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Journal, Misc

Chinese translation of western countries makes the Chinese love them more

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Back in the 1980s, there was a huge rise in the number of educated Chinese wants to immigrate to western countries. I think it’s partially due to how Chinese translations of some of the western countries. Even though the names have little to do with the countries or culture, it created a fantasized version of the country in the hearts of many Chinese people.

For example, the United States is translated as the “beautiful country”. France is translated as the “lawful country”. Germany is translated as the “honor country”. England is translated as the “handsome country”. Italy is translated as the “meaningful country”. Canada is translated as the “plus country”. Sweden is translated as the “intelligent country”. Ireland is translated as the “love country”. Czech is translated as the “fast country”. Of course, I romanticized a little bit here and added some of my personal touches, but the idea is not far from what people thought.

There are some that’s more on the quirky side. Like Span is translated as the “west country”, and Portugal is translated as the “grape country”.

These translations are due to the fact that Chinese characters have different tones for each pronunciation. Although differentiable by a native Chinese speaker, each tone does sound rather similar. And for each tone, there are many characters that sound exactly the same. For example, in English, the word “beat” can mean both sound rhythm or hit something. But you can expect upwards of tens of words that sound exactly the same in Chinese. So if you see a Chinese person with the same first or last name, you can probably expect tens of variations in Chinese, even though the Romanized spelling is the same.

Because of translation is mostly done by sound and each sound in Chinese could mean many different things, people often choose the word with the best meaning for translation. So the resulting country names are often carry well intentioned meaning. Because these western countries are the first contacted Chinese culture, their country name translations often took the best translations. Compare to African countries or Latin America countries, there are rarely any well meaning translations. They often just trying to stay on the non-offensive side.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Supreme Court decision on church gathering

Reading Time: 2 minutes

U.S. Supreme Court made the decision today on allowing non-essential church gatherings during this Covid19 pandemic, ruling against New York State Governor Cuomo. This is the first case after Justice Amy Coney Barrett becomes the deciding factor in a 5:4 vote. It also correctly reflect what I believe is the overall sentiment of US citizens. In the US people value freedom more than lives. In other words, people rather have the freedom to decide what they want to do, despite the high chance of death or permanent health damage.

I do think that the freedom to let people gather infringed the right of other people who want to live. If this is not an infectious disease that can easily spread to other people and cause death, then people can exercise their freedom as much as they want. They can commit suicide as many times as they wish. But because it is an infectious disease, the action of exercising their freedom potentially takes away other people’s freedom to live. Just because other people did not actively choose to gather, it does not take away their rights to live amongst society. At a minimum, the people who choose not to gather have to stay at home for longer periods of time and are prevented from going out and interact socially. And it does hurt society as a whole from the mid to long term, even for the people that want to gather, at least before an effective vaccine is available. I’m going to ignore the people who don’t believe in vaccines. Thankfully, they are still a minority of the US population.

I still remember the first time I saw New Hampshire’s state motto, “live free or die”. This reminds me of some of the things I was taught when I was little. Rather than falling on the conservative side in the US, it was taught by people more on the liberal side in China. So I think things on the extreme ends are rather similar, no matter where they are.

I personally value lives more than beliefs, but I understand why people values believe more than lives. Believes keep the human race advancing to the next stage because people believe there is always a better tomorrow. This belief comes at a cost though, so keeping the balance between beliefs and lives is the key. I’m more of a person that learns the rule than bend the rule. It is an easier option. But I do envy the people that at least attempt to bend the rule. That is why I think diversity is important. Not just race, gender, age, etc, but also in mindset and beliefs.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Thoughts on US election (system vs personality)

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I had some thoughts on the US election as I woke up this morning. From the conversation I had with some coworkers and what the people on Live streams are saying, I think that people in the US believe in the system of the US government enough, that despite the fact they don’t like the president as a person, they still think the policies will be carried out according to their plan.

After many years of living in the US, I think people believe strongly in the system rather than the person who is making the decisions. Because the system is putting up enough barriers to direct whoever is in charge to make the correct decisions, the personality of the person in charge does not matter.

