Perception vs reality .....

Some times we do things out of our own perception ignoring the reality, or not wanting to see the reality. However, what happens when we have to face the reality breaking the perception we built?

In an ideal world things work perfectly. Consider TV serials, movies, with a perfect plot where bad things are overcome by good things, things move fast to pace up the story line. It is during these times we understand that what are being shown is the perception of the writers fancies of how the ideal world should be. 

However, there is nothing like an ideal world, so if you try to control to make one, it can only happen through a forced perception, where you make yourself in believing things that you want to see in an ideal world. It comes at a cost of ignoring the hints that things are not ideal the way they should be, and the way you want them to be. 

However, the perception can not hold much longer if it involves lets say people, because people might be pretending to be fitting into your perceptive world, or you might be trying to fit them into your ideal world. Sooner or later, they give in only to realize that things are far from ideal. In a fictional story, things could be made so ideal, but real world behaves differently. 

So when this perceptive world does not hold any more, and realities creep into it hurts, because things do not stay ideal. Then mind can play games with you to understand why in-spite of all your tireless efforts things do not look the same the way they looked earlier. And then mind goes for a toss, in a endless spiral trying to figure out where did it all start, and how it went out of control until the mind which was controlling the ideal world became part of the world, and got dragged into its mindless fallacies. Coming out of this trap when the perception breaks could be a nightmare because the mind does not understand whose fault it was that the ideal world does not exist. It starts blaming things endlessly on different aspects blaming lets say the subjects that were part of the ideal world, failing to realize they were not ideal in the first place, they were just pretending to be ideal to match the expectations of the perceived world to match its creators fancies. 

Things could go terribly wrong if the mind can not understand the trap of falling into the endless blame game, thinking why ideal world does not exist anymore. Emotions creep into blinding rational judgments, and causing a downward spiral again. The effect can drag on for a considerable time unless there is realization of what exactly happened that lead to this situation. External stimulus could be then dwarfed by the fact that mind is not in control to understand such facts to improve upon the conditions, unless either time passes by to let it recover, or some strong external stimulus creates the necessary circumstances to let the recovery begin. 

However, once the recovery begins, you realize that you understood something crucial about yourself, that will help you become more stronger in understanding your own self to understand such situations better. And then that completes the necessary learning of you as a person.

Kudos. 

How do you handle betrayals from close friends ...?

How do you handle betrayals? Specifically when it happens through a close friend whom you trusted badly.

Being socially well versed could be a tough job if you are a serious PhD candidate as most of the times you are in a lab working on your experiments and research. Then you happen to meet somebody whom you think is your best friend. You feel happy. But then you realize the relationship is not good, because you are only investing it in from your side and the other party is just taking advantage of you. If the other party is much younger than you, you also tend to have parental feeling of love towards it, and you tend to ignore the non-investment from the other party saying ah its just a kid. But then suddenly one day you get a big jolt that oh, the other party simply took advantage of you and fooled you for your kindness.

So as a scientist how do you handle such situations? As a rational person you are aware of what is happening, but when the other party does not stop its low behavior it becomes difficult to accept the fact thinking, where is the morality and ethics? and how in the first place you allowed your self to be fooled in this manner even though you knew the signals, but you ignored them willfully?

As a scientist you can look at it as a failed experiment in which you put all your efforts knowing things are not going good, but hoping some day they will miraculously turn out to be good. You try to learn from the situations and move on, but if you are an idealist, who thinks an idea world should not behave in this way, if you were so genuine, then it becomes too difficult to understand how the other party could be so bad? I mean how could people be so bad where they just take things without any kind of empathy and compassion.

So to understand this question you start learning how people behave by studying psychology and you come across this notorious class of people called "narcissist socio-path", who seem friendly, agreeable, trustworthy, but who would lack any kind of emotions, regret, guilt towards the wrong doing they have done after taking advantage of others kindness. So you now understand technically and rationally there are these kind of weird bad people and you were unlucky (you do not believe in luck still) to meet such a person. But still your mind refuses to accept the fact that you were hurt so badly.

So you continue with new experiments to train your mind to come out of this shadow of darkness to find new goals, new ambitions to overcome the sadness of the betrayal. You train it daily that success is the best revenge, so you should be successful even more successful than ever, and only that can heal it. You train it saying, this is better for me, because it has taught me so many valuable lessons in terms of how to identify good people from bad people so early in my life, that it will not be difficult to identify them in future, and this is a blessing in disguise for the fact that this saves you from lot of difficult experiences in future due to this experience.

So you try to train your mind with all the willpower of your never die attitude and positivity, but still when you are not watching your mind, it sleeps into that other aspect where it hurts. The challenge is to keep watching it so that your rational always.

I think this is when you become a monk , when your feelings are immortal :-)

You could be The leader .... at the traffic junction ....

