I decide to seek for my lost feeling when I was in the freshman year. I was determined to prove myself, and I struggled to seize every minute to maximize every possible progress. I admit that I was in the low point of my life, but I never got depressed. Every strike by my competitors just gives me some hints to remain motivated and inspired.
What doesn’t kill you will finally make you stronger
3 NovSkills for research and industry work:
- Writing is the most important skills, (email, writing report, paper, technical issues hard to get it through talking)
- Practice public lecture…Speak aloud and confident. Do not shake your body
Life low point/valley: Reflection
–Don’t be panic/worried, that is only a waste of time
–Pick up some skills, and make myself stronger and stronger
Reflection of my second year:
Trade-off: I learn a lot of architecture knowledge, which is the pure computer related knowledge; I missed the chance to work with lots of Chinese students.
Work alone…
How to deal with asshole…
Understand the real meaning/purpose of some experiments?
Argue with someone and persuade some people
Make periodical summary and reflection of myself
Find some supervisor who really cares about you
Learn to say “NO” to something. You only have limited time
Three most important things I need to remember during my whole life:
- choose the correct platform
- recognize the real friends/allies
- follow the right leader
Forge meaning and building identity
25 Oct00:11As a student of adversity, I’ve been struck over the years by how some people with major challengesseem to draw strength from them, and I’ve heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with finding meaning. And for a long time, I thought the meaning was out there, some great truth waiting to be found.
00:34But over time, I’ve come to feel that the truth is irrelevant. We call it finding meaning, but we might better call it forging meaning.
00:45My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring, and one of the mothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities,said to me, “People always give us these little sayings like, ‘God doesn’t give you any more than you can handle,’ but children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They’re a gift because that’s what we have chosen.”
01:17We make those choices all our lives. When I was in second grade, Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone in our class but me. My mother assumed there had been some sort of error, and she called Mrs. Finkel, who said that Bobby didn’t like me and didn’t want me at his party. And that day, my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae. When I was in seventh grade, one of the kids on my school bus nicknamed me “Percy” as a shorthand for my demeanor, and sometimes, he and his cohort would chant that provocation the entire school bus ride, 45 minutes up, 45 minutes back, “Percy! Percy! Percy! Percy!” When I was in eighth grade, our science teacher told us that all male homosexualsdevelop fecal incontinence because of the trauma to their anal sphincter. And I graduated high schoolwithout ever going to the cafeteria, where I would have sat with the girls and been laughed at for doing so, or sat with the boys and been laughed at for being a boy who should be sitting with the girls.
02:38I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn’t know then, and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you’ve forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you’ve come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.
03:17One of the other mothers I interviewed when I was working on my book had been raped as an adolescent, and had a child following that rape, which had thrown away her career plans and damaged all of her emotional relationships. But when I met her, she was 50, and I said to her, “Do you often think about the man who raped you?” And she said, “I used to think about him with anger, but now only with pity.” And I thought she meant pity because he was so unevolved as to have done this terrible thing. And I said, “Pity?” And she said, “Yes, because he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildrenand he doesn’t know that, and I do. So as it turns out, I’m the lucky one.”
04:11Some of our struggles are things we’re born to: our gender, our sexuality, our race, our disability. And some are things that happen to us: being a political prisoner, being a rape victim, being a Katrina survivor. Identity involves entering a community to draw strength from that community, and to give strength there too. It involves substituting “and” for “but” — not “I am here but I have cancer,” but rather, “I have cancer and I am here.”
04:50When we’re ashamed, we can’t tell our stories, and stories are the foundation of identity. Forge meaning, build identity, forge meaning and build identity. That became my mantra. Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world. All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: how much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break the limits of what constitutes a valid life? Forging meaning and building identity does not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong precious.
05:41In January of this year, I went to Myanmar to interview political prisoners, and I was surprised to find them less bitter than I’d anticipated. Most of them had knowingly committed the offenses that landed them in prison, and they had walked in with their heads held high, and they walked out with their headsstill held high, many years later. Dr. Ma Thida, a leading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent many years in solitary confinement, told me she was grateful to her jailers for the time she had had to think, for the wisdom she had gained, for the chance to hone her meditation skills.She had sought meaning and made her travail into a crucial identity. But if the people I met were less bitter than I’d anticipated about being in prison, they were also less thrilled than I’d expected about the reform process going on in their country. Ma Thida said, “We Burmese are noted for our tremendous grace under pressure, but we also have grievance under glamour,” she said, “and the fact that there have been these shifts and changes doesn’t erase the continuing problems in our society that we learned to see so well while we were in prison.”
