Today, I decided to try Google’s cached page to recover my lost content, and THANKS A LOT! I’ve recovered my About Me page.

Now I’m working on my old posts.

I was very exciting that day, I hurried to see my girlfriend, she was waiting for me at a supermarket, then I took her to a restaurant and had a second dinner with her.

I feel so lucky, so lucky to be enrolled by ZJU and so lucky to meet such a good girl.

Future is coming, never care whatever others are saying, be myself, and one day they’ll believe me.

Tomorrow will be my 18th birthday, I’m going to be an adult. And life is so meaningful.

Felicity.

My girlfriend pick up the name OrdiPoppers for this project. Our goal is to make tranlating .srt files more easier, in this very early version, we focus on the basic function which simply create the section header info for every paragraph, as well as learning how to work with Visual Studio.

Now, our team member hasn’t gathered together yet. Looking forward to them.

I’m using Yizer’s laptop to write this post, and we will exchange our position and continue our coding.

-EOF-

Yesterday evening, when AOA and I went back from the store in which we bought 12 cans of beers, we met two players coming out and asking where we bought beer. AOA’s English is poor, so AOA went back to his room and I guided them to buy beer, :D. It’s fantastic to offer my help and have a talk with these cool guys.

When coming back, they invited me to join them and play card games, so I went there but saw their cards are so different from mine, I thought ‘Oh my god’, but you know to have a chance talking with so many foreigners I’ve already enjoyed this great night. They’re from Brazil, different universities, and they said that I’ve saved the night. :D

So, if you’re one of those guys, leave your comments here!

So everything before was lost….

I suggest you use this link to signup for DropBox, so you can get a 250MB bonus(while I can get a 256MB bonus).
Thank you?(Or thank me, too?)
:D

I would be glad if you wanna share your e-books with me.

But, what about the outside environment? Did they rely on something on their way to success? Had things like birthplace, ethnic, family, decade, or even birthdate ever affected them? These are what Malcolm Gladwell focus on in his book Outliers. Subtitled The Story of Success, the author try to show us that such thing can do affect us, say, a lot, on our way to success.

Consider this example, hockey players are nationally respected in Canada. There is an “all-star” team for each age of players. Make a list showing basic information about those players in the “all-star” team, and a strange thing appears(but maybe you don’t notice it), that is most of these players are born in January, February, March. Just coincidence? No! Let’s go over the birthdate of those great players, and players of the “all-star” teams in the history, we will actually find the same thing. Then comes WHY? Why players born in the first three months have such a big advantage over others? That is, believe it or not, because the date that separate two groups of players is January, 1st, so these born-older-players have more time to practice, so they gain more experience, so they can stand out against those same-level players. In conclusion, birthdate is their advantage by birth.

Next, the 10,000-hour rule, which says that if you want to become a world-class expert in any area, you must have been learning, practicing, reading, or teaching for at least 10,000 hours. Mozart didn’t disobey this rule, nor did Bill Gates, nor did the Beatles. But there obviously exist many other people that practiced tens of thousands of hours, but none of them are as successful as Bill Gates or the Beatles. Are their success only the result of their “genius”? No, both of them met a sequence of fortunate opportunities, and they held them all, and they success. For Bill Gates, his family is rich enough, his middle school is good enough to own a time-sharing terminal on which he can practice programming, he was given continuous terminals to practice advanced programming skills, he met essential friends like Paul Allen, he left collage at the right time when PC is stepping into more and more families. And finally, he succeed, greatly. For the Beatles, they were offered a chance to play in Hamburg, Germany, at that time they were not so famous, and they had to play rock and roll eight hours a night, seven days a week, but they didn’t give up. Just like Gladwell wrote:

“They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman went on. “They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers–cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

These are only the first two chapters of this outstanding book Outliers and they really refreshed my mind, my belief on why one success.

They success, because of their great luck, they are outliers, but when consider every chance given to them separately, there is nothing special, they do normally, so they are not outliers at all!