I remembered the good old India days, almost before I left for MS in USA, after watching the video promo of "Satyameva Jayate". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7av_h-stLow

The video shows how your behavior at Traffic signal can tell a lot about your personality. In crux, at night when there is reasonably less traffic, while most vehicles pass red lights, a single car stops, and after the car has stopped as a chain reaction, other vehicles also eventually stop at the signal. And then Aamir khan says, this guy who stopped first will watch our show, while the others who just passed by will not....He is watching from a balcony overlooking the signal. 

What reminds me about this video, is this is the exact same thing that I used to do back in India to make people stop at Traffic signals. No matter if there is any body at the signal or not, I would be standing there with my motorbike until the signal turns green. Some vehicles would pass by me, but eventually watching me stopped, many vehicles would stop and wait. 

Simple acts like this, can bring out the leader in you to tackle the social problems that India faces. People just want a representative to follow, and if your intentions are good, they will follow you. What matters is the ability to stand out from the crowd, stay put no matter what happens, and show that courage to take the first step. And then you will have followers.

Satyameva Jayate .....Long live the truth and my country. 

Abstraction from the perspective of Art and Science

While visiting the museum of Modern Art in Paris I was constantly thinking on what is the meaning behind all these art work which really does not easily convey the theme behind it. 

In my opinion art could be divided into two distinct categories the antique art (for e.g. renaissance paintings) vs the modern art. Antique paintings convey the theme directly, for example paintings such as Monalisa convey the depiction of European woman's portraits with its mystery smiles etc. The theme in general here could be human nature and its mystics. However, modern art is very very abstract in its nature. Many of the paintings I saw had just rectangles painted in the same color as the wall they were showcased on. Or one rectangle with a tilted side superimposed on a triangle. This the geometric perspective. Then there were many creations which used day to day objects such as a leather bag, a spoon etc. And then there were so many more which I could not understand. 

In Science too, abstraction is the theme. Science is all about asking abstract questions and then trying to find an answer to them. So the theme here is exploration of the observed abstraction and understanding why the observed facts are the way they are. So this is more of a top down approach where one starts with abstraction and then divulges into it. 

Modern art differs in this aspect I think where the big picture itself is so much abstract that most of the time understanding the theme being conveyed becomes an abstraction in itself, because the theme usually rests on the personal context of the creator. And it is not universal as in the case of the Science. Understanding an Art Work could therefore have too many dimensions from its creators perspective. The abstraction in Science gets conveyed using the method of publication of theory or experimental results. The focus here is to be as simple in conveying the abstract idea so that it makes sense. A modern art creation also differs here because it defies the sole purpose of simplicity by being extremely abstract in its nature. 

And there could be many more arguments like this ...

Solar Engineers - Barefoot college

In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men -- many of them illiterate -- to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It's called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works and the five non negotiable values.

Trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2JPwotX9hY

A talk by Bunker Roy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DmddCLhGNY

An interesting book collection

(This is a re-post from 2011)

Towards the end of 2011 I stumbled upon Harward's systems research lab and was curious to know about Indian grad students there. There was only a single student. Son of Mr. Narayan Murty (Infosys). Rohan Murty. I felt curious about the collection of books he had read since 2005. And here it is. 

I had always had this problem about finding a good source of books to read from a reliable source. This list made me extremely happy.

Men of Mathematics - E.T. Bell (5/5)

1984 - George Orwell (5/5)

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel (5/5)

Masters of Doom : How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - David Kushner (5/5)

Fermat's Last Theorem - Simon Singh (5/5)

e: The Story of a Number - Eli Maor (5/5)

A Mathematician's Apology - G. H. Hardy (4/5)

Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick (3/5)

'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' (Adventures of a Curious Character) - Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings and Albert R. Hibbs (5/5)

What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character - Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton (4/5)

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb - William Poundstone (3/5)

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman - Timothy Ferris (5/5)

Genius : The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick (3/5)

Trigonometric Delights - Eli Maor (3/5)

The Hilbert Challenge - Jeremy Gray (3/5)

No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman - Richard P. Feynman (3/5)

Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics - George Johnson (4/5)

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman and Jeffrey Robbins (2/5)

Feynman Lectures on Computation (2/5)

Six Easy Pieces, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman (4/5)

Six Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman (5/5)

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter (4/5)

Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun - David L. Goodstein, Judith R. Goodstein and Richard Phillips Feynman (2/5)

Strange Brains and Genius : The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen - Clifford A. Pickover - 2002 (2/5)

The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics - Marcus du Sautoy (4/5)

To Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite - Eli Maor (4/5)

Interactions : A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle Physicist - Sheldon Glashow and Ben Bova (3/5)

Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey - Ralph Leighton - 2003 (2/5)

Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy - Tim Roughgarden (5/5)

Universities and Their Leadership - Bowen and Shapiro (Editors) - 2004 (5/5)

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod - 2005 (3/5)

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (4/5)

Einstein: The Life and Times - Ronald Clark (3/5)

Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos - Steven Strogatz (4/5)

The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University - Frank Rhodes - 2005 (5/5)

Emergence: From Chaos to Order - John H. Holland - 2005 (2/5)

Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond (3/5)

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History - Stephen Hawking (2/5)

Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason - Charles Freeman - 2006 (5/5)

Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World - Stephen O'Shea - 2006 (4/5)

A Short History of Byzantium - John Julius Norwich - 2006 (4/5)

Byzantium: The Early Centuries - John Julius Norwich (5/5)

Byzantium: The Apogee - John Julius Norwhich (4/5)

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall - John Julius Norwhich (4/5)

For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery - Rodney Stark (3/5)

The Physics of Superheroes - James Kakalios (4/5)

One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism - Rodney Stark (3/5)

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond (1/5)

Behavioural Game Theory: Experiments in strategic interactions - Colin Camerer (3/5)

A Beautiful Mind - Slyvia Nassar (4/5)

Complete Yes Prime Minister - Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay (5/5)

Choice and Consequence - Thomas C. Schelling (3/5)

Readings in Political Economy - Kaushik Basu (3/5)

The Book of the Courtier - Baldesar Castiglione (3/5)

Rationality and Freedom - Amartya Sen (2/5)

Fate Is the Hunter - Ernest K. Gann (4/5)

Great Feuds in Mathematics - Hellman (4/5)

Constantine and the Conversion of Europe - Jones (3/5)

Becoming Charlemagne - Jeff Sypeck (4/5)

Moral Minds - Marc Hauser (4/5)

A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut (5/5)

Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine - Lenski (3/5)

The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant (5/5)

An Introduction to Political Philosophy - Wolff (5/5)

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins (3/5)

Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris (3/5)

Lord Chesterfield's Letters - Lord Chesterfield (3/5)

American Prometheus - The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer - Bird and Sherwin (4/5)

The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck (5/5)

The Moral Consequences of Economic Freedom - Friedman (5/5)

A History of Civilizations - Braudel (3/5)

Among the Believers - Naipaul (4/5)

God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist - Victor Stenger (3/5)

Bookless in Baghdad - Shashi Tharoor (2/5)

The Argumentative Indian - Amartya Sen (2/5)

Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (5/5)

Chairman of the Board: A Practical Guide - Brian Lechem (1/5)

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseni (3/5)

Big Bang - Simon Singh (5/5)

The Undercover Economist - Tim Hartford (4/5)

Right Hand Left Hand - Chris McManus (4/5)

The Battle for God - Karen Armstrong (4/5)

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel - Rebecca Goldstein (4/5)

Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics - Gino Segre (4/5)

God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism- Jonathan Kirsch (4/5)

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher - Julian Baginni (2/5)

The Therapy of Desire - Martha Nussbaum (3/5)

Boeing versus Airbus - John Newhouse (4/5)

Physics of the Impossible - Michio Kaku (2/5)

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company - David Price (2/5)

Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul - Kenneth Miller (4/5)

Lectures on The History of Moral Philosophy - John Rawls (3/5)

The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist - Richard P. Feynman (2/5)

Vikram Sarabhai - Amrita Shah (3/5)

Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works - Arthur Rimbaud (4/5)

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World - Timothy Brook (4/5)

Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life - Leonard Mlodinow (3/5)

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions - Martha Nussbaum (3/5)

Elizabeth Costello - J. M. Coetzee (5/5)

Mohandas - Rajmohan Gandhi (3/5)

Thus Spoke Zarathushtra - Friedrich Nietzsche (3/5)

Alberuni’s India - Al-Biruni (4/5)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain (5/5)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (5/5)

The Quantum Ten - Sheila Jones (4/5)

Poincaré’s Prize: The Hundred -Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles - George G. Szpiro (4/5)

The Honors Class: Hilbert’s Problems and Their Solvers - Ben Yandell (3/5)

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments - George Johnson (3/5)

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (4/5)

The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg - Robert P. Crease (2/5)

Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code - Matt Ridley (1/5)

Empires of the Indus - Alice Albinia (4/5)

Essays of E. B. White - E. B. White (4/5)

Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science - John D. Barrow (4/5)

The Great American University - Jonathan Cole (5/5)

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar (4/5)

Toys from Trash

Science could be made exciting by having experimental demonstration of the fundamental concepts.

Professor Gupta realizes this vision with an amazing array of science tools for kids that he builds from almost trash material.

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys.html

Hole in the wall ...

Schools of the future .....

How should schools of the future look like? Are schools the right way to impart education? Do they serve the purpose in the world of Information age and the Internet? Can self learning be achieved?

I remember reading about "The hole in the wall" experiment long time back. In this experiment a computer was stuck in a wall in a slum to observe what would be the reaction of the children in the area. It was observed that children not only managed to successfully self learn how to browse the computer but advanced to more skills in using the computer, even though they had not seen one before at all.

I happened to come across the creator of that experiment who won a TED prize for his idea about building a school in the cloud. Here is the talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

Children no matter where they are born, to rich parents or in slums, are creative and curious by nature. It is the responsibility of the society to understand how to nurture this creativity to foster talents.

The cost of missing an opportunity of the type the presenter speaks could be heavy for the societies if it does not understand these kind of basic questions about how to kindle the learning process in kids.

