Origami Kawasaki Rose

I finally managed to fold a Kawasaki rose (instructions here).

Now to gather enough pluck to attempt the new Kawasaki rose!

汉字标准格式

这个专为中文网页而设的 汉字标准格式（CSS）实在很棒！前些日子和 ChinaTeX 采访／闲聊时才说起，要找专针对中文内容的 Typography 样式，实在很难，没想到两个多月后就在 Twitter 看到了。

Another Grad School Quote

By Seamus Bradley, while explaining some reasons for his tendency for “over-the-top” L^aT_eX solutions to simple problems:

Because as a PhD student, procrastination is an important part of staying sane.

Closer to home, I‘m finding the need to make a little happy something everyday to carry me through. Ah, just another typical day in a grad student's career (or the lack of one).

Recursively Fixing File Permissions

Ahhh, the joys of restoring/moving files from a FAT32 external hard disk to a *nix system. Everything is 777, grrrrr. The all-knowing Google kindly directed me to try the following:

$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

to chmod all files to 644, and

$ find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755

to chmod all directories to 755. Ahhh, the joys of bash commands.

Mounting USB Devices in VirtualBox

Mounting USB devices on guest systems in VirtualBox seems to be a big headache for many people (yours truly included). But I think I’d finally figured it out.

It boils down to these two most crucial points for me:

1. Use the same usernames on your host and guest systems.
2. Create an empty USB filter for your guest system. This will automatically mount any devices to the guest system as soon as they are attached physically.

Use the same usernames on your host and guest systems.

• When installing your guest systems, create users with the same login name you’re already using on your host system.
• To make things easier, choose a username without space characters.

Create an empty USB filter for your guest system.

• With the guest system off, open the Settings of your guest system.
• Open the Ports → USB pane.
• Make sure you have enabled USB 2.0 (EHCI) controller.
• Click the icon with a blue circle on the right. This will add an empty device filter that matches anything.

Now try starting your guest system, log in with the same user name as the one currently active on your host system, and attach a USB device. Hopefully things will… work!

ERA Journal Ranking List Dropped

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has decided to remove ERA journal rankings in view of them “focusing ill-formed undesirable behavior in the management of research”.

(Although I’m guessing people here will just pretend they never read this and do nothing about it until 3 years later.)

[Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr] chastised the research community, saying: “There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings.

“One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers.

“In light of these two factors — that ERA could work perfectly well without the rankings, and that their existence was focussing ill-informed undesirable behaviour in the management of research — I have made the decision to remove the rankings, based on the ARC’s expert advice.”

Australian Academy of Science Secretary for Science Policy Professor Bob Williamson has this to say:

“In our recent submission to the Australian Research Council, the Australian Academy of Science argued strongly that key areas such as interdisciplinary research and new research were seriously disadvantaged by journal ranking,” Professor Williamson said.

“This affected not only areas of science and technology, but also interactions between the sciences and the humanities.”

“It has been very distressing to see some universities using publications in highly ranked journals as the basis for funding, promotions, and even staff appointments.

“The ranking of a journal as A* does not mean every paper in it is first rate, and some very good papers may appear in smaller journals.

So how would the new ERA initiative include as changes? One proposed measure is to move more towards a peer review system. More comments from various experts here: interesting reads.

Upcoming LaTeX Talk

ｷｬ━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━!! MOSC2011 has posted about my upcoming L^aT_eX talk!

Spanish and Tolkien and Arrancars

西班牙语是《魔戒》的作者——铎金教授最喜欢的语言之一，原因是他认为语音很美（我也这么认为），所以我其实对 Bleach 里破面们的名字非常爱不释手。

CICLing 2011: Sound Bites

I just don’t have time for long posts these days T_T so here goes: a bulleted list of sound-bites.

Jun’ichi Tsujii

• As engineers, you’d want to create applications that just work (so stats-based systems fit the bill nicely).
• As scientists though, you’d want to know when and why things don’t work sometimes, and is it worth your while to try handle these special (if they are) cases at all.
• And for this purpose, stats-based models can be like black-boxes that you can’t really inspect… and this is where computational linguistics can provide insights.

Hans Uszkoreit

• Don’t believe in the F₁ score blindly. For some applications you really just want the precision; for others recall is much more important.
• Example: for a system detecting possible reports of terrorist activities, a 1.0 recall means much more than 0.01 precision, because you can certainly afford a human perusing 100 reports and confirming that 1 genuine terrorist report.
• Unfortunately many inexperienced journal reviewers (Hans actually said that) would still insist that the system’s F₁ is too low and can’t be convinced of the more important role of recall in such cases.

