|
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
What I have read this week, October 8, 2017
Sunday, September 24, 2017
What I have read this week | September 24, 2017
The Catholic church becomes an impact investor
The Catholic church becomes an impact investor
“YOU cannot serve both God and money,” admonishes the Bible. But the church has always tried. In the Middle Ages monasteries were what would now be termed…
September 18, 2017 at 10:35PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2xdYpeO September 18, 2017 at 10:35PM
Note:
Vatican is adopting impact investing (intended to make money and do good at the same time) as a promising but complimentary strategy to expand its philanthropy efforts. The impact investing fund has $1bn under its control at the moment. It differentiate from the church's old way of 'sequential' financing strategy, where the church first acquires wealth then gives it away, to a 'parallel' one. The effort of impact investing, despite inspired by the pope, causes some anxiety. However, impact investing is no substitute for charity in its current form, and viewed as promising but complimentary strategy.
How Unconscious Sexism Could Help Explain Trump’s Win
How Unconscious Sexism Could Help Explain Trump’s Win
September 18, 2017 at 10:48PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2jj218O September 18, 2017 at 10:48PM
via Instapaper https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-unconscious-sexism-could-help-explain-trumps-win/
Note:
Trump voters shows higher implicit bias towards professional women. It is not conclusive, however, to say that it is driving their voting behavior.
Interesting takeaways:
- Women have more implicit gender bias than men do on average as a group.
- More politically conservative women are, more biased they are towards women. Men on both sides shows similar level of bias. However, politically neutral males are less biased then both liberals and conservatives.
- Gender bias increases with age, with significant increases during teenage years.
- HCD’s test , for testing implicit bias. although it won't tell your individual results.
The Netflix Prize: How a $1 Million Contest Changed Binge-Watching Forever
The Netflix Prize: How a $1 Million Contest Changed Binge-Watching Forever
September 19, 2017 at 07:20AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2t3OcPT September 19, 2017 at 07:20AM
Note:
Netflix set up a one-million dollar prize for a better recommendation algorithm or recommender back at 2006, when it was still a mail-DVD rental company. To win the million dollar, the team or individual has to improve the bench mark recommender performance by 10%. The competition fosters a community of developers/coders on the subject, with invaluable dataset of over 100 million ratings of 17,770 movies from 480,189 customers. This amount of date has never been available to public before. The competition advanced the field of recommender system significantly. It turns out that a cocktail of different solutions is the best way to improve recommendation results. The prize was won on September 18, 2009 by a team by tie-breaker. The winning team submitted the final product 20 minutes earlier, even though scored the same as the second place team.
Other companies have since then followed suite, opening its own data trove with a prize money in exchange for better algorithm. Companies like Yahoo! and Zillow have released massive amount of data, while the Heritage Health Prize offered a $3 million reward for the engineer who could predict how long people will be hospitalized for.
Netflix started another competition called Netflix Prize 2, with over 100 million data points including demographics and other background information of users. The competition never took off due to privacy invasion laws suits against the company.
I'm interested in studying Zillow's public data!
Trump’s Popularity Has Dipped Most In Red States
Trump’s Popularity Has Dipped Most In Red States
There are no national elections for president in the United States. Democrats relearned that lesson the hard way in 2016, when President Trump won the Electoral…
September 19, 2017 at 04:48PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2ftom3J September 19, 2017 at 04:49PM
via Instapaper https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-popularity-has-dipped-most-in-red-states/
Note:
Title says it all, Trump's popularity has dipped most in red states. Nothing conclusive yet, but worth noticing.
The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republican Party
The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republican Party
Supporter of the policies of a sitting American president. Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images Political scientist Lee Drutman argues in a Vox essay that…
September 19, 2017 at 05:12PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2gWpBvO September 19, 2017 at 05:12PM
via Instapaper http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/the-only-problem-in-american-politics-is-the-republicans.html
Note:
Cherry picking anything in favor of their own view, creating and exacerbating party's own sphere of media/talk host resembling socially engineered democracy, smearing opponents with no facts but mainly conspiracy theories, and solely responsible for creating this doom-loop partisanship. The Republican party and associates are the main problem of American politics. Main stream media NY Times etc., which has a tendency to attack the left, even when the facts are not as sound. While Fox News and Rush Limbaugh (or other conservative radio show host) have always selective using favorable anecdotes, or even pure conspiracy theories.