07:07And I understood her to be saying that concessions confer only a little humanity, where full humanity is due, that crumbs are not the same as a place at the table, which is to say you can forge meaning and build identity and still be mad as hell.
07:28I’ve never been raped, and I’ve never been in anything remotely approaching a Burmese prison, but as a gay American, I’ve experienced prejudice and even hatred, and I’ve forged meaning and I’ve built identity, which is a move I learned from people who had experienced far worse privation than I’ve ever known. In my own adolescence, I went to extreme lengths to try to be straight. I enrolled myself in something called sexual surrogacy therapy, in which people I was encouraged to call doctors prescribed what I was encouraged to call exercises with women I was encouraged to call surrogates, who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else. (Laughter) My particular favorite was a blonde woman from the Deep South who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliacand had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue. (Laughter)
08:42These experiences eventually allowed me to have some happy physical relationships with women, for which I’m grateful, but I was at war with myself, and I dug terrible wounds into my own psyche.
08:57We don’t seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it’s purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. “Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities,” St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, “for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
09:38In 1988, I went to Moscow to interview artists of the Soviet underground, and I expected their work to bedissident and political. But the radicalism in their work actually lay in reinserting humanity into a societythat was annihilating humanity itself, as, in some senses, Russian society is now doing again. One of the artists I met said to me, “We were in training to be not artists but angels.”
10:08In 1991, I went back to see the artists I’d been writing about, and I was with them during the putsch that ended the Soviet Union, and they were among the chief organizers of the resistance to that putsch. And on the third day of the putsch, one of them suggested we walk up to Smolenskaya. And we went there,and we arranged ourselves in front of one of the barricades, and a little while later, a column of tanks rolled up, and the soldier on the front tank said, “We have unconditional orders to destroy this barricade.If you get out of the way, we don’t need to hurt you, but if you won’t move, we’ll have no choice but to run you down.” And the artists I was with said, “Give us just a minute. Give us just a minute to tell you why we’re here.” And the soldier folded his arms, and the artist launched into a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in a Jeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present.And they went on and on, and the soldier watched, and then he sat there for a full minute after they were finished and looked at us so bedraggled in the rain, and said, “What you have said is true, and we must bow to the will of the people. If you’ll clear enough space for us to turn around, we’ll go back the way we came.” And that’s what they did. Sometimes, forging meaning can give you the vocabulary you need to fight for your ultimate freedom.
11:44Russia awakened me to the lemonade notion that oppression breeds the power to oppose it, and I gradually understood that as the cornerstone of identity. It took identity to rescue me from sadness. The gay rights movement posits a world in which my aberrances are a victory. Identity politics always works on two fronts: to give pride to people who have a given condition or characteristic, and to cause the outside world to treat such people more gently and more kindly. Those are two totally separate enterprises, but progress in each sphere reverberates in the other. Identity politics can be narcissistic.People extol a difference only because it’s theirs. People narrow the world and function in discrete groups without empathy for one another. But properly understood and wisely practiced, identity politics should expand our idea of what it is to be human. Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
12:55I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me, and I now like being myself betterthan the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine. But if you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes, and we become attached to the heroic strain in our own lives. I’ve sometimes wondered whether I could have ceased to hate that part of myself without gay pride’s technicolor fiesta, of which this speech is one manifestation. I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis, but the self-loathing of that period left a void, and celebration needs to fill and overflow it, and even if I repay my private debt of melancholy, there’s still an outer world of homophobia that it will take decades to address. Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame, but not yet. A friend of mine who thought gay pride was getting very carried away with itself, once suggested that we organizeGay Humility Week. (Laughter) (Applause) It’s a great idea, but its time has not yet come. (Laughter) And neutrality, which seems to lie halfway between despair and celebration, is actually the endgame.
14:32In 29 states in the U.S., I could legally be fired or denied housing for being gay. In Russia, the anti-propaganda law has led to people being beaten in the streets. Twenty-seven African countries have passed laws against sodomy, and in Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned to death, and lynchings have become common. In Saudi Arabia recently, two men who had been caught in carnal acts, were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each, and are now permanently disabled as a result. So who can forge meaning and build identity? Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity, but that’s still a rare privilege, and gay people deserve more collectively than the crumbs of justice.
15:39And yet, every step forward is so sweet. In 2007, six years after we met, my partner and I decided to get married. Meeting John had been the discovery of great happiness and also the elimination of great unhappiness, and sometimes, I was so occupied with the disappearance of all that pain that I forgot about the joy, which was at first the less remarkable part of it to me. Marrying was a way to declare our love as more a presence than an absence.
