How to Make Science Interesting in School

The question occurred to me to ask a friend of mine, "Why do you find biochemistry interesting?"

I would imagine he might answer, "Because I find antiviral resistance, and M2 ion channel blockers interesting."

"And why do you find M2 ion channel blockers interesting?"

Would he, I wonder, answer, "Because I find biochemistry interesting." That would be a completely circular answer, of course, and so it makes me think that perhaps people find science interesting if they find the underlying thing being studied interesting.

That is, I find physics interesting because I find how gravity works, how photons travel in space, how levers and gears work, etc, interesting — not the other way around.  This shouldn't really be a surprise, unless we consider the question in terms of an educator trying to interest students in a subject.

Moving between windows in Emacs: windmove-default-keybindings

I never used to have such a big monitor, so I made use of switching between buffers a lot. A quick cntl-x-b, etc.

With a big monitor, I find myself using Emacs (in Ubuntu) with the outer window (the thing Ubuntu calls a window anyway) enlarged to full screen. Then within this big window frame, I'll split the frame into smaller "windows" (what Emacs apparently calls "window" I guess) with a cntl-x-2 or cntl-x-3.

You can then switch to the next window with a command like cntl-x-o, and close the window with cntl-x-0, or close all other windows with cntl-x-1. Since I never had more than two windows open in the frame, it never occurred to me to care how to make switching between more windows more efficient.

Now that I do...

Just add (windmove-default-keybindings) to your ~/.emacs and you'll have a nice shift-(arrowkey of your choice) keybindings to move between windows!

More info at http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WindMove

Why oh why did I not find this out earlier? :)

Professionalism versus Passion?

What is it to be a professional, and is passion enough for doing a good job? What do those words mean anyway? That's what came to mind from reading Mark Dennehy's The case against passion and Soon Hui's Passion Does Not Mean Total Indifference of Other Things.

My first response would be that passion is not enough, and that professionalism is required above passion. Passion is necessary, but insufficient (and same for professionalism). We should be careful with first impressions though, so let's take a closer look at what it means to be passionate, professional, or both.

Book Review: Introduction to Algorithms

Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein, is a good introductory textbook to algorithm design and analysis for the undergraduate student in their first course on the study of algorithms.

It is a good learning text in that the writing style offers more explanations and has a more "conversational" tone (as compared to other texts that are much more succinct). Having said that, this is still a textbook and assumes students to have a fairly decent math background and ability to think in a mathematical manner.

It would not be far off to say that this is more of a math text than a programmers' text. That is to say, this is not a cookbook with code that can be copied to make things work. This is a text to help students learn to think and reason about algorithms.

For a first course in formal algorithms for undergraduates, this would be a good text. If you want a more rigorous, mathematical, and succinct reference or introduction, Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardos (which I have reviewed) may be a better fit for you.

CiteULike: Tags feature upgraded, and a word on the semantic web

So there I was using CiteULike yesterday as I normally do when, maybe half an hour later, their UI was upgraded! What a pleasant surprise, because the tags feature upgrade has finally made it perfectly great to use.

Suppose you have already added an article into your CiteULike library and you went back to edit its metadata, there is a field for updating the tags for the article. It used to be that you had to blindly guess what tags you have previously used, as it didn't show such a list, which was a major impediment to using tags at all. As soon as you started using more than maybe ten tags, the entire tags system became unwieldy because of this.

Now, not only are the tags you've previously used listed, but auto-completion is also there. Further, when it shows a list of completion suggestions, it even lists along with each suggested tag the number of articles with that tag!

That makes me very happy. :)

I know, I know, the entire idea of using tags is actually rather problematic especially when the possible tags is not constrained by a defined vocabulary and so on. Sometimes it's a bit of a drag in terms of effort to have to tag anything at all (and I notice many CiteULike users use few or no tags). But that's the web 2.0 world we live in, where true semantic web-ness just doesn't exist because computers do not understand meaning.

Employing a system that automatically tags articles doesn't actually solve the problem entirely (and search engines are essentially an automated system that tags the articles showing up in your search with the "tags" that is the words in your search query). It doesn't actually solve the problem, no matter how good a machine learning system is at associating a set of sentences (in the form of an article) with a set of keywords or tags, because the system is still just associating or translating a set of symbols to another set of symbols without a clue what the symbols mean.

Oh well, that's why I'm doing the artificial intelligence research I'm doing now, because words have meaning.