home and start to work on the research project again, sometimes until 3am in the morning. We mailed the paper out on Dec 18 and the professor and I worked on it until 5:50am that day to get it done...

So the life, as you can see, is pretty hectic recently. Luckily I also have achievement from this, such as got my first journal paper (even though I am just a third author). In retrospect, all my efforts pay off and I am happy.

Anyways, as the paper is submitted and my topology final is done this morning, now I am feel much less pressure and will take a good rest during this Christmas, as there will be new challenges coming next year.

Wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

E = mc^2 (and a lot of work) (zz)

2006-10-17T23:57:00.000-04:00

Have not updated this blog for a long while.......because I am very busy recently. Below is an article that I foundd interesting. Basically it tells us we need to work hard to achieve big. Hope it will be helpful/interesting to you.

From
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/10/13/1160246332748.html?page=fullpage#

E=mc^2 (and a lot of hard work)

October 16, 2006

In spite of a common belief that genius is innate, research shows that even Einstein, Mozart and Tiger Woods had to put in years of toil to achieve brilliance, writes David Dobbs.

MY MOTHER, rest her merry, brainy soul, convinced me early on that I was - as she liked to put it, quoting the cartoon character Yogi Bear - "SMARRR-ter than the average bear!" I happily assumed that my Yogi-like intelligence would ensure great things.

My sense of entitlement grew when I easily won good marks in school, then grew some more when three different college professors told me I had a talent for writing. Rising to the top, I gathered, was a matter of natural buoyancy.

The reality check came in my 20s, when nearly a decade of middling effort failed to cast the glow of my writing genius much beyond my study walls. By my early 30s I saw the obvious: my smarts and "talent" - above average or not - would count for little unless I outworked most of the other writers. Only when I started putting in some extra hours did I get anywhere.
About the time I had my epiphany, a growing field of scholarship was more rigorously reaching the same conclusion. It seems the ability we're so fond of calling talent or even genius arises not from innate gifts but from an interplay of fair (but not extraordinary) natural ability, quality instruction and a mountain of work. This new discipline - a mix of psychology and cognitive science - has now produced its first large collection of expert reviews, the massive Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

The book essentially tells us to forget the notion that "genius", "talent" or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration. Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born.

EXTRAORDINARY EFFORTS
"It's complicated explaining how genius or expertise is created and why it's so rare," says Anders Ericsson, the professor of psychology at Florida State University who edited the handbook. "But it isn't magic, and it isn't born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery.

"These people don't necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort."

This is mixed news, Ericsson says. "It's funny, really. On one hand it's encouraging: it makes me think that even the most ordinary among us should be careful about saying we can't do great things, because people have proven again and again that most people can do something extraordinary if they're willing to put in the exercise. On the other hand, it's a bit overwhelming to look at what these people have to do. They generally invest about five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent. It's not something everyone's up for."

Studies of extraordinary performance run the gamut, employing memory tests, IQ comparisons, brain scans, retrospective interviews of high achievers and longitudinal studies of people who were identified in their youth as highly gifted. None bears out the myth of inherent genius.
Take intelligence. No accepted measure of innate or basic intelligence, whether IQ or other metrics, reliably predicts that a person will develop extraordinary ability. In other words, the IQs of the great would not predict their level of accomplishments, nor would their accomplishments predict their IQs. Studies of chess masters and highly successful artists, scientists and musicians usually find their IQs to be above average, typically in the 115 to 130 range, where some 14 per cent of the population reside - impressive enough, but hardly as rarefied as their achievements and abilities.

The converse - that high IQ does not ensure greatness - holds as well. This was shown in a study of adult graduates of New York City's Hunter College Elementary School, where an admission criterion was an IQ of at least 130 (achieved by a little over 1 per cent of the general population) and the mean IQ was 157 - "genius" territory by any scaling of IQ scores, and a level reached by perhaps one in 5000 people. Though the Hunter graduates were successful and reasonably content with their lives, they had not reached the heights of accomplishment, either individually or as a group, that their IQs might have suggested. .