Winner takes all politics needs changing! No matter which side is winning, the government should always be hearing from the broadest audience possible. The current way of American politics creates too many strongholds at every level, from township,state to national level. The minority voice within non-competitive areas are always ignored or squashed, with their interest sacrificed. Less gerrymandering, more population-proportional representation should be the priority of our politics.
Psychologists studied 5,000 genius kids for 45 years — here are their 6 key takeaways
Psychologists studied 5,000 genius kids for 45 years — here are their 6 key takeaways
…
September 19, 2017 at 05:20PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2xn5NrM September 19, 2017 at 05:20PM
Note:
- genius normally does very well in life, on par with their early IQ
- exceptional kids don't get much attention, lots of resources are dedicated to bring kids from low to medium performance
- skipping a grade works (so what...)
- standardized tests are somewhat predictive
- high IQ kids normally ends up in academia/doctor/research (or maybe this is biased, since IQ tests are created by academics, it could be implicitly biased towards traits valued highly in academia.)
- being smart is not all, spatial cognitive/visualization ability is critical, as well as memorization
Good luck, sweet AL Wild Card team, in the wildest October ever
Good luck, sweet AL Wild Card team, in the wildest October ever
This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's October 2 MLB Playoffs Issue. Subscribe today! To exactly one of the Angels, Mariners, Orioles, Rangers, Rays, Royals…
September 21, 2017 at 04:17PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2vY5K1T September 21, 2017 at 04:18PM
via Instapaper http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/2069278
Note:
summary of crazy competitive journey for potential second wild card team in AL.. It shows how good the good teams are overall in baseball.
How Reddit Is Talking About The Trump Presidency
How Reddit Is Talking About The Trump Presidency
Every new presidency brings its own language to America, a set of names, acronyms and slang that work their way into the zeitgeist. The Bush era had 9/11 , WMDs…
September 23, 2017 at 12:06AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2xXRNWw September 23, 2017 at 12:06AM
via Instapaper https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-reddit-is-talking-about-the-trump-presidency/
Note:
an interactive tool for tracking popular words on reddit, during Trump's presidency.
Aaron Hernandez had advanced stages of CTE
Aaron Hernandez had advanced stages of CTE
September 23, 2017 at 12:10AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2xVUkkc September 23, 2017 at 12:10AM
via Instapaper http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/20777856
Note:
Former New England Patriot's star Aaron Hernandez's autopsy shows severe stage 4 CTE (a type of brain damage). At stage 4 out of 5, Hernandez might be the most severe case of CTE at age 27 or younger. CTE can cause violent mood swings, severe depression and other cognitive disorders.
A new trove of data on top of previous autopsies of former NFL players, which found 110 out 111 of them suffered different level of brain damage.
Bonds in the Government Pension Fund Global
Bonds in the Government Pension Fund Global
1 September 2017 Letter to the Ministry of Finance, 1 September 2017 The Ministry of Finance issues guidelines for the Government Pension Fund Global in the…
September 23, 2017 at 12:11AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2xIRN9l September 23, 2017 at 12:11AM
via Instapaper https://www.nbim.no/en/transparency/submissions-to-ministry/2017/bonds-in-the-government-pension-fund-global/
Note:
- Norwegian sovereign fund's submission to the finance ministry arguing for its change of bond investment strategy, which eliminates corporate bond investment, and focus only on government bonds only.
- also can be found on their website is their investment portfolio, which is 65% benchmark stocks (FTSE and Bloomberg, so large cap index of Europe and US), 33% bonds, and 2% undisclosed real estate investment. Following this, I changed my 403 investment strategy to mimic their portfolio.
Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund passes the $1trn mark
Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund passes the $1trn mark
A year earlier than expected, Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund, the world’s largest, surpassed $1trn in assets on September 19th. It had gained over $100bn in the…
September 23, 2017 at 12:16AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2wCPlV4 September 23, 2017 at 12:16AM
via Instapaper https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21729458-5m-odd-norwegians-own-more-1-all-shares-world-norways
Note:
recent stock market rally helps the fund to reach its 1trn mark goal more than 1 year ahead of time. Also prompts me to read more about their investment strategy.
The GOP’s Catch-22 On Obamacare
The GOP’s Catch-22 On Obamacare
September 23, 2017 at 12:22AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2xyQ7Sv September 23, 2017 at 12:22AM
Note:
Repeal of Obamacare is unpopular nation-wide. Repeal of it could mean alienating swing voters, most likely cost them in the mid-term election in 2018. But not repeal risk alienating their base, since this has been the campaign promise for the past 7 years. With both chambers in congress and presidency in control, this will be a heavy blow to Republican party's reputation, and raise severe doubts about their ability to govern.