Diana McCarthy

• Is word sense disambiguation still relevent especially when we talk about tagging with reference to a sense inventory? Because we increasingly feel this phenomena about words having a continuum of meanings rather than discrete ones (except in the case of homographs).
• I don’t have an answer for this though. Thoughts welcome!

(Thanks Prof McCarthy. I hope my idea works! Even if only somewhat.)

Chris Manning

• No, we don’t have special funding for the Stanford NLP tools development. T_T
• Yes, it’s really hard to maintain the code and projects as people leave. T_T
• Yes, it’d be nice if we had a long-term development team to take care of the software engineering and maintenance stuff so that the research students can concentrate on doing research, but this is really hard (impossible?) in reality. T_T

(Prof Manning… what can I say except that I/we feel the pain too? T_T)

Geilivable

今天学了一个新字，或是不同语言的同一个 concept:

[英] geilivable = [大陆流行语] 给力 = [大马华语流行语] 够力

《JUMP》之巅＋科技浪潮之巅

承继昨天说过，小女子一闷得发慌就会下载网上的一些好文章，用 L^aT_eX 排版成 PDF 电子书的怪癖。通常都是一些属于会有人觉得“太长不看”的好文，但不是这种就没意思了。

打头阵的两本电子书课题还真是南辕北辙啊。（那本 Grid Computing 的是工作分内的成果，不算啦）

如果你有阅读日本漫画的习惯，那该知道集英社的漫画周刊《少年 JUMP》吧？大陆动漫情报杂志《动漫贩》曾在 2004–05 年做过一个名为《〈跳跃〉巅峰！日本漫画杂志传奇》的长篇专题连载，让中文读者更深了解《JUMP》及旗下作者们创刊以来的种种风浪。我初次见到是百度食梦者吧吧友钉宫理惠病毒辛苦手打的图片版，太喜欢了所以重新手打排版成电子书。

另外一本则是中国谷歌研究员吴军所撰写的《浪潮之巅》，原文 2007–2009 年刊于谷歌黑板报，对许多科技公司、人物及投资结构作了很详尽的剖析，包括 IBM、Motorola、Intel 等等。 IT 工作者、投资者、有意创业者必读！读了才知道“仰望星空，脚踏实地”的真旨！

I make e-books as a pastime

Whenever I get really, really bored, is unmotivated to do “real” work but still itching to touch a computer but not in the mood for games… I re-visit good articles I came across on the Web, and typeset them with L^aT_eX to make my own PDF e-books.

(Yes, I’m weird, I know.)

And I’m putting the e-books online, if only to fill out my Website.

Now all I’m missing is an iPad to read them on!

MacBook is admitted T_T

Worse and worse. I simply couldn’t power up my MacBook on Friday. T_T It’s now at the Apple Service Centre in Gurney Plaza. Get well soon! I miss you so!

Kernel Panic!

I think my MacBook suffered a series of kernel panics yesterday. >_<

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

After a few tries it finally managed to boot wobbly. Shaken, I did a quick google, and one of Apple’s suggestions is to perform a safe boot, i.e. pressing the Shift key while booting up.

So the next time my MacBook failed to boot properly, that’s what I did, and after a lot of clicking and whirring noises (that’s the obligatory disk scan and fix I presume)… hmm, it does seem to resolve the problem. Fingers crossed!!!

KuroDigi Lomography/Toy Camera

Got a new toy: a KuroDigi toy camera!

The joke’s on all of us!

I just read this snippet from a news article related to the SETARA rankings in the Star:

…Dr Syed Ahmad said UUM’s score from the rating was 66, which puts it in the tier four range of between 60 and 69.9.

He said UUM was the last institution included in tier four.

“But this does not mean UUM is at the bottom as the MQA lists all institutions (in each tier) in alphabetical order,” he said.

What this mean, folks, is that MMU did not necessarily occupy the top-spot for the private universities list, and the joke is on all of us who even entertained the idea! :D The list runs thus:

He said the private IPTs were Multimedia University, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Sunway University College, Curtin University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Monash University (Sunway campus), Taylor's University College, International Medical University, Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Nottingham University (Malaysian campus) and Management and Science University.

