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Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008 - 02:53 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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"And... we're back!"
- Gmail Chat

A fortnight's absence has seen me complete my research project, though not completely to my liking; Perhaps I underestimated the difficulty of the problem - slightly - again (how hard can passing the Turing Test be, anyway?), though erring on the side of optimism is probably better than throwing in the towel mentally. At least, until it becomes a career.

Days of sleeping in the wee hours (beginning at 3 am, then right up to six in the morning for the final push) meant that it was a weight off my shoulders when I finally handed off a nicely printed-and-bound 48-pager to the undergrad office today. Or it would have been, had I not overlooked the fact that I actually needed two of the same for both evaluators. A quick rush down to the photocopying shop on campus solved matters, conveniently within the Central Co-op where I picked up a bunch of rewritable CDs to duplicate my source code and executables on, an envelope to stick the chosen CD within, and double-sided tape to paste the whole thing to the back of the bound report. There were two short project descriptions to be filled in too, and I finally managed to collect printed material from the community printers instead of having them hopelessly lost in the middle of stacks of other students' lecture notes. At least I wasn't the only one in this predicament. The office was sure busy today.

Didn't know whether to be happy or displeased when I summarized the 48-pager into a five page and a bit NUROP paper and discovered that it contained all the salient features. Then again, a lot of the papers I have encountered probably fall into this category. Which means that there may be a market for extracting only the essentials from papers.

There remain a few bugs in the code, which unfortunately has ballooned just about to the point where a rewrite under a more disciplined OOP approach may be profitable. Probably will have to do that for the actual competition, under rather less pressure I hope. Then again, maybe it's just the frustration from staring at the code for hours on end that discouraged progress.

Well, what's over is over. Let us see how the evaluators like it. More equations? More figures? More theory? More empirical work? Too fluffy? Too choked with details? Who knows? We'll see.

Came across an eyecatching book at the COM1 lounge today - A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science. Didn't have the time to get past the first few chapters, but what I read struck me as sound advice. "Soft" skills of presentation and networking etc probably as important as competency, pursue long-term research goals with a series of smaller (and achievable) projects so that one has something to show... all sound painfully obvious (as pointed out in quite a few reviews) - on hindsight.

"...that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill..."
 - Solomon et al, Ecclesiastes 9:11 (3rd century A.D.)

The author, Feibelman, suggests on Page 4 that "there has to be a theme to your work - some objective - something you want to know." (so far so good, I think most researchers actually have some interest in what they are investigating?) "There has to be a story line. (Do not start with: 'I have been trying to explain the interesting wavelength dependence of light scattering from small particles.' but rather 'There is a widespread need to explain to one's kids why the sky is blue.')"

i.e. practical research sells? I'm with that. Made me recall a short vignette in Jurassic Park, when Hammond met Wu:

"Norman always said you're the best geneticist in his lab," he said. "What are your plans now?"
"I don't know. Research."
"You want a university appointment?"
"Yes."
"That's a mistake," Hammond said briskly. "At least, if you respect your talent."
Wu had blinked. "Why?"
"Because, let's face facts," Hammond said. "Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don't look so surprised. I'm not saying anything you don't know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories. The laser, the transistor, the polio vaccine, the microchip, the hologram, the personal computer, magnetic resonance imaging, CAT scans - the list goes on and on. Universities simply aren't where it's happening any more. And they haven't been for forty years. If you want to do something important in computers and genetics, you don't go to a university. Dear me, no."

 I think this does have a ring of truth to it, especially in certain fields. Take gaming for instance - probably the true bleeding edge would almost never be at some Ivy League, but instead at some big developer. For massive searching, likely Google. For world domination, probably Microsoft. And so on.

Ending off with the obligatory hamster pic (they're getting extremely squeezable):


My hands are clean!



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