KWrite

As a HR manager for a new company, I have opportunities to read tons of resumes sent to my inbox. Unlike what I thought, there are still too many applicants, especially student job seekers, highlighting their Multi-Tasking skill in the resumes. I usually deleted those applications immediately.

It’s a deadly mistake to include this skill in your resume.  The hype is so dead now.

(A victim of the ADHD syndrome, I many times multi-task as well. However, it is my weakness, not strength.)

Osama Bin Laden could have hidden himself from the American military but he’s probably unable to run away from the news of Michael Jackson’s death.

Within a few hours after MJ’s death, the Thriller skyrocketed to the no. 1 album on iTunes. Many media sites experienced traffic slowdown and even crashed multiple times. As of now, 2 days since the news, there is countless number of  news articles and online talks about this event. MJ’s albums have spectacularly and totally invaded the iTunes Top Albums charts in 25 countries and undoubtedly other music stores as well.

Phenomenal statistics, aren’t they? But the mind-boggling question is: do people care about his death or about him that much? I doubt it. OK, perhaps not the right question to ask. How’s about: are there that many people who really love his music? Hm, possibly. The more interesting question to me is: how do we understand the dynamics of a mass movement like this? It definitely doesn’t equal the sum of each individual’s behavior. Geeky speaking, any linear approximation to this highly non-linear fashion could yield dreadful decisions.

MJ is a perfect example for this kind of study but by no means the only one. One can also relate this case to the Obama effect, the Paris Hilton effect (aka. “you start getting famous for being famous”), or more seriously the credit crisis that has been affecting each of us.

The internet obviously has played a big role in magnifying the scale of these phenomena. Knowing that doesn’t make us happier and you may ask: is there any new marketing or valuation model hidden in these effects that we can learn? An unknown I wish to further understand.

… between the two most dominant clubs in the world: Manchester United (MU) vs. Barcelona (Barca).

Well, the media has been talking about the controversies after the epic semi-final (Chelsea vs. Barca) and they’ll continue talking/writing about it for weeks. It was such a hell of a game. I admit that Chelsea played better, tactically, in the 2nd leg but overall, Barca deserved the ticket to Rome for the final. Full respect to the players on both sides for their fighting spirit.

This game might not have been as entertaining as the historical victory of Barca over Real Madrid last weekend but it is of a much higher level and well depicts the true modern football. The players brought so many good flavors to the game: philosophy, tactics, and intensity.

Now, what is my take on the final game in Rome? The Barca team this season could go down in history as the most talented club team ever. As a consequence, their players are technically superior to MU’s ones. However, I’d give a slight edge to MU (55% for MU and 45% for Barca) because:

1. MU has more depth in their squad. They have decent (even high quality) backup players for almost almost every position on the field.
   • Barca’s defence, on the other hand, is very thin and becomes vulnarable whenever a first-team player misses due to injury or suspension. Today, in the game against Chelsea, they didn’t have the service of the Puyol and Toure was pulled back as a centre back. As a consequence, without the three musketeers Toure-Xavi-Iniesta, Barca’s midfield looked very dull.
   • Worst, in the final, they’ll miss 3 defenders. Gerard Pique can be a sufficient replacement for Rafael Marque but the two full backs positions will cause a lot of thinking for Pep Guardiola.
2. Though technically superior, Barca’s players are not as physical. If allowed space to play their style, they’re weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise, they’re stuck. This is nothing new. They dominated the game but got stuck twice this year against Chelsea. It was exactly the same last year, albeit different outcome, when they played against an “anti-football” MU.
3. Alex Ferguson won’t tell his players to play attacking football and be victims of Barca. Unlike his counterpart, Alex is too pragmatic and experienced. He’ll probably apply the same tactics that Hiddink used this year and he himself used last year: parking a bus in front of the goal and killed off the game through a couple of counter attacks.

In summary, the final will surely be another hell of a game. Despite the reasons above, I’m a supporter of Barca.

• Unlike at other clubs (even Manchester United or Arsenal), most of Barca’s talents (Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Messi, Pique, Valdes, Krkic) are home grown. Their youth academy La Masia can easily produce a full team that has the potential of winning the Champions League.
• Coached by a manager who grew up in Barcelona and has played for the team himself.
• Their uniforms don’t have the name of any corrupted insurance giant.
• Still, they’re one of the two best teams in the world.

Who on earth doesn’t love these boys?

It’s a must watch if you fall into one of these categories

• Adventurous Travelers
• Motorcycle Riders
• You grew up in, have been to, or have already planned to visit Vietnam

Part 1

Part 2

It’s not hard to figure out my above-average admiration for great public speakers. Steve Jobs and Randy Pausch are two examples that I’ve written about. We learn from those speeches not only their insightful thoughts but also their attitudes, their voices, their body languages, and their styles. There’s just so much to learn from such speeches. Here’s another personal reason: I admire people who can do what I unpleasantly can’t.

I’m sure you know what I’m going to say next. That is, I’ve listened to another fantastic talk, this time by Guy Kawasaki. A former Apple employee, he’s now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the author of the best-seller The Art of the Start. His talk, in 2006, was essentially about the title of this book, i.e. entrepreneurship. I haven’t read the book but from his talk, I can imagine how thoughtful it is.

Every point in his 40-minute presentation is worth being listened. This guy does possess a great sense of humor, on top of other master public speaking skills.

(PDF of slides here)

For out-of-state and international kids, UT Austin (or UT) is among the toughest undergraduate schools to get in.

According to the new statistics by the admissions office (published on the Daily Texans newspaper), 29619 high school students applied to UT. Of these, 12665 were admitted and among them are 9252 Texas high school students admitted under the controversial Top 10 Percent Law.