I wish we have more action oriented scientists who want to bring change in the societies perception by bringing fundamental changes, than the scientists who are happy in publishing mindless publications without any impact on society. I wish more scientists shared this urge.

A PhD students memoir...From Stanford

The journey of a quality PhD program is one of the toughest intellectual challenges that one can face in one's life. Its an incredibly long unique journey, with lots of hurdles as it comes along.

Here is a great memoir by a remarkable student Philip J. Guo, from Stanford, describing his arduous tough life at Stanford from 2006 to 2012, in Computer Science department, as a PhD student.

http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf

Thanks Philip for documenting the details of the process called PhD, at one of the finest institute for Computer Science research in the world.

Regards,
Mrunal

Some tips on writing a research paper

Some steps in writing a good paper / article describing your research.

1. Think on the structure of the content and layout of the writing

2. Work on the abstract

3. Work on the introduction

4. Work on the conclusion

5. Work on writing what you did and how you did it, in the rest of the paper

This is how the individual section goes ahead. 

1. Abstract - Why is this problem important? What is the uniqueness of the solution that you are providing to this problem? Why others fail? What is your contribution? What are you going to describe in the paper.

2. Introduction - What context is needed to understand the problem? Why is the problem so much important? What is the solution that you are providing based on this context? What are some important characteristics and contributions of your approach? How is it better than other approaches?

3. How you do it, and what you do it. Description of architecture, components, algorithm, methodologies, work-flows etc.

4. Conclusion - What is the main contribution your solution provides, why this approach important, how this approach benefits, what are some future directions of thought.

Different iterations of paper writing -

1. Generate the entire content of the paper in the structure described above. Get the template Latex file for the paper and start writing in it directly. Keep placeholders for diagrams. When writing a paragraph, the first sentence of the paragraph should be an introductory statement, which gives crux of what the paragraph is about. Then describe the contents of the paragraph around this statement. Write long sentences which convey your thoughts and shorten them in the next review cycles.

State problem first and define the solution later.

2. Check if the paper reads like a story. Give it for a review to your adviser / friend. Ask for feedback. Do this as much as possible to have the final first version of paper.

3. Make corrections in the arrangement of the statements, paragraph structures, the way thoughts are expressed and story is told.

4. Shorten the statements and make them concise to convey the same point. Work on the tense and grammar to remove unnecessary words.

5. Check if some paragraphs do not fit in the story and re-write them,  add new paragraphs. Read the story again.

6. Work on fitting the paper in the given page number format and optimizing space. Lets assume the page restrictions is 4 in size. Start by looking at paragraph ends. Try to remove standalone words which create a new paragraph. Play with latex word rearrangement to rearrange words so that they are placed with minimal space. Replace long words with same meaning short words. Check grammar. Do this for each sentence in the entire paper.

8. Work on abstract, introduction and conclusion again to see if it introduces story line correctly and makes the correct impact. Try to understand what is the central message that your paper gives to the reader. Are you guiding him correctly in his reading process?

9. Once a good content is ready. Give the paper for peer review to couple of people. Remember, new people will have a new perspective to look at the paper and would provide you with critical feedback such as if story line is not clear, if some sentence is not fitting well and needs rephrasing / reordering / restructuring etc. Chose the peers to review in such a manner that some would give a technical feedback whereas the others would provide a language based story feedback. Improve on the feedback.

The central idea of a scientific paper is to convey the novelty of your research. Make sure your paper talks that loud and clear in best way in the abstract, introduction and conclusion section prominently.

Teaching machine....

Courtesy article from famous behavioral scientist "B.F.Skinner".

http://www.bfskinner.org/BFSkinner/AboutSkinner.html

Teaching Machines and Programmed Instruction

Skinner's children were growing up. When the younger was in fourth grade, on November 11, 1953, Skinner attended her math class for Father's Day. The visit altered his life. As he sat at the back of that typical fourth grade math class, what he saw suddenly hit him with the force of an inspiration. As he put it, "through no fault of her own the teacher was violating almost everything we knew about the learning process." In shaping, you adapt what you ask of an animal to the animal's current performance level. But in the math class, clearly some of the students had no idea of how to solve the problems, while others whipped through the exercise sheet, learning nothing new. In shaping, each best response is immediately reinforced. Skinner had researched delay of reinforcement and knew how it hampered performance. But in the math class, the children did not find out if one problem was correct before doing the next. They had to answer a whole page before getting any feedback, and then probably not until the next day. But how could one teacher with 20 or 30 children possibly shape mathematical behavior in each one? Clearly teachers needed help. That afternoon, Skinner constructed his first teaching machine.

