12 steps guide to a Ph.D.

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:

By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little:

By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more:

With a bachelor's degree, you gain a specialty:

A master's degree deepens that specialty:

Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:

Once you're at the boundary, you focus:

You push at the boundary for a few years:

Until one day, the boundary gives way:

And, that dent you've made is called a Ph.D.:

Of course, the world looks different to you now:

So, don't forget the bigger picture:

Keep pushing.

Related posts

• Recommended reading for grad students.
• How to get into grad school.
• Advice for thesis proposals.
• Productivity tips for academics.
• Academic job hunt advice.
• Successful Ph.D. students: Perseverance, tenacity and cogency.
• The CRAPL: An open source license for academics.

Resources

• A slideshow version in PDF.
• French translation: C'est quoi un doctorat? (by Pierre Poulin)

via matt.might.net

Terrific.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Leaked iPhone 4 troubleshooting guide

1. Keep all of the positioning statements in the BN handy – your tone when delivering this information is important.

a. The iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. Our testing shows that iPhone 4’s overall antenna performance is better than iPhone 3GS.

b. Gripping almost any mobile phone in certain places will reduce its reception. This is true of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, and many other phones we have tested. It is a fact of life in the wireless world.

c. If you are experiencing this on your iPhone 3GS, avoid covering the bottom-right side with your hand.

d. If you are experiencing this on your iPhone 4, avoid covering the black strip in the lower-left corner of the metal band.

e. The use of a case or Bumper that is made out of rubber or plastic may improve wireless performance by keeping your hand from directly covering these areas.

2. Do not perform warranty service. Use the positioning above for any customer questions or concerns.

3. Don’t forget YOU STILL NEED to probe and troubleshoot. If a customer calls about their reception while the phone is sitting on a table (not being held) it is not the metal band.

4. ONLY escalate if the issue exists when the phone is not held AND you cannot resolve it.

5. We ARE NOT appeasing customers with free bumpers – DON’T promise a free bumper to customers.

via boygeniusreport.com

HTML5 must read

...many early adapters (web developers and geeks) started creating some cool stuffs wtih the cleaner HTML5/CSS3 codes. In case you wanted to be one of them but don’t know where to start, here are list of useful HTML5 tutorials to get you started.

via webhostingsecretrevealed.com

Ten first steps to master HTML5.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

Done with verbal!

I'm just done with the last verbal bin from Cracking GMAT. Actually, with two last ones,#2 Medium and #3 Hard.

Well, frankly speaking, I'm still struggling in fixing my verbal part. I was able to score about 65% on the hardest part while scoring about 61% on the medium one. While I feel myself a little bit more confident on the type of the questions, I know the good approaches to solve some of the problems, I still much more intuitive on them, rather then knowledgeable.

I don't really have a theoretical points to support my answer. Well, sometimes I do, about half of the times. In all other cases, it's more like what feels good.

Also, I don't know if it's me or the book (Cracking the GMAT), but hardest ones were rather easy. Easy, I mean, I've got wrong 2 or 3 in total 16 or 17.

And a few final words: I'm pretty unsatisfied with the book. I believe it's pretty worthless. They've got a pretty solid part on permutations and combination theory, but, dude, it's only ten pages or so. Yes, they provided readers with some good use cases, but that's it. Everything else is like the image on the right -- too much about nothing (or the same).

My next one is Kaplan's Comprehensive Guide to GMAT 2009. My best hopes that it'd be a better book.

Other than that, I'm going full throttle into practice questions.

(Re)starting the GMAT preparation

I hope I can finally restart my GMAT preparation after settling up at the new place. I plan to complete at least 50 questions every single day, to be able to get some value from what I'm actually doing and keep preparation time reasonable.

While it doesn't seem hard for the most of math staff, I'm a little bit more concerned about the verbal piece. Anyway, the official GMAT books are about 1,400 questions, so it might take me about a month to get over them. I still have more on the table, but I want to nail them down first.

I tried it today, and completed a little bit more then 50 questions in about 30-40 minutes. Well, that was definitely too fast for the beginner, like me. I made about 20% of errors, mostly because of being pretty careless. Only few of them were really worth looking through the answer and thinking about what did I do wrong.

I already know that my behavior during the real test is really different, but still I want to be able to see the good results on preparation before I'll say I'm ready for the real shot. I should definitely arrange about 2-3 hours every day for keeping things done right.

Hopefully, I can complete the official guides by the end of April. We'll see. ;)

Widgets, badges, ...

HOWTO and DIY on Atomkeep' widgets — an unofficial guide.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Atomkeep's widgets. This is the typical one, mine, taken few days ago (as a picture).


So what's that? First of all, it links to your Atomkeep profile, so everyone can see your most recent information, of course, if you allow them to. To allow people to see your Atomkeep profile you need to click on the checkbox I want to share my profile and make it visible to other users in Profile Settings tab.

Okay, so going back to the widget. The icons on the right of your name are direct links to your accounts on different networks and sites. You — are the only legitimate owner of your information, so why should we point them anywhere else? Besides, what if there is somebody trying to reach you, but doesn't know how? That's the way out — find the network's link and go through it.

The most interesting thing is on the right side, the vertical status name. We've got several of them. It indicates the number of networks and sites that you're linked within Atomkeep. The more connections — the better. It's also one of the privileges indicator in our system. The most connected people are the ones who are willing to experiment (most of the time). So why not let them do that? ;)

Try us, see who are you? at Atomkeep and let us know what you think.