Highlight of the Day:
1. Yes! I finally gave my first talk in the lab meeting today, bringing my first project to the table! I didn't know I was gonna talk about it until 2 hours before the meeting. Somehow, I just felt that it should be in the next week, or in the last week. Consequently, I got less than one hour to make my PPT...
But yes! I made it! And it went on great! Several lab members showed good amounts of interests in the project, coming up with lots and lots and lots of cool ideas -- more than I can handle at this moment! And my advisor is super supportive and helpful, as always!
2. My Ayala's herbal water has arrived today. The most delicate, poetic, flowery, and pricy water I've ever tried (I know there's Bling H2O... but do you really want to spend $60 on a bottle of water?) I got 6 different blends and enjoyed a 40-minute water-tasting with Scarborough Fair as my selected background music -- there is the lyric of "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" in it.
The crispy refreshing clearness with deep smooth sweetness in the aromatic water (and in the music) caresses my palate like a soft, warm breeze. Truly a delightful and natural experience!
3. And I had two good lectures (both with free food) today! By the way, I can never imagine this at ZJU. That's why it is so intellectually stimulating to do research here!
One lecture at Brain Science Program is delivered by William Fifer at Columbia University (Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics), titled "Fetal Roots of Child Neurodevelopment". It was about the knowledge we have about infants beyond they can sleeping, sucking, and defecating (mostly done by EEG research). And what we know about fetus... not psychologically, of course, but physically measurable "behaviors" like heart rate and beyond.
Though the lecture is not easy to follow, the lecturer did show some great taste of humor. I like the following three points in his lecture:
i) "In the next study, we went to South Africa. We had a great time there, watching cheetahs watching us". This saying suddenly remind me of the days when I was in S.Africa. I didn't go on any Big Five safari, though.
ii) When he was showing how animal could (or couldn't) learn from past experience, he played and re-played the very funny, and sort of well-known, video clip in which one penguin waddled by the other one standing pretty still, but all of a sudden, the second guy slapped the first guy with his wing and the poor guy fell onto the ground! It was just so appropriately entertaining at that point!
iii) At the end of his lecture, after presenting a good variety of different studies in recent years and intensive progress at his lab, he showed a piece of jig-saw puzzle on the slide, and circled a smaaaaaaall corner of the piece, modestly saying that he was just working on a tiny piece of the field, but hopefully that one day, research can shed light on the whole piece. Another pretty well-used picture with a pleasing tone.
Another lecture at CLPS is delivered by Todd Gureckis at NYU, titled "Follow Your Own Path: Exploring the Impact of Self-Directed Information Sampling on Learning". It was even more difficult to follow. Instead of examining "passive" learning by limiting participants’ control over the information they experience at each point in time (and do Bayesian analysis or connectionist or whatever), the current study explores how people gather information in "self-directed" learning environments. In other words, the primary aim of this research is to characterize the information sampling strategy that participants use to reduce their uncertainty, and to examine how self-directed learning influences acquisition. Guided by this idea, researchers have found that learning is faster when they can select and sequence learning episodes themselves, depending on the abstract structure of to-be-learned concepts and the space of hypotheses that the learner considers.
So, that's it about today! Well, I don't really want to mention that there are too many emails coming in which sort of troubles me, and that I'm having more and more problem falling into sleep in recent days and feel a little bit tired (probably because I am too excited by current research?) As you see, I like to KEEP POSITIVE THINKING in life, because life is truly a gift!
Link of the Day:
Since I just mentioned about Ayala's Herbal Water, please click on this link to get a better idea of what it is and what different herbs are used for.
Quotation of the Day:
As you may know, I'm reading David Thoreau's Walden to (hopefully) give myself a better understanding of the rhythm and thyme of the language called English. I encountered a very well-known paragraph today, which is probably among the earliest ones I happened to read long ago. I want to quote it for today's quotation, especially because it can also serve as an excellent footprint of my "One New Thing A Day"!
"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching Thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that."
这里也附上我早先读到的中文翻译版，正是这一段文字让我对《瓦尔登湖》产生了兴趣：
“每一个早晨都是一个愉快的邀请，使得我的生活跟大自然同样地简单，也许我可以说，同样地纯洁无瑕。我向曙光顶礼，忠诚如同希腊人。我起身很早，在湖中洗澡；这是个宗教意味的运动，我所做的最好的一件事。据说在成汤王的浴盆上就刻着这样的字：‘苟日新，日日新，又日新。’我懂得这个道理。”
1. Yes! I finally gave my first talk in the lab meeting today, bringing my first project to the table! I didn't know I was gonna talk about it until 2 hours before the meeting. Somehow, I just felt that it should be in the next week, or in the last week. Consequently, I got less than one hour to make my PPT...