Skinner's first teaching machine simply presented problems in random order for students to do, with feedback after each one. But this machine did not teach new behavior. All it did was give more practice on skills already learned. Within three years, however, Skinner developed programmed instruction, where through careful sequencing, students responded to material broken into small steps. The steps were similar to what a skilled tutor would ask of a student working with one student at a time. The first responses of each sequence were prompted, but as performance improved, less and less help was given. By the end, a student was doing something he or she could not have done at the beginning. For about ten years, Skinner was caught up in the teaching machine movement, answering every one of thousands of letters from parents, schools, and business and industry. With a grant, Skinner hired James G. Holland who with Skinner's supervision, created The Analysis of Behavior for Skinner's class of Harvard students to take on a mechanical machine. (There were no microcomputers yet.) The field of education embraced this newest teaching method, but many of the materials were poorly written and no company wanted to design materials for a teaching machine that might go out of production. So most programmed instruction was put into book form. But the a book does not maintain the contingencies: Students can look at the answer before writing their own. By around 1968 education publishers stopped printing programmed instruction. That same year Skinner published The Technology of Teaching, a collection of his writings on education. Some of the better programs from the 60's are still used and with the coming of the computer and internet, the perfect machine that Skinner lacked is now available. Increasingly, instructional designers are realizing that, as Skinner insisted, tutorials must do more than present blocks of content with quizzes at the end. Effective instruction requires learners to respond to what each screen of information presents and to get feedback on their performance before advancing to the next. In addition, the sequencing of steps is critical.

Vigyan Ashram

Vigyan Ashram is a center of Indian Institute Of Education (IIE) Pune. A scientist turned educationalist Late Dr.S.S.Kalbag started Vigyan Ashram in 1983 to find out solution to the problems in education.

For us “Vigyan” means ‘Search of Truth’ and “Ashram” symbolises ‘Simple living and High thinking for us, a organization where all are equal, it’s a modern version of old Gurukul system’

More on this here ...

http://www.vigyanashram.com/

Nice piece of advice about research and life.

Some nice piece of advise from Prof. Keshav.


http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/wiki/index.php/Aphorisms


-Mrunal

Some good strategies of teaching and learning.

Seven mathematical processes that form the heart of the teaching and learning strategies used in mathematical teachings.

Communicating: Several opportunities for students to share their understanding both in oral as well as written form.

Problem solving: Scaffolding of knowledge, detecting patterns, making and justifying conjectures, guiding students as they apply their chosen strategy, directing students to use multiple strategies to solve the same problem, when appropriate, recognizing, encouraging, and applauding perseverance, discussing the relative merits of different strategies for specific types of problems.

Reasoning and proving: Asking questions that get students to hypothesize, providing students with one or more numerical examples that parallel these with the generalization and describing their thinking in more detail.

Reflecting: Modeling the reflective process, asking students how they know.

Selecting Tools and Computational Strategies: Modeling the use of tools and having students use technology to help solve problems.

Connecting: Activating prior knowledge when introducing a new concept in order to make a smooth connection between previous learning and new concepts, and introducing skills in context to make connections between particular manipulations and problems that require them.

Representing: Modeling various ways to demonstrate understanding, posing questions that require students to use different representations as they are working at each level of conceptual development – concrete, visual or symbolic, allowing individual students the time they need to solidify their understanding at each conceptual stage.

The real education

I have been thinking on this very hard for a long time. Is education that we receive in our schools the real education? Is the education that one receives as a child when one is totally incapable of understanding what is being taught and why it is being taught the real education? Why people and most of the society think that the academic achievements are the only one's which establish a person as a real achiever?

Do all the gifted children who were considered a child prodigy able to survive the rigor that life poses as one enters different phases of life. Or does society eats them with its traditional views. Why does history starts looking more fascinating when one does not come in its contact at all, after leaving school.

I believe a person gets molded by two things. The environment that he grows up with and the inherent genes that he carries from his parents while he / she is born. Not all kids are born with great genes, but if they grow up in good environment, with great teachers or thinkers they end up being good too.

Our education gives us different contexts at different stages of our childhood. We are taught to learn vocabulary, we are taught science, we are taught mathematics, history, civics. Then we are taught special branches like engineering. medical..etc etc. Point of a good education is to make good human beings who could understand how to live a meaningful life. But unfortunately many of the times, our education prepares us just for our survival, to earn our bread and butter.

Is education's role solely limited to teaching a person to earn his bread and butter? That is important but how can people understand the role it also plays in making a good human being? That is why you see so many people hating to be educated after a certain basic degree. That is why you see, least resistance to go for higher education in places like India. Because people believe they have achieved a certain qualification to earn ones living and be happy for the rest of their lives.

Does it really happen so? Do people really stay happy with the limited knowledge that they achieve? I believe people make themselves feel they are happy in their state of ignorance of so many things that go around them, which they might become aware of they more educated and if they are taught how to think in a more wise way. And that is why we see so much of nonsense that goes on around us.

I believe real education starts when you are mature enough to understand the vast amount of problems in the world, and how you can contribute to make it better. The rest of the education that one receives in classrooms is not education, its just a tool to make you powerful to sustain your life, by giving you power to earn. And mostly people realize the importance of real education late in their life, when things have come to a full stop or looks like they will come to a full stop.

I am a firm believer of the view that if all these people, who get themselves into the monotonous rigor of living a life as expected by society according to its standards, start visiting their school education again, they will find so much happiness that yes, they are actually understanding the meaning of all of it. And that happiness is a great to be cherished for, as it will take their attention away to some extent, from the daily problems that we face as grown ups at different stages.

