STEM hysteria

I have subscribed to TechRepublic's newsletters for a while. (The place I work for has a learning-hour requirement and these newsletters did a great job in recommending tech webiners or white papers. I am not reading as much this time of the year 'coz the quota has been met :P) It does have its fair share of poorly put-together articles like "the Photo of Alan Turing" (the comment section of which is actually more interesting: some criticized TechRepublic shamelessly plugging Google's technology and Android all the time. Some defended the British government's harsh treatment of Turing for his homosexuality) On the other hand, I found one article argued that "not everyone needs to learn to code", which I completely agree. From the article:

some of the fundamental concerns expressed by the "learn coding" movement are legitimate. Skills such as breaking a complex problem into component parts, rapidly learning and applying new tools and methods, synthesizing a complex series of tasks to accomplish an objective, integrating disparate elements designed by multiple teams, and "debugging" a system when it doesn't work correctly are critical for success in a variety of professions. While coding checks all these boxes, so does woodshop, cooking and baking, advanced mathematics, or designing a house. "Debugging" a failed soufflé or a mortise and tenon joint that doesn't quite fit uses a similar thought process to debugging some pesky JavaScript code, but each content area likely appeals to different sets of people.

I also learned the term "STEM hysteria" from the comments (Yes, I do have friends who think STEM education is not enough in US and is hurting US economy in the long run) I tend to agree with another author, Michael S. Teitelbaum, who wrote the book “Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent." He urges that we continue to strengthen math and science education in K-12, because educated citizens should have an understanding and knowledge of math and science, not because there will be lucrative careers awaiting them. There will be for some, but not for all or even most.

I noticed one comment from the post linked above suggested engineering jobs are higher paid so if more students major in engineering, it would solve the problem with inequalities in the US economy. I cannot disagree more: wouldn't having more graduating engineering students drag down the salaries of engineering jobs?

Free software challenges

I am actually writing about 2 unrelated stories in 1 post:
- To me, the term GNOME in the context of IT immediately refers to the Linux Desktop (see my earlier post) Indeed, it was trademarked for such since 2006. However, the online coupon giant Groupon wanted to name its Point-Of-Sale system Gnome too and trying to register its own trademarks. Well, there are always 2 sides of any issue. Some denounced Groupon's act as bullying the open source community. On the other hand, some pointed out that the two applications are not exactly the same and the names should be able to co-exist. After all, GNOME has its fair share of detractor after all these years fighting the "Linux Desktop war" Anyway, GNOME requested $80k donation to engage in legal battle against Groupon. And they apparently have enough supporters to cover that. At the end of the day, it's all moot point though as Groupon conceded. (GNOME promised to use the money in other ways to benefit the community)

The biggest problem I see though, is the flaw of the copyright system: why does the party in the right (presumably GNOME the desktop organization) still need so much money to defend the copyright it deserves? 

- When talking about free software in the context of the likes of GNOME, the word free means "free as in free speech" Of course, another meaning is "free as in beer" That applies the Microsoft's new strategy to promote Microsoft Office to mobile devices. The author of this post thinks it makes sense as a way to lure more users to Microsoft's online service Office 365. I had an urge to install Office since it's free but then I realize I have Google Doc. I agree with one commenter that "the ship has sailed": a lot of users like me have already been using Google Doc, which probably has less feature than mobile version of Office but good enough for us.

後記：本來個blog有752個帖，我見到想起香港7俠52警察，很不安，快快多寫呢個帖。

How much money do NASCAR drivers make?

I was chatting with my co-w about sports (which is our favorite topic 'coz you can't do no harm with it) and was trying to convince them to follow the Chase for the Sprint cup. I was asked whether it's a big deal to win the chase (i.e., the overall championship) in terms of prize money. For comparison, the overall championship for golf (FedEx Cup of PGA) pays $10 million. And for baseball, each player on the 2013 World Series winning Red Sox got $307,322.68. I have no idea how much the prize money for winning the Sprint cup was! It doesn't seem to be well advertised: I googled and found the money comes from what is called a "points fund" (the term is used for NASCAR's lower-tiers too) When Brad K won it in 2012, he got $5.7 million from it. Not sure how much the runner-up gets these days. The only number I got was from 2002: the runner-up got a bit less than half of what the champ got. And of course, top drivers got a lot of endorsement deals and high base salary from team owners too. Check out Forbe's list of the world's highest paid athletes. Top golfers do make a ton: Tiger at #6 and Phil Mickelson at #8. The top of the list also features a lot of soccer, football and NBA stars. For the whole motorsports, F1 star Lewis Hamilton made it at #19, Dale Jr at #28 and Jimmie Johnson at #42. It's a bit surprising to see the top baseball player was Cliff Lee at #30. Don't get me wrong: he's a great pitcher but not the biggest name out there today.