16:17Marriage soon led us to children, and that meant new meanings and new identities, ours and theirs. I want my children to be happy, and I love them most achingly when they are sad. As a gay father, I can teach them to own what is wrong in their lives, but I believe that if I succeed in sheltering them from adversity, I will have failed as a parent. A Buddhist scholar I know once explained to me that Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what arrives when all your woe is behind you and you have only bliss to look forward to. But he said that would not be nirvana, because your bliss in the present would always be shadowed by the joy from the past. Nirvana, he said, is what you arrive at when you have only bliss to look forward to and find in what looked like sorrows the seedlings of your joy. And I sometimes wonderwhether I could have found such fulfillment in marriage and children if they’d come more readily, if I’d been straight in my youth or were young now, in either of which cases this might be easier. Perhaps I could. Perhaps all the complex imagining I’ve done could have been applied to other topics. But if seeking meaning matters more than finding meaning, the question is not whether I’d be happier for having been bullied, but whether assigning meaning to those experiences has made me a better father. I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
17:59I know many heterosexuals who have equally happy marriages and families, but gay marriage is so breathtakingly fresh, and gay families so exhilaratingly new, and I found meaning in that surprise.
18:14In October, it was my 50th birthday, and my family organized a party for me, and in the middle of it, my son said to my husband that he wanted to make a speech, and John said, “George, you can’t make a speech. You’re four.” (Laughter) “Only Grandpa and Uncle David and I are going to make speeches tonight.” But George insisted and insisted, and finally, John took him up to the microphone, and George said very loudly, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please.” And everyone turned around, startled. And George said, “I’m glad it’s Daddy’s birthday. I’m glad we all get cake. And daddy, if you were little, I’d be your friend.”
19:08And I thought — Thank you. I thought that I was indebted even to Bobby Finkel, because all those earlier experiences were what had propelled me to this moment, and I was finally unconditionally grateful for a life I’d once have done anything to change.
19:27The gay activist Harvey Milk was once asked by a younger gay man what he could do to help the movement, and Harvey Milk said, “Go out and tell someone.” There’s always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity, and there are always stories that restore it. If we live out loud, we can trounce the hatred and expand everyone’s lives.
19:51Forge meaning. Build identity. Forge meaning. Build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy.
20:03Thank you.
20:06(Applause)
20:08Thank you. (Applause)
20:11Thank you. (Applause)
20:15Thank you. (Applause)
vliw vs. superscalar
19 OctFrom http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~j2lau/cs141/week9.html
http://www.haenni.info/thesis/presentations/noptimization_html/sld006.htm
Click to access lect10.frm.pdf
one of the great debates in computer architecture is static vs. dynamic. “static” typically means “let’s make our compiler take care of this”, while “dynamic” typically means “let’s build some hardware that takes care of this”.
each side has its advantages and disadvantages. the compiler approach has the benefit of time: a compiler can spend all day analyzing the heck out of a piece of code. however, the conclusions that a compiler can reach are limited, because it doesn’t know what the values of all the variables will be when the program is actually run.
as you can imagine, if we go for the hardware approach, we get the other end of the stick. there is a limit on the amount of analysis we can do in hardware, because our resources are much more limited. on the other hand, we can analyze the program when it actually runs, so we have complete knowledge of all the program’s variables.
vliw approaches typically fall under the “static” category, where the compiler does all the work. superscalar approaches typically fall under the “dynamic” category, where special hardware on the processor does all the work. consider the following code sequence:
sw $7, 4($2) lw $1, 8($5)
suppose we have a dual pipeline where we can run two memory operations in parallel [but only if they have no dependencies, of course]. are there dependencies between these two instructions? well, it depends on the values of $5 and $2. if $5 is 0, and $2 is 4, then they depend on each other: we must run the store before the load.
in a vliw approach, our compiler decides which instructions are safe to run in parallel. there’s no way our compiler can tell for sure if there is a dependence here. so we must stay on the safe side, and dictate that the store must always run before the load. if this were a bigger piece of code, we could analyze the code and try to build a proof that shows there is no dependence. [modern parallelizing compilers actually do this!]
if we decide on a superscalar approach, we have a piece of hardware on our processor that decides whether we can run instructions in parallel. the problem is easier, because this dependence check will happen in a piece of hardware on our processor, as the code is run. so we will know what the values of $2 and $5 are. this means that we will always know if it is safe to run these two instructions in parallel.
hopefully you see some of the tradeoffs involved. dynamic approaches have more program information available to them, but the amount of resources available for analysis are very limited. for example, if we want our superscalar processor to search the code for independent instructions, things start to get really hairy. static approaches have less program information available to them, but they can spend lots of resources on analysis. for example, it’s relatively easy for a compiler to search the code for independent instructions.