This is a strong contrast to the Chinese government for example, in which people believe that a good leader can direct the country to a much better place. And there are many old stories and historical comments that show strong favor of a leader that is compassionate and listen to the people.

But my question is that do we want to leave up to chance that we have a good person in the leading position. Would it better to have a system that makes sure the leader does not waver from the people’s interests, no matter how deranged they might be?

Being trained from a scientific background, I believe in the system of discovery. That we should experiment using systematic approaches, rather than design experiments depending on how we feel it should be. And we should collectively build a system that essentially guarantees things do not fail. And we should consider the said system to be our grand achievement for the government and society, not celebrating the individual who makes great decisions for us.

As I can think of it, nobody is perfect. And we certainly should not rely on the hope that any leader will be perfect.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Random thoughts

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As it happens, sometimes I get into these rabbit holes to watch a specific type of Youtube videos. As of last weekend, I got into this type of video about a specific person with provocative views. The views they made are rather appalling, but if I listen to his explanations more and more, I don’t see a flaw in their reasoning. The reason that I feel these views are appalling is that they are different than the values I believe, at least on the surface. Yet it is also amazing that I arrive at the same conclusion if I listen to their reasoning.

It is not uncommon to feel this because I was listening to a math lecture and some guy proved that the sum of all positive integer is -1/12. The result is absurd and obviously wrong, but I cannot find where the equations went wrong. (I didn’t found out why later). So I listened to other people who have opposing views than them, and they were able to disarm all of the opposing views with ease. I understand that it is also possible that all the videos I saw purposely constructed in a way to prove they are right, further leading me to their side. After all, Youtube is famous for providing the videos that their customers like. There is a possibility though, that these views are correct. It doesn’t serve me right if I just completely ignore them because they are different than my views.

I recognize that these views are mostly on how to navigate the existing world. It’s more about the old rules that govern the world. So it’s self-serving that save these rules is correct because we have been operating under these rules for centuries. Sometimes, to have a better life, we need to break the currently working rules and create new rules. And because change is always hard, they are going to feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean the old rules don’t work, it only means there may be a better world we can strive for.

I don’t think that just because the current political world is more polarizing than ever, we should forget about extreme views and try to bring more things to the center. I think we should keep having discussion about the extreme views, evaluate why they are not a good idea, and potentially develop on some ideas that seem extreme, but actually build a better world. Although sadly to say, I’m still going to stay in the center for my personal actions. Maybe because that’s deeply ingrained on my personality already.

by yangliu3456
AI, Journal, Misc

OpenVPN

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I made an attempt to install OpenVPN using linuxserver.io‘s docker image. I tried Docker compose version but hit this error:

You can configure manually using the /usr/local/openvpn_as/bin/ovpn-init tool.
/var/lib/dpkg/info/openvpn-as.postinst: line 72: systemctl: command not found

After a little digging in the log file, it said:

Error: Could not execute 'systemctl enable openvpnas' to enable startup/shutdown scripts

I tried to search some error and github page said they are working on it. I then went to this page and there seems to be a solution by changing the config.json file.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/79012-support-linuxserverio-openvpn-as/page/71/

But I tried that by execute into the docker container, execute this:

/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key "vpn.server.daemon.enable" --value "false" ConfigPut
/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key "vpn.daemon.0.listen.protocol" --value "tcp" ConfigPut
/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key "vpn.server.port_share.enable" --value "true" ConfigPut
/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli start

This however didn’t work either. There seems to be other tutorials using straight docker and get to the admin page. So I can only say it’s the mentioned multiprocessing problem, and I will have to wait to a working update.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Family symbol

Reading Time: < 1 minute

So I was searching for some designed for family banner, sigil, coat-of-arms, or whatever you call it. My family name is “Liu”. Then I found this one.

link to the picture

I read the description and thought it was interesting. It looks and feels like old Chinese characters, but there is still a good chance that it’s just an attempt to duplicate what was before.

by yangliu3456
Misc

Covid-19

Reading Time: 5 minutes

There is no escape as this virus has dominated everybody’s life this year. I will write my personal journey here. And if in the future I get to look at it again, it may be a reminder for if I fall into similar situations again.

