Controversial 228 documentary

These two videos are very controversial in this island. The embed links are also requested to be removed from the youtube so that I can not show the video directly here. 228 now is our national peace memorial day, a holiday. For over 50 years ago, several hundreds and thousands people are killed because of the demonstration to the new government. This history had been hidden for so long, over 40 years, by the government. Our people did not dare to mention anything about this. Today Taiwan people finally get our freedom to discuss our past; however, the competition of the two political parties, it makes every discussion is so controversial. I feel such attitude to against understanding our past is sick, even though they are political controversial. None of historians can be pure objective. Every interpretation implicitly has its own perspective. For such important hidden tragedy of our nation, we should listen to as many studies or reports as possible to help us understand the past.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgFpdWktVxc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjrg-DV-GgA&feature=related

BMElib bugs

1. ExperimentalV (in BMElib2.0b1)
2. Cross-variogram calculation in vario

Taiwan Health Data

Cancer Data 癌症公報
http://crs.cph.ntu.edu.tw/crs_c/annual.html

Accessibility approach

The accessibility approach can incorporate the road network computational power in GIS to obtain the quantitative value to evaluate the accessibility for a certain area. Dr. Su's student just came by to discuss her topic with me before.
I gave her the suggestion that the random sampling can be applied to obtain the average pattern of the accessibility in a large area. With the consideration of the uncertainty of traffic conditions, e.g. traffic light, traffic jam, or parking time, a range for the access time can be obtain to evaluate the mean and variability of the accessibility of certain area.

Bad start

Today is my first S/T analysis class ....
It was bad from my point of view. I am not well-prepared for today's class. I should be more ready for the next time, especially for the first part of the class. I did not make the powerpoint file by myself and I did not even review carefully by myself before the class. It is really bad. It should not happen again.

A cute cut

A very cute song ... it reminds me what I was in my childhood. I tried to mimic everything from my dad, even speaking the "bad words" as it is in the lyrics. My dad also asks me why I did that with angry and the same response I did as the kid in the mtv ... very funny song.

Remember -- A-Mei

I just saw this mv by accident. Maybe it says the similar story I have been going through these months. I felt the tears stuck in my eye while I was watching, even before the song started. The voice-over before the song is very touching. For me, even if the date is really about to end, I would like to say thank you for all this. Let's enjoy the song.

記得 - 張惠妹

 曲︰林俊傑
詞︰易家揚
編︰吳慶隆

 
＊誰還記得是誰先說永遠的愛我
以前的一句話　是我們以後的傷口
過了太久　沒人記得當初那些溫柔
我和你手牽手　說要一起走到最後

我們都忘了　這條路走了多久
心中是清楚的有一天
有一天都會停的　讓時間說真話
雖然我也害怕　在天黑了以後
我們都不知道會不會有遺憾

重唱　＊

我們都累了　卻沒辦法往回走
兩顆心都迷惑　怎麼說
怎麼說都沒有救　親愛的為什麼
也許你也不懂　兩個相愛的人
等著對方先說想分開的理由

誰還記得愛情開始變化的時候
我和你的眼中　看見了不同的天空
走的太遠　終於走到分岔路的路口
是不是你和我　要有兩個相反的夢

重唱　＊

我和你手牽手　說要一起走到最後

Research Idea: the comparison of two long-term variables (2)

In the discussion of t-distribution idea of comparing two long-term variables

Dr. Chen raised a very constructive comment about this idea and suggested that the definition of the long-term exposure is kind of similar to the idea in the survey sampling, where the long-term exposure can be considered as the exact if the everyday measurement is available.

I did the wrong way to interpret the daily measurements within the long-term period to consider its annual mean variance is the variance of annual exposure. If the measurements are complete, the annual exposure should not have any variance in lieu of the mean variance.

The test should be to check if an random variable with mean and variance can be considered as the approximation of the exact value (z-test), where the null hypothesis is to see if the population mean and sample mean are the same.

Once the measurement is incomplete, I should consult with the sampling analysis to see how to use the incomplete sample to have a representative value and its corresponding variance.

A long-distance song (Hey there Delilah)

I saw this song in one of my friend's blog. It is touching as long as you have any experience like this. This song is for myself, my past, the one I love and for my dear friend who is being suffered in this kind of relationship.



