You Don't Need to Know That

Overheard in a cubicle.

B is trying to help debug A's code, and is soliciting some explanation.

B: "What does this chunk of code do?"

A: "You don't need to know that, because I don't understand it myself."

B: "..."

In Challenging Times, the Tide Changes

Geeks are So In

In the early 1960s when he was choosing a career, Professor Chamberlin recalled, technical people were respected and well paid. Money, he said, was part of the equation. “But the bigger part of the motivation for me,” he said, “was that I would be doing exciting and important work and that my contributions would be appreciated.”

--With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King? [nytimes.com]

The universities in Singapore have release information regarding the grade profile of students entering each course of study. [NTU] [NUS] [SMU]

A comparison between common courses at the various universities at the 10th percentile (letter grades are for GCE A-Level grade combinations, and floating point numbers are the polytechnic diploma GPAs):

Course	NTU(H2/H1, GPA)	NUS	SMU
Accountancy	AAB/B, 3.71	AAA/B, 3.64	ABB/A, 3.60
Business	AAB/B, 3.63	AAB/B, 3.50	ABB/B, 3.49
Economics	ABB/B, 3.48	BBC/C, 3.39	BBB/B, 3.30
Law	-	AAA/A	AAA/B
Information Systems, NTU Comp Eng, Computing (IS)	BCC/C, 3.38	BCC/B, 3.54	BCC/B, 3.16
Social Sciences, Psy, Socio	BCC/B, 3.39	BBC/C, 3.39	BBC/B, 3.28

Reproduced from [Jay Lim's Blog]

Some observations: Computer Science/Engineering has the one of the lowest admission cut-offs, except when considering polytechnic diploma GPA for NUS (at which point, CS actually has a more stringent requirement than even Business).

It is true - we simply do not get the best and the brightest in Computer Science. And while I imagine it would be very difficult for an entrepreneur with solely non-technical background to create the next big thing in software and Internet technology. The faculty in NUS routinely relies on foreign students to prop up the quality of the student base - an illustrative example is a fellow Singaporean in Google who had my PhD supervisor as his supervisor for his project. In the first meeting between the professor and the student, the professor simply assumed the student was not Singapore and asked, "so, which part of China are you from?".

Geeks make money - No?

Do not fill young people's heads with too much nonsense like how they have to look cool. Sell the cool ideas they work with. Teach them to see that you can make money and be rich only if you have something worth selling, and that is where engineers come in.

Years ago, engineering was the top school to go to.

Today, everyone wants to be in business and make money and that is why our young flock to anything and everything to do with business, finance and economics.

-- Straits Times Forum Comment - Focus on engineers' 'cool' ideas, not their image [straitstimes.com]

As my colleague (in Google mind you) likes to quip: "If you are in software engineering for money, you are in the wrong business."

If you are the gahmen, hear my plea

Singapore might want smart and hardworking generalists to be to civil servants by enticing them with extraordinary salaries. But if you want a striving science and technology sector, specialists have to be nurtured. And my last rant: uhm, propping up A*Star scholars like trophy dogs is not the way to go, simply due to the overemphasis of look-at-my-scholars-with-their-high-grades, aren't they adorable sense of it all.

Rejected by Harvard? Not a problem. You're in good company.

The list is, well, impressive. Investor Warren Buffet, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass,
Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, NBC "Today" show host Meredith
Vieira, former "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw, New Yorker magazine
editor David Remnick, CNN founder Ted Turner, folk rock legend Art Garfunkel,
Matt Groening, creator of the animated television series "The Simpsons," Sun
Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
president Harold Varmus, and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger
round out the list.

-- Non Ivy League Graduates

Brain turning to mush

My life has been a little topsy turvy over the past few weeks - Dominic had to be briefly hospitalized. Rest assured that he is doing well now and is on scheduled to fly over to the States soon. (yeah, except for the onset of sleep deprivation)

In other news, my mind is a chaos of mush - I just realized how fast you forget things once you leave school - my colleague is taking Probabilistic Graphical Models course in Stanford. Flipping through his quizzes, I realize I cannot remember the nuances of loopy belief propagation and details of message passing algorithms.

I now go to bed with my graphical model notes beside me.

Busy? Mind map!

My colleague has been advocating using mind map to organize his thoughts and to-dos. There are several software which does this, even some on the web. However, the free versions on the web, sadly, do not allow for easy export of data (only easy import).

Thanks to open source though, we have a free implementation of creating mind maps that all the online mind map tools support (but then again, there is always email). [Freemind]

Cool stuff:

• Google can sort 1PB easily.


• My project is mentioned in a Google blog post - can you find out which one it is?

Being more effective at work and in life

Work hard, play hard.

This is easier said than done, and I am working on being more effective both at work and in life. I have always maintained that one should be working on things that they love, but that neglects to mention how to separate work from the other demands of life.

The truth is, it's not easy (for me at least), and sometimes I devote all my energy in work; leaving no time or energy to have a social life.

The problem with integrating work with life and working "hard" (aka long hours) - I become myopic in my work - working on the immediate goals, and not standing back to focus on the big picture; working on small features, when there are revolutionary things up for the taking.