Back to the topic of NASCAR, so how much does a "below average" driver makes? Here's the story of Landon Cassill: From his stats at NASCAR.com, he finished between 28th-32nd (out of 43) on average for the last 4 Sprint Cup seasons. He made ~$300k from each of his 2011 and 2012 season, which I think is pretty good (double the annual salary of a Python coder!)

Linux Desktop

To be honest, I never have much opinion on such a controversial topic among Linux users (it's kinda like emacs vs vi) I basically use whatever come with default install like your typical dumb user. I have no problem with GNOME or KDE. And if I have to pick one, I picked JWM. I have no idea what desktop I got when I installed Ubuntu 14.04. It turned out to be yet another controversial desktop called Unity, which I saw a lot of negative comments. What is so great about the open source community is that people are actually passionate about the technology. This guy wrote a looooong post to compare GNOME, KDE and Unity!

Sports highlights: Texan football sweeps

These teams from Texas played during the weekend and won:
- University of Texas: defeated #23 West Virginia 33-16. First victory over ranked team under Charlie Strong!
- Texas A&M: upset #3 Auburn.
- Baylor: defeated #15 Oklahoma fairly easily.
- TCU: defeated #7 Kansas State.
- Dallas Cowboys: defeated (unranked :P) Jacksonville Jaguars in London 31-17.
(The Houston Texan has a bye)

Smart music

The title is the name of a piece of software for practicing music (which I used for my jazz class at Stanford)  but this post is not about it. According to a new study, smart people listen to Radiohead and dumb people listen to Beyonce. (The "smartness" was based on SAT scores) Well, I don't listen to either. I found both boring. Some people who claimed they are Radiohead fans are actually kinda pretentious. Beyonce looked great when she was younger and had a few catchy songs earlier in her career but that's pretty much it. Well, people listen to System of a Down is also smarter than those listen to Bon Jovi (For the record I listen to some of both) The ridiculous part of the chart though was that Beethoven was rated way high while "classical" as a whole was way low. WTF? My conclusion: smart people diss the chart while dumb people created it.

Retroactive product placement

Just learned this new term from this Rolling Stones magazine article: old music videos were edited to feature "new" products (i.e., brands who signed up after the video came out) For example, a billboard of Grand Marnier liqueur was digitally "inserted" to Darius Tucker's MV of "True Believers" from 2012 (Coincidentally, I saw/heard the song for the first time a few nights ago! He looked familiar and I was wondering if he was the guy from the Hootie and the Blowfish) I guess the songs chosen for retroactive product placement gotta be somewhat successful to begin with. Hopefully the musicians earn a few more $ than getting their songs streamed by Spotify (the streaming service which just lost Taylor Swift's catalog. Taylor said "We're not getting back to together again. I know you were trouble") 

2014 deja vu moments?

I wrote this in 2010 about certain teams and athletes. Then I wrote this in 2012 about the same group. Here is the 2014 version:
1) The University of Texas football team lost to Oklahoma in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Well, this is a rebuilding year under 1st year coach Charlie Strong. In fact, it's unlikely the team will have a .500 season :(
2) The University of Wisconsin lost to Michigan State in 2010 and 2012. They won't play against each other in 2014.
3) Will Power couldn't win the IndyCar championship in spite of a good chance entering the final race in 2010 and 2012 but he finally overcome his last-race-jitter and won it in 2014.
4) US lost to Europe in Ryder Cup in all 3 years. US had a huge lead before the final day and blew it in 2012 but we are not even close in 2014. Looking forward to a new generation of young players picking up the slack.
5) Tiequan Zhang lost his UFC fight in Macau in 2012 and that was the last time he fought. Li Jingliang was another Chinese fighter signed by the UFC and appeared in FOX Fight Night 54 but lost.
6) Last but not least, SF Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014!