PLAIN WHITE T'S LYRICS

"Hey There Delilah"

Hey there Delilah
What's it like in New York City?
I'm a thousand miles away
But girl tonight you look so pretty
Yes you do
Times Square can't shine as bright as you
I swear it's true

Hey there Delilah
Don't you worry about the distance
I'm right there if you get lonely
Give this song another listen
Close your eyes
Listen to my voice it's my disguise
I'm by your side

Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
What you do to me

Hey there Delilah
I know times are getting hard
But just believe me girl
Someday I'll pay the bills with this guitar
We'll have it good
We'll have the life we knew we would
My word is good

Hey there Delilah
I've got so much left to say
If every simple song I wrote to you
Would take your breath away
I'd write it all
Even more in love with me you'd fall
We'd have it all

Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me

A thousand miles seems pretty far
But they've got planes and trains and cars
I'd walk to you if I had no other way
Our friends would all make fun of us
and we'll just laugh along because we know
That none of them have felt this way
Delilah I can promise you
That by the time we get through
The world will never ever be the same
And you're to blame

Hey there Delilah
You be good and don't you miss me
Two more years and you'll be done with school
And I'll be making history like I do
You'll know it's all because of you
We can do whatever we want to
Hey there Delilah here's to you
This ones for you

Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
What you do to me.

Yellow Book in South California (Food)

Staying in south CA for almost 2 years, today I just find this very interesting website for Taiwanese or Chinese people. The ChineseYellowPages provides very abundant information for life and entertainment. The most important, of course, is the restaurant info. You can find where to go by selecting the restaurant category, city, or even zip code.

Idea of future direction

The dynamic system is to describe the interaction of a series of linear differential equations, which can be used to discuss the behavior of disease transmission or the interaction within the human body.
The geostatists idea should be able to incorporate into the stoachstic part of these dynamic solutions. This dynamic solution can be solved by the representation as Lagevin equations (Colizza et al, 2007). The proposed way to incorporate geostatistics is to replace the pure random variable into spatial/spatiotemporal correlated random variables.
To familiarize this, I should do some study and focus on the the solution of compartment functions in biology or ecology(?).

A lesson

Today is not a special day, but I got a special experience with my auto sale. It was a good lesson to me.

Don't be risk ourselves to give any words without the 100% confidence. Otherwise, we can simply lose our credibility in a second.

This is not a devastating experience, but this is indeed a hard lesson and I have to remember it.

CDC Environmental Health Data

Here might be some valuable data for the environmental research

clipped from www.cdc.gov Data & Statistics Asthma Data and Surveillance Cruise Ships Outbreak Summaries Environmental Public Health Indicators Hazardous Substances Emergency Events Surveillance Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals More Toxic Substances & Health Data & Statistics More Environmental Health Data & Statistics Publications Case Studies in Environmental Medicine Handwashing Tips Healthy Housing Reference Manual National Exposure Report Public Health Assessments and Health Consultations ToxProfiles Vessel Sanitation Program Operations Manual More Environmental Health Publications More Toxic Substances & Health Publications Tools Cruise Ship Inspection Scores ToxFAQs More Tools & Resources

The next step

Few of the possible directions for me to pursue in the next few years. My weakness is the lack of the major domain knowledge other than hydrology, which is less and less unpopular in the field.
I have to pick one of the field to extend my career to stabilize the funding resources. I have to spend more time in Epid, such as spatial epidemiology and risk assessment, especially probability risk assessment to incorporate the environmental issues with human health or ecological concerns.
I do not know how far I can devote into. But I have to read a lot of books in this area in order to be familiar with the concerns of each domain knowledge to generate new research topics.

Yoga Lin's songs

轉載自SonyChuck MP3合輯分享

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(註:聲音檔轉載自youtube及I'm vlog)

Iraq won the Asian cup

What an emotional moment it is. Just one hour ago, I accidentally switched the channel into CNN and saw the last few minutes of the game. The Iraq beat Saudi Arabia by one point in Asian cup soccer game. I saw the Iraqi crowded at the TV and cheered for their coming championship together as I experienced our third position of the world cup baseball game tournament in 2003.

