A turn for the better

Life is always full of ups and downs. Fortunate or unfortunate for me, it's mostly downs. So it all boils down to how good you can handle these setbacks. I have to admit I am not very good at it. I could easily feel dismal and despaired. Despite these, I could still manage to hold on to myself by simply constantly asking the same question again and again to myself, "Are you sure you want to give up? How do you know there isn't any good chance coming up?" or "you never know until you try it!".

Fortunately, I am still here and haven't given my hope on being a sound researcher yet, simply because I always hold on to the belief that some will resonant with me one day. Better yet, I have gotten good news that I might stand some chances in moving to the lab that I believe is the best of its kind in MRI research. I truly hope things will go smooth and as planned so that I can finally have my first dream come true.

Wish me luck!

A new way to relieve your stress (sort of)

I am thinking of another Python project where I plan to build a web app that allows people to relieve their stress by hooking them up with someone who have similar experience. The way it works is this, user will first type few descriptions (with word limits) on the source of stresses and how does stress affect them. And for those who have already resolved the issues, they can also describe how they got rid of the stresses and etc.

So the app will then sort of automatically find an appropriate guy/gal for the user to discuss or simply suggests their pages' for the user to read in the first place. I am thinking of using simple algorithm (link) to do the categorization first as I have absolutely no experience in machine learning/data mining stuff. But I think this should be a good project for coding!

Any suggestions?

Spread your wings

It has been discussed how similar an academic can be similar to an entrepreneur (here). Another post discussed nicely how mediocrity would possibly destroy (I exaggerated a little!) one's career (here). These two great articles lead me to discuss the importance of spreading your (as well as mine) wings no matter whether you are an academic or entrepreneur.

Obviously I would discuss this from the perspective of a researcher. Let me start by asking you a question as such. Would you rather join a lab which is new but they offer you a position with higher rank, or a lab which is rather established or even in the elites but just an entry position? This is analogous to asking whether you want to join a startup with cofounders you have never heard of, or one that are backed by the smartest and the brightest. My answer to the question is to join the top-notch lab! I learnt this the hard way though.

You might say you would have more "freedom" as to choosing what you want to work on or etc. But the key is the pedigree in the place you work. It is obvious that you are there to contribute, but at the same time you are also there to learn and pick people's brains. I consider the latter the most monumental and influential to one's career. This is why I want to up my game and work in a much better lab (that's of course only if I can be offered any job). Sometimes it's not just the talent in you that brings you success but also the inspirations from the great and smart people around you, especially for people like me who is not all that smart:)

In any cases, don't worry about the money or how you look on paper. Spreading your wings and working with great people matter most!

Building relationships with friends on twitter

I finally have a little bit of idea what my first python project should be, and that's to do with your twitter friends. Have you ever had the moment where you are not sure whether you should follow the guy who just followed you? E.g. thinking whether that person is truly wanting to be a "friend" with you or simply want to do some advertising here and there.

Also would you want to build a timeline of when you followed a particular person or when a particular person followed you? Sometimes it would be cool to see how long you have been following someone or followed.

So these are the two things that I am going to hack in the coming weeks! Hope to get it done as quick as possible!

Update [2011-04-13]: Duh! Turns out Twitter API doesn't store the date you follow someone or the other way round!

Road to building something using Python

Having spent the past month or so reading different materials (here, here, and here) on Python, I can't wait to start building something with Python. But I definitely need to thank Mark Pilgrim (the author of Dive into python) for writing such a great book on Python 2.x. I have learnt a lot from his book. It's absolutely a book for beginner like me so I would recommend beginner to start diving into this book first!

Having spent all this time learning Python, it is time to start building mini-project. You will never learn coding until you actually code! So apart from thinking up startup ideas, I am also looking for mini-projects idea along the way. The thing I most wanted to implement at this moment is automatic tagging/categorization using Python. (Anyone has any good sources?) It would also be cool to build a dumbed-down version of Dropbox too!

Let's see how far I can go in the following months then!

Share your failure - 35th startup idea

One should not only learn from success but more importantly failure (this was well described in this HBR post Visualize failure). However, we might somehow forget the mistakes that we made along the course of life. So I think it would be cool to make an app that allows you to document all your failures. At the same time, you get to learn from others' failure as well from the app.

On the flip side, I guess it's sensible to think of an important feature of the app being suggestions on ways to prevent the same failure from happening again. What do you say?

Early failures

Yesterday I was reading this post titled Column: Entrepreneurs and the Cult of Failure which describes how should one deal with failure. I felt like it was talking to me, especially this excerpt " ... Failures come early; successes take time. Early failures are important because they generate systemic learning about where opportunities are (and are not) and how to address them ... ". 

I am clearly no stranger to failures (yes multiple failures!) up till this point in time. Let me pick the most recent failure as an example. Having been working in US for 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow in 2 different laboratories, I consider those experiences valuable in terms of the people that I met. However I consider the impact of these 2 years from a career development point of view minimal. That's why I think of this as a failure. As a guy in his mid to late 20s, I should not have chosen those laboratories that are not well established. I should have picked a laboratory that is located in CA or NY where you can easily find high quality research labs as well as culturally rich cities (considering how desperate I want to indulge myself in the startup community as an aside!). 

It is because of these failures that generate systemic learning about where opportunities are and how to address them (phrase borrowed from the article!). So in hindsight this might be a failure, but it did teach me a good lesson. There is one caveat though. Time is something that I can't flirt with (and many of you as well). Such unstable career prospect certainly isn't one that a married man would look forward to, not least his wife. So I am almost at the verge of giving up my "America dream" and finding opportunities back in my home country. Not unless there is any jump in my career here in US, I will return by the end of the year. 

In any cases, don't be baffled by your early failures as long as you see more lights in your future endeavor as a result of them.