M. J. Adler - a great academician

Some very well known scientists / academics leave a strong mark of their work when they leave this world. Mr. M.J. Adler is one such person. A PhD in philosophy. He has written some amazing books to date.

Here is a collection of some of his best work so far on various topics.
http://www.thegreatideas.org/adler-on.html

And here is a very much useful article from him, on "How to read a scientific book". Reading a novel is different than reading a scientific book. He explains lot of myths here in a very much illustrative manner.

http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf

Teaching Assistant ...(TA)

The biggest find I had during my graduate days at UCSC was the role of a Teaching Assistant. US education system has lot of small small nice aspects which makes it one of the best education system in the world.

Teaching Assistant is the role played by a senior student or a graduate student in making the lower class students / junior students understand any difficulty with respect to subject matter / practicals being conducted by a professor during class. So let us consider an introductory class like "Introduction to Computer Science". Now this class will have all type of students right from some students who have previous exposure to programming and computers to those type of students who are totally new to computers and do not know absolutely anything about them. Role of a professor is to make teaching lively and taking into account psychology of all students in account. Professor usually has a biweekly session of 1 hour called Office Hours. Where students can ask difficulties to the professor directly. For all the other difficulties there is a Teaching Assistant. Responsibility of this TA is to answer to queries of students, dumbest of the questions ( "How do I turn on the monitor?" "How do I save this file on hard drive" to advanced programming questions like "What is an assembly language and how well can you explain it".) He also helps students in conducting before exam review session so that students are well prepared for the exams.

Role of a TA is important because most of the times, it becomes easier to interact with a student than a professor and ask some stupidest questions without feeling embarrassed. It really helps in making basics clear for these students. So this is a great system where students get benefited a lot and their basic concepts become really good. It helps students understand that they are a part of a group and help them understand the concept of correct methods of learning. Believe me there are different ways of learning. One could be learning a thing in a wrong way unknowingly.

Good thing about these professors and Teaching Assistants is they really want to help you understand material in a better way. They like questions being asked. I was a Teaching Assistant for 2 courses and I loved my job. It was great to understand students psychology and make them a better person.

Compare this with the way education is imparted in Indian schools. I remember, professors who made students cry during final practical examination under their own ego. I remember lecturers throwing away journals without understanding the cause behind a faulty lab experiment. I remember lecturers playing games in class and making a mockery of the important basic subjects which should have been taught correctly, so that students had a vision of the future. I remember lecturers favoring a certain group of students because they were already well exposed and could answer questions. I remember lecturers not attending classes, teaching wrong things, bluffing, making fun of low performing students because of different things.

I never entertained these lecturers. But I knew many who left no opportunity to please them, though they were wrong. I did not know then that, this is called Interpersonal skills. You repeat the same nonsense in pleasing your boss in a nonsense work environment to move ahead of others. I some how could not develop these interpersonal skills and please others. But I know many who did and are pretty ahead in their respective fields. Good for them.

But I made sure that I gave these people the feedback that they did this thing wrong and that thing wrong. I could not suppress the nonsense they were doing. I some times walked out from classrooms when I could not take the nonsense. People do not like giving feedbacks, because it comes at the cost of interpersonal skills. People do not like to admit mistakes because it hurts their egos. People do not want to share things because they feel what if I stay behind and the other person goes ahead of me?

US is a country which respect utter professionalism. Be it in work environment or education system. I am glad I could be a part of one of the best education systems in the world and could learn so many things. Sure they would come handy in long run.

I wish some day Indians learn this professionalism.

Why having a good mentor is important?

Having a guide / mentor who helps you get the vision is one of the most important things that could happen to a person in one's life.

I always cry aloud on what is the importance of exposure and how it matters. A mentor kicks in exactly at this stage. He is the one who gives you the correct exposure to the outside world when you are still growing. When you are grasping for the newness of the outside world. Many people find mentors in their parents may be father / mother, many find them in their teacher, many in their Professors, many in the colleagues. The person may be different but the role stays the same.

Exceptionally fortunate are those kids, who are born in a family of well educated, well connected people where there is large awareness and exposure right from the early age, from the time when you are groping yourself with new child like enthusiasm and questions, the role of mentors grows manifold. Here is your chance to grow to your potential, develop intellectual curiosity, ask the right questions and most important get most of them answered in the most appropriate manner. Fortunate are those kids who get such early exposure.

Fortunate are those kids who get an outstanding teacher who makes them believe in themselves and in their abilities, when they will grow up to face the changing world. This teacher may not be at all well knowledgeable, what matters is how he makes you interested in whatever he knows and teaches. Such early stage development and confidence brings a lot of different attitude in a kid's mind later.

Getting a visionary Professor during ones formal higher education is equally important as this is where the "Big Vision" of what one wants to do in one's life later comes into picture. This is the critical stage when you can transform those ideas that were bubbling into real life work. This is where one can get correct guidance to what direction to go in one's life and what vision to have and how to achieve it. This is where you learn how to address the correct problems and how to find the correct solutions or at least make a sincere wise attempt towards them.