That leaves 20367 other students having competed for the remaining 3413 spots. So, the admission rate for students not qualified by the rule above is essentially 16.7%, as low as of Ivy league schools. If you’re an admitted out-of-state or international freshman, you have every reason to feel proud of yourself.

However, the almost 10000 students automatically admitted may damage your education at UT. Everyone knows that there are so many high schools in Texas at which a retard can end up in the top 10%. Texas legislators really need to revise this stupid law immediately if they want UT competitive. Here are a few options:

• Abandon the rule completely. I’d love to see this option implemented but it’s quite infeasible for a state school like UT.
• Change the rule from Top 10% to Top 5% or Top 3%. This alternative is not the best but still much better than the current law.
• Better yet, allocate the number of automatically qualified students for each specific high school according to its rating. It’s not expensive to compile/revise such a ranking every 2-3 years. Not only will UT admit the better students but this rule, if implemented, will also create incentives for Texas high schools to continuously improve to be competitive.

Intro: Once awhile, I introduced an inspiring commencement address by Steve Jobs (Apple’s CEO) at Stanford about life. Now comes another sensational one, also by a techie and also about life: the last lecture by Randy Pausch.

Randy Pausch is a highly respected Computer Science Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, mostly known for his work in Human-Computer Interaction.

Note that the 3rd story of Steve is also about his struggling with cancer. Fortunately, he survived and then gave a speech about death. Randy gave words of wisdom knowing that he would die in a few months. Instead of talking about death, he talked about how he has “achieved” his childhood dreams, how he has enabled others achieve their childhood dreams, and how we achieve our dreams.

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“fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too .

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabr igde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.”

Source: this is all over the internet, I don’t know where it’s originally from.

Herbert A. Millington
Chair – Search Committee
412A Clarkson Hall
Whitson University
College Hill, MA 34109

Dear Professor Millington,

Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite Whitson’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then. Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,

Chris L. Jensen

Source: NADA (KTH)’s bulletin board

The following are my extremely old ideas, which the then-young-sophomore called “Research”. Looking back, I find those ideas very funny, silly, and trivial but still, they’re all my kids and I’m proud of them. Since I’m cleaning my website, including the Research page, I’m gonna bring the kids over here so that they won’t be forgotten by their damn father.

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* Generalization of Poisson distribution and its application in Epidemiology (K.Tran, L. Meyers): Many infectious diseases spread through populations via the networks formed by physical contacts among individuals, which are called social networks. Understanding those social networks helps us predict the probability and demographic distribution of an outbreak. Determining the degree distribution is thus a study of interest, where the degree of a person in a community is the number of his/her contacts. Data collected in Vancouver, where there were four cases of SARS detected in 2003, suggested that the degree distribution of an urban center may resemble a Poisson distribution but with higher probability of super-spreaders (a super-spreader is a person who has a high degree of contacts). Hence, we are interested in generalizing the Poisson distribution and computing the corresponding probability mass function that best approximates the data.

(Social Networks is still a hot research topic but definitely, my contribution is infinitesimal, if not 0.)

* New Action Model for the Robots: a failed project. Basically, in standard, each movement action (in a very short time) of the robot is modeled by 3 variables: turn (angle), travel (distance), and turn again (angle). Since there’re always errors in measurements (sensor, lazer, etc.), you model these as 3 Gaussian variables. I proposed a model that uses only 2 Gaussian variables, which are the (tangential) velocity and the turning rate (angular velocity). Such an “improvement” would tremendously reduces the computation time. Of course, in the proposal, I also showed how to derive the 2 variables from the sensor readings (in Computer Science world, such a mathematical derivation is considered so trivial). Indeed, Prof. Kuipers was also very excited with this idea. However, the testing demonstrated that my model was terrible. It turned out that even in a very short time, the robot’s motion is not necessarily circular.

Note that the motion of the robot is controlled by the motor (velocity) and the turning of the wheels/legs (turning rate). If the parameters are kept the same for 1 second, the robot will travel on a circular arc during that second. The problem is that those parameters change continuously.

(In the picture above are Sony Aibos, the robot dogs that I worked on.)

* The Laptop Hanger: an invention to facilitate my laziness. You stick the frame to the wall, you place your laptop on this frame and then you can comfortably use the laptop while laying down on bed. I made it with my own hands. This product would look much nicer if I had wooden furniture manufacturers in Vietnam make it. There are several technical problems in this paper. I resolved all of those as well as made some improvements; however, I haven’t rewritten the paper yet (so it’s interesting if you can figure out yourself).
* The Hash Tree: during my first semester in college, I invented an efficient data structure for the dictionary problem and I called it a Hash Tree. I was crazy about this idea (jumped off the chair) and excitedly thought about a cool publication. I presented this idea to Dr. Lin, my algorithms & data structures course instructor, and he (a compiler expert) found it cool too. He really made me hope. However, I was still a kid who re-invented the wheel (I figured that out after talking to Dr. Ramachandran). The data structure is classical (in some sense, it’s trivial) and in liturature, it’s called a Radix Tree.

* On Viète Theorem: An Interesting Application. In this paper, I present an interesting application of Viète theorem, a fundalmetal theorem about the sum and product of 2 roots of a quadratic equation, in Number Theory. It was first written in Vietnamese, when I was still in high school, and was translated into English 2 years later.
* Some Web Development Ideas: in my first year, I proposed these web development ideas to the Departmental Honors Software Development Group (the first Turing Scholars founded it), but no member found them cool (stupid kids, I still find them cool ), so no real project has been launched.