What College is about

Today a Year-1 student approached me asking about minoring in Statistics. He complained that there are too many prerequisite courses and he was not so sure whether he could accomplish it. And here is what I replied:

...There are prerequisites; however, you may consider waiving them by consulting the math department head... [This practice] is common for students pursuing advanced levels of achievement. Do never be impeded by mere stated prerequisites. You will find the experience of taking advanced courses especially rewarding as you will learn a lot along the way and challenge your intellectual limit.

While I was reading Cal Newport's How to Win at College recently, I've been thinking, for what we came here to college? A higher than everyone else's GPA? A presidency of a student club? Being awed by peers and favored by teachers? The last two paragraphs of the above stated book really touched me:

I conclude this book with these words because I believe that pursuing your ambitions for the right reasons is more important than any specific strategy for succeeding at college. If you want to succeed because you like the attention, then this book can't help you. If you want succeed to prove yourself to others, then this book can't help you. If you want to succeed because you enjoy adulation and praise, then this book can't help you. You will never really win, because the fear of failure will always be lurking around the next corner.

If, however, you want to succeed because you love the excitement of pushing your potential and exploring your world and new experiences, if you want to succeed because life is short and why not fill it with as much activity as possible, then you will win. If you approach life with an attitude of never having regrets and always having a hopeful smile on your face, you can find a measure of success in all your endeavors. Don't have no regrets, but have plenty of fun along the way. In the end, that is what it is to really win.

So prove yourself only to yourself. Strive to reach your limit. There is no defined success for everyone. Success is defined for you and for you only by achieving the mightiest things in the world as you can.

Hitachi Mini-Stereo

Are you considering buying one?

On Learning English, Again

Ever since my success in the TOEFL test, the frequency of people asking me about how to learn English has risen to a brand-new level. Every time there’s someone asking me, I kept thinking, why can’t everybody do the same if I can do it. And here is what I came up with recently.

(Apparently) most everyone can speak their mother tongue very well – basically because they have no other choice, even if we cannot understand something written in our mother tongue, we still have to crack it, possibly aided by a dictionary or an instructor, but still, we have to understand the words in their own "physical form". There is not an alternative since our mother tongue is the primary choice in comprehension. The usual method we use in learning a second language, i.e. translating it into our first language, does not work!

Therefore I can’t stop thinking why we cannot learn a second language as if it is our first. Imagine you are a Chinese, and is reading a text written by the 20th Century Chinese writer Lu Xun (if you are not Chinese, think about some influential writer who lived some a hundred years ago). It is not uncommon for students to complain that Mr. Zhou’s (i.e. Lu Xun's) dialect is obscure and hard to understand. However, even after checking a reference source and having your teacher explain the background and theme of the essay, you still have to rely on your innate language ability to understand the article.

Okay, now let’s look back at learning a second language. When you are presented with a piece of text in English, and if you have trouble understanding quite a portion of the text either because of your lack of vocabulary or impotence to connect the words into meaningful chunks, you probably would look for a Chinese version of the article to read instead. That is at least common of many of my friends - many from the math department read texts in Chinese only!

My advice here: pretend that you can understand even if you don't! This may sound ridiculous at first but if we investigate further, we will find that it is effective in forcing yourself to decipher the meaning of the text as if it is your first language. This is exactly what I experienced back in high school. In fact I couldn't understand original versions of English novels very well until my senior years in high school. In at the first few trials I did encounter manifold problems following the flow, especially the detailed descriptions. But I did not just throw the book away and turn to a Chinese translation - I stuck with the book and read as if I could understand. And by the end of my high school years, I was capable of the vast majority of modern English articles.

This does not work only with reading - it works equally well with listening and speaking. Take speaking as an example. When you speak in English, imagine yourself as a native speaker. Talk as it you are an American or Briton - it does not matter that at first your accent would sound awkward; you will gradually grab the right way to pronounce and intonate along the way. And do speak with confidence; do make yourself heard clearly. Many language learners speak as if murmuring and the listener is simply disappointed because they can't quite hear the speaker.

These are I what I've thought of recently. Hope they'll be of help.

Retweet (Beta) on Twitter

Today Twitter launched a new feature (in beta) with a name that probably has been familiar to your for ages - Retweet. It is a feature that should have been there a long time ago. Basically it allows users to retweet on Twitter directly by clicking on a button at the end of the original tweet (instead of copy-and-paste). If you are not yet chosen a member of the beta group, the retweet will still start with an "RT" as before.

On Exam and China Leave

The exam season is lurking at the horizon. As a friend put it, I really take no "rubbish course" this semester. That means every one of the eight coming finals counts. Though it has been fascinating to learn extensive hard-knock knowledge from these courses (and some are inevitably quite boring, e.g. law), it is also very draining; and for some I had to learn external knowledge myself to make sure that I could meet the professors' expectations. All in all, I won't be here often these days, and as usual I will spend my Christmas in China, where Blogspot is blocked, for the sake of which I won't come here often probably until early to mid- January. However, you can expect me to appear every now and then on Twitter. Take care!