Sports highlights: two races in Texas

As a big fan of auto-racing who used to live in Texas, last Sunday was an awesome day: F1 in Austin and NASCAR in Fort Worth. Both were the 3rd last race of the season and the results would have big impact on the championship (It also helped that UT beat Texas Tech the night before) Rosberg won the pole of the F1 race and his car looked unbeatable in the first half of the race but Hamilton was able to catch up lap by lap and eventually passed Rosberg and went on to win his 5th consecutive race and 10th race of the season. Obviously there were many more lead changes at the NASCAR race ~200 miles north on I-35. Both Jeff Gordon (points leader entering the race) and Jimmie Johnson (eliminated from playoff already) had strong cars and Brad Keselowski used strategy to get to the front towards the end of the race. Too bad Brad K turned Jeff Gordon which resulted in a flat tire for the latter during a late restart and ruined Gordon's chance for a good finish (if not a win) So, after 2 races in the Eliminator round, no team has clinched a spot out of the 4 for the final championship race yet (Gordon went from 1st to 4th in point) 4th-8th were really close so all 8 drivers are still in contention! It was announced in the broadcast that the grandstand at Phoenix (next race) was already soldout. In addition, NASCAR got the Monday morning shows talked about them too, not because of on-track but off-track activity though: Brad K once again was in the center of controversy. He was pushed by Kevin Harvick post-race towards Gordon's team and resulted in a brawl.

The next 2 races are gonna be even more exciting!

Sports highlight: the Giants won it all again

Hopefully writing about this topic will become my every-other-year ritual. I posted this two years ago and this four years ago. Once again I am linking to Peter Gammon's writeup for the 2014 victory. Similar to last time, the Giants' great pitching was a key. Madison Bumgarner wrote another chapter in playoff history since 2010: 2 Win (Game 1 and Game 5, a complete game shutout) and 1 Save (Game 7, with 2 day rest and pitched as reliever for 5 innings!) in the World Series. And Tim Lincecum struggled as a starter in the regular season, too bad he was only able to pitch 1 2/3 inning as a reliever in "garbage time" (Giants was behind by 5 runs) and left because of injury in game 2 of the World Series. There were quite a few key hits from unexpected players in 2010, like Cody Ross and Edgar Renteria. In 2012 they have Marco Scutaro and Ryan Theriot. In 2014 they have Travis Ishikawa and Juan Perez. And of course great defensive plays from the rookie Joe Panik and the stud Brandon Crawford helped. I guess more things change, more things stay the same. The management has proven they know how to run the organization the right way. Both Brian Sabean and Bruce Bochy will join the hall of fame someday for sure. I gotta admit I have doubts in many of Sabean's decisions during his earlier days as the GM. I felt that he tended to sign over-the-hill/over-priced players like Barry Zito (yeah, everybody could cite this one) Randy Winn, Aaron Rowand, Armando Benitez ...... and hang on to older players for too long, like Ray Durham (see this analysis of the 2008 team and this 2010 breakdown of Sabean's success and failure, before he won the 1st WS) That's why I was so skeptical when the Giants signed Edgar Renteria, Pat Burrell, Aubrey Huff, Andres Torres and Cody Ross. Well, turned out they all helped with winning the 2010 championship, one way or the other. Now I become believing in whoever they signed, like Angel Pagan, Michael Morse and Tim Hudson (the last 2 were the only "big names" signed before the start of the 2014 season) They have certainly contributed a lot to the early season success (team W-L record for the first 60 games) which piled up enough wins to make up for the poor showings later and barely made it in as the last wildcard! Morse even had a few key kits in the playoff! The mid-season signing of Hunter Pence (and Jake Peavy to a certain extent) almost made me forgotten about Carlos Beltran.

I would have enjoyed this year's WS even if the Giants didn't win. Why? Their opponent Kansas City Royals certainly qualify as a Cinderella: one of the least likely team to make it to the WS in years IMO. (Check out this list of unlikely winners) Some pointed out this Giants-Royals matchup as the worst ever. In fact, the TV rating of game 1 was the lowest ever, which is understandable given the small size of the KC TV market (However, Game 7 had pretty good rating.) My friend who dislike baseball cited the low rating to support his argument that baseball is boring. Well, does it really matter? Parity in MLB was actually good to the business overall speaking. It's because more fans are likely to tune into broadcasts of the local team, which are making $$$ for all these regional sports network (this model is different from NFL's) I guess it all comes down to the fact that there are just not enough superstars in the games these days. Some say there are way too many teams (30) to compete for the talent. 

I can't wait for the 2015 Spring training!

Resuming Ubuntu from sleep makes thick black borders around windows to appear

This is an annoying bug of Ubuntu 14.04 but I found the workaround here:
1. Press the "Ctrl+Alt+F2" key combination (Warning: you will be sent to a text console where you won't be able to read this).
2. Press "Ctrl+Alt+F7".