Kris Kobach Can Prove U.S. Elections Are Messy, But That’s Not The Same Thing As Fraudulent
Kris Kobach Can Prove U.S. Elections Are Messy, But That’s Not The Same Thing As Fraudulent
President Trump’s voter fraud commission has the stated goal of ensuring the integrity of the vote as “ the foundation of our democracy .” But, like the buried…
September 23, 2017 at 08:13AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2xs5RGb September 23, 2017 at 08:13AM
via Instapaper https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/kris-kobach-can-prove-u-s-elections-are-messy-but-thats-not-the-same-thing-as-fraudulent/
Note:
Trump's voter fraud commission trying very hard to use indirect evidence to prove voter fraud, but actually just shows American voting administering is messy instead of fraudulent.
Evidence provided by Trump's commission:
- people showing up in multiple states' registries - counter: states don't do a good job purging voter registration, which is very hard to do due to the mobility of the population, and hardly practical without massive voter depression
- thousands of people using out of state license to vote in New Hampshire - counter: college students are allowed to do so, and the practices are found to be highly concentrated in college towns.
Flying Solo
Flying Solo
Illustration by Katie Kosma This story was funded by Longreads Members Join and help support great storytelling Jen Doll | Longreads | July 2017 | 24 minutes…
September 23, 2017 at 09:51AM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2vr0KTS September 23, 2017 at 09:51AM
via Instapaper https://longreads.com/2017/07/21/flying-solo/
Note:
A mental journey after a breakup with a Christian boyfriend, which was doomed almost from the start with trivial and invisible signs to the insiders.
Life will move on, and conversation has to continue. But changing people, even those seem intimate to us at the moment, is always a gigantic challenge.
Will Miami’s Skyscrapers Withstand Irma?
Will Miami’s Skyscrapers Withstand Irma?
As Irma continues to drive its way through the Atlantic Ocean, bringing with it 150+ mph winds, a lot of comparisons are being drawn to Hurricane Andrew, which…
September 23, 2017 at 02:20PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2weZEd8 September 23, 2017 at 02:20PM
Note:
Current building codes might not be adequate to handle category 4 or 5 Hurricanes, since the assumptions at higher floors are they won't be affected by projectiles. Also the impact resistance glasses at lower levels might not survive the higher winds either. The cranes in downtown could also be a concern since they are only required to withstand category 4 hurricane.
Baseball’s ‘Hot Hand’ Is Real
Baseball’s ‘Hot Hand’ Is Real
Illustration by Kelsey Dake W e’ve all seen a pitcher when he’s zeroed in: His mechanics are clean, his curveball is dropping off the table and he’s painting…
September 23, 2017 at 03:16PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2vq8441 September 23, 2017 at 03:16PM
Note:
Fast ball speed as a proxy is a good predictor of a pitcher's status (hot or cold). Fast ball speed deviation from his average does a fairly decent job of predicting hot/cold hand.
How a football transfer works
How a football transfer works
In football, July and August are known as the “silly season”—and looking at Neymar’s world-record €222m ($261m) move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain…
September 23, 2017 at 04:39PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2vFmxJM September 23, 2017 at 04:39PM
Note:
Surprisingly 'whats app' is the go-to tool for arranging transfers...
Álvaro Morata may need to channel his inner Costa to be Chelsea success | Jonathan Wilson
Álvaro Morata may need to channel his inner Costa to be Chelsea success | Jonathan Wilson
Álvaro Morata never had to cope with the pressure of being a No1 striker while at Real Madrid.Photograph: Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images O f the players…
September 23, 2017 at 04:43PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2wdSaYn September 23, 2017 at 04:43PM
Note:
Alvaro Morata should be more Diego Costa like (more hustle and dirty?) to help Chelsea succeed. He has the talent and mental readiness to achieve this though.