Obama's Health Care Plan Passes House

Read it on N.Y. Times. Universal health care is a moral issue - more than an economic one. However substantial the cost may be, as long as the affordability is in place, there is not a reason to reject such a plan. Thank Nelson for the pointer.

Google Dictionary is Collins Cobuild

By yesterday, I already noticed that the wording and style of the Google Dictionary explanations looked familiar. A thought that it was derived from the Collins Cobuild Dictionary quickly passed through my mind. Today, I was quite tempted to check it, and it turned out that I was right.

Google Dictionary

You probably already know the define: operator of Google for a long time, which serves as a quasi- online dictionary. However, do you realize that Google have a real dictionary service (which is, as you guessed it, free!)? Like the operator mentioned, the Google Dictionary provides you with definitions of a word. However, it is much more formatted than that of the define: operator, as well as enriched with example sentences; more importantly, it supports more than a dozen languages, and can help users translate around! You may also "star"/bookmark a word and review later. So besides dictionary.com and W-M (or any other such services you are accustomed to), you now have another choice.

P.S. I've enabled the Followers gadget of this blog. You can now openly (or secretly, if you wish) follow Hanrizon, if you have a Google account. The gadget is found at the bottom of the sidebar.

Statisticians who know economics

When I was reading the text of my statistics course, I came across a sentence that reads:

This relationship between reliability and sample size indicates that there are, to use a phrase from economics, diminishing returns to increasing the size of a sample. It seldom pays to take samples that are massively large.

I am not sure whether it was Freund or Perles who came up with this. I guess one of them probably had taken a course in economics before; or he had done research in economics, which is vastly probable - at least there is a sub-discipline in economics called Bayesian.

Another More *Exciting* Trailer for EVA 2.0

Why do we still need to wait until December to watch it here in Hong Kong?
Video source.

p-value

I have been wondering where dose the name of p-value (in statistics) come from. Is "p" from a name of a statistician? Or is it simply short for "probability"? I googled it but found no satisfactory result. Any suggestions?

Google Maps Street View Beyond the Streets

Google Blog: Dan Ratner:

With Street View on Google Maps, you can take a virtual drive over the Golden Gate Bridge or see the bustle of Times Square from the comfort of your own home. But some of the country's most interesting and fun places aren't accessible with our Street View car. What if you want to tour the campuses of prospective universities, scout a new running trial, or plan the most efficient route to your favorite roller coasters in a theme park?

I've been thinking if I am one day accepted to an institution outside China, how troublesome and costly would it be for me to pay a visit to the campuses to make the choice? Google gave me an answer.

The Future of Hummer

GM agrees Chinese sale of Hummer. In the future, Hummers will be manufactured by a company based in Sichuan Province.

Obama Wins Nobel

I've just heard that Barrack Obama has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Though a proponent of Obama myself, this breaking news really caught me unprepared.

Beijingese Moon Cake

The story of the original moon cake that was the tradition in Beijing during Mid-Autumn Festivals (Chinese).

The Most Difficult Language on Earth

On Wikipedia there is a page on the expression "Greek to me", referring to an incomprehensible language to the speaker of another language. Language Log made a tree graph of these relative relationships. By far Chinese seems to be quite hard, isn't it. Thank est's blog for the pointer. Image.

A Japanese Lady

A work of my friend Kaye.

Cowen on *Superfreakonomics*

Marginal Revolution:

This book is recognizably in the style of Freakonomics, a book I suspect you already have made up your mind about.  I will say only that SuperFreakonomics is a more than worthy sequel, a super sequel you might say.  If you're a fan of Freakonomics, you'll like this too.  This really is the fall season of big, big books.

Life and Virginity

BBC: Egypt anger over virginity faking:

A leading Egyptian scholar has demanded that people caught importing a female virginity-faking device into the country should face the death penalty.

Compensating people's lives for virginity? How unbelievable this is.

New Proof (wonkish)

There is a lemma proposition for the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem, namely, a sequence converges to a number if and only if any and every subsequence of that sequence also converges to the same number (technically a trimmed-down version of this proposition, i.e. only the necessary condition part, also suffices to prove the B-W Theorem). Traditionally, this proposition, or theorem by nature, can be possibly proved with a deduction occupying one page or so. However, I discovered today that my schoolmate Ling Hao from the Math Department has a better solution to verify the sufficient condition part (from convergence of subsequences to convergence of the original sequence). He simply picks the original sequence as the selected "any" subsequence and it is obvious that this subsequence has a limit, and consequently the original sequence, which is exactly the same as the subsequence, also converges to the same limit. Proof complete. I advised he write an academic paper for this.