From the news, I realize that it is the first soccer championship for Iraqi for the last 31 years. Iraqi people made the impossible into possible. As discussed in the news, this incredible job is made under the condition of lack of money, lack of training, lack of everything. Even more, these players fought for their countries, their families, every victims of the war. They are the historical heroes of Iraqi now like our little baseball players from the little league with the championship cup few decades ago. Their achievement will last for long. They give the Iraqi hope. The gunfire started everywhere in Baghdad at the moment they won.

Congratulation to Iraqi. I can feel their joyfulness. I hope they can stand up again after the years of suffering by the invasion and suppression. I also hope our Taiwanese can stick up too to show the world that they should not ignore the truth of our existence. But I think the pity is we will not be able to this emotional moment from our very biased Taiwanese media.

Making the vacation message in the unix email system

I do not know if the commands apply to every server. It is the way how our department email server works now.

1. Check and see current vacation message: cat .vacation.msg
2. Edit vacation message: vi .vacation.msg
3. Edit vacation message within vi editor: I am not familiar with vi at all, and for me to remember all the commands. Here are some essentials:
   
• dd: delete entire line
• dw: delete the character before the cursor
• ":" : go to the command line
• wq: save and quit of the file used in command line
4. Activate vacation message: mv inactiveDotForward .forward
5. De-activate vacation message: mv .forward inactiveDotForward
   

Research Memo: co-kriging functions

The function kriging and coregfit are two functions to work for cokriging in BMElib. The convention of using kriging in multivariate problem is discussed in BMEprobamoments. The idea is to use the cell data structure to save the multivariate information and do the prediction.

No surface M-bags to Taiwan anymore .....

It was a really bad experience by shipping books to Taiwan this time. The USPS closes their service for surface M-bags to Taiwan now. It means the shipment of 60 lbs books to Taiwan will cost me $233 US dollars. Isn't it crazy? The shipping fee is even more expensive than buying the new books.

American baggage company is the one I found from those Google advertisement for international shipping services, after my few hours desperate internet search. I do not know if they offer the best prices but at least their price sounds to me is more comfortable. $135 for the books of 300 lbs. The disadvantage of such service is they only deliver the packages to the depot rather than your home. It means I will have to drive to warehouses to drop off or pick up my stuff, but, anyway, I save at leat $200 dollars per 60 lbs parcel. Hope it can be a pleasant experience with this small delivery company.

Rising Superpowers in the history (大國崛起)

This series was produced by CCTV China. It is no doubt today that China is one of the most terrifying emerging power in the world. Many magazines or articles predict that China or India will overpass the US in the next few decades. This series shows their Chinese people's ambitions. This series discuss every super powers in the past or nowadays about the mechanism, the boundary conditions and the reasons for their success. These countries includes Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, British, France, Germany, Soviet Union, Japan, and United States. Every country took its own historical opportunity to become the major domination of the world. Such discussion generates a lot of buzz within China as mentioned in some newspaper. No matter whether the China will become the next super power as the media or Chinese people expect, this series can always be a good media for us to understand our world nowadays and the contemporary history in the world.

Be a Taiwanese, the funny thing learned from this series is that Taiwan was found as Formosa by the first super power, Portugal, then governed by the third super power, Netherlands, and then colonized by the other one, Japan, and finally controlled by the current super power, United States. It can be said that we are so internationalized.....ha...

Such a educative series can always help us understand where our position is even though we will be never in the list of super powers. The series still teach as how to find and hold our own opportunity. Hope one day we can be the Netherlands in the series ....... as long as we will not fight each other anymore. The vision should take further into the world rather than the political opponent as we are doing now.

Taiwan -- A People's History (打拼-台灣人民的歷史)

Taiwan's PTS (Public Television Service Foundation) recently produce a series talking about the Taiwanese history. Given the previews, I anticipate to see this series very much. I do not remember I had seen any kind of very organized Taiwanese history TV shows in the past, even though I am from Taiwan and I had been focus on our own culture and history for a little while.

I do not know if this series had already been broadcast, at least I still can not find their full version on youtube. Anyway, I believe this must be a valuable series to see at least for our Taiwanese generation who had never been well taught our history. It generates the debates and argues nowadays about the Taiwanese identity in Taiwan society. In addition, the production from PTS is always good from the past experience, as it was called leading sports station in the universe in the past years .... Ha .....

Suffered by mlb.tv blockout?

It is always annoying that mlb.tv has the block-out policy once the games are broadcast by nationwide channel, especially my favorite Yankees, Redsox or off-season games are often in this category.

