Sunday, February 28, 2010

CANADA TAKES GOLD IN MEN'S ICE HOCKEY!

Sunday, February 28, 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr9j-MRTxz8

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We Work Hard, Party Hard. Friends, Booze, and Good Times

So, it's no mystery that med students are generally ranked as some of the most caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived, and crazy stressed students on campus. But what may not be known is the social life of med students!

With the amount of parties and conferences that we have (practically one a week minimum) it's not hard to meet a group of really good friends. I think I've grown closer to my group of friends in the last several months than to most of my friends I met in my entire undergrad degree.

Aside from that med parties are perhaps some of the best ones on campus, rivaling that of fraternity/residence parties. You usually have a party every week and there's probably at least 50 people at attendance at any one of these parties. Perhaps it's because we all get so close through the year, but med students get crazy wild and there's at least one good story to tell from every single one of the parties. By the way, the picture just looks hilarious.

Of course boozing parties aren't the only ones that happen. There's tons of people who also organize other types of gathering such as potlucks, movies, and board game nights for those that are less inclined to go out boozing.

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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Google and it's Approach to Search

Wednesday, February 24, 2010
I'm an avid reader of wired.com; recently, they posted an article on google and went into a never-before reported depth on the inner workings of the algorithm and how Google actually interprets your query and comes up with the most relevant sources. The full article can be found here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm.

What I found interesting was how intelligent the algorithm actually was. Google started off with the first breakthrough with having the search engine look at the popularity of sites by looking at how many links pointed to them. Later it moved on to do such things as even learn context and underlying meanings of words. For example it has been built to learn human-made synonyms. For instance, they talk in Wired about the meaning of dog/puppies. A puppy and a dog are two distinct words, but google uses the fact that when users search up a term such as pictures of dogs, they go back, delete the term dog and replace it with pictures of puppies. Google uses this to learn that to human beings dog and puppy are in some ways similar. This doesn't seem as difficult but Wired goes on to talk about the association between boiling water and hot. Google has learned enough that it can also seperate a hot dog from a boiling dog. In addition, it understands that a hot dog isn't a dog that is very hot, but rather a type of food. Similarly when you search up "strcraft", google has learned that this is a common misspelling for starcraft and tells you to change your search term. Google has been built in such a way that everytime a user enters a search term, it's learning from the user associations between words and the meanings of words. The last example I'll use shows it's learning of word associations. For example, the search engine understand the word horse to be an animal and white to be a color. However, when you pair up the two White Horse (even if you leave a space between them), the search engine recognizes that it no longer has it's old two meanings but is instead the name of a city (and incidentally a song by Taylor Swift lol). Additionally it's also realized the difference between the order of the words. Typing in horse white will give you similar results to before, but one of the top choices now talks about horses whose color is white.

What is interesting is the evolution of computers. The first computers were really basic calculators. Anything even slightly creative or different than what they have seen before would bring up errors. However, in the past few decades, algorithms have gone on to achieve much more complexity, I would daresay, some extent of intelligence. Google essentially has developed a capacity to think and even to LEARN! It seems that movies like Terminator and AI aren't so far-fetched after all...

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Monday, February 15, 2010

It's that time of year again!

Monday, February 15, 2010
So, lots of my friends who were previously un-admitted (as well as the slew of posters on pre-med101!) are all going through the interview phase of med school admissions now.

For all those non-medical people out there, this time of year is perhaps one of the most stressful times of a pre-meds life, but it's also a pretty unique time of the year. I'm going to dedicate this post to describing the process and the "fun" that you actually experience (although of course it's a very stressful process as well).

One of the biggest perks of interviewing was getting to travel around and seeing some of the cities and schools. Many of them were quite a bit different than my school and it was really enjoyable to walk about the campus or the city. I had already decided on my first choice prior to interviews but I took a look around these other campuses to know what my ranking of the other schools were, in the event I was not admitted to number 1 and had a choice between the others.

The other really enjoyable experience was to meet the other applicants. There were always a lot of social events around interviews and I went out to some of these (although I never did any of the drinking, thought it would be a bad idea to show up to an interview hung over). Talking to other pre-meds you'd realize that everyone was actually pretty cool and I made friends that I ended up going to school with this year and also friends who made it elsewhere. It's pretty cool because you often introduce yourself to someone at an interview earlier in the year and you end up bumping into them again in some random other school later in the interview cycle.

Of course the entire experience was also a very stressful experience and the interviews are among some of the most important you will ever have, but also try and enjoy yourselves!

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New Layout!

Had some free time and I decided to tinker around on my blog. How do you guys like the new layout for the blog? A semi-med post follows immediately!

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Monday, February 8, 2010

Celebrity Role Models

Monday, February 8, 2010
Anyways, sorry for the delay in posting, but the last month or so has been absolutely crazy!

My next post is about celebrity role models. Who is yours? One of mine would be Bill Gates. Someone who's truly changed the world we live in, who came up with an invention that perhaps defines our civilization today. On top of that he is an amazing business administrator. He has retired from Microsoft since, but he's taking up more roles in global health and charity work, and I can't wait to see what he brings to this second career of his!

I shall try and post soon on updates from med school!

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