Harr Chen

Hah, I'm a dork:

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Wow my cousin (first cousin by blood), a UW undergraduate, is on the cover of the Seattle Times, regarding the protests against the Dalai Lama's visit (he's the guy shouting):



http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/index.html

Oh crap ... how did I become an adult so quickly. :-\

I've been doing a lot of analysis on Wikipedia data recently for my research, and this is one of the more interesting tidbits.

In the English Wikipedia, the single article with the most segments (delimited by section headings, e.g. ==FOO==) is titled "List of Playboy NSS models G-R", that is, Playboy Magazine newstand special (NSS) girls, at 868 segments. In second place is the same article for letters A-F at 541 segments.

Gives a whole new meaning to the notion of a "clean" dataset.

For the curious, in French Wikipedia it is a Quebec-geography-related list, in German it's about nature reserves, in Spanish, a list of missiles, and in Chinese it's on ... a list of famous Chinese people.

Just goes to show, Americans are lecherous, Spaniards are violent, Germans not nearly as violent as one would expect, and the Chinese are just arrogant. Not sure what to make of the French though.

Results for other languages forthcoming! And possibly other fun tidbits as I dig around with this data. (Having 10 languages of Wikipedia mirrored on a local SQL Server really does make analysis a lot easier.)

For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test (New York Times)

By CAROL KAESUK YOON
Published: March 18, 2008
Ever since there have been scientists, there have been those who are wildly successful, publishing one well-received paper after another, and those who are not. And since nearly the same time, there have been scholars arguing over what makes the difference.

What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud?

After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer.

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

“I was really surprised,” said Dr. Tomas Grim, the author of the study and an ornithologist at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, who normally studies the behavior of birds, not scientists. “And I am happy to see that the relationship I found seems to be very well supported by my new observations in pubs, bars and restaurants.”

Dr. Grim, carried out the research by surveying his fellow Czech ornithologists about their beer drinking habits first in 2002 and then in 2006. He obtained the same results each time.

The paper has quickly been making the rounds among biologists, provoking reactions like surprise, nervous titters and irritation — often accompanied by the name of a scientist whose drinking is as impressive as his or her list of publications.

Matthew Symonds, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne who has also studied factors affecting scientific productivity, called the results remarkable.

“It’s rather devastating to be told we should drink less beer in order to increase our scientific performance,” Dr. Symonds said.

Though the public may tend to think of scientists as exceedingly sober, scientific schmoozing is often beer-tinged, famous for producing spectacular breakthroughs and productive collaborations, countless papers having begun as scrawls on cocktail napkins.

Yet the new study shows no indication that some level of moderate social beer drinking increases scientific productivity. Some scientists suggest that biologists in the Czech Republic could prove to be an anomaly, given that the country has a special relationship to beer, boasting the highest rate of beer consumption on earth.

More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.

Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”

In spite of his study, Dr. Grim, who said he would on occasion enjoy more than 12 beers in a night, is not on a campaign to decrease beer drinking among scientists. Why not? His answer: “I like it.”

*dreamy sigh* When I grow up, I want to be a designer at the LEGO Company.

Man, shooting that .44 Magnum today has left me with interminable forearm pain. :(

Flight attendant shows boobs to immigration service for Brazilian re-entry visa:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23576779/

I just bought this monstrosity:





Three feet long, 3,100+ pieces of sheer Lego. Arrives in a week or so.

Early self-birthday present? :-P

A crappy picture of my not-so-crappy 2x 24" and 2x rotated 19" monitor setup:

You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.

Societe Generale Reports EU4.9 Billion Trading Loss (Update7)

Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Societe Generale SA said unauthorized bets on stock index futures by a rogue trader caused a 4.9 billion-euro ($7.2 billion) trading loss, the largest in banking history.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.qZ3gOMOxhE&refer=home

The guy responsible (Jerome Kerviel):


Holy shit ... last time this happened (Nick Leeson), they "only" lost USD $1.4 bln, enough to drive the then-oldest merchant bank Barings Plc into insolvency (and purchase by ING Bank for GBP £1).

I'm freaking out about SIGIR. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

In other news, CNN posts an article about how its own readers disliked its earlier report:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/21/emails.race.gender/index.html

My lab's purchasing a new machine for me, and I get to choose the parts. Given the generous cost ceiling, here's the parts going in:

1x Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition QX6700 (2.66GHz quad-core)
4x 2GB PC6400 DDR2 SDRAM (8GB total)
4x 500GB SATA Seagate Enterprise HDDs (2TB total)
2x ATI Radeon X1950PRO 512MB

7-channel audio
RAID-10
650W PSU
A case

Derrrr, NERDGASM.

http://www.searchles.com/channels/show/2257

This was just sent to our entire dorm by the housemaster:

Good morning all,
It has been brought to our attention that the construction crew working on the new Ashdown building have been distracted by sights of nudity (and more) occurring in some south facing S-P rooms without closed shades. In order to preserve modesty and privacy, and to avoid slowing construction of the new building, please remember to pull down your shades!!

Here I am at JFK airport waiting for my flight, and what do I see but two birds flying around the place, making a ruckus and eating crumbs off the floor. Which got me thinking - obviously these birds made it past airport security, so what the terrorists should do is attach BOMBS to the birds (e.g. war pigeons, which I think were used in WWII or something) and fly them into the terminal.

So am I gonna get arrested for using the word "BOMB" at the airport, even if it's on my laptop screen?

Ooh I have a neat new year's resolution:

This year, I resolve to turn 21.

:-P

Like a good grad student, I'm having a research meeting via phone with a colloborator on Christmas Eve...

Update: wow, after an hour of looking at math and getting NetMeeting to work we just scheduled a follow-on session for midnight Christmas morning.

Ah, looking forward to good ol' Seattle in a week: