网络资源的拷贝粘贴 备份参考之用


30 November 2008

Randy Pausch

 
In Randy Pausch's Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University in the Fall of 2007, facing pancreatic cancer and the likelihood that he would only live a month or two, Randy summed up his life's wisdom for his kids (then 1,2, and 5). He gave his lecture to several hundred in a CMU auditorium, but it has now been viewed on YouTube by millions of Americans.  It's enormously inspiring, tear-rendering and well worth your time if you haven't seen it.

His Last Lecture is now fleshed out in a book of the same name (co-written with Jeff Zaslow, the WSJ reporter that brought his lecture to widespread prominence) and he recently filmed an ABC News Special with Diane Sawyer. His comments are immensely wise for a 47 year old.

Randy Pausch alas died in his home last night (July 25, 2008) as reported by Diane Sawyer on GMA. Randy Pausch's home page is here.

He lived a vibrant life to the end, giving a charge to the graduating seniors at his beloved Carnegie Mellon University just in June 2008

and providing moving testimony to Congress on supporting pancreatic cancer research to help future innocent victims (3/13/08).

Notable quotes:

  • When there's an elephant in the room introduce him

  • Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people.

  • If there's anything I want to do so badly, I should have already done it.

  • We can't change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I'm not as depressed as you think I should be, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

  • Work and play well together.
    - Tell The Truth. All The Time. No one is pure evil.
    - Be willing to apologize. Proper apologies have three parts: 1) What I did was wrong. 2) I'm sorry that I hurt you. 3) How do I make it better? It's the third part that people tend to forget…. Apologize when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself.
    - Show gratitude. Gratitude is a simple but powerful thing.
    - Find the best in everybody…. Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you. It might even take years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting.
    - If you want to achieve your dreams, you better learn to work and play well with others…[you have] to live with integrity.

  • Collaboration, treating others with respect.
    - Never found anger a way to make things better.
    - How do you get people to help you? You can't get there alone. People have to help you and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest. I'll take an earnest person over a hip person any day, because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.
    - Loyalty is a two-way street.
    - Get a feedback loop and listen to it. Your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did, or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear. The hard part is the listening to it.

  • Persistence and hard work.
    - When you are doing something badly and no one's bothering to tell you anymore, that's a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones still telling you they love you and care.
    - Don't bail: the best gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap
    - Don't complain, Just work harder. [showing picture on screen] That's a picture of Jackie Robinson. It was in his contract not to complain, even when the fans spit on him. You can spend it complaining or playing the game hard. The latter is likely to be more effective.
    - Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted…. I probably got more from that dream [of playing professional football] and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish.

  • Fun, wonder, living your dream.
    - Decide if you're a Tigger or an Eyeore. I'm a Tigger.
    - It is not about achieving your dreams but living your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you.
    - Never underestimate the importance of having fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day, because there's no other way to play it….Having fun for me is like a fish talking about the importance of water. I don't know how it is like not to have fun…
    - Never lose the child-like wonder. It's just too important. It's what drives us. Help others.

  • Risk-taking.
    - You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. But at the end of the day, a whole lot of people will have a whole lot of fun.
    - Better to fail spectacularly than do something mediocre. [Randy Pausch gave out a First Penguin award each year when he was teaching to the biggest failure in trying something big and new because he thought this should be celebrated. First Penguins are the ones that risk that the water might be too cold.]

  • Parenting and kids.
    - The best piece of parenting advice I've ever heard is from flight attendants. If things get really tough, grab your own oxygen mask first.
    - About his pancreatic cancer: It's unlucky, but it not unfair. We all stand on a dartboard and some of us randomly get hit by pancreatic cancer. But my children won't have me for them and that's not fair.
    - Someone's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon and I won't be there to catch them and that breaks my heart. But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall so that seems like the best and highest use of my time and I better get to work.
    - I'm sorry I won't be around to raise my kids. It makes me very sad but I can't change that fact, so I did everything I could with the time I have and the time I had to help other people.
    - Importance of people instead of things. Told story of buying new convertible that he was so proud of and taking niece and nephew for a ride. Randy's sister, the kid's mother was telling them how important it was to keep car pristine and kids were laughing because at the same time he was pouring a can of orange soda on the back seats. His sister asked what are you doing and he said "it's just a thing." And nephew Chris wound up being really grateful because he had flu and wound up throwing up on way home. "And I don't care how much joy you get out of owning a shiny new thing; it's not as good I felt from making sure that an 8 year old didn't have to feel guilty for having the flu."
    - [not a direct quote] but Randy implores parents to always indulge your children's wild ideas (he talks about how important it was that his parents let him decorate his walls with math formulas, despite the negative impact on their house's resale value) He says: "If you're going to have childhood dreams you should have great parents who let you pursue them and express your creativity."
    - It is Important to have specific childhood dreams. (For example, Randy wanted to play football in the NFL, write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia, experience the Weightlessness of Zero Gravity, be Captain Kirk from Star Trek, work for the Disney Company.)

  • Be good at something; it makes you valuable…. Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.

  • I've never understood pity and self-pity as an emotion. We have a finite amount of time. Whether short or long, it doesn't matter. Life is to be lived.

  • To be cliché, death is a part of life and it's going to happen to all of us. I have the blessing of getting a little bit of advance notice and I am able to optimize my use of time down the home stretch.
 

24 November 2008

Other Tips

 
Questions and Answers

What is the function of the statement of purpose?
You must demonstrate to the committee how your goals coincide with what the program has to offer as well as how you will fit in and how your qualifications will benefit the program. It is the personal statement that communicates to the admissions committee what it is about you which makes you stand out from the other applicants. The more competitive the school, the larger the pool of applicants with strong GPAs and GRE scores, the more important the personal statement becomes in the selection process.  Therefore it is important to devote ample time to writing your statement.

How important is the statement of purpose in the application process?
In short, it is a very important piece of application materials. Start working on it at least three weeks before the deadline for you to sent your documents. Even if all the rest of your application is perfect the carelessly written statement can spoil all your efforts. Members of the admission committee will use it to determine what kind of person you are and whether you are capable to be successful in their PhD program, how well you are suited for that, how goal oriented you are and many other things. Well-written statement can greatly help you to get admitted even if you have average test scores.

What information should I include in the statement of purpose?
Discuss your career goals, and how an advanced degree and this program would help you get there. Include relevant experiences such as research you have done and skills you have demonstrated.
Relevance is key and doing your homework about graduate school programs will help you determine relevancy. Ask some of these questions... what degree programs does this school offer? What areas of emphasis does it offer within that major? What license and certificate preparation does the program provide? What original research is being done by which faculty at this school? The answers to these questions should help you decide to which schools and programs you'll apply. This information should also be incorporated into your statement of purpose. Only include your life story if it's relevant.

How exact should I be about the research field I would like to work in?
People in the admission committee are looking for applicants with determination, for those who know what they want to do in their life and know why this university and this program will enable them to reach their goals. If you have broad interests and experiences you can state that you are still choosing the exact field for your research, usually though it is better to state the area you are especially interested in (it can be quite a broad area such as experimental condensed matter physics or modeling of cellular processes). Don't narrow you field too much though. Make sure that at least 2-3 faculty members are working in the field you have emphasized. And remember you can always change your mind after you have been admitted into the program; nobody will force you to stick to the area of research you emphasized in your application materials.

Should I mention the faculty members who I want to work with?
It is highly advisable to mention faculty members who you might be interested to work with. It is especially important if you have already done some work similar to the research some of these professors are now doing. If the professor you have mentioned is in the admission committee this can also help. Also, do not hesitate to contact these (and other) professors personally (via email). Ask questions about their current and prospective research projects, about the possibility to become members of they group if you get admitted, about the department, you might want to attach your statement of purpose and resume to the first letter you send them.

How long should the statement of purpose be?
Your statement of purpose should be about 1 to 2 pages. Use normal margins and font 11 or 12, refrain from using small fonts since they are hard to read. Generally, a shorter statement of purpose that is clearly written is better than a longer one.

Can I use the same statement of purpose for all universities which I apply to?
Mostly you will see advices that you need to write a separate statement for each program. Ideally this might be the best, but realistically you will not have time to do all the work it requires well. So it is better to spend time writing one really good statement and then for each university changing particular part of the statement which emphasizes some aspects of particular programs and mentions faculty members (usually it is one or two last paragraphs of the statement). Do not send completely identical statements to all universities, mention the name of the university in the text, it is fine to use "Your University", but you also need to use the name of the university. Finally, make sure you send right statement to the right university.

Who will read my statement of purpose?
Your audience is made up of faculty members who are experts in their field. They want to know that you can think as much as what you think.

 http://www.students.uidaho.edu/default.aspx?pid=77258

Statement of Objectives: Sample from Golan Levin

 

Statement of Objectives, MIT Graduate School Application

Written in support of an Application for Admission to Masters' Studies in the Aesthetics and Computation Group, MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge MA.
Golan Levin, 15 December 1997.


It was quite clear to me that painting was capable of developing powers of exactly the same order as those music possessed.
— Wassily Kandinsky, 1922

[The new medium is:] Dynamic, manipulable graphics with complex behavior.
— Bill Verplank, 1981


Systems for Abstract Creation and Communication

I have had, for as long as I can remember, a deep interest in abstract visual communication. My mother, who is an Abstract Expressionist painter, and my father, who is an engraver, exposed me continually and from the youngest age to imagery whose content was form itself. Oddly enough, however, my earliest recollection of experiencing the power of abstract form is a memory of an event that occurred in my family's synagogue when I was very small: I had just learned to read English, but it hadn't yet dawned on me that there could be other writing systems apart from the one I knew. One evening during services, I asked my father what the funny black squiggles were in the prayer books we were holding. "Sh!" he said: " — that is how we talk to God." I became riveted by the black squiggles, which no longer seemed quite so funny, and stared at them intently until they danced before my eyes; only later did I learn that these marks were Hebrew. Since that time, I have been preoccupied by the idea that abstract forms can connect us to a reality beyond language. Having much to communicate which is neither linear, segmented, nor divisible into minimally distinctive semantic units, I have come to regard with suspicion the wholesale reduction of human existence into verbal language, and have striven instead to create meaningful expressions that could only be conveyed through non-verbal media.

For the past year I have attempted to explore abstraction by creating prototype "visual instruments" that afford continuous, expressive handles into the real-time performance of dynamic, abstract animation. Much of this work has been inspired by, and performed in close collaboration with my colleague Scott Snibbe, to whom I am indebted for introducing me to the domain of performative abstraction, and with whom I presently share many of the motivations expressed in this statement. The intent behind our work in interactive visual instruments has been to deliver similar experiences of joy, surprise, whimsy, creation, and non-verbal communication as are afforded, for example, by traditional musical instruments. In fact, the systems we have built are highly analogous to musical instruments, but in the visual domain — allowing interactants to gesturally perform visual patterns whose formal language consists of geometry and color, instead of sound, over time.

Musical instruments provide an especially rewarding basis for analogies because they have offered, for thousands of years, what may be the best example of humans deriving gratifying interactions from machines. Although the systems I have recently developed do not produce "music" as such, the idea that these works could nevertheless be considered "instruments" for the performance of animated graphics also serves to distinguish them from other software systems which might, on the surface, appear similar. "Visual instruments" are distinct from, for example, screen savers (which depend on a passive interaction model), games (which are generally not concerned with the user's creative expression), visual interfaces to musical instruments (in which the creative expression is made in audio), or music visualization systems (in which, again, graphic expression is an accessory to music).

The broad goal of the work I propose here is to promote creativity and communication via computational visual media. In the remainder of this statement, I put forth one possible theoretical context within which this pursuit may be framed; some criteria by which I have come to evaluate the success of systems of this kind; and a list of some of the new questions and directions to which I'd like to open this endeavor in graduate study.


Hot and Cool

In my attempt to understand the design of great media for creative personal expression, I've been tremendously influenced by Marshall McLuhan's distinction between what he termed "hot" and "cool" media. To McLuhan, "hot" media are high-definition, high-resolution experiences that are "well-filled with data," while "cool" media are low-definition experiences that leave a great deal of information to be filled in by the mind of the viewer or listener. Photography and film are hot media, for example, while cartoons and telephony are cool. McLuhan's definitions establish a strongly inverse link between the "temperature" of a medium and the degree to which it invites or requires audience participation: hot media demand little completion by their audience, while cool media, "with their promise of depth involvement and integral expression," are highly participatory.

A quick glance at the tradeshow floor at SIGGRAPH is all that is necessary to observe that the trend in the computer graphics industry to date has been the development of high-resolution, high-bandwidth, mega-polygon experiences. The products of this focus — typically photorealistic three-dimensional virtual realities — have been dazzling and hypnotizing. But our relations to these spaces are rarely ever more than as spectators, and almost never as creators. The industry's rush to develop these hot experiences has left in its wake numerous fertile and untrammeled technologies for cooler, more participatory media. Scott Snibbe has pointed out that one such territory is the domain of synthetic two-dimensional computer graphics, which, largely neglected after the early Macintosh era, has only recently begun to be revisited in the roughly two years since consumer PC's became capable of real-time, full-screen dynamic interaction.

I seek to build sophisticated cool media for interactive communication and personal expression. In doing so, I interpret McLuhan's specification for cool media — that they demand "completion by a participant" — quite literally. The notable property of cool media, I believe, is that they blur the distinctions we make between subject and object, enabling the completion of each by the other. An example of such a subject/object distinction is that between author and authored, the blurring of which, according to psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, is critical to the Zen-like experience of creative flow. Another such distinction is that between sender and recipient, to whose dissolution, wrote philosopher Georges Bataille, we owe the delight of communication itself. My aspiration for graduate study is to build — and understand the mechanisms of — systems that successfully blur these boundaries, enabling the joyful flow and authentic communication that are possible people engage, through a medium, in a transparent, continuous and transformative dialogue with themselves and others. My foremost measure of success for any medium I design begins, therefore, not with the question "for how long can I suspend my disbelief in it?" but with the questions: "for how long can I feel it to be a seamless extension of myself?" and "to what depth can I feel connected to another person through it?"


Instantly Knowable, Infinitely Masterable

The design of seamless extensions to ourselves is "non-trivial", as is the design of structures that can afford deep intercommunications. In attempting to surmount these difficulties, nevertheless, I have become convinced of a somewhat more tractable design implication which follows from them: that, ideally, such systems should be instantly knowable, yet infinitely masterable and expressible.

By "instantly knowable," I mean that no instructions or explanations ought to be necessary for novice use: the mechanisms of control are laid bare to the intuition, and thus the operation of such a system is self-revealing. By "infinitely masterable and expressible," on the other hand, I mean that the system has an inexhaustible expressive range, which, like the finest instruments, requires a lifetime to master — and furthermore, that this expressive range is wide enough that different users can develop unique styles or creative "voices" in that medium. This remarkable combination of attributes is commonly found in real-world expressive instruments but rarely — if ever — in computational ones. Consider, for example, how a three-year-old child can sit before a piano or a pencil and almost immediately intuit its basic principles of operation. Yet we take for granted that pianos and pencils are also rich enough media that the same child could spend the remainder of her life mastering them.

I know of no software tool which matches a piano or a pencil by these criteria. Instead, instant knowability and infinite expressibilityare all too often traded for one another: we slog through thick software manuals written "For Dummies," only to reach the limits of our tools' capabilities in homogenized outputs that, processed by the same filters and plug-ins, look and sound like everybody else's. At best, computers have only inverted the cultural logic of tool use, making our most general software tools difficult to learn and our specialized tools easy. I believe that the remedy for this, in the case of expressive instruments for visual communication, is a double-pronged research effort focused not only on the development of more "intuitive" interfaces, but also on the development of "intelligent" graphics models which know as much as possible about both themselves and the user. In the section that follows, I detail some of the questions and approaches I intend to pursue on the path towards knowable and expressive, intuitive and intelligent graphical experiences.


New Directions

  • Whole-body interactions. Many artists and designers have traded the direct control afforded by physical media for the flexibility, precision, transmissability and undo-ability furnished by computational tools. But this trade has not been without a cost: for the most part, computer interfaces have physically disconnected us from direct expression, and haven't taken advantage of the many physical heuristics we use to understand the world. We have gone from using our whole bodies directly to using a single index finger abstractly — and what use to feel like play has come to feel more and more like labor. In short, we now spend far too much time hunched over clumsy keyboards, poking at cryptic symbols with inarticulate mice, when we ought to be playing in a spacious and malleable world that conforms to our intuitive physical understanding and all manner of direct manipulations.

    I strongly feel that creative expression should be something that we do with our whole bodies — just as it was for millenia in the pre-computational era. It is my hope that, by designing and developing interfaces which create more fluid connections between our computational and physical environments, I can work to dissolve the modern boundaries between artists, tools and artifacts which gave rise to the term "interface" in the first place. Although the introduction of devices like pen-based tablets has been a good, if small beginning, I anticipate that the next great advances in direct-manipulation interfaces will inherit from the development of unique physical bridges to computation, using technologies like force-sensitive resistors, accelerometers, electric field sensors, inclinometers, and so forth. I've had some experience connecting software to physical sensors at Interval Research, but I would like to do more, and I haven't yet had the opportunity to meld these technologies with expressive, synthetic graphical environments.

  • Alternative vehicles for software delivery. I love two-dimensional graphic displays, but I dislike fifty-pound monitors — especially since even the tiniest two-bit LCD is a microworld bursting with interesting opportunities for expressive interactive display. I want to bring dynamic graphics off of the desktop and into my own body-space, towards engaging software for such small-screen devices as portable hand-held game machines, Tamagotchi-like keychain computers, and palmtop computers like the U.S. Robotics Palm Pilot. I came to feel at home in a low-resolution universe after I spend years, as an undergraduate research assistant, developing icons on a 32-by-32 pixel grid; now I wish to make these small spaces breathe with expressive interactivity.

  • Design for multiple users. Most image-making activities, for practical and historical reasons, have been solitary ventures. Even the most up-to-date commercial software tools assume and perpetuate this lonely mode of artistic endeavor — but this need not be so. The computer has made it possible for people to share and experience simultaneous visual communication, and evidence from recent networked improvisation systems such as Scott Snibbe's MotionPhone suggests that people truly enjoy creating in this way. The challenge is that the idioms and mechanics of collaborative image-making remain poorly understood. What are the formalisms of image and animation which, like the Blues in music, can provide strangers with idiomatic structures in which to improvise together? What are the mechanisms by which participants can engage in a visual dialogue with each other, learning and responding to each other's unique signatures? I seek to design systems for collaborative visual improvisation that permit multiple users — however abstractly their expressions are communicated — to develop sophisticated understandings of, and relationships to, each other.

  • Instruments as cybernetic systems. When sophisticated instruments are performed expertly, the boundary between human and machine dissolves, and we perceive only a single expressive system. How can the instrument level itself to the user naturally and gracefully, continuously but unobtrusively suggesting what can be done next? Can the parts of the interaction language the users do know intrinsically suggest the parts of the language they don't? As users engage in a dialogue with a medium, how can both user and software grow and change together as a coupled system?

Conclusion

It's still an open question as to whether black squiggles, properly deployed, could allow us to communicate directly with supernatural forces. In the meantime, it's my hope that by developing systems for creative visual communication, we may at least have a means for connecting to each other in the reality beyond verbal language. The questions and issues I describe above are only some of the many interesting hurdles that lie in the path of creating such a connection.

The design space of interactive abstract visual communication remains fundamentally unexplored. My goal is to derive an understanding of this space as well as create systems which embody the design principles I discover. The lessons learned from this pursuit may be generalizable to traditional software applications and potentially to all areas of human-computer interaction, transforming the design of our already-prevalent dynamic information graphics in ways that have not yet been brought to bear.

The research I have conducted thus far, and which I propose to continue, cannot be understood as located wholly within the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, or the domain of Computer Graphics (CG) research. Instead, the work I propose resides in the connection between these two areas of endeavor — an interdisciplinary niche which must necessarily assume a hyphenated acronym at best. It is my hope that, as a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, I will be able to delve deeply into this niche, toward the design of intuitive, articulate, whole-body instruments for multimedia play and communication.

Golan Levin, 15 December 1997
 
 

23 November 2008

Tips from Berkley

[Original Text : http://career.berkeley.edu/Grad/GradStatement.stm ]

Graduate School - Statement

Graduate and professional schools often require some sort of written statement as a part of the application. The terminology differs, but may include "statement of purpose," "personal statement," "letter of intent," "personal narrative," etc. Some statements require rather specific information--for example, the applicant's intended area of study within a graduate field. Others suggest subjects which should be addressed specifically. Still others are quite unstructured, leaving the applicant free to address a wide range of matters. Some applications call for one statement, while others require responses to a series of six or more questions, ranging from 250 to 750 words each. The importance of the statement varies from school to school and from field to field.

 

Determine your purpose in writing the statement

Usually the purpose is to persuade the admissions committee that you are an applicant who should be chosen. You may wish to show that you have the ability and motivation to succeed in your field, or you may wish to show the committee that, on the basis of your experience, you are the kind of candidate who will do well in the field. Whatever its purpose, the content must be presented in a manner that will give coherence to the whole statement.

  • Pay attention to the purpose throughout the statement so that extraneous material is left out.
  • Pay attention to the audience (committee) throughout the statement. Remember that your audience is made up of professionals in their field, and you are not going to tell them how they should act or what they should be. You are the amateur.

Determine the content of your statement

Be sure to answer any questions fully. Analyze the questions or guidance statements for the essay completely and answer all parts. Usually graduate and professional schools are interested in the following matters, although the form of the question(s) and the responses may vary:

  • Your purpose in graduate study. This means you must have thought this through before you try to answer the question.
  • The area of study in which you wish to specialize. This requires that you know the field well enough to make a decision and are able to state your preferences using the language of the field.
  • Your intended future use of your graduate study. This will include your career goals and plans for the future.
  • Your special preparation and fitness for study in the field. This is the opportunity to join and correlate your academic background with your extracurricular experience to show how they unite to make you a special candidate.
  • Any problems or inconsistencies in your records or scores, such as a bad semester. Be sure to explain in a positive manner and justify the explanation. Since this is a rebuttal argument, it should be followed by a positive statement of your abilities. In some instances, it may be more appropriate to provide this information outside of the personal statement.
  • Any special conditions that are not revealed elsewhere in the application, such as a significant (35 hour per week) workload outside of school. This, too, should be followed with a positive statement about yourself and your future.
  • You may be asked, "Why do you wish to attend this school?" This requires that you have done your research about the school, and know what its special appeal is to you.
  • Above all, this statement should contain information about you as a person. They know nothing about you unless you tell them. You are the subject of the statement.

Determine your approach and style of the statement

There is no such thing as "the perfect way to write a statement." There is only the one that is best for and fitting for you.

There are some things the statement should not be:

  • Avoid the "what I did with my life" approach.
  • Avoid the "I've always wanted to be a " approach.
  • Avoid a catalog of achievements. This is only a list of what you have done, and tells nothing about you as a person. Normally, the statement is far more than a resume.
  • Avoid lecturing the reader. For example, you should not write a statement such as "Communication skills are important in this field." Any graduate admissions committee member knows that and is not trying to learn about the field from the applicant. Some statements do ask applicants about their understanding of the field.

These are some things the statement should do:

  • It should be objective, yet self-revelatory. Write directly and in a straightforward manner that tells about your experience and what it means to you. Do not use "academese." This is not a research paper for a professor.
  • It should form conclusions that explain the value and meaning of your experience, such as what you learned about yourself and your field, your future goals, and your career plans. Draw your conclusions from the evidence your life provides.
  • It should be specific. Document your conclusions with specific instances, or draw your conclusions as the result of individual experience. See below a list of general words and phrases to avoid using without explanation.
  • It should be an example of careful persuasive writing. Career Center Counselors can help you determine if this is so by reviewing your draft statement.
  • It should get to the point early on and catch the attention of the reader.
  • It often should be limited in length, no more than two pages or less. In some instances it may be longer, depending on the school's instructions.

If you want a career counselor to read your personal statement, you must submit it through our online statement review service. Before you do that, we recommend that you attend a "Writing the Statement for Graduate School" workshop.

Words and phrases to avoid without explanation

significant
interesting
challenging
satisfying/satisfaction
appreciate
invaluable
exciting/excited
enjoyable/enjoy
feel good
appealing to me
appealing aspect
I like it
it's important
I can contribute
meant a lot to me
stimulating
incredible
gratifying
fascinating
meaningful
helping people
I like helping people
remarkable
rewarding
useful
valuable
helpful
 

22 November 2008

Quotes from Randy Pausch

Notable quotes:

  • When there's an elephant in the room introduce him

  • Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people.

  • If there's anything I want to do so badly, I should have already done it.

  • We can't change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I'm not as depressed as you think I should be, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

  • Work and play well together.
    - Tell The Truth. All The Time. No one is pure evil.
    - Be willing to apologize. Proper apologies have three parts: 1) What I did was wrong. 2) I'm sorry that I hurt you. 3) How do I make it better? It's the third part that people tend to forget…. Apologize when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself.
    - Show gratitude. Gratitude is a simple but powerful thing.
    - Find the best in everybody…. Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you. It might even take years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting.
    - If you want to achieve your dreams, you better learn to work and play well with others…[you have] to live with integrity.

  • Collaboration, treating others with respect.
    - Never found anger a way to make things better.
    - How do you get people to help you? You can't get there alone. People have to help you and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest. I'll take an earnest person over a hip person any day, because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.
    - Loyalty is a two-way street.
    - Get a feedback loop and listen to it. Your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did, or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear. The hard part is the listening to it.

  • Persistence and hard work.
    - When you are doing something badly and no one's bothering to tell you anymore, that's a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones still telling you they love you and care.
    - Don't bail: the best gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap
    - Don't complain, Just work harder. [showing picture on screen] That's a picture of Jackie Robinson. It was in his contract not to complain, even when the fans spit on him. You can spend it complaining or playing the game hard. The latter is likely to be more effective.
    - Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted…. I probably got more from that dream [of playing professional football] and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish.

  • Fun, wonder, living your dream.
    - Decide if you're a Tigger or an Eyeore. I'm a Tigger.
    - It is not about achieving your dreams but living your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you.
    - Never underestimate the importance of having fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day, because there's no other way to play it….Having fun for me is like a fish talking about the importance of water. I don't know how it is like not to have fun…
    - Never lose the child-like wonder. It's just too important. It's what drives us. Help others.

  • Risk-taking.
    - You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. But at the end of the day, a whole lot of people will have a whole lot of fun.
    - Better to fail spectacularly than do something mediocre. [Randy Pausch gave out a First Penguin award each year when he was teaching to the biggest failure in trying something big and new because he thought this should be celebrated. First Penguins are the ones that risk that the water might be too cold.]

  • Parenting and kids.
    - The best piece of parenting advice I've ever heard is from flight attendants. If things get really tough, grab your own oxygen mask first.
    - About his pancreatic cancer: It's unlucky, but it not unfair. We all stand on a dartboard and some of us randomly get hit by pancreatic cancer. But my children won't have me for them and that's not fair.
    - Someone's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon and I won't be there to catch them and that breaks my heart. But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall so that seems like the best and highest use of my time and I better get to work.
    - I'm sorry I won't be around to raise my kids. It makes me very sad but I can't change that fact, so I did everything I could with the time I have and the time I had to help other people.
    - Importance of people instead of things. Told story of buying new convertible that he was so proud of and taking niece and nephew for a ride. Randy's sister, the kid's mother was telling them how important it was to keep car pristine and kids were laughing because at the same time he was pouring a can of orange soda on the back seats. His sister asked what are you doing and he said "it's just a thing." And nephew Chris wound up being really grateful because he had flu and wound up throwing up on way home. "And I don't care how much joy you get out of owning a shiny new thing; it's not as good I felt from making sure that an 8 year old didn't have to feel guilty for having the flu."
    - [not a direct quote] but Randy implores parents to always indulge your children's wild ideas (he talks about how important it was that his parents let him decorate his walls with math formulas, despite the negative impact on their house's resale value) He says: "If you're going to have childhood dreams you should have great parents who let you pursue them and express your creativity."
    - It is Important to have specific childhood dreams. (For example, Randy wanted to play football in the NFL, write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia, experience the Weightlessness of Zero Gravity, be Captain Kirk from Star Trek, work for the Disney Company.)

  • Be good at something; it makes you valuable…. Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.

  • I've never understood pity and self-pity as an emotion. We have a finite amount of time. Whether short or long, it doesn't matter. Life is to be lived.

  • To be cliché, death is a part of life and it's going to happen to all of us. I have the blessing of getting a little bit of advance notice and I am able to optimize my use of time down the home stretch.

14 November 2008

Single mouse/keyboard set over multiple computer systems (单套键盘鼠标控制多台主机)

Share Your Keyboard and Mouse Across Computers with Input Director

Posted by Adam Pash at 8:00 AM on January 24, 2008

Windows only: Share a single keyboard, mouse, and clipboard between multiple Windows computers with freeware application Input Director. Similar to the cross-platform keyboard sharing app, Synergy, Input Manager offers an easier setup and a handful of really useful features―including the ability to copy and paste files and folders between systems (a feature that never seems to work correctly in Synergy). While Synergy is the best available solution for a multi-platform setup, if you're only running multiple Windows machines, Input Director looks like the best solution. If you happen to have an all-Mac setup, check out previously mentioned Teleport. Input Director is freeware, Windows only.

12 November 2008

What is Marshalling, and Unmanaged Code?

Guest - n/a Posts
#5: Re: What is Marshaling?

Sam,

From the perspective of a .NET developer, managed code does in fact equal
..NET code, and unmanaged code is all code that does not run under the CLR.

However, Java bytecode is often referred to as "managed code" as well. By
this more generic definition, managed code is any code that is run in a
managed environment that controls security access and access to resources.
That managed environment might be .NET's Common Language Runtime, Java's
bytecode interpreter, or something else. It is not enough for the code to
require a supporting runtime; VB6 or FoxPro executables, for example, are
not "managed" in this sense. A support library full of routines is
passively called by such code; but unlike a suport library, a manged
environment may refuse application an request if it violates security
protection levels or accesses forbidden resources. In order to be able to
determine whether or not to honor requests, the application code must be
self-describing; hence the other requirement to call an execution
environment "managed."

So, generically, managed code (1) contains some kind of meta-data to
describe itself to its runtime environment with (2) actively grants or
denies application requests based on the defined security configurations for
the application, and the machine and network the application is interacting
with.

--Bob
 
Sam Gentile [MVP - C#/.NET] November 15th, 2005 11:13 PM
Guest - n/a Posts
#4: Re: What is Marshaling?

> Thanks. So is recreating the structs into C#-readable structs (class or[color=blue]
> struct) marshalling?[/color]

Yes, it's one form of marshaling. As people said, marshaling is serializing
or transforming types over the wire or some boundary.
COM had marshaling
when you went out of one apartment into a non-compatible apartment or across
the wire to another machine. When dealing with COM Interop, .NET uses
Interop Marshaling between COM data types and .NET CLR types.
 
>> And what's unmanaged code? I've heard that code with pointers is
>> unmanaged
> code, or C code is unmanaged code. But why is a class managed code (if
> that statement is true) hile other code is unmanaged?

Unmanaged code is simply all code pre .NET. It is all code NOT compiled to
operate under .NET's runtime, the CLR. Unmanaged code is code compiled and
linked natively and has no knowledge of the CLR. Unmanaged code can be
native C++ with pointers, or C, or VB 6, or Delphi, etc. It is everything
not managed by the CLR. In the CLR, code is compiled into IL + metadata into
assemblies and then those assemblies are JITed into assembly language
instructions while called. It is the metadata throughout that allows managed
code to be managed, managed by the CLR. The CLR can control the type
definitions and boundaries (enforce CTS type definitions), control memory
through automatic management of data via the garbage collector, and provide
CAS security among other benefits. So a class is managed code IF compiled
with a .NET compiler and controlled by the CLR whereas "other code is
unmanaged" because it is compiled without a .NET compiler and uses the
unmanaged heap for memory and knows nothing of the CLR.

This is the answer to your question but I can go deeper if you want.
Essentially, both systems produce a Windows PE format file in the form of a
DLL or EXE. The huge difference is that in .NET, that PE file is called an
assembly and has different header. It also contains IL + metadata. All .NET
compilers are REQUIRED to emit IL + metadata. The metadata fully describes
all types in terms of CTS types. The metadata allows managed code to be
called "self-describing." When that assembly is loaded, and the types used,
the CLR JIT's the IL for the called method and replaces that section of IL
with the native assembly language. The IL is *never* interpreted but
provides a common platform-independent, language-independent standard form.
Because of all this, the CLR can manage the types and provide it's services.

-----
Sam Gentile
Microsoft MVP - C#/.NET
..NET Blog http://samgentile.com/blog/

 
Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP] November 15th, 2005 11:07 PM
Guest - n/a Posts
#2: Re: What is Marshaling?

Marshaling is the act of taking data from the environment you are in and
exporting it to another environment.
In the context of .NET, marhsaling
refers to moving data outside of the app-domain you are in, somewhere else.

When you work with unmanaged code, you are marshaling data from your
managed app-domain to the unmanaged realm. Also, when transferring data
between app-domains (to another application, on the same or another
machine), you are also marshaling data from your app-domain, to another
app-domain.
 
 

11 November 2008

Re: VB、C++、C#、JS 变量类型对照表 [转载]

C++            C#
=====================================
WORD            ushort
DWORD            uint
UCHAR            int/byte  大部分情况都可以使用int代替,而如果需要严格对齐的话则应该用bytebyte
UCHAR*            string/IntPtr
unsigned char*        Intptr
char*            string
LPCTSTR            string
LPTSTR            [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] string
long            int
ulong              uint
Handle            IntPtr
HWND            IntPtr
void*            IntPtr
int            int
int*            ref int
*int            IntPtr
unsigned int        uint
COLORREF                uint
 

VB、C++、C#、JS 变量类型对照表 [转载]

Category Class name Description Visual Basic data type C# data type Managed Extensions for C++ data type JScript data type
Integer Byte An 8-bit unsigned integer. Byte byte char Byte
    SByte An 8-bit signed integer.

Not CLS-compliant.

SByte

No built-in type.

sbyte signed char SByte
    Int16 A 16-bit signed integer. Short short short short
    Int32 A 32-bit signed integer. Integer int int

-or-

long

int
    Int64 A 64-bit signed integer. Long long __int64 long
    UInt16 A 16-bit unsigned integer.

Not CLS-compliant.

UInt16

No built-in type.

ushort unsigned short UInt16
    UInt32 A 32-bit unsigned integer.

Not CLS-compliant.

UInt32

No built-in type.

uint unsigned int

-or-

unsigned long

UInt32
    UInt64 A 64-bit unsigned integer.

Not CLS-compliant.

UInt64

No built-in type.

ulong unsigned __int64 UInt64
Floating point Single A single-precision (32-bit) floating-point number. Single float float float
    Double A double-precision (64-bit) floating-point number. Double double double double
Logical Boolean A Boolean value (true or false). Boolean bool bool bool
Other Char A Unicode (16-bit) character. Char char wchar_t char
    Decimal A 96-bit decimal value. Decimal decimal Decimal Decimal
    IntPtr A signed integer whose size depends on the underlying platform (a 32-bit value on a 32-bit platform and a 64-bit value on a 64-bit platform). IntPtr

No built-in type.

IntPtr

No built-in type.

IntPtr

No built-in type.

IntPtr
    UIntPtr An unsigned integer whose size depends on the underlying platform (a 32- bit value on a 32-bit platform and a 64-bit value on a 64-bit platform).

Not CLS-compliant.

UIntPtr

No built-in type.

UIntPtr

No built-in type.

UIntPtr

No built-in type.

UIntPtr
Class objects Object The root of the object hierarchy. Object object Object* Object
    String An immutable, fixed-length string of Unicode characters. String string String* String

 

貌似这列是VB.NET,我补充一下VC++到VB6的:

BOOL就是Byte (BOOL是CHAR=BYTE)

DWORD是LONG

Handle是Long型

BOOLEAN是Byte

7 November 2008

What are the "buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and the song called 'We Shall Overcome'"?

 
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.
From wikipedia,
1) the buses in Montgomery
The No. 2857 bus on which Rosa Parks was riding before she was arrested (a GM "old-look" transit bus, serial number 1132), is now a museum exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum.
 
2) the hoses in Birmingham
High school students are hit by a high-pressure water jet from a firehose during a protest in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Images like this one, printed in Life Magazine, inspired international support for the demonstrators.[1] Image credit: Charles Moore, Black Star
 
3) the bridge from Selma
wikipedia:
vids:
John Lewis (right, in trench coat) and Hosea Williams (left) lead marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March 7, 1965.
 
4) the song "We Shall Over Come"
"We Shall Overcome" is a protest song that became a key anthem of the US civil rights movement
 
 
 
 
Google