How taxes can align the interests of individuals and society
How taxes can align the interests of individuals and society
This week “The Economist explains” is given over to economics. Today’s is the fourth in a series of six explainers on seminal ideas. MARKETS are supposed to…
September 23, 2017 at 04:48PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/2hi1PdV September 23, 2017 at 04:48PM
via Instapaper https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/09/economist-explains-economics-2
If new archived item, then add to weekly digest sent to wangrz0405@gmail.com on Saturday at 8PM
Note:
Arthur Pigou's economic idea of using taxes to encourage/discourage certain behaviors (tax on social bad like pollution or sugar drinks, also called externalities) is applied to real world. It is to calculate exact values/price to be paid in real world, and obviously creating losers which creates resistance.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich
How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich
The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment
A statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh, Scotland
Photo:
Alamy
Deirdre N. McCloskey
Actually, the “we” of comparative enrichment includes most countries nowadays, with sad exceptions. Two centuries ago, the average world income per human (in present-day prices) was about $3 a day. It had been so since we lived in caves. Now it is $33 a day—which is Brazil’s current level and the level of the U.S. in 1940. Over the past 200 years, the average real income per person—including even such present-day tragedies as Chad and North Korea—has grown by a factor of 10. It is stunning. In countries that adopted trade and economic betterment wholeheartedly, like Japan, Sweden and the U.S., it is more like a factor of 30—even more stunning.
And these figures don’t take into account the radical improvement since 1800 in commonly available goods and services. Today’s concerns over the stagnation of real wages in the U.S. and other developed economies are overblown if put in historical perspective. As the economists Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry have argued in these pages, the official figures don’t take account of the real benefits of our astonishing material progress.
Look at the magnificent plenty on the shelves of supermarkets and shopping malls. Consider the magical devices for communication and entertainment now available even to people of modest means. Do you know someone who is clinically depressed? She can find help today with a range of effective drugs, none of which were available to the billionaire Howard Hughes in his despair. Had a hip joint replaced? In 1980, the operation was crudely experimental.
Nothing like the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries had ever happened before. Doublings of income—mere 100% betterments in the human condition—had happened often, during the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, in Song China and Mughal India. But people soon fell back to the miserable routine of Afghanistan’s income nowadays, $3 or worse. A revolutionary betterment of 10,000%, taking into account everything from canned goods to antidepressants, was out of the question. Until it happened.
What caused it? The usual explanations follow ideology. On the left, from Marx onward, the key is said to be exploitation. Capitalists after 1800 seized surplus value from their workers and invested it in dark, satanic mills. On the right, from the blessed Adam Smith onward, the trick was thought to be savings. The wild Highlanders could become as rich as the Dutch—“the highest degree of opulence,” as Smith put it in 1776—if they would merely save enough to accumulate capital (and stop stealing cattle from one another).
A recent extension of Smith’s claim, put forward by the late economics Nobelist Douglass North (and now embraced as orthodoxy by the World Bank) is that the real elixir is institutions. On this view, if you give a nation’s lawyers fine robes and white wigs, you will get something like English common law. Legislation will follow, corruption will vanish, and the nation will be carried by the accumulation of capital to the highest degree of opulence.
But none of the explanations gets it quite right.
What enriched the modern world wasn’t capital stolen from workers or capital virtuously saved, nor was it institutions for routinely accumulating it. Capital and the rule of law were necessary, of course, but so was a labor force and liquid water and the arrow of time.
The capital became productive because of ideas for betterment—ideas enacted by a country carpenter or a boy telegrapher or a teenage Seattle computer whiz. As Matt Ridley put it in his book “The Rational Optimist” (2010), what happened over the past two centuries is that “ideas started having sex.” The idea of a railroad was a coupling of high-pressure steam engines with cars running on coal-mining rails. The idea for a lawn mower coupled a miniature gasoline engine with a miniature mechanical reaper. And so on, through every imaginable sort of invention. The coupling of ideas in the heads of the common people yielded an explosion of betterments.
Look around your room and note the hundreds of post-1800 ideas embedded in it: electric lights, central heating and cooling, carpet woven by machine, windows larger than any achievable until the float-glass process. Or consider your own human capital formed at college, or your dog’s health from visits to the vet.
The ideas sufficed. Once we had the ideas for railroads or air conditioning or the modern research university, getting the wherewithal to do them was comparatively simple, because they were so obviously profitable.
Storefronts along Hudson Street in New York City, circa 1860 to 1900.
Photo:
Fotosearch/Getty Images
Why did ideas so suddenly start having sex, there and then? Why did it all start at first in Holland about 1600 and then England about 1700 and then the North American colonies and England’s impoverished neighbor, Scotland, and then Belgium and northern France and the Rhineland?