聶衛平評李娜

看到老一輩棋王聶衛平一則新聞：大病初愈後露面，不改一貫意見多多的本色，對中國體壇指指點點，說不喜歡剛退役的網球名將李娜，因為她比較自私，國家隊不好好打。我驟耳聽只覺有點跟隨政府體育部的口徑，但也可能是老人家個人偏見，不妨一笑置之；想來內地網民也許會同意他呢。誰知看看評論，竟然有大量網民指聶不應信口開河，對他個人操守亦甚不以為然，真是始料不及。

Metal musicians on mainstream shows

Just read that Mastodon appeared on David Letterman's show. I was kinda surprised even though Mastodon's sound has become more mainstream these days but it is still a prog-metal band. Is it an act of selling out? Doesn't seem so judging by the comments but I found one interesting comment: these hosts may not really care or choose the musical acts on their show. For example, Slash once appeared on Jay Leno's show wearing a Team CoCo pin (for those who forgot or don't know the back story from 2010: NBC initially put Conan O'Brien on the Tonight show to replace Jay Leno but later on it brought back Leno, which angered a lot of Conan O'Brien's supporters, i.e., Team CoCo)

The Apple post

I am writing this as part of my effort to cleanup my long-forgotten-unpublished draft posts. Before talking about old news, I will start with a new one: RiteAid and CVS (two popular pharmacy chains in US) blocked Apple Pay over the weekend in thousands of stores. My first question was: wasn't Apple Pay become usable very recently? Why would a business reverse its decision so quickly? Well, it turns out: (1) RiteAid and CVS have installed NFC (near-field communication) terminals at some stores some time ago, not for Apple Pay. (2) RiteAid and CVS are NOT partners of Apple Pay. It just happened that the existing terminal works with Apple Pay, for a few days before being disabled. The "casualty" also included Google Wallet. Some Apple supporters were very vocal about this and claiming they will not buy from those stores anymore. Well, is it that big a deal? Currently only iPhone 6 owners could use Apple Pay anyway. Do you think it's a high percentage of the drug stores' customer base? And, most people shopped at a pharmacy when they really need the stuff (e.g. medicine) quickly so they just go to the closest one or the one they know will have the stuff. Do you think people will do otherwise just because it doesn't accept Apple Pay? Is it so much more troublesome to pay with (gasp) cash? And one news article brought out another point to support Apple Pay: iPhone users are richer than Android users. I can't argue with that ('coz it's true when it comes to my friends) but is that relevant?

An old news from August 2012: More than $60,000 worth of computers, jewelry and personal items have been stolen from late Steve Job's home in Palo Alto. A report in the San Jose Mercury News says that the burglar made off with iPads, iPhones, Macs, Tiffany jewelry, Beats headphones and Cristal Champagne, among other items. He also took Steve Jobs' wallet, which contained his drivers' license and $1. McFarlin, a former San Jose State football player, has confessed and has written a letter of apology to Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell, the Mercury News reported. Maybe he could write about his experience later. I'm sure a lot of people want to know more about what the house is like.

Finally, I commented on a report from July 2012: ABI Research recently predicted that in coming years, smartphone users around the world will be downloading and using fewer and fewer apps. What will they be doing instead? Using the mobile Web more and more, according to senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. Do people still remember when iPhone first came out, no app developer kit was available and Jobs was pitching software would be available on the phone by 3rd party (non-Apple) as Web application? Once again it proved he was such a visionary. I am no iOS expert but read that some App are actually "wrapper" on top of browser-webapp-based library. Anyway, as of 2014, I found most businesses still prefer users to download their own apps on iDevices, like Yelp or Groupon (the links from emails actually won't work with mobile Safari for me)

Ubuntu was borned 10 years ago today

Can't believe I wrote two posts about tech "birthdays" in this month! Let's face it: you lose "street cred" when admitting running Ubuntu instead of the more "hardcore" distro of Linux (like Arch?) but I really enjoy using it for "desktop activities" (i.e., playing back music/video, surfing web) rather than the "server stuff" (like serving up files or pages) I definitely feel the improvement during these 10 years: it became more and more usable "out-of-the-box" (i.e., right after installation) Less tweaking or installing additional drivers were needed to make things work.

