Spam Email

One of the most annoying things about internet is spam emails. Most of them are unsolicited advertisements, and some of them are scams, which pretend to come from your banks, online sellers, or even government. I once received one scam email which claimed coming from Bank of America and let me give my account information. I almost trusted the email and was about to release my person information before I called Bank of America and found it was a fake.
Most of time, I will trash them right away without reading them. However, I may scan through the list of titles to make sure the mail server does not put some "good" emails into the "spam" folder by mistake before I delete them permantly.
In terms of sexually or inappropriate emails for kids, parents should set up the filters properly in order to filter those email before the kids access them. In the meantime, parents should educate them and make sure they are aware of the existence of these kinds of emails and deal with them appropriately in case they have access to them.
Spam emails are difficult to fight against. More intelligent softwares are needed to develop to deal with them. However, it is impossible to remove them completely because the technologies at both sides develop at the same time. Hence, the more viable way is to let people be aware of it and able to handle it in a correct way.

March 13th, 2008, EAV 7b #1

According to Chernicoff, Fox, and Tanner in What Caused the Extinction of the Dinosaurs, paleontologists are very interested in the factors contributing to the massive extinction 65 millions years ago, including 75% of all live forms on the earth and dinosaurs in particular. Some early hypotheses focuses on single factor, however, other proposed that global environment changes were the reasons. But none of them was able to explain why 75% species were lost and the other 25% species survived. One possible factor, which is agreed among several hypotheses, is the catastrophic collapse of the global food chain preceded the widespread extinction because of the "impact of winter". One group suggested that the massive volcanic eruption sent enormous ashes and gases into the atmosphere. The other group proposed the same phenomenon, yet, trigged by the strike of a meteorite. The third hypothsis combined both as trigger factors for the wordwild food shortage. Although there are numerous evidences demonstrating the correctness of these hypotheses, none of them has attained theory status. Hence, scientists are still searching more evidence to support their hypotheses.

March 6th, 2008 English Learning Experience

Although I have spent almost 20 years to learn and improve English, I am still not satisfied with it . In terms of the four basic skills, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, I am able to read well and very weak with three others. First, I was not able to follow the news in the radio or the talking in the movie before I came to US. Most of the time, I heard the words, but I could not find the meaning very quickly. In another words, I had to translate English to Chinese in my mind for understanding the listening English. After five years of continuous listening, my capbility for this skill finally improves. Second, my English writing skill is still horrible. I am still not able to tell the minor differences among synonyms and feel difficult to find accurate word in writing. Very often, there is no natural connection between two contiguous sentences, which makes it suffering to read my writing. Notwithstanding I know that it is necessary to keep on writing to improve it, and I write English everyday, I still feel what I write is very awkward in terms of grammar and word selection. Finally, I have to say my English speaking is not acceptable at all. I keep making mistakes about the timing issue, the pronunciation, and plural form of nouns, which do not exist in Chinese. I am only able to speak in very simple form using simple words; hence, I repeat using same word when I present. Further, my voice always sounds dry and clumsy. The only way to improve my English is to practice and this is what I am going to do.

Assignment on March 4th, 2008

1. Name some types of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources that are used by researchers in your field.

Field: Computer Engineering

Primary source: the original publication of new data, results, and theories; or, own first-hand result, such as simulation result, the output of a program.

Secondary source: interpretation, commentary, analysis and criticism of primary sources; examples include the validation or disapproval of a new theory.

Tertiary source: bibliographies, library catalogs, directories, and survey articles; particularly, a good survey article will give a comprehensive coverage of a particular field and list the most important publications in the field.


2. When you research a topic, how do you keep track of information
In scientific fields, Computer Engineering in particular, the main method to keep track of information is to build a bibliography which consists of all the citations the researcher once used in technical writing. Each item in the bibliography includes the authors, publication name, the original place, published time (year, month), and abstract.