In the words of study leader Rena Subotnik, a research psychologist formerly at the City University of New York and now with the American Psychological Association: "There were no superstars, no Pulitzer Prize or MacArthur Award winners, and only one or two familiar names."
The genius these elite students showed in their IQs remained on paper.
So what does create genius or extreme talent? Musicians have an old joke about this: How do you get to Carnegie Hall from here? Practise. A sober look at any field shows that the top performers are rarely more gifted than the also-rans, but they almost invariably outwork them. This doesn't mean that some people aren't more athletic or smarter than others. The elite are elite partly because they have some genetic gifts - for learning and hand-eye coordination, for instance - but the very best rise because they take great pains to maximise that gift.
Take Stephen Hawking, who likes to dismiss questions about his IQ by saying, "People who boast about their IQ are losers". He was a middling student and achiever until his mid-20s. Only then did he catch fire - and begin working obsessively - while collaborating with fellow physicist Roger Penrose on black-hole theory.

Pete Sampras didn't possess more talent than Andre Agassi, but he won 14 grand slams to Agassi's eight because he worked harder and more steadily. And as cellist Yo-Yo Ma once said, the most proficient and renowned musicians are not necessarily those who outshone everyone as youths, but rather those who had "fire in the belly".

DECADE OF DEDICATION
This has led scholars of elite performance to speak of a 10-year rule: it seems you have to put in at least a decade of focused work to master something and bring greatness within reach. This shows starkly in a 1985 study of 120 elite athletes, performers, artists, biochemists and mathematicians led by University of Chicago psychologist Benjamin Bloom, a giant of the field who died in 1999. Every single person in the study took at least a decade of hard study or practice to achieve international recognition. Olympic swimmers trained for an average of 15 years before making the team; the best concert pianists took 15 years to earn international recognition. Top researchers, sculptors and mathematicians put in similar amounts of time.

The same goes even for those few who seem born with supreme talent. Mozart was playing the violin at three years of age and received expert, focused instruction from the start. He was precocious, writing symphonies at seven, but he didn't produce the work that made him a giant until his teens. The same is true for Tiger Woods. He seems magical on the golf course, but he was swinging a golf club before he could walk, got great instruction and practised constantly from boyhood. Even today he outworks all his rivals. His genius has been laboriously constructed.
Study so intense requires resources - time and space to work, teachers to mentor - and the subjects of Bloom's study, like most elite performers, almost invariably enjoyed plentiful support in their formative years. Bloom, in fact, came to see great talent as less an individual trait than a creation of environment and encouragement.

"We were looking for exceptional kids," he said, "and what we found were exceptional conditions."

He was intrigued to find that few of the study's subjects had shown special promise when they first took up the fields they later excelled in, and most harboured no early ambition for stellar achievement. Rather, they were encouraged as children in a general way to explore and learn, then supported in more focused ways as they began to develop an area they particularly liked. Another retrospective study, of leading scientists, similarly found that most came from homes where learning was revered for its own sake.

Finally, most retrospective studies, including Bloom's, have found that almost all high achievers were blessed with at least one crucial mentor as they neared maturity. When Subotnik looked at music students at New York's elite Juilliard School and winners of the high-school-level Westinghouse Science Talent Search, he found that the Juilliard students generally realised their potential more fully because they had one-on-one relationships with mentors who prepared them for the challenges they would face after their studies ended. Most of the Westinghouse winners, on the other hand, went on to colleges where they failed to find mentors to nurture their talent and guide them through rough spots. Only half ended up pursuing science, and few of them with distinction.

MASTERING MEMORY
So what do elite performers attain through all that deliberate practice and sensitive mentoring? What makes a genius? The creme de la creme appear to develop several important cognitive skills. The first, called "chunking", is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns.

Chess provides the classic illustration. Show a chess master a game in progress for just five seconds and they will memorise the board so well that they can re-create most of it - 20 pieces or more - an hour later. A novice will be able to place just four or five pieces.
Yet chess masters don't necessarily have a better memory than novices. Their clustering skills begin and end at the chessboard. Show a master and a novice a random list of 20 digits, and a few minutes later neither will be able to recall more than seven or eight of them in sequence. In a chess game, by contrast, the master sees not the 20 pieces that confront the novice but clusters of pieces, each of which is familiar from experience. Interestingly, the chess master will remember about as many clusters - four or five - as a novice will individual pieces. The better the master, the larger the clusters he'll remember.

We all exercise such clustering skills when we read. Learning to read means coming to recognise chunks of letters as words, then chunks of words as phrases and sentences and - at a deeper level -sentences and paragraphs as components of a work's larger meaning. This chunking puts individual words into logical, recallable contexts. As a result, we'll remember almost all of a logical 20-word sentence and only four to seven words from the same 20 words ordered randomly.