I first heard of the virus on Wechat, a Chinese social app, when a group of people at Wuhan thought SARS came back. There was some news about possible new cases of SARS, but it soon got quiet and nobody was mentioning it. I never gave much thought about it since similar rumors are quite often on social platforms. This was around mid-December of 2019. About two weeks before the Chinese New Year 2020, a bunch of people in China got tested positive for some new disease that’s similar to SARS. And there were some cases of death. It seems that things were starting to get serious. Then just before the Chinese New Year celebration, the government started to be open about the disease, and the New Year celebration TV show was filled with the topic. It was around how medical personnel was pulled from other areas of China to support Wuhan. My parents in law told me about how their activities were being limited. My brother-in-law and his wife found some surgical mask for my parents-in-law and send it to them back in China. It’s all-around Chinese social media now. This was just the end of January 2020.

At the same time, Americans were not very worried. My coworkers were not talking about it as much. I tried to warn them, but I don’t think anybody was actually concerned. I had to take a company-wide meeting in the last week of January. I took some surgical masks with me on the flight but was too “scared” to use it because nobody else was using it. In the U.S. this is a sign that someone is really sick. I didn’t want to raise that flag, especially since I’m Asian looking. On the flight back, my transport from the airport to near my house was a bus ride. On the bus ride, there were two groups of Chinese travelers wearing masks. They mostly have surgical masks, and one guy even has an N-95 mask. Even the two children had masks on. I remember I was thinking that my son will never put a mask on. At that time, most people didn’t know that children under 12 are not heavily affected by the virus. I had some debate about whether I should have pulled the masks from my luggage, but it was under the bus already, and I didn’t want to ask the driver to get it for me. I intentionally shipped two rows of seats as I passed them. They weren’t coughing, so I wasn’t too worried. That may have not been a good thing, because we now know it can spread without symptoms, even if they had masks on.

After coming back from the business trip, there was no change in terms of public sentiment. There were no known cases in America except the Princess Diamond Cruise travelers. President Trump did close the border to China pretty early. But there was no mentioning of any country in Europe, and no known cases in Italy yet. I pretty much carried out the same at work. No masks or gloves. But every morning, I would ask Google Home to tell me about cases near my home. And see if there are cases. I checked the CDC website pretty regularly. The Sina Chinese site was keep tracking of cases by day. And there are more cases every day. No media other than CDC is covering this in America.

Right around the time my son had a break in February, there started to have cases around us because they went to Italy for vacation. There are more confirmed cases due to travel around my hometown. I was getting increasingly worried. We discussed as a family and thought about whether we should take my son out of school, even though he will be marked absent. We did not end up doing it. I just watched super closely. However, when California, Washington, and Massachusetts starting to have double triple-digit cases, I worked up the courage to ask my boss to let me work from home. My boss was of course super understanding about it. The funny thing was our CEO decided my whole company is going to work from home the next day. So all that was just for one day of working from home.

Once I started working from home, we were more worried about getting food and try to limit our trips to crowds. We started getting deliveries more and stocking up on rice, flours, and other non-perishable foods. Trips to grocery stores are getting more intense. We used masks and gloves even though no more than 10% of the public is doing that. My coworkers didn’t seem to be too worried about it. We were, of course, trying to get masks. But they would either be extremely expensive, like $20 each. Or simply not in stock for physical drug stores. All the big vendors were out. Since my wife is close to the healthcare system, she was still working. They are starting to lock PPE supplies at work. She had two 3 more weeks than me because she simply cannot work from home. When she no longer required to work, she was put on furlough. Unlike my company, her employer didn’t ever plan a similar situation, or have the funds to support her. She was told to apply for unemployment benefits.

