Category: personal AnGoL

.
in response to this statement from jaafgie:

The fact that less than 20% of the initial block makes it to grad day means that there’s either something wrong with the selection process, the curriculum, or the quality of education and teaching.

Probably the problem is with selection and the program.
I read somewhere that in Harvard they had a projected grade that few people deviate from. You probably had to be someone who couldn’t take the pressure and ultimately failed or someone like bill gates who just had to conquer the world (In a way.)
In another interview I read that the head of an Ivy League institution alumni fund raising head probably Princeton or Yale commissioned a research  on donors. He wanted to know what were the profiles of the students who donated money later on.
What they found out was very interesting, it wasn’t the ones with the highest grades or the best in everything that were the most likely to donate 20 million later on in life. The people who donated the most were the were jst good enough to get through the selection wall and had other skills. They were the ones who were presiednt of an organization, already doing nonprofit volunteer work, people who had what they call soft skills (leadership, management, communication).
The thing is if you graduate from eee of up, you went through a very challenging set of hoops, and (specifically for someone) you are one of the smartest people anyone of us would probably know personally. The problem is that I feel that the “future donors to the department” are somewhat being turned away because the hoops are more apt to produce college professors (Nothing wrong with this i love my professors) rather than future stewards of industry. Think of it this way, circuit and erg consistently place at the top 6 of the freshman orientation rankings, and those two organizations are not pushovers in the engineering week overall championships. We have some of the best if not the best students in our department, but we seem to not let them fly. We burden them with stuff that they probably would be forgetting a semester removed. I read something from a professor I think a canadian school, he said “Joy First Theory Second”. And forgive me for saying this but in eee its, “Theory First, Your lucky if you find Joy”
If I were to regret something, it was that if I graduated on time I would probably never have found the time to love science, engineering , technology and research. If i graduated on time I would have been lacking most of the soft skill that I believe I now possess. The course was hard enough to really limit interactions and joy of work.
The thing is Ideally I shouldn’t have had to graduate 2 years later than expected to just have a full college experience.

I so long to be a teacher. and when the time finally arrives. Hell I’m going to be one hell of a teacher.  hope I do become one and I’m going to be using this as a criterion.  Do I change the people that I teach?

Successful designs shape those for whom they are designed. In designing structures for people, we design them, their possibilities.
I wonder how often we who make software think this sobering thought. How often do we simply string characters together without considering that our product might — should?! — change the lives of its users? My experience with software written by small, independent developers for the Mac leads me to think that at least a few programmers believe they are doing something more than “just” cutting code to make a buck.
I have had similar feelings about tools built for the agile world. Even if Ward and Kent were only scratching their own itches when they built their first unit-testing framework in Smalltalk, something tells me they knew they were doing more than “making a tool”; they were changing how they could write Smalltalk. And I believe that Kent and Erich knew that JUnit would redefine the world of the developers who adopted it.
What about educators? I wonder how often we who “design curriculum” think this sobering thought. Our students should become new people after taking even one of our courses. If they don’t, then the course wasn’t part of their education; it’s just a line on their transcripts. How sad. After four years in a degree programs, our students should see and want possibilities that were beyond their ken at the start.
Knowing and Doing: September 2008 Archives.

Sometimes its all about the money. I wish I started bloggin before bloggin was about the money, but sadly I was too preoccupied then.

Recently an econoblogger emailed me to ask about a website which had been stealing his content without his permission. He asked them to stop, and they did — but he was still unhappy; I told him that the best thing to do was simply not be unhappy.
It’s the nature of blogs to put intellectual property out there, on the web, for free. If you do that, there will be lots of unintended consequences. Don’t sweat them. If Barry really thinks that Seeking Alpha wouldn’t have used the phrase “The Big Picture” were it not for the existence of his blog, then, well, that tab over at seekingalpha.com is just another one of thousands of unintended consequences that Barry’s blog has had.
Bloggers can control the content on their own sites; that’s hard enough. It’s just not worth it to start getting upset about content on other sites, especially when that content isn’t doing you any harm.
Blogonomics: Brand Theft – Finance Blog – Felix Salmon – Market Movers – Portfolio.com.