Apart from chunking, the elite also learn to identify quickly which bits of information in a changing situation to store in working memory. This lets them create a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practised, allowing them to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships. Again, this is something skilled readers do with good novels. However, it appears more striking - more suggestive of "genius" - when we see these skills used by Garry Kasparov to simultaneously beat 30 grandmasters or French footballer Zinedine Zidane to spot a killer through-ball that no one else saw.

Such masters seem to operate on another plane, yet the rest of us can take solace in knowing that their mastery rarely extends beyond their discipline. It is a fair bet that Roger Federer would beat you at both tennis and ping-pong, but not as soundly in the latter. The gap will shrink as you move further away from his field of expertise.

Michael Jordan, widely considered to be one of the world's greatest athletes, struggled horribly when he moved from basketball to baseball, where he was routinely flummoxed by minor league pitchers. Likewise, if you ever met Kasparov over a poker table, you might well hold your own.
While the study of elite performance has been based mainly on observational and interview techniques, its models agree nicely with what neuroscience has discovered about how we learn. Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York, who won a Nobel prize in 2000 for discovering much of the neural basis of memory and learning, has shown that both the number and strength of the nerve connections associated with a memory or skill increase in proportion to how often and how emphatically the lesson is repeated. So focused study and practice literally build the neural networks of expertise. Genetics may allow one person to build synapses faster than another, but either way the lesson must still be learnt. Genius must be built.

Studies of elite performance also chime with another recurrent theme in modern neuroscience and genetics. These disciplines all but insist that the traditional distinction between nature and nurture is obsolete. What we call talent or genius illustrates vividly what the past 25 years have taught us about gene expression - that our genetic potentials are activated and realised only through environment and experience. Natural buoyancy merely gets you off the bottom. You rise to the top by pumping yourself up.

So is the ideal of innate genius dead? If not, should we kill it? Certainly a clear-eyed analysis shows that "genius" is really a set of exceptional skills cultivated through disciplined study. We should probably shelve the notion of genius as an innate, almost irrepressible gift and speak instead of expertise, talent or even greatness - terms that hint at the work underlying supreme accomplishment.

Granted, this isn't as much fun, and recognising the work factor is sobering. It is disappointing to realise all your mum's blather about how smart you are doesn't mean anything, and that you have to work demonically regardless. But as something to believe in, genius is not looking so smart. You want to play the big stage, you got to put in the time.

-New Scientist

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, by Anders K Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J Feltovich, Robert R Hoffman, Cambridge University Press, $104.

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Copyright . 2006. The Age Company Ltd.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Blog Management

2006-09-30T23:57:00.000-04:00

Some recent updates of my blog:

Use of new skin ( a few weeks ago :P) -- it make more space and I can customize the template better. It is best viewed under 1280x1024 resolution. Please let me know if you have problem on 1024x768 or resolutions below.
Add License to the articles on this blog -- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. so if you want to refer my blog links, feel free to do it, as long as you retain the original author information and does not put it to commerical use.
Re-arrnage the Google Adsense Ads for Conent and Product Referral Links --- They do produce incomes for me, though at a modest rate. I would recommend you try it out too --- it doesn't hurt to earn a few bucks by doing almost nothing. You can click the ad on the top-right corner of this page to apply for an Adsense account --- it is almost as easy as applying for a Email account.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Google's Mirror site

2006-09-28T22:55:00.000-04:00

Google's Mirror site:
http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/m/index.cgi

Pretty geeky, huh?

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Personal viewpoints on some career paths for engineering students

2006-09-27T00:36:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer
This entry is totally my personal viewpoints, so it could be biased, incomplete, or sort of midleading. I write it in English for a larger readership and am sorry for any inconvinience causing by this.

Abstract
This article will discuss some possible careers for engineering students, including Consulting, Quantative Financial (Quant). It will try to identify the engineering's disadvantages and advantages in these careers, as well as the possible effect on life style.

In addition to traditional enginering related careers(industry and academia), there are some other possible career paths for engineering students, including consulting, quantatative financial (Quant), and lawyer. These positions seems quite attrative as they genereally come with very good compensation. For example, it is not uncommon for a Quant to get $150,000/year or higher, and a entry-level salary in a big law firm is about $65/hr. I don't have any data for consulting, but it should be something similar. In addition, all these jobs are pretty challenging so it could bring you more fulfillment than a dumb job does.

