July 2008 Trip to Las Vegas

Due to the ERSA 2008 conference, I paid a short visit to Las Vegas from July 14 to 17.

I was supposed to fly on Sunday (13th) night from National Airport (DCA), however, the flight was cancelled due to the weather. At that moment, I have spent one hour waiting at the airport.
However, it was good for me actually since the new leather shoes were hurting my feet.
After I got back to the campus, I made a phone call to my wife and let her pick me up. Nevertheless, there was a miscommunication about the exact location. So, I waited at the the Vernon shuttle stop on H street and she expected to meet me in front of Tompkins Hall on 23rd street. Anyway, I finally found the car because she was blowing the horn.

The next day, the flight successfully departed from DCA with one hour delay. After a 4 and half hour flight, I arrived at Las Vegas. The first thing I had to do was to find my luggage, which I checked in Sunday night and arrived at Las Vegas with the first flight on Monday morning. It took me another 45 minutes to find it.

Then the bad thing happened. The taxi driver started playing scam on me. Instead of using the shorted route, he used the unnecessary I-15 and made a big circle. The price on the meter was 22, which I was pretty suspicious since one local told me it would cost around 12 dollars. I paid full without tip because I was overcharged already.

After checking into the room, I prepared for the presentation for a while before go to sleep. The presentation on Tuesday went quite well.

On Wednesday I decided to walk through the city. The Las Vegas Strip is not quite long and there are around 20 mega resorts and casinos standing along the Las Vegas Blvd South. I had no interest to the casinos and they look pretty much same to me. On the map, there is a downtown area and I decided to pay a visit as well. Therefore, I decided to keep walking after I passed the Sahara casino. Then I entered the original city before the development of the Stip. All of a sudden, you could not find any people on the street and feel like walking in a ghost city. Occasionally, you may encounter some homeless. Finally, I reached the downtown and saw a lot of tourists again. However, they all crowded in the same block. I took the bus, the deduce, as the most tourists did and back to the strip.

The next day, I decided to walk back to the airport since it is not very far. After the lunch at a Chinese buffet near the hotel, Monte Carlo, I started walking with my bag and luggage. Again, there is no people after one block away from the strip. Since it is hot and dry at Las Vegas, there is almost no tree and grass over there. It took me more than one hour to reach the airport.

At last, I get one the plane at mid night and head back home. I don't like the city at all.

The existence of alien intelligent life form.

Two thousand years ago, people thought the Earth is the center of this universe and human was the only intelligent life form in this world. Later, people discovered the vastness of the universe and found the Earth is only one of the countless planets. Then, logically it becomes interesting to find whether there are some other intelligent life form in other planet.

Personally, I believe there are some other intelligent life forms existing at remote planets in the universe, just like us. However, I don't think we are able to find them and contact them, and vice versa. Human, as one species living on the Earth, faces the same fate as other species. Eventually, human species will start extinguish one day and the culture developed at that time may not reach the level to perform inter-planet journey in an efficient way, i.e., we are not able to go to other planet as described in the movies.

The other intelligent species at other planets face the same situation.

We are not alone, however, we are lonely from the sense that we cannot contact other intelligent life form in other distant planets.

How to get accurate and balanced information in today's world?

Everyday, we get the information about the events happening in this world through different channels, such as news paper, radio, TV, Internet. It is impossible to witness these events in person; therefore, it is necessary for us to know what are happening through the media. However, media are produced by people based on the information they collect. There are several factors that may affect the accurancy of the information what they give us.

Firstly, the information they collect may not accurate or complete at the very beginning. In today's media market, different companies are competing against each other in order to get the eyeballs from the audiences. Hence, all the media are forced to provide the information to the public as quick as possible. Once something happens, the journalists working for different companies rush to the scene and start releasing information as soon as possible based on the information they can obtain at that moment. Therefore, the stories they tell may change as the time goes. For example, during the reporting of the Virginia Tech Massacre last year, the media was not able to provide the correct information about the exact number of casualties and kept telling different versions of the story.

Secondly, the information they give us is interpretated by the people working for the media. In the interpretation process, they inevitably add their personal opinions. Sometime, they even change the story by covering the truth. The extreme case is how CNN made news based on one picture, which was cut into half intentionally, for the event happened in XiZhang (Tibet) following 3.14. The right part of the original picture shows the rioters were throwing stones to the military trucks. What CNN did is to cut off the right part and only showed the left side with the trucks and then started making stories on the top of it.

Thirdly, the people who work for media even make the news based on nothing. Before America invaded Iraq, media kept telling the public that Iraq owned the MDW and chemical weapon by quoting the voice from the government instead of investigating the truth. Because their continuous effort for broadcasting the fake story, the public started to accept it as a truth until later the report from the government itself claimed that there was no any this kind of weapon at all in Iraq.

Because it is impossible for us to witness all the events in person, it is necessary to get information from today's media. However, it is very important to get the correct information from the stories provided by these media. In order to get accurate and balanced information about any event as much as possible, the public can do the following.

1) Do not assume the information given by media is always correct and complete, particularly for big event. It is better to wait for enough time, such that we can get enough information before making the conclusion or judgement.

2) It is good to obtain the information about the same event from different channels. You may first hear some news from the radio or TV. Then you can check the Internet to see whether they are telling the same story, or there is something conflicting in different versions. It is always a good strategy to look for information from different sources and verify each other.

3) Use individual's own judgement. Once the individual hears some news, it is necessay to look at the logic behind it. If the logic does not make any sense, the information we get may not correct or complete at that moment.

Actually, the public can not completely blame the media itself for the inaccuracy. Most of the time, media is driven by the desire of the public to get news as quick as possible. Therefore, all the media companies always rush to provide the information to the public under pressure. If the public are able to give media enough time to collect information and acknowledge the accuracy and completeness, the media itself will start changing the way providing and interpreting information eventually

Temperature Figures

Although there were some fluctuations in the middle, the main trend of average temperature of each decade is rising, from 13.8 Celsius degree in 1890 to 14.6 Celsius degree in 2005. There was a small dip at the beginning in the curve. Then the average temperature kept climbing gradually until 1950, followed by a down trend. From 1970, the average temperature of each decade started rising again until 2005, however, at a rate much higher than before. The fluctuation seems reasonable in the first half of this century. Nonetheless, the recent temperature rising is rapidly enough to warn us the emerging of Global Warming.

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.