The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not. By certain accidents of European politics, having nothing to do with deep European virtue, more and more Europeans were liberated. From Luther’s reformation through the Dutch revolt against Spain after 1568 and England’s turmoil in the Civil War of the 1640s, down to the American and French revolutions, Europeans came to believe that common people should be liberated to have a go. You might call it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
To use another big concept, what came—slowly, imperfectly—was equality. It was not an equality of outcome, which might be labeled “French” in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Piketty. It was, so to speak, “Scottish,” in honor of David Hume and Adam Smith: equality before the law and equality of social dignity. It made people bold to pursue betterments on their own account. It was, as Smith put it, “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”
And that is the other surprising notion explaining our riches: “liberalism,” in its original meaning of “worthy of a free person.” Liberalism was a new idea. The English Leveller Richard Rumbold, facing the hangman in 1685, declared, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.” Few in the crowd gathered to mock him would have agreed. A century later, advanced thinkers like Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft embraced the idea. Two centuries after that, virtually everyone did. And so the Great Enrichment came.
Not everyone was happy with such developments and the ideas behind them. In the 18th century, liberal thinkers such as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin courageously advocated liberty in trade. By the 1830s and 1840s, a much enlarged intelligentsia, mostly the sons of bourgeois fathers, commenced sneering loftily at the liberties that had enriched their elders and made possible their own leisure. The sons advocated the vigorous use of the state’s monopoly of violence to achieve one or another utopia, soon.
Intellectuals on the political right, for instance, looked back with nostalgia to an imagined Middle Ages, free from the vulgarity of trade, a nonmarket golden age in which rents and hierarchy ruled. Such a conservative and Romantic vision of olden times fit well with the right’s perch in the ruling class. Later in the 19th century, under the influence of a version of science, the right seized upon social Darwinism and eugenics to devalue the liberty and dignity of ordinary people and to elevate the nation’s mission above the mere individual person, recommending colonialism and compulsory sterilization and the cleansing power of war.
On the left, meanwhile, a different cadre of intellectuals developed the illiberal idea that ideas don’t matter. What matters to progress, the left declared, was the unstoppable tide of history, aided by protest or strike or revolution directed at the evil bourgeoisie—such thrilling actions to be led, naturally, by themselves. Later, in European socialism and American Progressivism, the left proposed to defeat bourgeois monopolies in meat and sugar and steel by gathering under regulation or syndicalism or central planning or collectivization all the monopolies into one supreme monopoly called the state.
While all this deep thinking was roiling the intelligentsia of Europe, the commercial bourgeoisie—despised by the right and the left, and by many in the middle, too—created the Great Enrichment and the modern world. The Enrichment gigantically improved our lives. In doing so, it proved that both social Darwinism and economic Marxism were mistaken. The supposedly inferior races and classes and ethnicities proved not to be so. The exploited proletariat was not driven into misery; it was enriched. It turned out that ordinary men and women didn’t need to be directed from above, and when honored and left alone, became immensely creative.
The Great Enrichment is the most important secular event since human beings first domesticated wheat and horses. It has been and will continue to be more important historically than the rise and fall of empires or the class struggle in all hitherto existing societies. Empire did not enrich Britain. America’s success did not depend on slavery. Power did not lead to plenty, and exploitation was not plenty’s engine. Progress toward French-style equality of outcome was achieved not by taxation and redistribution but by the Scots’ very different notion of equality. The real engine was the expanding ideology of classical liberalism.
The Great Enrichment has restarted history. It will end poverty. For a good part of humankind, it already has. China and India, which have adopted some of economic liberalism, have exploded in growth. Brazil, Russia and South Africa, not to speak of the European Union—all of them fond of planning and protectionism and level playing fields—have stagnated.
Economists and historians from left, right and center cannot explain the Great Enrichment. Perhaps their sciences need revision, toward a “humanomics” that takes ideas seriously. Humanomics doesn’t abandon the economics of arbitrage or entry, or the math of elasticities of demand, or the statistics of regression analysis. But it adds the study of words and meaning and their stunning contribution to our enrichment.
Over 200 years, average world income per person has soared from about $3 a day to a stunning $33 a day.
Photo:
Getty Images
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, had the right idea in what he said to Reason magazine last year: “When people ask, ‘Will our children be better off than we are?’ I reply, ‘Yes, but it’s not going to be due to the politicians, but the engineers.’ ”
I would supplement his remark. It will also come from the businessperson who buys low to sell high, the hairdresser who spots an opportunity for a new shop, the oil roughneck who moves to and from North Dakota with alacrity and all the other commoners who agree to the basic bourgeois deal: Let me seize an opportunity for economic betterment, tested in trade, and I’ll make us all rich.
