11.30.07
Posted in Personal, Research at 11:02 pm by Michael
Most of the grad. students on facebook groups appear to be working far more hours a week than I am for much longer spans of time than I have been, and yet appear to be making far less progress (some people are in their fourth years, work 60+ hours a week, and haven’t even started their dissertations!)
I generally write about 3 hours per day, four days a week. That’s 12 hours. My class adds another 3, plus 9 for the assignments, so that brings me up to 24. Working on other projects generally takes far less time than the dissertation; perhaps another 5 or 6 hours a week. That makes 30.
And that’s it (unless you count commuting back and forth, which adds 3-12 more hours each week, which is one reason why I try to work remotely and minimize the number of days I need to be in the lab).
I still feel like my life as a graduate student is very much out-of-place. I easily managed to get an MS in one year simply by taking four courses a semester – my undergraduate workload was heavier (but still left me enough free time that I had to wedge three jobs into my week to avoid becoming bored). On the dissertation, it’s only been 6 weeks since I started and I’m already 1/3 of the way through (granted, the easiest third)… and it’s still only the beginning of my second year, when no one else in the department has even come up with a topic!
I’m also the youngest student there by at least five years. This isn’t speculation – there was a meeting where all of the graduate students mentioned their ages.
Some of it is the fellowship. Some of it is motivation: the drive to recover my personal autonomy so I can again pursue great things. Some of it is probably the fact that I follow what I think I’ve shown to be a much more powerful personal philosophy for acquiring knowledge than the one typical students follow (sacrifice breadth and you sacrifice your very creativity – don’t hyperspecialize). That doesn’t account for everything, however – the rest is probably the school.
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Posted in Research at 12:07 am by Michael
The “10 pages per week” goal I’ve been setting for myself has generally worked up until this point (save for one week, when I simply had too heavy an assignment for machine learning to work on my dissertation), but it’s going to fall apart very soon.
At page 50, I’ve reported all of the experiments we’ve done so far. I’ve even made up a lot of figures and sprinkled them throughout the paper. I am now idle. It’s bad when you think you can fill another page or two just by writing the acknowledgments early. I simply can’t cram anything more into that dissertation until we do more experiments. However, we can’t do more experiments until the next meeting with the CMU people.
If this continues every week, I am going to slip behind my schedule fast, since I’m working on an entirely different timeline than the rest of my group. While I can push myself as hard as I’d like, it’s unfair to my group to force them to move at a breakneck pace because I want to finish quickly; it’s not like they’re slacking off. Anyway, I don’t want such a disparity to occur, so I need to do something. Perhaps taking on more work myself is a good idea, since what I have thus far for my dissertation isn’t particularly challenging or time-consuming, not to mention that the rest of the group would probably be happy to offload more work on my shoulders. Once I finish machine learning, I’m going to have a lot of time as well, as it will essentially start the winter break that never ends 
I’m wondering if I can do some experiments of my own and put them in the paper. It is supposed to be my own original work, after all, and I do have some good ideas which I’m fairly sure are original, having done a fairly extensive background search before and during writing.
Every conference paper I’m writing now (and there are a lot!) has some relevance as well; I can probably find a way to include all of them in my dissertation as experiments without losing the focus on tensors and medical imaging that I’ve established.
I need to polish some things up and then I’ll send a draft to my advisor. Yes, the first draft I’m sending for review is going to be 50 pages long. Hopefully this won’t end up with me rewriting what I expect to be 1/3 of my dissertation
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11.29.07
Posted in Programming at 5:46 pm by Michael
In Vista, there’s an interesting bug that involves cutting a set of images on thumbnail view, followed by cutting a superset of those images. Explorer will usually freeze or crash the second time.
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Posted in Ideas, Personal at 8:48 am by Michael
Here’s another one of mine.
Digg Style Voting on Search Results
Sometimes I feel so much like the Roark to society’s Keating that it’s uncanny. Maybe they came up with this independently, but given that it was one of the things I mentioned during my interview, it’s doubtful. It’s nice to see my ideas implemented, but it’s not so nice to constantly have them ripped from me without them returning anything to their creator. It’s something I’ve had to deal with for most of my life… the only consolation is that it cannot last; I only need to succeed once for people to start noticing my ideas.
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11.27.07
Posted in Ideas at 10:47 pm by Michael
A lot of the concepts in data mining / machine learning seem to share commonalities that suggest a unification is possible. For example, SVD is related to PCA is related to K-means clustering is related to the Lloyd Algorithm is related to Vector Quantization is related to compression is related to MDL is related to Kolmogorov complexity. K-means is also related to kNN classification is related to boosting is related to SVMs is related to regression is related to neural networks.
And so on. All of these concepts share notions. The question is whether they can be treated as the overall expression of one concept.
The answer is probably no, but they certainly could be condensed as new results arise.
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Posted in General at 4:18 pm by Michael
You know you have a gambling problem when you start saying this:
“It’s way up today; only three more grand until I’m even!”
It doesn’t matter whether it’s stocks or slots; if you’re consistently that far behind, you need to rethink your strategy (which includes whether you should be gambling at all).
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Posted in Personal at 11:19 am by Michael
You would think having two wisdom teeth yanked out of your mouth would hurt. Oddly enough, it basically doesn’t, at least in my mouth.
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11.25.07
Posted in Research at 10:53 pm by Michael
I find it odd that research that contains blatantly incorrect material can win a best paper award, but I just stumbled upon such a paper in the course of my dissertation research. Just more evidence that we really can’t estimate the worth of ideas, I suppose.
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Posted in Psychology at 2:20 pm by Michael
I just learned that about half of my archetypes were already represented by Jung.
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Posted in Programming at 10:34 am by Michael
Signs you’re a bad programmer and don’t know it:
http://damienkatz.net/2006/05/signs_youre_a_c.html?repeat
9 of the 12 things in this list applied to my undergraduate algorithms professor, who even took it beyond his own bad programming and imposed things like function length restrictions on the class.
Like everything else, the key to being a good developer is to figure out what actually works for you and what is just fluff, then learn what works. Good Programmers realize that things like design patterns and languages are just tools. Different tools apply to different jobs. Design patterns especially do not apply unless there really is a canned solution to the class of problems you’re working on, because otherwise you’re imposing a structure on the solution that it may not necessarily have. If you can’t reasonably justify your choice of tools, you are not solving the problem correctly.
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