Exceptionally fortunate are those who get a spouse who is equally enthusiastic about his / her other halves interests and take pride in carrying them forward. He / She also acts as a mentor to guide you during your troubled times, when you need direction, when you seek some one so close to yourself to whom you can confide in your personal space and personal thoughts and on whom you can rely and trust when the entire world seems to be going against you.

Fortunate are those who get some mentor of some sort during atleast one of these stages. And I would say unfortunate are those who even after realizing the importance of these stages could not get one of these. Really unfortunate are those who even after getting one of these, could not make use of them for their betterment under their ego and over-confidence.

A correct mentor is very important. He / She can make your life great if you find the right one.

Tips for Masters students ...

Some tips for MS / PHD students for being successful in their studies while at graduate school.

1. Be open minded. Do not fall in the trap of I want to stick to this specialization. This is an Indian mentality. Get out of it. It does not work in US. Explore and get exposure to different areas and take courses accordingly.

2. Chose difficult projects, different projects, long projects. Do projects in groups. Understand the good practices that your team members are using. Observer their work methods and chose the good ones. Discuss. Chose group members such that you will end up sharing and learning things. Do not chose group members because you are his friend. Chose on the basis of knowledge. If you are less knowledgeable, go to a group which has clever people so that at the end of it you would have emerged wiser.

3. Chose the courses wisely. Do not get bogged down by the course content. Have a diverse yet related courses. Like if you are in systems, good courses are statistics(undergrad level) (this is needed for analysis of data), operating systems, storage systems, distributed systems, data mining, database systems, multimedia systems, computer networking, algorithms, logic algorithms etc. Do not fear the ones you do not know. Understand the way this system works and try to build up the context and prerequisite for the courses you are not good at by taking extra undergraduate counterpart courses. US education system is very flexible and it allows you lot of flexibility in terms of lot of things. So make most of it. Get exposed to different problems so that when similar situation arises you can have atleast some background to think on it. You need not emerge out expert.

4. Take some courses which are inter-disciplinery ie. take some course in departments other than Engineering like say Psychology? Music? depends on your interest. Understand the life other than engineering. You will be surprised to see how different it is and what attitude it carries. Be socially responsible.

5. Professors are weird people. Do not feel bad if they do not talk nicely sometimes or not reply to your mails. Each professor is different. Some are really good, some are really considerate, some are good researchers but not good lecturers, some are good lecturers but not good researchers, some are harsh with spoiled attitude, some are very humane, some are not so. Understand their behavior and analyze them.

6. Difficult courses usually have a Teaching Assistant session where students are helped with their difficulties. Make most out of it. Learn how to use this time for a better learning and understanding of the material. Do not break your head on a complex problem under ego. Take hints and help of other people. Acknowledge the hints and help in your work. Share the credit. Do not brag. Plagiarism could be dangerous.

7. Homeworks are meant for making the material covered in class better understandable. You can learn new subject only if some problem in it is given to you and you break your head thinking about it. It is only during this time that you will face more problems and then only you will explore the subject more and appreciate it more. The satisfaction of solving a complex problem could be more than satisfaction of having a beautiful / HOT girl sitting next to you :) Experience it. haha. Homeworks are meant for that. So do that. Do not try stealing others ideas and copy. Get read of the typical Indian mindset.

8. Learn the material before hand. By learn I mean before professor teaches it in class, go over it in books, wikipedia, Internet. Get into the context of the subject so that the lecture would become interesting and you could identify yourself with what the professor is teaching. After the class is over, spend some time thinking about what professor talked. You will have better chances of remembering it, if you recall it immediately after the class. Your chances of understanding things improve manifold if you spend some time beforehand in going over lecture material, which is usually posted on class website by professor. Or take a look at previous years class websites.

9. Different professors have different ways and styles of conducting lectures. Do not try to force yourself in a single style. It will not work. Observe what is needed and how it could be achieved for the current class. Observe your methods each day so that you can correct them and improve upon them. At the end of your MS you will have lot of learning styles which would make you a real fast learner.

10. Take some undergraduate level courses. Audit them, do not enroll in them. By auditing I mean, just go and listen to lectures, take notes. Do not do homeworks, or appear for exams. Undergraduate classes are taught really nicely and it would give you a comparison basis for Indian education that you learned. Understand the difference between graduate and undergraduate ways of teaching by different professors.

11. Make American friends. Understand their culture. Pick their good habits. Discuss American and Indian culture with them. Make them understand Indian culture.

12. Attend different seminars that might be conducted in the school. Keep abreast with latest happenings in your field and in engineering in general.

13. Well that is most of it. Do not enter graduate school with the sole aim of entering US job market. American education system offers lot more than that. Make most out of your stay here. Enjoy it. Get stressed, depressed. The feeling that you made through it successfully at the end on your own is immensely gratifying. Experience it.

All the best...