Sports highlights: The Chase for the Sprint Cup

The last 3 NASCAR races were so interesting that I should dedicate at least one post to it (actually wanted to write last week and the week before but didn't get a chance) The last race I wrote about was the first race of the Contender round at Kansas won by Joey Logano who thus qualified for the next Eliminator round. The 2nd race at Charlotte was won by Kevin Harvick but the biggest story was the fights that broke out afterwards, centered around Brad Keselowski. Brad K got a poor result at Kansas and needed a better result at Charlotte. Otherwise he had to win Talladega to qualify for the Eliminator round. Well, Brad K did his best to drive but had a few clashes with Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth. He ended up outside top 10 and didn't improve his standing.  He was so mad at them that he tried wrecking them after the race during cool down laps, which was totally not cool. He accidentally bumped into Tony Stewart and the Smoke put his car in reverse to retaliate! What a scene!

Then we had the usually unpredictable Talladega race (because of the high speed and likeliness of big crash) One goal for the bottom 4 drivers: win to advance. And that list included Jimmie "Six times" Johnson, Dale Jr and Brad K. In the past years we saw Johnson playing it safe at this race but this new format kinda forced his hand and he tried staying in the front all race long but ultimately failed to do so. Junior had all sort of problems and was also involved in an accident which doomed his chance. The one who rose to the occasions was Brad K, who won the race and advanced. Another casualty was the originally Top 8 driver Kyle Busch, whose car was crashed without his own fault. He lost so many points to fall to the bottom 4. Kasey Kahne didn't make it either so only 1 our of the 4 drivers (Jeff Gordon) from Hendrick Motor Sports made it to the Eliminator round, which featured 3 former champs, 2 former runner-ups.

The Eliminator round started at Martinsville. Ironically, it was won by a Hendrick driver not in contention: Dale Jr. His victory came one race too late (he would still be in the chase if he won at Talladega!) but he totally deserved it: when he was leading the race late, he had to survive a late caution by passing the cars who didn't pit to regain the top spot. Jeff Gordon had a strong car too and almost caught Jr at the end. What an exciting finish! I think the new Chase format definitely added excitement to every race. Thumbs up to NASCAR (and proved the naysayers wrong! Still, a lot of fans are complaining that it's possible to win the cup without winning one race)

Video editing software

I have always enjoyed editing home/music video. Back in the early 00's, I actually bought Adobe Premiere for such purpose. Of course, newer versions of Windows come with Windows Movie Maker free and I stopped using my purchased copy of Premiere. So, what's the alternative to Windows Movie Maker on Linux? There are at least five.

Menuhin Competition

Came across an interesting article from the magazine of my Alma Mater University of Texas about a violin competition held there in Austin back in Feb.

Part of the competition was to play an original piece by UT faculty member Don Grantham, commissioned for the 2014 competition. Each semifinalist performed the tune as part of their repertoire, having received the sheet music just four weeks ahead of the premiere.
Stephen Waarts, the eventual winner, was the first one appeared on the video. The video editor did a good job piecing all these different performances together! I went to a concert in Palo Alto that featured Stephen Waarts as the soloist a few years ago and was already very impressed by his techniques.

Netscape was borned 20 years ago today

Do you still remember people suggesting you to install and use the brand new Netscape browser instead of the "good old" Mosaic 20 years ago? For me, it's probably one of my professors or fellow grad students at UWisc. If I remember correctly, one of my friend actually bought Netscape as boxed software in the late 90s. Those were the days.

Music critics favoritism

I certainly enjoy reading reviews from magazines like Downbeat or web sites like AllAboutJazz. I guess I am old school because these are the main ways I found out about new music in addition to the radio. I had an interesting observation from the October issue of Downbeat, in which Latin jazz master Paquito D'Rivera's "Jazz Meets the Classics" and Andreas Varady's self-titled album are both reviewed.

Every month Downbeat highlights 4 new releases in its review section called "the Hot Box." These albums get 3 additional short reviews in addition to the main review. D'Rivera's got 4 stars from the main one but also a 2 and a 2.5 because one reviewer thought it's unnecessary to emphasize the fusion of jazz and classical music (which D'Rivera did successfully and better than other well-known players like Jacques Loussier, who is the Bach-Jazz specialist, IMO) while the other thought the arrangement is too busy and showy (which I totally don't mind. To me, there's nothing not to like about jazz musicians with great techniques) I just find these 2 critics a bit too harsh.

Varady's album got 3 stars (not part of "the Hot Box") I would have given 2-2.5 because it's way too commercial with strings, vocal, and borrowed "star power" from guest like Roy Hargrove. I actually think it is a step back from his earlier debut album "Questions" with producer/drummer David Lyttle. The Downbeat reviewer wrote "Clearly there is a huge talent beneath the gloss here. Here's hoping he reveals it in a more genuine sense on the next outing" I suppose the magazine is more lenient to him because he is only 17 year old.