Life post the big event is settling in place. We don’t go out. Try to get food delivered to us when we can. And only go out for groceries when it’s necessary. I can still work from home, so it’s somewhat regular. I have done online meetings before so I don’t think work is hugely affected. My son has to study and do homework for about 6 hours a day. All that time is managed by my wife, so she is getting stressed more than normal. We go out to run early in the morning to get some exercise. We live in a somewhat rural town, so it’s no difficult to avoid neighbors. We just say hi from far away. I don’t know when I will be going back to work physically as my son’s school is “home only” for the rest of the year. I don’t think we can manage my son’s school work with both my wife and I working the whole day without teachers. There are some talks already for people going back to work because some states have protested about it. And I think people area unrest because not everybody can make ends meet. A lot of people need to work to survive. And some people are willing to take the chance to fight for what they built with their whole life. They don’t want to see that go away because of the virus. For myself though, I think I will stay put for a while until there is a definite plan to return.

by yangliu3456
Misc

Incorrect password for Ubuntu login screen

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI have been having this problem multiple times, and there are so many non-working solutions online. So I thought I should recorded for future usage.

Edit the following file with this content:

sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

vim can be replace with whatever command-line editor you have available, nano, emac, etc…

[SeatDefaults]

greeter-session=unity-greeter

greeter-show-manual-login=true

by yangliu3456
AI, Misc

How I went from a Neuroscientist to an AI practitioner – Part II

Reading Time: 4 minutesAfter studying further about what neural networks can do, I realized this is what people are going to do in the future. For everything. And I know I got to get a piece of it. So I started to learn the basics. At the time there was not much training or tutorials. AlexNet was widely used and I ran across a tutorial on using Matlab to make VGG16 convolutional NN. I had pretty good video card, but it wasn’t able to run the Matlab package. I had my eyes on the upcoming Nvidia 1070 cards. I had to wait for it to release and I new it was going to be hard to get.

In the mean time, I figured out it doesn’t have to run GPU. And I can start learning the basics before I can get my hands on the new cards. I searched around. Most of the tutorial have fragmented information, and I feel I have no grasp on the material and did not really understand anything. Then I found Stanford’s CS213n class notes, and felt I hit the gold mine. It was technical and theoretically involved, but it explained how CNN model pixels and many of the CNN tools like weight initialization and dropout.

Once I got a sense of how CNN works, I joined Kaggle’s competitions to actually ran my own models. I tried the simple ones like Titanic morality prediction that require heavy feature engineering, but quickly realized that’s not the way to do things, because it required too much manual work and introduced bias. Then I saw the competition where State Farm want to categorize pictures taken inside of cards for what drivers were doing. That required me to use opencv for image pre-processing and categorized pictures using training and test sets. I didn’t end up having a super high ranking, but I learned various ways of doing it from people’s published kernels.

Fast forward several month, and I got my hand on a Nvidia 1070. Popped that puppy in the tower and sped up the models by a huge chunk. Of course, by this point, I knew Python is the way to go and used Theano and Tensorflow for making the models. I played with some public data and started a project to estimate house price in NYC, because everybody was doing it. I tried out for an interview with Insight Data Science. I prepared my projects and seemed to know what I talked about. I was told that I was on the board line and barely missed the cut, but maybe she was just being nice.

No problem, I will try again. On the third real try for Data Incubator, I finally answered enough questions in Python and got an interview. After a group interview with 6 other applicant, I got an offer for the paid, second tier fellowship program. Supposedly, I wasn’t as good as what they are looking, but if I pay for the fellowship, I can tag along. It was a large amount of money, even for NYC standards, but I had other considerations.

My Professor was about ran out of funding, at least for me. So I was about to be out of a job, unless I want to find another postdoc position. I started looking for industry jobs, but wasn’t successful. Just one week earlier, I got an offer to join a doctor’s office to do In Vitro Fertilization stuff. I applied because I have many family connections in that field, and I actually know how to do the stuff. It was a safe job with limited upside. My wife encouraged me to turn it down and pursuit my dream in AI. And I thank her so much now. I would be doing the same thing day after day to earn a living if I took that job. But instead, I’m learning new things everyday and loving it.