For the guys like me without TV at home, here is the solution. The P2P technology provides the forwarding TV show from the current channel. MyP2P is an website which put all sports games available in all kinds of P2P services together, even CPBL .... Ha. Also, the P2P services are also arranged for the easy download. With this service, we probably will not miss any interesting games easily again.

A free dictionary to install on PC

There is another article which introduces several on-line dictionaries. However, it is not always the case that your computer is online.

WordWeb is a free English thesaurus and dictionary to install locally. In other words, it is a English-English dictionary with synonym and antonym with pronunciation support as well. Even though the example sentence is not the focus here, WordWeb is still a very useful tool for writing or learning English.

楊宗緯 Songs

楊宗緯 has not been a real singer, but his songs spread more widely than anyone else. I like him since my first listening to his singing in 康熙來了.

Later I follow his performance strictly in 超級星光大道. Here is the list of his songs.

轉載自SonyChuck MP3合輯分享

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The best online dictionary?

What is the best on-line dictionary or simply dictionary?

For me, in order to learn English, it is not really easy for me to find a good dictionary which satisfies my poor English level with a very small vocabulary. I need the dictionary can pronounce, I need English explanation, and I also need Chinese explanation.

I have tried

• Dr. eye: a well-known dictionary from Taiwan (English-Chinese dictionary with example sentences, and pronunciation service). Its service is also adopted by Yahoo Kimo Dictionary.
  
• freedictionary: a free on-line English-English dictionary with pronunciation
• open dictionary: a growing open source dictionary with multi-linguistic translation
• Webster dictionary: a renowned English-English dictionary with pronunciation service and Webster Thesaurus gives the synonym and antonym services
• Dict.cn: This is my current favorite on-line dictionary with English-Chinese, Chinese-English and English-English dictionary along with the example sentences. The pronunciation service is provided as well. In addition, it sometimes gives synonym. Some of its disadvantage for me is the support of big5 (Traditional Chinese) is not perfect with very little bugs sometimes but bearable.
  

The next generation of Computer

This guy, Jeff Han, I believe he will dominate the world for a few years like Windows, Google or youtube today. The first time I see his presentation of his innovation of multi-touch sensing computer, I was really amazed by his work. After his presentation, I can only say if there is any product from his research with affordable price, I will go buy one right away.... :-D

Here is his presentation

DLL creation and calling by VC++6

In Yahoo Kimo knowledge base, there is a very good example to learn the dll creation and calling in VC++6. I do use this example to create the dll file for my own project and it runs well.

Here I borrow some of the content from the website and add some of my interpretation.
The essential part to generate a usable dll file is the modification of the header file from the original one for exe file.
For example, the hello.h should be

// hello.h___________________

#ifdef __cpluscplus
#define EXPORT extern "C" __declspec(dllexport)
#else
#define EXPORT __declspec(dllexport)
#endif

EXPORT void hello();
// end hello.h___________________________________________

The red bold part is the required addition to the original header file.

In the main file, hello.c, we can simply keep the original file as the original one, such as
// hello.c___________________

#include"hello.h"
#include

EXPORT void hello(){
printf("The First Hello World !");
}

• To build a hello.dll, in visual C++ 6, we can create a dll project with the inclusion of the files above.
• To use the hello.dll, we should include the hello.lib generated from the compiler into the main executable code. Then the dll, lib and other codes are put in the same folder to make a new executable file which can use the functions in dll files.

Fortran and C/C++ interaction

To develop a C++-based program with the support of built Fortran library, the mixed language programming is the essential part. It had been a frustrated process for me to figure this out. Here are some very important documents for the interaction between Fortran and C++ with the usage of visual Fortran and visual C++.

1. A introductory website
2. The MSDN mixed-language programming page
3. Some tips: some of them are not quite right but it is still worthwhile to consult with.
4. The most important: the table to see which library and settings has to be done in visual studio. It is also briefly shown here in Table 1 and Table 2

Table 1: The library combination for Visual Studio (both Visual Fortran and Visual C++)

Table 2

GIS data and resources

1. Few ArcGIS Notes from a website of a doctoral student in NTU
   
2. Taiwan GIS resources from a class document in 2008 spring
   
3. GIS resources page from Duke university which has a very well-organized with simple description and links
4. Computer Geography page from Ireland which provides some lecture notes about Computational Geography (such as small area problem and Spatial analyst) and also many useful GIS resources.
5. Xtoolspro is a shareware for ArcGIS which provides many useful functionality addition to the original ArcGIS functions.
6. SaTScan: A free software that analyzes spatial, temporal and space-time data using the spatial, temporal, or space-time scan statistics.