Somewhat confused? But what I want to tell you is that Everyone Is A Miracle, we all have this or that opportunities(maybe not all of them lead to success), we are unique because no one would experience exactly the same as us, there’s no way to “chase after” success, but there’re many ways to hold every chance you’re given.

Everyone is a miracle.
Everyone is somewhat, an Outlier.

Everything we have learned in Ourliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it’s a better shot at making the all-star team. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high. Joe Flom and the founders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz got multiple breaks. They were born at the right time with the right parents takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on. And what Korean Air did, when it finally turned its operations around, was give its pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural legacy.

And in the Epilogue titled A Jamaican Sroty Gladwell writes :

They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are.

The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

Just bought The Tipping Point and two other books(Chinese Edition, The Island, and Combination Mathematics) on Amazon.cn.
My next target is Blink.

Go, go, GO!

So what Outliers means exactly? The author showed us the answer in the Introduction:

1: something that is situated away from or classed different from a main or related body.
2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.

Subtitled “The Story of Success”, the author Malcolm Gladwell

argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we want to understand how and why some people thrive, we should look around them — at things like their family, their birthplace, even their birth date.

In Chapter 1, which titled The Matthew Effect, Gladwell shows how much “all-star” hockey players are influenced by their birth date.

In Chapter 2, which titled The 10,000-Hour Rule, he argues that if you want to be a world-class expert in any field, you MUST spend AT LEAST 10,000 HOURS(about ten years or so) in training yourself. This is true from Mozzart to the Beatles to Bill Gates.

In Chapter 3 and 4, which titled The Trouble With Geniuses(Part 1, Part 2), with the comparition between Chris Langan(a high-IQ man who is ignored by almost everyone) and Robert Oppenheimer(the physical theorist who directed the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic-bomb), he explains why high-IQ doesn’t always produce Nobel Prizer winner or something like that.

Continue reading.

But getting more deeply involved in China posed problems too.The country was ruled by a sprawling Communist bureaucracy that actively monitored, restricted, and censored the Internet. Doing business there ran in the face of the founders’ core principles of providing free, unfettered access to information. Since 2000, the company’s approach had been to provide unfiltered Chinese-language search results that users anywhere in the world could access through Google.com. Because Google operated this site outside of China’s borders, the government had no say in what could or could not be displayed. The catch was that within China, certain links from Google were blocked–though users were able to see the nature of the information the government was prohibiting access to. The blacklist consisted largely of pornographic and political Web sites, particularly those dealing with human rights, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square uprising. Blocking was done by a massive set of sophisticated government-run filters–dubbed “the Great Firewall of China”–that often slowed the Web traffic passing through it.

I wonder whether the Chinese edition of The Google Story still contains these things or not.
I think it doesn’t.

So, this is the fact,
the fact we are facing in this country.

Start new reading plan: Outliers.
Which I couldn’t guess how much time will I spend on it….

Programmers from China and Russia have dominated an international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.
Whether the outcome of this competition is another sign that math and science education in the U.S. needs improvement may spur debate. But of the 70 finalist in it, 20 were from China, 10 from Russia and only two from the U.S.

The whole article as follow:

About 4,200 people participated in the U.S. National Security Agency-supported challenge. The NSA has been sponsoring the program for a number of years because of its interest in hiring people with advanced skills.
Participants in the contest, which was open to anyone — from student to professional — and finished with 120 competitors from around the world, went through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas.

China’s showing in the finals was also helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others.
Of the total number of contestants, 93% were male, and 84% were aged between 18 and 24.

Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, said the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education.
“We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there,” Hughes said. He said the U.S. needs to make earlier inroads in middle schools and high school math and science education.
That’s a point Hughes is hardly alone on. President Barack Obama, as well as many of the major tech leaders including Bill Gates, have called for similar action.

Of the participants in the contest, more than 57% had bachelor’s degrees, most in computer science, and of that 20% had earned a masters degree, and 6% a PhD.

But the winner of the algorithm competition was an 18-year-old student from China, Bin Jin, who went by the handle “crazyb0y”. Chinese programmers have a history of doing very well in this contest.
Mike Lydon, TopCoder’s CTO, said Jin’s future in computer science is assured. “This gentleman can do whatever he wants,” he said.
The participants are tested in design, development, architecture, among others, but one of the most popular is the algorithm coding contest.