Dr. McCloskey is distinguished professor emerita of economics, history, English and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This essay is adapted from her new book, “Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World,” published by the University of Chicago Press.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
My Reading Plan
My reading plan.
I think it should start what specific topic I want to learn, and then start with a few most famous book/author or book list. There are several advantages in reading this way. First, if after reading a few books I found the topic is not as interesting as I thought, there would be no need to spend more time. Second, it is a great way to narrow down the topic I want to focus on. After so many years of book production, even a small topic, say like the history of 1950-1955 may be covered by hundreds of books (the U.S. have published 292,037 in 2011 alone). Most of the times the interest starts with a vague idea, then it could be more specific after reading several books. Although it is still instrumental to know what do I want to know from these books/readings. Writing on blog on the topic? Writing a series of essays? Or just broaden my knowledge and have a better understanding of a specific thing? Always start with the result will make things much easier to carry on and define a certain stop point.
Right now, I have a few topics in mind that need to be addressed. First is of course my thesis, that involves a shortlist of reading including some papers and books. Then I am interested in interview techniques, how to express myself more clearly and intrigue companies to hire me. A little beyond professional, I want to know the complete general world history, history of Europe, history of the United States, history of the United Kingdom and history of China in a chronically way. As I have long been interested, there are some popular psychology/cognitive/social psychology knowledge I want to know more, like how human behavior are influenced by the context, how to focus more, how much unconsciousness affects the way we behave, and eventually how I can better control and organize myself.
Although I still feel something in my mind, reading this will probably take me a year or two. Obviously other ideas will come up or follow the reading. So first let me get the thesis done and nail a job, during this time, collecting interesting book titles for the rest of the topic will be a leisure.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
