Serenity

Yesterday I read the book, “Advice for a Young Investigator”. The author said that the progress of studying science takes three steps. observations, hypotheses and experiments. First, we need to observe our target such as stars, animals, people, etc. Then, we provide our hypotheses about why some facts happen and how our targets move. Last but not least, we conduct experiments to prove or disprove our hypotheses. No matter what kinds of sciences we study in, the progress is similar.

Interestingly, the author points that a hypothesis is useless if it cannot be proved or disproved. Although this idea is quite simple, it shocks me. Sometimes I feel that my hypotheses are hard to prove, and they annoy me a lot. For example, I’m studying the ranking of web pages or the ratings of movies. I think there should be some other ways to rank these things; however, ranking methods are hard to evaluate. The fact is that everybody can easily propose a new way to rank, but nobody can evaluate it. Maybe there is always an absolutely correct answer in nature, but there is not, in humans. This phenomenon bothers me for a long time, but it’s also the interesting part of data generated by humans.

Another useful advice from this book is that find out the problems from the real data analysis. It’s a simple idea again, but it is not that obviously in computer science. In computer science, researchers can easily generate synthetic data from simulators. Sometimes researchers are lack of real data such as the real-time traffic flow; they can only generate it by their simulators. Therefore, sometimes they may claim a new problem from their own imaginations. I did similar things several times, too. In the end, I cannot make sure what the impact of my research to the world is even if my experiments show that my idea works. Some researchers illustrate many examples to convince us that someday another study will use our result, and finally many researchers’ efforts will be combined together and create a big successful result. I do believe these scientific histories, but sometimes I doubt that some studies including mine are not useful pieces to a success.

One of my younger friends had read the book Into the Wild and he seemed to like this book very much, so I went to the library and borrow it. There was a story about why this book was published. At first, there was small news about an anonymous young man who died in Alaska, and then his friends identified who he is. The young man, Christopher McCandless, is well-educated, smart and strong in sports. Nobody knows why he went to the wildness in Alaska and finally died there. Therefore, Jon Krakauer, the editor of Outside Magazine, wrote a report on this. Many readers wrote mails to Jon after they read this report. Some of them gave positive comments such as brave man to the young man, while some of them gave negative ones such as reckless and arrogant boy. On the other hand, some of the young man’s friends shared what they knew about Christopher and they wanted to know why Christopher died there because they thought that Christopher was strong enough to live everywhere and he definitely didn’t go to their suicide. This brought Jon an idea to dig out what happened to Christopher.

Jon desired to understand Christopher because Jon had a similar experience as Christopher. He went to climb a notorious mountain named Devil’s Thumb in Alaska when he was young. To find out what happened to Christopher, Jon traced where Christopher had visited and interviewed the family and friends of him. Combined Christopher’s notes, Jon’s personal experience and some related and famous people who have been wildness in history, Jon tried to write this book to explain what Christopher thought and why he did these things; however, the clues were too less to build a whole view of Christopher, so what we read was inferences of the author.

Christopher seemed to not like the civilization and didn’t want to live with folks. In contrast, he liked the nature and lived alone, and he did do many trials to close the nature and succeeded to live peacefully with it. It was a pity that he made some mistake in his final trip. What I learned is that there are many possibilities in life. Before reading this book, I only knew to be a scholar or an engineer in the future; however, we could live with more freedom as long as we drop some desires in physics. I knew that I can’t live as Christopher since I like convenient functions of cities and I don’t like trouble, so I may never try to go to the wildness. Also, I think I don’t need to go there to find out the deep feeling of mine. At least, I don’t need currently. By the way, a new movie based this story will show up on Sep. 21, 2007. When there is a DVD in Taiwan, I’ll take some time to watch it.

Recently there is too many things to do, and I found that I was lack of the power to execute all things soon. Therefore, I go to the library to borrow the book “Execution”. I think it may tell me how to execute well. For example, how can I live with more energy, or tell me a story that makes me have new positive thoughts. In fact, I was wrong; it is a book about management.

Although reading this book can’t improve my passions so that I can solve a lot of things, I learn many principles from it. This book tries to emphasize the importance of execution. Usually, books about management tell much abstraction, and I understand nothing after reading these kinds of books. The great thing of this book is that it gives a lot of examples in order to explain their simple principles. For example, ten focuses are no focuses, or execution is not a strategy in business, it is a basis of everything. There are some principles that many manager think they are impossible to achieve, but when this words come from the mouth of the chief executive officer of the top 100 companies, they will trust and follow them. For example, no matter how high your position is, you should still go to talk to the lowest staffs, otherwise, you won’t be aware the situation of your company. Also, no matter how busy you are, you should still supervise the plans, otherwise, your staffs would think these plans are not important, and therefore they wouldn’t do many efforts.

Another good example is that managers who work more than normal hours are bad ones. This point is somewhat opposite to many people. People who work harder than others usually earn the respect from their managers. The authors don’t think so. They think that managers who work harder would also ask their staffs to work harder. This department may crash suddenly someday because the whole department works too many hours than usual ones. Also, this reveals a drawback of this kind of managers. The drawback is that they can’t authorize their jobs to their staffs, and this means that they can’t afford more complicated jobs since authorization is a necessary part of a organization.

The review written in Chinese is in here. I try to write another review in English. Note: this article is not a translation.

( book's basic information )