Coming back to my decisions, it was tough to turn down offers when I about to be unemployed. Again, my wife agreed to “take care of me” for 6 month, since my research said that’s the average time of unemployment for changing careers. It gave me a piece of mind, and let me focus on what to learn. With all my personal affaires lined up, I accepted the layoff and prepared to be workless, payed a hefty amount for the fellowship, and doubled downed on my future.

The fellowship was enjoyable. Hard, but fun. We were squeezed in a box for at least 8 hours a day. Studied as much as we could, did a lot of programming, prepared for interviews, and met some potential employers. It was a good variety of topics, and I was still talking about it 6 months later. As fun as it was, time flies. But the end of the session, 2 people got offers. Some are hopeful, I wasn’t one of them.

When the time of workless came, strangely, I wasn’t afraid. Moved out of NYC, we ranted an apartment in a suburban area. I kept the discipline of applying jobs everyday and interviews kept happening. A few showed interest, but ultimately, none of them went through.

Finally, a family member helped me to find a job, but it a rollercoaster. I got a phone interview a year earlier. A statistician asked about what models I made before and some other technical questions for half an hour. No feedback or anything after that. Seven months later, I got an email about scheduling onsite interview out of the blue. Of course I went. It was a grueling 8 hour day interview. Mostly behavior questions, with a few stat questions throwing in between. Then nothing. Mostly mentioning there is no position opening right now.

A month later, I got an email from a different department asking to schedule a phone interview. This time more questions on neural networks and programming. I knew I wanted whatever job they have. But again, no feedback on job or no job. A month later, same group of people called again and simply asked do I want the job. They knew I wasn’t sold on programming, but they are willing to teach. I had to go for an onsite, but from what I felt, it was just a routine I had to go through. The decision was already made.

Everything was what I though it would be and better. The rest is history. Now I’m working on applying the latest AI algorithms to industry related tasks. Some people asked, do you feel overwhelmed by doing more than 20 projects in one year. I responded to that: I was never too busy to do the things I love.

So, for people who are looking to change their career to AI, or any career you love, don’t give up. The road may be long and scary, but we only live once, and you should go for broke.

by yangliu3456
AI, Misc

How I went from a Neuroscientist to an AI practitioner – Part I

Reading Time: 5 minutesCareer change is often thought of as a tough act to pull off. It is especially difficult to transition from a highly specialize field to another. However, everything happened for a reason, whether you know it or not. I started college as a computer science major for about a year, then I was forced to change to Biology, due the Dot Com bubble around the year of 2001. My parent heard the news that internet companies fell one-by-one. And they thought my computer science is not a traditional, stable career path to follow. (Of course they were proven wrong many years later).

When I go home for the summer, my parents and I had a talk. And they convinced me that I should change my major to Biology and possibly becoming a doctor. At that time, I was weak-minded, and didn’t want to displease my parents. And the fact that my college room and board was paid by my parents didn’t help. I reluctantly changed my major and started taking biology related class. I didn’t waist too much time since I took some AP class in high school and was able to test out of Chem 101 and Physic 101. I have to say that Biology was not something I hate. In fact, it was my best interest before my dad bought a computer when I was 11. So, I chucked along with the courses. Got my fair share of As and Bs, and of course, a bad grad for Organic Chemistry.

Bioinformatics was a hot topic at the time. With my limited programming skills, I was able to get a fellowship in computational biology from Howard Hughes Medical Institute. With a few classes in protein folding and predicting tertiary structure from protein sequence, I learned the basic knowledge to BS my way through college. Then I met my undergraduate advisor, who is interested in programming and nifty projects. We painted the rat’s paws with colored markers and videotaped their footsteps through Plexiglas from underneath. We wrote a C++ plugin in iMovie that tracked the footsteps and how faster they turned following various experiments. It was a blast working with him and it seemed like a fun project for him. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the topic, although it seems like unpublishable junk looking at it now.