Persist
20 SepAfter reading more and more papers, I suddenly felt that I was nothing but failure. I don’t have any time to do any extra activities other than research, how come that I have so many unsatisfying needs!
Stay calm and carry on. Believe in yourself. No matter what happened, the only person you can believe in is yourself. You will become somebody someday eventually. So stay concentrated and keep moving.
Judge each day by the seeds you plant, not the harvest you reap.
Come on James!
7 SepWhen I clean up my cubicle in GDC, I found that actually I made a lot of notes for courses, interviews, researches, and random stuff. I realized that I was actually working so hard towards my initial goal. But look at me now, I am so unmotivated that I don’t want to do anything related to writing paper and finish my experiments. I cannot do active thinking stuff.
When I was young, my head teacher told me that I will be always as strong as my opponents. So in the rest of my life, I am on the journey to find stronger opponents. Although some failure in some key milestone (e.g. Gaokao) in my life, I prepared long time and never say give up, only to get rid of the low point in my life. Finally I make it, although I know the low point will be a forever brand in my life journey.
Looking back to the recent two years, when I was just drifting in an overseas country. I made mistakes. I was depressed by the failures. I experienced dangerous moments. However, I never say no to my future. I want to persist on my original dream. I want to keep my mind open to the new stuff. I want to learn more from my life and to seek for the next corner stone for my life. In some periods, I got up quiet early and I told myself, it is not only the alarm clock but also your own dream which finally wake you up every day. I keep seizing every opportunity which I can touch, and work hard to make it. I may fall down, but I will always try my best to stand up like a real man.
Now, I should have more time. So I should never say that I have lots of course to do as my excuses to avoid touching the research. The time left for me is not long. Either to swim or to sink, it is up to yourself.
–Make plans (vovcabulary, work out, research, course)
–Make notes
–Reflections every day
How do you earn opportunites to review journals or conference papers?
6 Sep|
Critical reading is a very useful skill for most PhD students (and postdocs and researchers in general). Instead of assuming that everything you read in a scientific paper is right, it’s useful to learn how to evaluate the paper critically: e.g., to question its content, to identify shortcomings and limitations and ways it could be improved. Experience with reviewing papers is a powerful way to gain experience at critical reading of papers. Writing reviews for journals and/or conference helps a PhD student learn to get better at reading a paper with a critical perspective. Unfortunately, review opportunities for PhD students are rare. For instance, it is rare for PhD students to be invited to serve on program committees or asked to review papers. In addition, some may think that PhD students are not competent enough to write correct reviews of scientific papers. How does one solve this problem? How can a PhD student get opportunities to practice reviewing papers? What would you suggest to a PhD student who wants to do some reviews? |
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I’m going to address your question, but first, I have some issues with it generally:
This is manifestly not true in my opinion. Indeed in my experience (and I’ve seen this shared by others), I’ve watched faculty members reign in students who had torn into a published paper for what were essentially minor methodological flaws that wouldn’t change the substantive findings of the paper one way or the other. I think a far more common problem is “failing to see the forest from the trees”.
They can be. I’ve reviewed 4 or 5 papers for journals in my time as a PhD student, and a disheartening number of conference abstracts.
There are three ways I’ve gotten papers to review:
Publish. The strongest way I’ve ever ended up getting papers to review has been from papers I’ve published. Talk to your advisor. Look out for opportunities – I’ve seen at least three calls for reviewers in my time expressly open to students. This also gives you an experience beingreviewed, which is important both for honing your own skills as a reviewer, and something you need to learn how to deal with.