-Mrunal

MS vs PHD - The difference.

When I was in India I often used to think what is a PHD? How different it is from a MS? In this post I try to answer some of the basic questions which occur in any students mind about the difference between a PHD and a MS program.

First of all let me give you a brief background on the type of Universities in US.
Different universities could be categorized broadly as.
1. Universities which are research oriented -
The main focus is research. These universities are very well funded. They are
mostly the top universities and very tough to get into.

2. Universities which are research / commercial oriented -
These universities have main focus on research but they also produce candidates
for job market. Like MS students. But 95% people in here are PHD students.

3. Universities which are commercial oriented -
These universities do not do research. Their main aim is to give students degree.
Most of them do not have PHD programs also.

Now I explain the differences between a MS and a PHD.

1. Duration - The first and most important difference is duration. MS duration is fixed. In most of the universities it is upto 2 years. PHD duration can vary from 5 years to more, depending on the professor, university policy and the research that you are doing.

2. Both MS and PHD candidates have the same course work to do for the first two years. So essentially a PHD candidate also gets a MS degree after the completion of the first 2 years. What differs is the rest 3 or more years which he /she spends on doing research.

3. Coursework - First two years are spent taking different courses which helps the student in his future research work. These courses are related to the work he / she wants to do. There is lot of autonomy in terms of choosing the courses. This is a credit based system. The projects which you do in these courses are sort of mini research oriented. So slowly one starts getting the feel of the research oriented environment.

4. Background - Most of the candidates who appear for PHD have very strong background in research. They would have shown inclination towards research in their previous work. They would have published some papers, have done good work in industry, graduated from a reputed institute. PHD candidates thus show the aptitude for research and getting admit for a PHD program is tougher than getting admit for a MS program. A PHD is sort of commitment from the student. It requires patience, the aptitude towards research.

5. Adviser - Every student works with his adviser. He guides the student initially to identify a problem, find the correct thinking procedure, giving directions, help in giving ideas etc. Slowly as the student matures adviser's involvement grows less. Student has to find a path on his own, identify problems, work on the solutions, fail, recover. The important part is the procedure of thinking, which the student develops ones he goes through this cycle.

What a PHD teaches is how to think independently. How to identify problems, how to seek solutions. May be that is why the PHD in its full form is called "Doctor Of Philosophy". So once student has understood the technique, he concentrates on the research work. The ideas on which he is working is termed as a technical paper and it is published in reputed conferences like say for storage systems "FAST", "USENIX", , "OSDI", "RTSS" etc. There are many such conferences depending on the area you are working in. These conferences attract eminent personalities from academia and industry and they judge the quality of your research work. Links for these could be find in one of my earlier posts. Many students start publishing their work as early as in the first year. Many take 2 years or more to get started. It all depends on your previous background, your advisers interests.

6. Research - The standards of quality are very high. No plagiarism is allowed. The research work mainly could be categorized as

6.1 Survey and analysis of existing work and comparison of them -
consider the analysis of the data access patterns in existing storage servers
and how the performance gets affected. what are the observed trends in
accessibility of data in terms of sequential, randomness etc.

6.2 Design of new ideas -
Design of a new file system.

6.3 Tweaking existing ideas into a different form -
How could an existing file system be used on a different device and how it
would affect the performance.

This is a very gross level division. But mainly the work could be split like this.

7. Funding - PHD is a long term commitment. Mostly in 99% cases students get admits from university if he shows a potential to be a PHD candidate and some professors finds him worthy to be working in his group. Professors control the funding. Professors have control on everything. They design the syllabus, teach, design labs, design exams, homeworks. They receive grants from different sources like industry, Government, national laboratories. The grants in US universities mainly arrive from Governments. National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), National laboratories are some of main sources which fund the professors to carry on the research. Some part of it comes from Industry. The professor has to utilize this budget on his students. Thus he sponsors the students and funds their education. He pays their fees. He gives them stipend for monthly expenditure. So it is like a mini job where you have schedules, deadlines and are paid. So a PHD student gets admit only if some professor finds him good enough, so that he could get him in research that he is doing.

The situation varies in case of MS students. MS students do not contribute much in terms of research as their time is spent in doing the coursework for initial 2 years. So many times funding is an issue for MS Students. The available funding to MS students is in terms of Teaching Assistants where you assist professors in conducting labs, grading assignments, solving difficulties of students etc. This is a very good learning experience. This funding comes from the department and not from the professor. Many MS students depending on their potential do get funded by professors and work as research students. It varies from student to student.

8. Many times student switch from MS to PHD program if they find the atmosphere encouraging and feel they could commit to the work. A lot of factors go into taking this decision. Professors always look out for good students and encourage MS students to go for PHD.

This is a different process, than what we find in India. In India only IITs work in this way. But the scale to which this kind of operation is done in IITs is also minimum. MS is a good process to understand all these details. It gives you enough exposure and food for thought, that you can take some decisions about your future and the direction in which you would like to move.

The process makes you more wise and mature. This exposure is what that matters because it makes you aware of so many different perspectives.