初衷
这个博客的目的，或许不是让人阅读，当是让我自己每天整肃自己。正视自己不会成为儿时梦想里的人，不会拿到诺贝尔奖，不会成为人人敬仰的教授，不会成为声名赫赫的大作家，不会成为钱多到手软还继续低调装逼的人，也不会成为一个举手投足一呼百应的名人或政客。平凡，该是我今生的结局。人只活一次，纵以佛教言，万物轮回，一切皆为因果，但终究，纵然成佛，无价的自然人生只有一回。因此，不记录自己生命中的脚步，只把一切交给年老时的回忆，好象不该是个把工程师当生活目标的人所当做的。
认清和审视自己，并非要接收平淡安逸的选择，而是该看清自己的起点，再使出自己的全力，只活一次，更要有意思。记录每一天，点滴所作，所想，自省，是这个小空间的意义。
研究和学术
今天浏览量50篇左右和我的毕业论文相关的论文，发觉学术可能该分为以下几步。通过大量基础知识的学习，讨论，自己或老师或者合作提出一个有意思的问题，通过阅读，或者讨论精确定义问题的范围。这时的阅读主要是概括性的，文献综述，小领域和具体应用的概论。之后开始认真研究问题，同时在研究的过程中不断明晰，也一步步重新定位自己，聚焦于问题的重点，关注类似研究的动向，总结别人的经验，提升自己的知识，与人合作和沟通，同样的问题，与不同人的讨论都会诞生很多有趣的观点。和人交流，暴露自己的不足，并不是件丢人的事儿，不懂而不问，才是真傻。问问题也是门技巧，一要自己认真思考，二要真诚，三要多和不同的人谈，在恰当的时机交流。像所有世上的事儿一样，好的提问者来自于不断思考和实践。
回到研究问题上来，总结是极为重要的。定时的总结，能够了解自己的进度，修正自己的方向，就如人生总结一样，不断审视自己，不断审视自己的结果，才能明白自己哪儿能做的更好，下一步该向哪儿走。最好的总结当然是结于文字，报告，说与人听。比较才是最好的丈量。
再说读论文的感想，读论文最好的方式是带着明确的目的，明确到能够落于纸上，最为细节的目的。比如我想找这篇论文里对方怎么推倒公式的过程，以及最后的公式或者结论，记下自己的目标。或者我想要这篇文章中关于这个实验设计和结果的某几项具体参数，几何尺寸，运行工况，具体如何。
魔鬼在细节不是一句空话，但是关键是对认真的对待每个细节，以及细节能有多细。
2013-12-04，/00:58，当以自勉。
认清和审视自己，并非要接收平淡安逸的选择，而是该看清自己的起点，再使出自己的全力，只活一次，更要有意思。记录每一天，点滴所作，所想，自省，是这个小空间的意义。
研究和学术
今天浏览量50篇左右和我的毕业论文相关的论文，发觉学术可能该分为以下几步。通过大量基础知识的学习，讨论，自己或老师或者合作提出一个有意思的问题，通过阅读，或者讨论精确定义问题的范围。这时的阅读主要是概括性的，文献综述，小领域和具体应用的概论。之后开始认真研究问题，同时在研究的过程中不断明晰，也一步步重新定位自己，聚焦于问题的重点，关注类似研究的动向，总结别人的经验，提升自己的知识，与人合作和沟通，同样的问题，与不同人的讨论都会诞生很多有趣的观点。和人交流，暴露自己的不足，并不是件丢人的事儿，不懂而不问，才是真傻。问问题也是门技巧，一要自己认真思考，二要真诚，三要多和不同的人谈，在恰当的时机交流。像所有世上的事儿一样，好的提问者来自于不断思考和实践。
回到研究问题上来，总结是极为重要的。定时的总结，能够了解自己的进度，修正自己的方向，就如人生总结一样，不断审视自己，不断审视自己的结果，才能明白自己哪儿能做的更好，下一步该向哪儿走。最好的总结当然是结于文字，报告，说与人听。比较才是最好的丈量。
再说读论文的感想，读论文最好的方式是带着明确的目的，明确到能够落于纸上，最为细节的目的。比如我想找这篇论文里对方怎么推倒公式的过程，以及最后的公式或者结论，记下自己的目标。或者我想要这篇文章中关于这个实验设计和结果的某几项具体参数，几何尺寸，运行工况，具体如何。
魔鬼在细节不是一句空话，但是关键是对认真的对待每个细节，以及细节能有多细。
2013-12-04，/00:58，当以自勉。
Thursday, November 28, 2013
谷歌搜索技巧
今天看看具体的搜索技巧。
谷歌提供了很多运算符号来帮助我们找到我们想找的东西。例如我想要针对某个网站进行搜索，就可以用到第一个运算符，site 运算符。我们可以用 site:某网站地址 + 关键词的方式，搜索指定网站内的内容；或者指定某些特定域名，比如.gov或者.edu，只搜索带有这些域名后缀的网站。
举例来说，比如我想要做一份关于收入的调查，我需要政府在这方面的数据。于是我就会搜索 工资 site:.gov。结果如下。
小提示：记住，无论是网站名称还是后缀，都要紧跟在冒号的后面，跟冒号之间不要有空格。空格会被谷歌认为是新的词的开始。
谷歌还可以帮我们搜索公开的文档，比如pdf，word，ppt，excel，csv之类。有时候我们认为想要的资料会出现在某种特定的文件类型中，比如excel表格，或是ppt文档，谷歌可以帮助我们搜索特定类型的文档。这回需要的运算符就是 filetype 运算符。接着刚才我们想要做的工资调查。我们想要知道纽约的工资的数据统计，我们就可以用如下的方法搜索。
最后一个常用的搜索运算符是 intext 运算符。限制搜索的结果必须在网页中包含intext运算符后面的字符串。这有点像所谓的搜索结果内再搜索，比如我想找一些关于珊瑚礁的地质学资料，就可以这么搜索：