To give some sense of difficulty, Lydon provided a description of a problem that the contestants were asked to solve:
“With the rise of services such as Facebook and MySpace, the analysis and understanding of such networks is a particularly active area of current computer science research. At an abstract level, these networks consist of nodes (people), connected by links (friendship).
“In this problem, competitors were given the description of two such networks, but with the names of all the nodes removed from each. The networks were each scrambled up before given to the competitors. The task was to determine if the two networks could possibly be from the same group of people.
“The competitors were to unscramble and label the two networks so that if Alice was connected to Bob in one of the two networks, then Alice was also connected to Bob in the other network. This problem is known as the network isomorphism problem, and solving it for large networks is a major unsolved problem in the realm of theoretical computer science.”

Lydon said the overall problem is unsolved for larger networks, and what’s considered a correct answer for this problem would not be considered large enough for the solution in this case to be groundbreaking.
Two people solved the problem.

I think this exposure such things that Chinese student true master mathematics better or (to tell the truth) easier. In a Chinese mind, number system is much easier than that in any other language. I got this feeling a long time ago, and emphasized it while reading Mind Performance Hacks, which introduced many methods of how to calculate in mind or something like that:
Its Chapter 4 titles Math, which including these hacks:

• Hack 35. Put Down That Calculator
• Hack 36. Make Friends with Numbers
• Hack 37. Test for Divisibility
• Hack 38. Calculate Mental Checksums
• Hack 39. Turn Your Hands into an Abacus
• Hack 40. Count to a Million on Your Fingers
• Hack 41. Estimate Orders of Magnitude
• Hack 42. Estimate Square Roots
• Hack 43. Calculate Any Weekday

Reading this chapter I found that number is a big problem for many foreigners (or maybe not? But I found these things in my Chinese mind exist by nature…).
But then I found a contradiction:

Why Chinese student hadn’t found companies like Microsoft? Or something more close to us, like Google? Facebook? Twitter? These websites all based on algorithms which are not too complex. So, are we only focusing on complex ones?
NO, EITHER.

I believe what caused this is a lack of creativity. That’s not to say we Chinese don’t have new ideas, but we don’t CATCH IT. Everyone can be creative. But when we used to come up with an idea, what we usually got is discouragement. So, we wouldn’t be devoted to archiving it. And in the course of time, we wouldn’t even thinking about new ideas any more.

And, we Chinese always feel that things NOW are ENOUGH, which leads to such a result that we don’t want to improve anything exists. Meanwhile, I find many foreigners want to improve every concepts of things in their lives EVEN VERY SMALL CONCEPTS.

Two culture, two attitude. It’s not the question which is better, which is worse. But I will try to change my mind into a creative one.

And reading The Google Story makes me believe that Technology is ALWAYS on the TOP of this information society.

I’m proud of hearing this news, but something under this should also be noticed.

I’ve learned many algorithms. but while pronouncing names like Dijkstra, KMP, Bellman Ford, or Floyd, I always feel something in heart uncomfortable. And, I felt if we have a better sense of number but not using it properly, it’s such a waste of mental resources.

And I always feel sorry when seeing classmates who give up studying when so young.

I love Chinese(but not The Party).

Like the Death Knight in Blizzard’s RTS game WarCraft 3 often asks:

I will spill it for programming and code.
Bless myself a brighter future.

Just as the title said, I’m now reading The Google Story(Updated Edition For Google’s 10th Birthday).Now the process is page 67.
This is a book telling the story about Sergery Brin and Larry Page-the two founders of Google-and Google the search engine.
It’s really an exciting story.
And I also know that what ‘PageRank’ stands for is not a ranking algorithm for web pages but Larry Page’s Ranking System…

Nice book,nice history.
As a google fans,
I gonna read this book now~

P.S.
I bought this one from Amazon.cn, there are many English book online for shopping on it, try it if you’re in China.