Then it’s time to prepare for the dreaded MCAT. I knew I wasn’t going to study enough on my own, so I paid a hefty amount to join a prep class. The teacher is a current Med school student that got a good score. He showed us how to prepare and do practice tests. But he also said Med school is not for everyone because he constantly practices involuntary fasting and became an insomniac. I did as many practice test as I could, but because I was not enthusiast about it, I didn’t get a good score. The eight-hour test was not that bad, as I had those tests then I was in China, as middle schooler. It was good enough for me to get into a D.O. school, but didn’t want to be a primary doctor. The chance of specialize in Radiology or Neurology was below 10%. And it was not good enough for me get a M.D. I later found out that being Asian did not help either. I wasn’t going to be one of those Hispanic female applicants who got in with a 21 on MCAT.

I wasn’t disappointed when I found out I don’t have much of a chance with a dismal 27 on MCAT.  I was lost for a while. I got a simple gross room processing job at a pathology lab, then applied for graduate school. With my research background in college and honor with undergraduate thesis, it wasn’t too hard to get offers from multiple schools. It was years later I found out there is a good reason for those programs to offer stipend, because there is no job prospect even with a Ph.D. So, then I choose the best state school I can get into and started the long, long journey of graduate school.  Without too much detail here, I suffered through 7 years of graduate school, with many sleepless nights, and got my degree. I did learn a lot of things during that period, mostly built my resilient character, but also learned what hell was like. Perhaps it wasn’t like hell physically, but it was definitely mental hell.

With no marketable skill outside of rat brain and spinal cord surgery, my only choice was to become a postdoc and give a shot at becoming a faculty. There were two ways of finding such jobs. One is to send CV (resume) to every professor who is trying to find a postdoc. The other is focus on the lab you like to join, and write custom, specific letter to the few labs you are looking for. I was told the second option is how you find jobs in the industry, and I know people who got jobs that way. So I tried that. I researched the hand-full of labs I want to go to, read their papers, and thought about specific experience I would like to try if I joined their lab. I asked other people to proofread my email. And… Nothing. No answer. No rejection emails.

So I was force to go to the first option. I send out as many applications I could. Finding every ad on Science, Nature, or any other journal or website I can get my hands on. Three people returned my email. One said her research area is too different. One was really nice and asked for a follow-up skype interview. And one asked for a phone interview. The second guy talked about his research and promised he was going to take me. He described the surrounding area and planned out where I can rent to be closest to the lab. Then no contact for a month. During this time, the third guy called. We talked about the projects I will be working on and asked about what I can do. He liked my surgical skills, and offered me a position the next day. He didn’t give me much time to think, so I talked to some friends and took the job. It was a world class institution, and I didn’t have much of a choice. Two days later, the second asked for another skype session, but had to reject. “Dude, where were you for a month?”

Arrived at a major metropolitan for my job, I started to experience some new things. The professor like my surgical skills and promised to help me publish some papers soon. I got to do a little more programming than my graduate work and learned more concepts about signal processing. I had to learn how to apply linear algebra and partial differential equations to solve research problems. This was beneficial for getting an AI career. Big data became the hot topic, and so did Neural Networks. People started talking about data scientist jobs and I started looking in that direction as well. I looked for various boot camps in my area and tried out the “free” ones. They are hard to get into and I either failed initial interview or didn’t pass the screening process. But I kept trying for 3 years.

One day, DeepMind published their paper on Alpha Go. It was amazing! I used to play Go as a child. Although I never even got to 1 Dan at the amateur level, I could beat the best computer simulation easily. I knew this is hard to program. So, when the paper came out, I was blown away, but skeptical. Of course, I didn’t know what a reinforcement network is and only pretend to understand how it work. Then they announced they are going to play with Lee Sedol, a top ranked player in the world. Nobody though they would win. I stayed up 3 am in the morning to watch all 5 games. When the first game finished, my mouth dropped. I know Lee didn’t have a chance. The fact that he won the 4th game was nothing less than miraculous, and shows Alpha go still had weaknesses.

This is the day I realized AI is the future. This is the day I decided I want to do this for the rest of my life …

by yangliu3456
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