.
Watching this obama ad, made me remember the my favorite show (tied with the Wire) the West Wing. I distinctly remember the matt santos ad where matt santos says “This is matt santos and you better believe that I approve this ad”. I was almost half expecting barack obama to say those very words.
This left me wanting to rewatch my favorite scenes from the west wing. thanks to youtube, Desire To watch Favorite Scenes + youtube means a half day spent on watching West Wing scenes. Damn you west wing. I love that show soooooo much!

Reading this made me WANT TO WORK HARDER!

— He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Harvard (in Law)
— age 24, he wrote the definitive book ‘The Naval War of 1812’, standard history for two generations.
— age 24 the president appointed him to the United States Civil Service Commission, where he served for 13 years. In his term, he vigorously fought the spoilsmen and demanded the enforcement of civil service laws.
Angry Bear: Dueling Mooses.

I confess that I had a pixar marathon this weekend (Incredibles, Ratatouille two times each), and It really helped me rediscover cooking again. I was planning a hackaton last saturday but it became a cookfest!
Thanks to j for the pointer: from here:

Anime Sommelier
Interesting piece from the Times Online on the biggest trend shaping the Japanese wine market:
Entire 20,000-bottle shipments of burgundy sell out within hours in Tokyo if he so much as looks at a glass, South Korea’s biggest film star is lined-up to play him in a TV drama and he has converted thousands of Asian women into the most discerning oenophiles.
In the rarefied world of superstar sommeliers, there may be none greater than Shizuku Kanzaki. The only snag is that he is a cartoon.
Despite his two-dimensional limitations, the hero of Kami no Shizuku (The drops of the gods) has emerged as an extraordinarily potent mover of Asian wine markets — far more so, say some in the industry, than flesh-and-blood wine critics.
The sales records of Japan’s largest wine merchants have been smashed because, in a single frame of comic, the hero has uttered a dreamy sigh over a 2006 New Zealand Riesling or closed his eyes in appreciation of a Saint-Aubin Premier Cru.
…….Shizuku’s adventures are read by about 500,000 Japanese each week and book collections of the comics have sold millions of copies. Wines that feature in his weekly manga activities regularly become overnight hits, particularly for Japan’s frenetic online wine markets.
In Taiwan a single reference to a relatively obscure French terroir shifted dozens of cases of the stuff within a few days.
…..
Watch your back Parker.
Posted by J at 8:43 PM
Labels: Miscellany
The Meaningfulness of Little Things: Anime Sommelier.

Do we have to be victimized for us to have compassion?
Damn, just got this idea for an Alan Moore Graphic Novel:
The main idea is that for people to be compassionate we need to be victimized, and in 2059 the government institutes a law that people have to be victimized to help them in the pursuit of happyness!
From Overcoming Bias here:

Guiltless Victims

When we are reminded of when others have victimized us, we are less able to see that we victimize others:

Wohl and Branscombe randomly divided [US] volunteers into groups. One group was reminded of the terrorist attacks, while another was told about Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II. A third group was reminded of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. … Volunteers reminded about the Sept. 11 attacks were less likely to perceive the distress the [Iraq] war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility, compared with volunteers told about the tragedy in Poland. … it makes no difference whether you remind them about the Sept. 11 attacks or about Pearl Harbor. …
The psychologists re-ran the experiment with Canadian volunteers. Two groups heard reminders of the Sept. 11 attacks and Pearl Harbor, while a third heard about a deadly terrorist attack in Sri Lanka.  None of these tragedies affected Canadians personally. Wohl and Branscombe found no differences among the groups in whether they felt distress on behalf of Iraqis, or a sense of collective guilt.  … The psychologists similarly found that Jewish volunteers in North America feel reduced guilt and responsibility for Israeli actions that cause suffering among Palestinians when they are first reminded about the Holocaust, compared with when they are reminded about the genocide in Cambodia.