谷歌提供了很多运算符号来帮助我们找到我们想找的东西。例如我想要针对某个网站进行搜索，就可以用到第一个运算符，site 运算符。我们可以用 site:某网站地址 + 关键词的方式，搜索指定网站内的内容；或者指定某些特定域名，比如.gov或者.edu，只搜索带有这些域名后缀的网站。
举例来说，比如我想要做一份关于收入的调查，我需要政府在这方面的数据。于是我就会搜索 工资 site:.gov。结果如下。
我们看到，搜索的结果就是很多政府的关于工资的网页。而想要更多的信息，比如最低工资，平均工资等等，也可以换关键词进行搜索。
小提示：记住，无论是网站名称还是后缀，都要紧跟在冒号的后面，跟冒号之间不要有空格。空格会被谷歌认为是新的词的开始。
谷歌还可以帮我们搜索公开的文档，比如pdf，word，ppt，excel，csv之类。有时候我们认为想要的资料会出现在某种特定的文件类型中，比如excel表格，或是ppt文档，谷歌可以帮助我们搜索特定类型的文档。这回需要的运算符就是 filetype 运算符。接着刚才我们想要做的工资调查。我们想要知道纽约的工资的数据统计，我们就可以用如下的方法搜索。
这里，我同时采用了两个运算符，第一个是filetype:.csv，限制了查找的文件类型，是csv表格数据。另外我用site:.gov 把查找的范围限制在了政府的网站。第一个结果就很符合我的要求，是纽约市统计局的一份表格。
小提示：同site运算符一样，对filetype运算符而言，格式都要紧跟在冒号的后面，跟冒号之间不要有空格。例如搜索filetype: csv 其实是没啥用的，Google会认为关键词是两个，一个叫filetype，一个叫csv。
有的时候，我们想找包含完整词组的网页，这时候就用上双引号。例如“the good wife”,搜到的就是所有完整包含the good wife这个词组的句子。这个适用于有时候单个词的结果出现频率高于整个短语的时候，可以排除很多我们不想要的结果。至于为什么会出现这个情况，就要回到 谷歌是怎么所搜索的这个问题上来，可以点这里看看。
在搜索的时候，有时我们知道搜索结果里会混入某些我们不想要的东西。比如我们想找一家叫达芬奇的手术流程，可是我们知道，直接搜索达芬奇的话，常出现的结果会是关于著名画家达芬奇的网页。所以为了排除关于达芬奇这个人的结果，我们就要用到 “-” 运算符，即减号标志。
如图，我们剔除了 da vinci 这个词组中包含 artist的所有网页。
小提示：同样，减号和要排除的关键字之间不能有空格，否则Google会忽略减号，认为要搜索的是 da vinci artist，效果正相反。
搜索的时候，我们可能需要扩大自己的搜索范围，比如在搜索一些我们认为是同义词的东西的时候，比如“馄饨” OR “云吞”，就可以给我们两个词都有的结果。
用简单的数学里集合的概念来解释 减号运算符和 OR（或）运算符，就是下面的样子：
小提示：OR运算符一定要大写，否则就只是正常的or这个单词。
最后一个常用的搜索运算符是 intext 运算符。限制搜索的结果必须在网页中包含intext运算符后面的字符串。这有点像所谓的搜索结果内再搜索，比如我想找一些关于珊瑚礁的地质学资料，就可以这么搜索：
搜索的结果，就主要是关于珊瑚的地质学学术资料了。
这些搜索的功能，都可以在Google的advanced search里找到，
这些搜索的技巧都可以结合起来运用，帮助我们更快更好的利用谷歌找到我们想要的结果。搜索的要诀，在于想清楚自己要找的东西，精确的描述、表达自己想要的结果。很多时候，搜索也是一个过程，需要多走几步，获取更多的信息，才能找到最好的结果。
这些搜索的功能，都可以在Google的advanced search里找到，
这些搜索的技巧都可以结合起来运用，帮助我们更快更好的利用谷歌找到我们想要的结果。搜索的要诀，在于想清楚自己要找的东西，精确的描述、表达自己想要的结果。很多时候，搜索也是一个过程，需要多走几步，获取更多的信息，才能找到最好的结果。
谷歌是怎么搜索的
这两天正在学习Google上线的“玩转谷歌搜索”（ Power Searching with Google）小课程，发现了许多以前不知道的好技巧，以飨众人。
理解搜索是怎么实现的，会帮助我们理解搜索的结果，改进搜索的方式。所以首先是关于Google搜索的一些基础知识。Google的搜索方式是从Google的服务器中抓取所有包含关键词的网页，关键词出现的地方包括了网络链接地址（URL）、网页标题、网页内的内容等等。比如我输入 猪头 两个字，Google会提取服务器里所有包含 “猪” 和 “头” 字的网页。Google是怎么决定网页的排序呢？首先如果“猪” 和 “头” 两个字是紧连的（作为一个词，phrase），那么包含“猪头”的结果更接近我们想要的，而不是任意一个包含“猪”或者“头”单个字的网页，因为我们输入时并没有把这两个字分开。精彩的地方来了，接下来谷歌又是怎么排序的呢？Google搜索的精髓在于它借用了类似学术论文排名的方式来对网页进行排名，有兴趣的话可以戳这儿看看Google创始人 拉里·佩吉 和 谢尔盖·布林 最早的论文。 简单的说，就是根据一个网页被其他网页引用的次数来判断这个网页的排名（现如今还有另外两百多项指标来对网页进行排名）。回到我们的例子上，谷歌显示的第一个结果，就是它认为包含“猪头”这个词中排名最高的网页。
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)