Categorization of Memes

If you don’t know what is a meme? Here is the link to wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme It is worth mentioning Richard Dawkins’ popular book “The Selfish Gene” which is a kind of meme itself. How do we categorize memes? Similar to genes, good memes propagate prolifically both in space and time; while bad memes cannot survive [...]

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Tips for my students (I)

1. Be more selective on reading papers and books. The game of scientific research is a constrained optimization problem – maximize your productivity (in terms of both quality and quantity) subject to certain time constraint. This time constraint simply dictates that you need to more carefully think about how you want to spend your time. [...]

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Order from Noise (Fluctuation)

What is common between mind and universe? You might be surprised by the astonishingly similarity between their topology (network or neurons vs. network of galaxies) though they belong to two highly contrasting scales. If there is a grand law governing the evolution of everything including life, intelligence and cosmos, such law must be the simplest [...]

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Characteristics of high-impact research in Computer Science and Engineering

What kind of research has a high impact? 0. Discovery-type: Small-world/scale-free networks, Kleiberg’s Authoritative sources, self-similarity of internet traffic, emergent property of social, economic and biological systems. If Old One creates this world by a simple rule, discovery of this rule is the holy grail of all scientists. The rule is there – just go [...]

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What I have learned from “poor-quality” PDF files?

For a long time (at least a year), I was bothered by a problem with some pdf files – they appear really lousy on my computer screen. Unless I zoom to >150% under Acroread, texts in those PDF files are just terrible – primarily due to aliasing. So I even had developed a habit of [...]

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