Xu Cui

离家不远处有一条静静的小河
闲暇时我和孩子总有一段时光在那儿度过
清清的河水静静地流淌
只偶有几头到河边吃草的老牛慢慢走过
柔顺飘逸的苔丝和水草为小河装点了绿意
一群群小鱼在上面散步跳舞唱歌

思绪像随风的浮云那样闲适随意
心儿像逐流的鱼儿那样悠然自乐
我们用诱饵和器具将小鱼捕获
又在河滩上为放生的鱼儿拦坝做窝
孩子捧起小鱼和它们喃喃私语
鱼儿听懂后摇着身子点头致意
又用一根小棍和小鱼逗乐
也为不慎误伤小鱼而伤心难过

清清的河水静静地流着
在大自然母亲的怀抱中孩子的童趣永远没有个够
再三催促后才恋恋不舍地准备往家走
我们和小河鱼儿约定了下次见面的日期
婀娜多姿的苔丝和我们挥手告别
小鱼跳跃着提醒我们别把约会的时间记错

出处：百草岭  作者：陆平

David is an amazing person: he has published 5 papers in Nature and 1 in Science, two of which were published this year. Check out what he says in Peaya interview (click the photo below).

David Shelly

I noticed that gmail will remind you if you have something like “… is attached” in the email body but actually you don’t attach any files. This is very considerate.

Null hypothesis (H0): Octopus Paul doesn’t have the ability to predict. Or, the probability that he predicts correctly on each event is 1/2.
Data: In 2010 World Cup, Octopus Paul correctly predicted the outcomes of 8 games out of 8 games.
p-Value: (the probability to obtain the data assuming the null hypothesis is true): 1/2^8 = 0.0039
Statistical significance threshold: alpha = 0.05
Conclusion: as pvalue < alpha, we conclude that the null hypothesis should be rejected. Loosely speaking, octopus Paul does have prediction power.

The goal of Peaya  is to make your academic life more fun and more productive.

Peaya Comics

Comic strips about our academia life – the excitement, joy, depression, and pain.  We hope the strips will make you smile. Below is the latest comics:

Peaya Paper

A software tool that allows you to manage papers and PDFs and access them anywhere (Windows, Mac, and Linux). It also makes it easy to share with friends and collaborators. We hope Peaya Paper will make your work more productive. See how happy Iris (below) is after using Peaya Paper!

Peaya Cite

A MS Word add-in that offers a completely new way to insert citations — Cite Seamlessly with real-time context-dependent reference hinting. We hope Peaya Cite will allow you to concentrate on writing itself rather than on trivial citation insertion or formatting.

As I have quite some emails (>13000) in gmail, searching more efficiently becomes a necessity. Fortunately gmail offers some advanced search syntax.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7190

1. Search emails with attachment
   fmri meeting has:attachment
2. Search emails with attachment, and the attachment is a pdf file
   fmri meeting filename:pdf
3. Search emails sent from John
   fmri meeting from:john
4. Search emails sent to John
   fmri meeting to:john
5. Search emails sent before 2009/08/01
   fmri meeting before:2009/08/01
6. Search emails sent after 2009/08/01
   fmri meeting after:2009/08/01

I just became a new father. My daughter Iris was born 4 days ago. Currently sleep deprived …

1. Several years ago in San Diego I was in a friend’s car when he hit the car in front. The accident was mild and nobody was injured. After the two cars pulled over, I was wondering what the other driver would say. He said, “I am sorry to meet you this way.” I never forget this sentence.
   Years later in Houston my car was hit from back. This was actually my first accident and I had no idea what to do. But I remembered to do one thing: when I got out of the car, I said to the other driver: “I am sorry to meet you this way.”
2. In early 2009 I attended a meeting in Beijing. The organizers already booked hotel rooms for me. But when I checked in the front desk secretaries refused me because I could not provide my Chinese ID card or passport. For some reasons (not my fault), I did not have these two IDs at that moment. I did have other ID such as my driver’s license but they refused to accept that. I then argued with them. One of the event organizer said to me: “Don’t argue with the working class.” That silenced me.

My gmail inbox has 12,000 emails. I receive ~30 emails (after removing junk mails) each day. Though I have set to display 100 emails per page but some important but unreplied emails soon disappear from the first page. I often “star” important emails to reply them later. I did not do categorizing or tagging, the only way I do to find an old email is to search.

As my life is so much dependent on emails (and particularly gmail), I can’t help wondering:

1. What if gmail is down, even only for a few days?
2. How can I manage emails more efficiently?