Useful website for Mac users

Applewoods is a very good website for Mac users, especially Taiwanese. It is very consistently updated and fast. You can very easily find useful information or little software from the site.

As a newbie to Mac, I like it very much, especially it is posted in traditional Chinese. Surfing there makes me feel like home.....Ha.

How to see MLB.TV full screen in Mac

After 2006, mlb.tv only supports windows media player format. It makes a lot of Mac users suffer in watching mlb.tv. In order to workaround this, two little programs are required to download, Flip4Mac and QuickTime FS. After downloading and installing, here are the instruction to see the mlb.tv in full screen.

1. Go to the mlb.tv and now you can see the game in the default small screen.
   
2. Use right button to adjust setting to "Launch Quicktime player" (I do not remember the exact word in the setting menu).
3. Shut out your firefox (browser), and reopen it to mlb.tv.
4. This time the quicktime player should launch in a new window rather than playing in the browser.
5. Run QuickTime FS. In its window menu, press Quicktime FS, and then go Full screen.
   

Note: for the QuickTime FS, there also have the widget for download and it is even easier to use.

Research Idea: the comparison of two long-term variables

Following the idea of upscaling study, how do we know if the long-term estimates is good enough in the case that we do not have long-term data to compare with?

The idea of the comparison is for both of them, to create a t-distribution and compare these two t-distribution by using t-test to see if the null hypothesis will be rejected.

For the t-test, we should estimate the long-term mean along with their standard deviations, and the number of valid values. However, one difference between the regular t-test and our t-test, because the long-term estimates also accompany with their estimation variances. One possible approach is to add estimation variances on the regular variances to be the new long-term estimation variances for the t-test.

Another proposed task for the upscaling test is the evaluation of the spatial pattern of the accuracy. The presentation of the estimation errors over the space is drawn on the map.

Research Memo: Upscaling technique

In the HEAPL study, I develop two upscaling techniques; however, for the geostatistical approach, a S/T process is often considered as the combo of a meantrend and residuals. For the upscaling problem, we should be careful of how to apply the upscaling techniques.

It is divided into two parts: meantrend part and residual parts
From the equation (3) and (4) in the HEAPL paper, it upscales the residual meantrend and covariance function into larger scale. As for meantrend part, it is also very important to the estimation, though it is considered as deterministic.

To upscale the meantrend part of the S/T process, instead of the stochastic upscaling as mentioned in (3) and (4), it can be simply aggregated by arithmetic average on the basis of the long-term period.

This idea can not only be applied in this HEAPL study but should be used in any S/T studies.

Shipping books to Taiwan (M-Bags)

It is time to pack my stuff to start my next position. Even though this trip is going back home, the leaving of the place I spent over five year is still emotional.

Before shipping my books back, I collect some potential economic ways to deliver these heavy stuff. The first one is the M-Bags. Though I am still not clear of the way to deal with it, some of useful websites I have collected.

1. A website to consult about the detail instruction for shipping in M-Bags
2. The rate information from USPS website

How to merge polygon in ArcGIS?

Case 1: Automatically merge all small polygons into a big one with respect to a specified attribute.
We can refer to the dissolve function in ArcToolbox.

Case 2: If the two specific polygons are expected to merge, follow the steps as follows
a. Select Editor > Start Editing.
b. Toggle the original polygon layer invisible.
c. Select the polygon features from the new polygon layer to be merged.
d. Select Editor > Merge.
e. The Merge dialog lists the polygon features to be merged. Click OK to merge the polygons features.
f. Select Editor > Stop Editing and click Yes to save the edits.

For more info, we can refer to the ESRI website

One note:
The dissolve function in ArcGIS 9.2 is not as capable as it was in Arcview 3.2. The dissolve function can experience memory limitation difficulty once the shapefile is too big. The workaround for the polygon dissolving is the usage of Arcview 3.2 geoprocessing wizard.