As these jobs are attractive, they naturally have relatively high requirements for the applicants. For a consultant, in addition to your strong analytical and problem solving skills gained from engineering training, you also need excellent communicaiton capabilities to work with all kinds of people. For law, you need to take LSAT and apply to law school first. Only after that can you consider your mext move. For a quant, very strong programming (usually C++) and mathematical skills(stochastic processes, ODE/PDE, thing like that) are required. As a result, many quants are from Physics, Applied Math, EE and CS as they have these skill sets. And for most positions, you will face fierce competition and you have to beat others if you want to get the job.

Engineering students have both disadvantages and advantages in these career paths. I think a general disadvantage is that we are not specialized on any of these, for example, we may have relative less knowledge on business than those commerce/economics students, or we don't study law in our curriculum, or we don't know much economics as an MFE does. But these should not be real problems as long we can learn by ourselves. And what's our advantage? Our engineering background. There are IT consulting, which you specialized in one IT field and provide service to others. This business model works because many companies do not need to hire very skillful IT employees most of the time, so they will ask for some outside help when it is necessary and they are willing to pay more unit cost for that, because in total they still saves money. Or in the business of law, a big part is patent, Intellectural Property(IP) and other technical related stuff. Nowadays, if a merge or acquisition happens, a lot of legal efforts are spent on patens or IP, and these merges or acquisitions ususally very BIG --- for example, Alcatel and Lucent(13.5 Billon EUR), AMD and ATI(5.4 Billion USD), or the acquisition of Freescale (17.6 Billion USD). Imagine you get 0.001% of that --- well, I am kidding :P. Back to the topic -- our background will definitely help us on that, as we have better capabilites to make correct technically judgements.

And how will these careers affect our life styles? If you are just an employee of a normal technical company, your life should most of the time be regular, 9am to 5pm, and enjoy yourselves during the weekend. However, for all these three careers, it is not very easy to achieve that. A consultant's work schedule could vary a lot, depends on the project they are working on, and they may need to travel a lot, which may become not very pleasant after you have had enough. To work in a law firm or as quant, it is pretty normal to work from 9am to 10pm --- as a result, the salary is not that much as it appears to be, as the work time is longer. Most of the law firms and financial institutions will pay you for lunch and dinner, no matter what you orders, but they "prefer" you to have lunch at the work place to minize your time for meals --- after all, your time ($50/hr, for example) is much more expensive than a meal (what the hell can you order and make it cost $30 for a meal?). These will probably get better when you climb up in the hierarchy, but that's beyond my visibility and the scope of this article.

So in conclusion, as the cliche says, every thing has its pros and cons. A career choice will directly affect your economic status, life style, etc. and I hope this article could be somewhat useful, as I am trying to be as objective as I can.

References/Sources
* Talk with a friend working in a law firm
* Quant Board, at mitbbs.com (Chinese)
* Information Session on consulting
* News reading on WSJ, EETimes and Forbes
* Personal work experience

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Honour Dinner

2006-09-26T23:35:00.000-04:00

It is my second time to attend the honour students' dinner and I hope it won't be the last time. I had a good chat with Mark Liang, Yuhui Luo and David Han, as we sat on the same table. Prof. Jacobson and Stan were sitting at the same table too, but unfortunately, we don't have much to talk about in common --- I am not very interested in Middleware and Prof. Jacobson thought the conversation between we students was too theorectical :P

It is also great to meet a lot of other old friends or "old" profs -- Shan, Mark, Peng, James, Fan, Wallace, Prof. Kwong, Prof. Ben Liang, Prof. Sarris, etc. It is a pity that I didn't get much time to chat with them.

And I get the Sedra medal this year, so it is better than last year. But I won't be satisfied with that...Gotta to work harder.

p.s. I have promised that I will write something regarding the non-engineering careers of engineering students. I will try to post it by the end of this weekend.
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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Yau 终于开始反击New Yorker了

2006-09-21T23:18:00.000-04:00

[Keyword: Poincare Conjecture, Yau Shing-Tung (丘成桐), Perelman, Topology ]
(If you know none of these keywords or are not interested, this blog entry will probably make no sense to you)

前一段时间New Yorker的文章Manifold Destiny围绕着Poincare Conjecture大造文章。
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060828fa_fact2

虽然这篇文章在New Yorker的Fact Column，但实际上却非常误导人，很多论点都是无中生有，或者断章取义，恶意中伤，影响很坏。很多记者就是这样，玩弄手法。-----It is said that, writers never lie, they just make up stories.

现在Prof. Yau终于开始采取行动了，而且反击有理有据。支持老丘!
http://www.doctoryau.com/

真理是越辩越明的!

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Life is an opportunity to do something.