You don’t need a journal to do this. One of the most useful things you can do to train is to get a faculty member to support a journal club where, in addition to presenting the paper, the student writes a critique in the style of a review. Not only does this force you to read the paper you’re presenting more closely, but it will let you learn in a protected, mentored environment rather than “out in the wild”. |
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I disagree with the statement that a PhD student never doubt a published article (at least in my field). This said, it seems to me that one of the first work of a PhD student is to read and “review” papers: for example, when we start a new project, my advisors always ask me to do a whole bibliographical work, sum up the papers read to them, comment them, try to find what is good and what can be improved in the previous work. Even after, I am also asked to always follow on the new papers that could correspond to our work. I believe it is one of the work of the advisor to help her/his PhD student to learn to do this sort of work. Then if one really wants to review unreviewed papers, there is always ArXiv (or other equivalent repository for papers) where one can subscribe to the rss feed, then work on reviewing for oneself (or for one’s advisor) the papers read that are close to your work. Since your question seemed to be how can we do a review, I believe it is not important whether it is an official review or not: the important part was to review a paper in the first place. |
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Just to add some personal experience to the other answers. I did quite a lot of reviews as my advisor and other people in my group who were on programme committees asked me to do some of the reviews they were assigned to do. As far as I can tell, this is quite common practice in Computer Science. You would probably have more trouble avoiding doing reviews than doing them. |
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I don’t know what field you’re in, but in my field, there exist journals with a public discussion phase. Anybody can comment. For example, this interesting paper explaining why there is no easy way out to anthropogenic climate change had a lengthy discussion (most papers do not). Assigned peer reviewers are required to comment, and naturally the author is required to respond. But in addition, anybody else can respond. Unlike Stack Exchange, there is no voting (-;. In geophysical sciences, the European Geophysical Union has the following two-stage journals (as of July 2012):
Possibly, there may be other fields where such kind of journals exist. Then you can exercise your reviewing by posting an unrequited review for a paper — note, however, that unrequited reviews (short comments) are not formally anonymous — although I have seen instances of people posting under a false name… For a discussion on the wisdom of actually posting there, see: Pros and cons on commenting on public review papers |
Minus Four Week in Intel
3 AugI tried to implement coordinate descent algorithm in OpenCL, but failed. The main problem is that I don’t have any experience with CUDA/OpenCL for real applications…Also, I realized that I don’t have the daily accumulation for code snippets which can be used later for my academic or industry practice.
- important parameter (Google Docs)
- Diary about everyday life (per week, in my wordpress)
- Paper notes (Mendeley ), PDF: AcrobatPro, Adobe Reader XI
- Idea notes (evernote, Quora)
- Vocabulary notes (Google Docs, and hand-written note)
- Code/Programming accumulation (Github, bitbucket)
- Slide/Paper: Bitbucket
- URL list (evernote)
Ganesh insisted on implementing the FPGA/ASIC with Chisel, so that means I need a lot of extra time to learn the tutorial for Chisel. I spent the whole Thursday and Friday going through the Chisel entry level examples, and found a vector co-processor implementation with Chisel on Github. But it looks very hard to understand.—There is no document at all. During the weekend, I just went to office and dig into the code to check how to implement Floating point unit with Chisel and vector processor. It looks really difficult for me to achieve the goal of implementing a real sparse coding accelerator, but I am trying my best. There are two main problems currently: 1. How to implement high level branches with Verilog (HDL) 2. How to measure the performance if I successfully implement the accelerator with Chisel? (I guess that I need to implement it first based on that vector processor…One weired stuff is that it is not real large register size…it only has 32*4 bit register while keeping 256 depth mem in register class)
Eriko looks interested in this project. However, I have to admit my code is in a mess, so now only myself can understand the code. That sucks! Since that means I myself have to learn and implement everything by myself. I will wrap up all the code stuff in a more clear way.
Another headache is the poster. The deadline is Friday, but I just finish the title…Debbie is going back tomorrow, and we will have a meeting on Tuesday. So I guess I have to prepare for something.
Hope I can survive through next week and achieve something. Go, James!
Learning experience:
every 2 hours (11h per day)
play with children (learn how they learn new stuff)
CPU frequency and Turbo mode
29 JulIn principle, you can avoid turbo boost if you use Linux cpufreq (needs sudo):
for i in $(seq 0 1 71)
do
cpufreq-set -c ${i} -g userspace
cpufreq-set -c ${i} -f ${freq}
done
$i the the core that you want to set in that mode (userspace) and frequency. My recommendation is that you do it on all the cores before your run.
After done, you should reset the mode to the previous one, which I guess will be performance.
vi /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
vi /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
3600000
echo 1 > /sys/module/processor/parameters/ignore_ppc
for x in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-3]/cpufreq/;do
echo 2501000 > $x/scaling_max_freq
done
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_frequency_scaling
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1458811/bind-threads-to-processors
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1398588/how-to-run-processes-piped-with-bash-on-multiple-cores
export KMP_AFFINITY=verbose,scatter
export OMP_NUM_THREADS=18
How to get GPU info on Linux
17 Julhttp://askubuntu.com/questions/5417/how-to-get-gpu-info
lspci -v -s $(lspci | grep VGA | cut -d" " -f 1)
meditation by maverick 