a journal of a researcher

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Google I/O 2010

Google I/O 2010 finished on May 20. Very interesting to see what google is doing.

1. Android: the message pushing is innovative. You can push content from Web browser to the Android device. Other things you can imagine from google search and from iPhone.

2. HTML5: I am just teaching XHTML. It seems xml is not so integrated into HTML. People are using HTML5 for video and animation content. However, I am not so fan of SVG and Canvas. I find it is difficult to program it. I do not want to calculate the coordinates when doing graph. Without proper tool, writing SVG or Canvas has no fun.

3. Web TV: not see the demo yet. However, I can imagine it, as the integration of Web search, content and video.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Some truths a student may not know

Students come and go in a university. However, many students do not know how the university works beyond their classroom and courses. The undergraduate students do not know that my teaching counts only 40% of my work load. They probably surprised that I have projects worth a million dollars to run. And I have another group of graduate students to supervise.

The graduate students may not know that I am also evaluated by the student papers published and the number of the students I graduate. It is not used to evaluate my research capacity, but to evaluate how well I can supervise graduate students. When I apply funding, my graduates’ performance is an important indicator, because the money goes to the students largely, not to me or equipment. In my research, we just need a PC most of the time.

So, if my students do not work well, I am upset. I work for them, but they lay me done.