Thought of the day

I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul. / I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul. ~William Ernest Henley, Invictus

Government's promises are like the Ringgit, they depreciate with time.



Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Get the taste of being a scientist

I was working like mad after my previous vacation in Penang. Practically for the last whole week, I have been sitting in front of the PC, tuning 16 parameters just to get the correct reponse which met the precise requirement by my sup. Finally I got the result on Sunday and sent it to him only to find out that the denominator of my transfer function is wrong. WTF! One week's effort all down the drain.

So I am back to square one today. Morale is a bit low, but I am still driving myself to progress forward. Hope that I can go to Salt Lake City by this Oct with the sweat and pain I put in and endured.

Alas, I know what it's like to be a researcher. Steps to be an excellent researcher:
  1. First, read lots and lots of papers from the guru or gosu*. Here, you are required to think critically while absorbing their power.
  2. Next, to piece up the jigsaw puzzle so that you can form a big picture of your research scope. Here, you need to play around and juggle with the knowledge absorbed and think creatively to come up with a million dollar idea.
  3. Implementation. You need to develop the software and hardware environment for your experiment. The steps here are: Run experiment -> debug software -> rerun experiment -> debug hardware -> run experiment -> debug... (Analytical skills required here.)
  4. Once the setup is ready, you can start your experiment:) The steps here are: Run experiment -> tune parameters -> rerun experiment -> tune parameters -> run experiment -> tune...

Well, hopefully all these endeavours will pay off eventually:) Cheers, to a better future.

*gosu = 高手, expert or professional.

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