in the land of the buckeye

i went to an IIE conference this weekend in columbus ohio. i learned some interesting things while i was there, such as:

1. it is impossible to go to an industrial engineering function without hearing at least one person preach six sigma.
2. a large part of learning and networking can occur during "social activities" of a conference.
3. never leave a club while person 'D' still wants to stay, lest girls start taking off their clothes and licking each other's nipples.

so i would highly recommend going to a conference some time if you get the chance. especially if someone else is paying.

in other news, the airing of the final SATC episode was tonight. a sad day for all fans indeed.

schedule

while scheduling my classes for this semester, i did not purposely schedule only tuesday/thursday classes. it just sort of turned out that way. having worked out this schedule with a nice four day weekend, i figured i would have plenty of time to read for pleasure and other good stuff. alas, i was quite disillusioned and this semester has been pretty rough. my supposedly relaxing four day weekends have turned into four day study sessions for weeks at a time. hardly the relaxing final semester i had envisioned.

i'm tired. i'm going to bed. tomorrow, i head out to the bad place that happens to contain cedar point. i only hope that as a wolverine, i will survive. wish me luck.

you've got mail!

so today i wrote two letters. i am quite proud of myself, especially given my propensity to not write letters to anyone. i rather enjoy receiving letters, but no one ever writes to me. in fact, a lot of the people i talk to say that they like getting mail, but they never bother with writing real letters anymore.

there's no doubt that writing a letter takes a lot of time. it takes me about an hour to write what i could type up in a matter of ten minutes. and the typed up version would be a lot more legible than the crazy scrawl that is my handwriting. however, i like to think that my writing out my thoughts on paper lends a certain credence to what i write, telling people that i think that writing to you is important enough for me to spend an hour of my time on.

am i just one of those old fogies who stubbornly clings to the delusion that the old ways of pen and paper are better?

if you have never received mail from me, you're probably not important enough to spend time on. or maybe i don't have your address. i think have four people's addresses.

ice fishing in madison

i spent this past weekend in madison, wisconsin to go ice fishing. we didn't catch any fish, but we did do a lot of other fun stuff while on the lake, including building a snow fort, grilling bratwursts, and making snow tea.

speaking of ice fishing, i recently heard a story about ice fishing. persons 'J' and 'Y' had just finished digging a hole in the ice with an ice chisel. person 'Y', like any good engineer, was curious as to how deep the water was below the ice. so he took the ice chisel (~4 feet or 1.3 meters long) to the hole to determine water depth. as person 'Y' was doing this, person 'J' cautioned him to be careful to not drop the chisel into the water. person 'Y' was somewhat offended at such nagging and proceeded to dip the ice chisel into the water. unfortunately, as the chisel was being lowered into the water, person 'Y' lost his grip on it and with a plop, the the ice chisel sank down to the bottom of the lake. at least they were able to determine that the water was deeper than the length of the ice chisel.

so don't be like our tragic hero, person 'Y'. it is best to exercise prudence while testing uncharted waters.

how to read papers.

after spending the past few years spending countless hours reading a large number of papers, i have formulated a method for spending the least amount of time to go through the paper while still absorbing the vast majority of the content. the strategy for reading each section of the paper is described below:

abstract: the abstract is one of the most important parts of the paper. it concisely summarizes the entire paper. read it thoroughly and you will have a good idea of the general idea of the paper.

introduction: this part of the paper is perhaps the most useless. for the most part, introductions consist of a literature survey and a brief outline of the paper. the outline might be worth looking over quickly, but the literature survey is largely useless as any important research papers you might want to look at are presented in a more clear and organized manner in the references section.

body: this is where many novice readers mistakingly spend a lot of their time perusing. contrary to what the author would like you to think, the body of the paper is comprised of mostly fluff. the only parts worth reading are formulas, graphs and tables and the text that explains them. everything else tends to be either fairly obvious assumptions or opaque attempts of expressing information from graphs and tables in the form of text.

conclusion: this is another very important part of the paper. by reading this part, you will be able to confidently converse with academics on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper as well as possible topics for future research thrusts. nothing helps say that you've read the paper better than reading and quoting random ideas from the conclusion.

references: this section is good for finding the important papers in the field of study. if a paper is important, you will find that it is cited quite often in later papers. besides finding the important papers on a topic, the reference section is good for finding papers that you can pretend that you have read and then proceeding to belittle your colleagues for having not read them. a lot of what academia is, is convincing smart people that you're smarter.

of course, i do not use any such strategy for my classwork/research, but if you ever find yourself in a jam for time, i hope it proves useful.