But yes! I made it! And it went on great! Several lab members showed good amounts of interests in the project, coming up with lots and lots and lots of cool ideas -- more than I can handle at this moment! And my advisor is super supportive and helpful, as always!
2. My Ayala's herbal water has arrived today. The most delicate, poetic, flowery, and pricy water I've ever tried (I know there's Bling H2O... but do you really want to spend $60 on a bottle of water?) I got 6 different blends and enjoyed a 40-minute water-tasting with Scarborough Fair as my selected background music -- there is the lyric of "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" in it.
The crispy refreshing clearness with deep smooth sweetness in the aromatic water (and in the music) caresses my palate like a soft, warm breeze. Truly a delightful and natural experience!
3. And I had two good lectures (both with free food) today! By the way, I can never imagine this at ZJU. That's why it is so intellectually stimulating to do research here!
One lecture at Brain Science Program is delivered by William Fifer at Columbia University (Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics), titled "Fetal Roots of Child Neurodevelopment". It was about the knowledge we have about infants beyond they can sleeping, sucking, and defecating (mostly done by EEG research). And what we know about fetus... not psychologically, of course, but physically measurable "behaviors" like heart rate and beyond.
Though the lecture is not easy to follow, the lecturer did show some great taste of humor. I like the following three points in his lecture:
i) "In the next study, we went to South Africa. We had a great time there, watching cheetahs watching us". This saying suddenly remind me of the days when I was in S.Africa. I didn't go on any Big Five safari, though.
ii) When he was showing how animal could (or couldn't) learn from past experience, he played and re-played the very funny, and sort of well-known, video clip in which one penguin waddled by the other one standing pretty still, but all of a sudden, the second guy slapped the first guy with his wing and the poor guy fell onto the ground! It was just so appropriately entertaining at that point!
iii) At the end of his lecture, after presenting a good variety of different studies in recent years and intensive progress at his lab, he showed a piece of jig-saw puzzle on the slide, and circled a smaaaaaaall corner of the piece, modestly saying that he was just working on a tiny piece of the field, but hopefully that one day, research can shed light on the whole piece. Another pretty well-used picture with a pleasing tone.
Another lecture at CLPS is delivered by Todd Gureckis at NYU, titled "Follow Your Own Path: Exploring the Impact of Self-Directed Information Sampling on Learning". It was even more difficult to follow. Instead of examining "passive" learning by limiting participants’ control over the information they experience at each point in time (and do Bayesian analysis or connectionist or whatever), the current study explores how people gather information in "self-directed" learning environments. In other words, the primary aim of this research is to characterize the information sampling strategy that participants use to reduce their uncertainty, and to examine how self-directed learning influences acquisition. Guided by this idea, researchers have found that learning is faster when they can select and sequence learning episodes themselves, depending on the abstract structure of to-be-learned concepts and the space of hypotheses that the learner considers.
So, that's it about today! Well, I don't really want to mention that there are too many emails coming in which sort of troubles me, and that I'm having more and more problem falling into sleep in recent days and feel a little bit tired (probably because I am too excited by current research?) As you see, I like to KEEP POSITIVE THINKING in life, because life is truly a gift!
Link of the Day:
Since I just mentioned about Ayala's Herbal Water, please click on this link to get a better idea of what it is and what different herbs are used for.
Quotation of the Day:
As you may know, I'm reading David Thoreau's Walden to (hopefully) give myself a better understanding of the rhythm and thyme of the language called English. I encountered a very well-known paragraph today, which is probably among the earliest ones I happened to read long ago. I want to quote it for today's quotation, especially because it can also serve as an excellent footprint of my "One New Thing A Day"!
"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching Thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that."
这里也附上我早先读到的中文翻译版，正是这一段文字让我对《瓦尔登湖》产生了兴趣：
“每一个早晨都是一个愉快的邀请，使得我的生活跟大自然同样地简单，也许我可以说，同样地纯洁无瑕。我向曙光顶礼，忠诚如同希腊人。我起身很早，在湖中洗澡；这是个宗教意味的运动，我所做的最好的一件事。据说在成汤王的浴盆上就刻着这样的字：‘苟日新，日日新，又日新。’我懂得这个道理。”
No comments:
Post a Comment