Purposive without Foresight

In January I completed a Coursera course “Computing for Data Analysis” taught by Prof. Roger Peng from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This four-week online course taught programming in R and data analysis in R. R is the most popular scripting language for data analysis out there. “Big data” is nowadays such a [...]

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Today I received my first Coursera Certificate “Introduction to Finance” taught by Prof. Gautam Kaul of University of Michigan. The design of this certificate does not really match the exceptional quality of this course. There is even a typo (!!!) in the text. I would like to have a list of the key content of [...]

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While many Germany people are still protesting against the 500-euro-per-semester tuition fee, many German people still refuse ebooks, universities in USA are already experimenting with e-Lectures accessible via Internet. Lectures in experimenting phases are offered for free, later they will start to charge. I think tuition is a fair thing. Good things deserve a high [...]

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So far my autumn 2012 has been really busy and productive. So incredibly many things compete for my time and energy: New IT projects from employer; Local finance community meetings; Technical further education; Final exam in an online course and then I started another, because sources said that similar online courses will no longer be [...]

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想起一个本地 community 里的相识。七十年代末出生的德国人，在一家巨型德资公司的 treasury 里供职，照看上亿的养老金资产。这位小哥只用了总共一年半时间就考过了 CFA L1 L2 L3。一起吃饭的同学们都把他惊为天人。大家问他是怎样用功的。他说，他也没怎么用功。人家看足球赛的时候他也一起看。还有一个女朋友，该约会就约会咯。考试前一天提早到达慕尼黑，晚饭还有出去喝啤酒。总之生活没有太大不同啦。他大学念的是微观经济，虽然说考 CFA 的基础知识不错，可是这个考试里还是有许多细节，够折磨人的，哪怕他是微观经济背景。他说他没有看原版教材，买了一套业界有名的速成笔记，篇幅比教材要小得多。

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I wanted to refresh some content I’ve learnt when preparing for my CFA L1 exam and found an online course “Introduction to Finance” that is hosted by Prof. Gautam Kaul from University of Michigan. As I watched the introductory video, I fell in love with Kaul’s teaching style and immediately enrolled in his course. Every [...]

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（照片来源：中国人民大学新闻系网站） 念初中时的班主任陈瑛老师教历史。我们班是她师范毕业以后，踏入社会带的第一届学生，她待我们很认真。当时她上历史课时讲话还很快，课上到后来常常时间有多。她就常有推荐各种延伸阅读书籍给我们。陈老师推荐的部分书籍，对我的影响十分大。有一段时间我迷上黄仁宇。有一日陈老师问我，知不知道高中部的一位师姐叫陈继静，她非常喜欢历史，自己的文笔又好。陈师姐我当然知道，念小学的时候就知道。那时妈妈送我去少年宫学唱歌，陈师姐也在陈志安老师带的班里。她是陈志安老师很喜欢的学生。常有表演二重唱和独唱。她的高音透亮又含蓄，我觉得很好听很喜欢，记得她的名字。中学时学校内部有发行一本文学刊物，都是语文老师推荐的优秀学生作文。陈师姐的作文我好几次在刊物上拜读。她那时的文字，除了流畅通顺等等基本的品质之外，条理逻辑都好，而且比较克制内敛，一如她的歌声和表演。我们的中学也有个合唱队，陈师姐和我又在一起排练表演过。记得有一次她受命独唱新疆民歌 “送我一枝玫瑰花”，最爱看她排练。我那时唱歌，好大喜功。其实很羡慕她的头腔共鸣到位，台风优雅。学校里开运动会，也记得她有跑 400 米 800 米这类在那时很有挑战性的项目。

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On June 6th I took the CFA Level 1 exam in the test centre in Shanghai. First of all, the level 1 exam itself, to be honest, was not extremely difficult. I finished reading volume 1 and 2, and about half of volume 3 of all the CFA L1 curriculum, and worked all the exercises [...]

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Actually I wanted to write this entry a while ago, because of my laziness and online-shopping impulses it’s postponed till now. June 15th to June 19th was German students’ “protest week” this year. Many students from all over the Germany, from primary pupils to university students, went to streets and protested against bad hardware conditions [...]

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Months ago my mother-in-law sent us a newspaper from Tübingen. It says in Tübingen, several middle schools start to offer Chinese as foreign language course, and students can take the Chinese exam for Abitur (you can understand it as Germany’s SAT of high school children). I thought the children would need some special staff paper [...]

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My graduate thesis EatSmart: A Personal Nutrition Management System Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Methodology can be downloaded here. Keyword: combinatorial optimization, dynamic string-matching, fuzzy string-matching, knowledge based systems, Rete-based rule engine, Java Enterprise Edition. Copyright Ning Zhao. Any constructive critics and/or comments are most welcome. Please write to ellen_zhao@web.de. Thanks! Days ago I passed the theoretical [...]

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Ningning’s word: I love to keep an eye on what’s happening in the world and love to listen to what people think. For interesting discovery, new technologies and other new stuff I’ve been dropping them in the “Sniff and Sneeze” titles and now I’d like to start the “Opinion Orbit” titles for people’s opinions which [...]

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Sniff: Beyond Java ? Recently I read a book called Beyond Java (the part before the detail of Ruby starts) by Bruce A. Tate. And days later I found this _very interesting_ discussion from theserverside.com. The discussion is much more interesting, insightful and informative than the book itself, just my opinion. It’s a loooong discussion [...]

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