…or did it? If the unis were listed alphabetically, then shouldn’t Curtin be listed first? Hmmmm. Ranking lists are such complex creatures.

MMU President’s Response to SETARA ‘Excellent’ Ranking

Hot on the heels of MMU being named the top Malaysian private university in the recent SETARA ranking exercise, I received the following e-mail from MMU's Corporate Communications Unit (CCU) on Prof. Zaharin’s response (all emphases are my own):

Putrajaya, 12 July 2010 – The Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin, yesterday announced eighteen top Malaysian universities. According to the rankings released to Bernama, topping the public universities was International Islamic University Malaysia. Leading the category for private institutions was Multimedia University. Professor Dr. Zaharin bin Yusoff, President of MMU, admitted his surprise at the news. “Like any university in Malaysia,” he said, “we’re just trying to do what is best for our students and our stakeholders.”

“Our strategies so far have included formulating the best academic programmes we could think of, and creating an environment to produce the most marketable graduates in the country. I am pleased that the people whose opinions we care for agree that we’re doing the right thing,” Prof. Zaharin said.

The ranking system categorized institutions into one of six tiers. “Tier-6” or Distinction, “Tier-5” (Excellent), “Tier-4” (Very Good), “Tier-3” (Good), “Tier-2” (Satisfactory), or “Tier-1” (Weak). MMU is in Tier-5, along with 17 other institutions. 25 universities are in Tier-4, and four in Tier-3. However, Prof. Zaharin is quick to stress that MMU must not allow this achievement to “get to our heads”, as other private universities in Malaysia are also extremely capable. He cautions, “If anything, this announcement will only spur others to try and knock us off the top.”

“We must pay attention to the fact that absolutely no university earned Tier-6, no one got Distinction. This means there is still room for improvement for everyone, MMU included,” Prof. Zaharin said. The ranking is formally known as the Rating System for Institutions of Higher Learning (Setara), and is outlined by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA). 2009’s exercise was led by Prof. Muhammad Jantan of Universiti Sains Malaysia. The system assessed 25 criteria covering the input, process, and output of the universities. This is the first time the rankings covered both public and private universities.

Public universities in Tier-5 are International Islamic University Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Malaya, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Mara.

Private Tier-5 institutions are Multimedia University, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Sunway University College, Curtin University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Monash University (Sunway campus), Taylor's University College, International Medical University, Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Nottingham University (Malaysian campus) and Management and Science University.

I’m relieved that Prof. Zaharin’s response is a down-to-earth and realistic one. I was actually wincing when I first opened the e-mail (and my mouth itching to cynically form the words ‘jaguh kampung’, fearing that it will contain the usual blowing-our-own-trumpets, thumping-our-own-backs kinda of congratulatory spiel that we so often read in the local press. Thank goodness Prof. still kept his level head!

Facebook Query and Markup Language

Did you know FB has a Query Language and Markup Language of its own?

• Facebook Query Language (FQL)
• Facebook Markup Language (FBML)

Just in case anyone’s interested in these for their research. Also to KIV in case I find them useful in future.

Vote Plato!

A very different kind of election is on! Vote your philosopher (past and present) of choice into the (UK) government. Here’s the message from Warwick Alumni’s newsletter:

Warwick Plato expert Dr Angie Hobbs has had an idea for a very different sort of election. Dr Hobbs is asking people to nominate one or more philosophers, past or present, for an alternative UK Cabinet. Your proposals could be serious e.g. Hobbes for Home Secretary or more mischievous e.g. Zeno for Minister for Transport. The idea is both to have some fun and to consider whether any philosophers might actually be/have been any good at such jobs.

QS sacked from The Times Higher Education World University Rankings

Phil Baty, current editor of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings and deputy editor of Times Higher Education magazine, confessed that the rankings published for the past six years using data supplied and owned by QS, are not fit for purpose. Baty said QS achieved only a tiny number of respondents to the “peer review” criterion, which made up 40% of a university's score. QS also did not take into account different citation habits between disciplines, thereby greatly handicapping the arts, humanities and social sciences.

THE has therefore ended their contract with QS, and enlisted Thomson Reuters instead. They're also looking at a major (if not complete) overhaul of the methodology to produce the 2010 Rankings, to be published this autumn.

(suspenseful, brooding music)

Hmmmm.

I shall reserve further comments until we see the resultant rankings. ;-)