School Headlines
The titles are links to the post's excerpt within this category archive page. The dates are links to the post's excerpt within its monthly archive page.
"Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends..."
Hello. My name is Felix. Felix Ling. And I have a blog.
And now that grad school is done, I've come back. A lot has happened. More later…
A Daily Conflict of Interest
Update 6/14/06: Added point about hiring of editors, and clarified a few minor things.
I guess I didn't mention it here earlier, but I'm a staff photographer for The Spartan Daily at SJSU this semester. I wanted to see explore my recent obsession with photography, but I think this semester has all but confirmed that my true calling likely lies in economics (see my LiveJournal for more on that). I've always doubted photojournalism was the way I was meant to change the world. After all, only a small slice of it is visible to cameras (try illustrating comparative advantage or opportunity cost with a photograph). Because of that, photos in newspapers are often used merely to fill space or as eye candy to draw readers (it's telling that the best paper in the country by far, The Wall Street Journal, hardly runs any photos and indeed used to run none altogether). It's a useful function, but it's not the primary one of journalism, which is to inform and educate.
I still think my true calling will involve writing. Of course, I don't intend to write for the Daily, because to tell the truth, it's just not a quality publication. To be sure, it's a bit unfair to compare it to the WSJ (required reading for my Public Policy course) or even The Daily Californian (which I probably didn't judge as critically when I was there), but almost every time I attempt to read The Spartan Daily, I find it a poor use of my time. Erika agrees, saying that most of the stories read little more like press releases. Heck, at the Don Edwards Lecture featuring Terence Smith on Wednesday night, political science professor Terry Christensen couldn't resist making a crack at how far the Daily has fallen.
Given that I haven't worked on the writing side, my various theories as to what's going wrong and how to address them are probably not worth much to anybody (which is why I blog). But there's one thing that really sticks out as an obvious flaw. I may regret saying this, but I've generally been underwhelmed by most of the opinion columns (which tend to make up an unusually central role in this paper, for some reason). And I think there's one really obvious reason behind this. You see, the paper is currently in the process of selecting the editors for next semester. Once that's done, the editors then get to select the opinion columnists — inevitably themselves.
Continue reading "A Daily Conflict of Interest"Flinging Four Things at the Meme
Update 3/3/05: Whoops, I'd copied it from Rich's version, which was missing some of the categories. Added those in, but I'm sure I screwed up the order of everything.
Okay, when I get tagged twice, I guess that's a sign I really oughtta participate. So, without further ado:
The Four Things Meme
Four shows I enjoy:
- Mythbusters (oh, I suppose you knew that already).
- Lost
- The L Word
- Battlestar Galactica
- How I Met Your Mother
- Grey's Anatomy
- Weeds
- Robot Chicken
Oh, sorry. Television rotted my brain to the point where I forgot how to count! Or maybe it wasn't the television?
Four movies I can watch over and over:
- Finding Nemo (okay, truthfully I actually liked Monsters, Inc. better, but I can't hurt the feelings of the fishies)
- Garden State (this should not be a surprise to anybody)
- Aliens
- Beauty and the Beast
Four jobs I've held:
- Paper-hatted grill dude at McDonald's
- Word-processing/data entry temp
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer (which, come to think of it, is an awful lot like Software Engineer, but I haven't had any other jobs that I can recall).
Four cool toys:
- My Canon Digital Rebel (yeah, to me, it's still a toy).
- Astrojax.
- Magz magnetic construction toys.
- The hopes and dreams of other people, bwa ha ha ha!
Four of My Favorite Dishes:
- Tortellini pomodoro alfredo from Frankie, Johnnie, and Luigi Too!
- Halibut sushi (hirame). But don't tell the fishies!
- Couscous with Artichokes, Feta and Sun-Dried Tomatoes (well, Erika makes it without the artichokes).
- Caprese.
Four Web sites I visit daily (uh… not counting Gmail and my Sitemeter stats):
- Last.fm (powered by Audioscrobbler).
- LiveJournal.
- del.icio.us.
- And Flickr of course!
Four places I've lived:
- New Hartford, NY (next to Utica, which is not too far from Syracuse)
- Diamond Bar, CA (about 15 minutes north of Disneyland)
- Berkeley, CA
- Sunnyvale, CA (no, not Sunnydale)
Four places I've vacationed:
- Amsterdam (honeymoon counts as a vacation, no?).
- San Diego.
- Seattle.
- uh… does staying in a hotel in San Francisco count? Or Mountain View? We don't really vacation much.
Four places I'd rather be:
- Washington D.C., making a real difference in this world.
- New York City, living the urban life.
- The engine room of Serenity.
- Behind the wheel of a McLaren F1 car, kicking the arses of both Schumi and Fred.
Four bloggers I'm tagging.
Well, I don't know if they do memes or if they read me, but I'm tagging the four SJSU student bloggers that I know of. San Jose State reprahzent!! Yeah, yeah. This from a guy who was wearing a Cal hat today (well, I haven't bought any SJSU gear yet).
Oops, that wasn't four. Yeah, me are an kollij gwajuwett. I suppose that's why I'm going back again to get it right this time.
Pitiful Sweeps Week Wrapup
Okay, okay. I didn't come close to delivering on my promised Blog Sweeps Week posts of kitty cat and Natalie Portman photos. Don't worry. I'll get to them later. Seems like my stats (such as they are) did okay anyway (you can check them out yourself if you're so inclined). Not too many hits on the photos themselves, so I'm chalking it up to the fact that I've been posting more frequently (especially compared to November or December), and everybody knows that search engines love frequent updates.
The economist-wanna-be in me of course would consider this a perverse incentive to write a lot — even if you have nothing to say and even about subjects you don't know anything about. While the political-scientist-wanna-be in me would notice that, like many politicians, I was rewarded for making bold promises that I did not intend to keep. And the journalist-wanna-be-in-me would notice that the blogging medium rewards post-frequency over credibility — much like how journalists are incentivized more by deadlines than really understanding the fields they're writing about. This reinforces the obvious fact that the blogosphere has a long, long way to go from becoming the ideal meritocracy that will unseat traditional media (which is something I admitted even when I pronounced journalism a dying field).
Anyway, I would like to point out that I did actually intend to post every day. I just knew that it wasn't bloody likely with my schedule. Indeed, I was a total idiot and added a class (Beginning Photojournalism) to push my course-load at SJSU to 18 units before realizing it was past the drop deadline. Um, yeah. I guess as an engineer at a startup, I got used to ignoring deadlines as being ridiculously unrealistic. So I get a rude real-world lesson after leaving the real world to go back to school. Go figure.
Also, I ended up spending the bulk of my allotted blogging time working on the write-up for my 2005 Mix CD, which is almost done. Stay tuned for that. No, really. I am almost done. Aw heck, who needs credibility anyway?
Nat and Cat
Yeah, I think I bit off more than I can chew this week. 15 units of classes at San Jose State plus I'm attending another class I'm considering adding (no, I'm not planning on taking 18 units, but I haven't figured out which class to drop yet so I'm still attending all of them), plus working part-time at my last job (well hey, it's a helluva much higher paid position than that of most of my classmates), and then spending a ridiculous amount of time on the silly 2005 Mix CD. And apparently, now I'm also on the photography staff of the Spartan Daily (although they've yet to run anything of mine yet).
So that's why no update so far.
Well, I promised the Top 6 of my favorite kitty photos, so you'll still get a Top 6. I just probably won't finish all 6 within Sweeps Week (“Oh, boo hoo!” you say). And as I have way too many favorite Natalie Portman photos, I'm not going to actually go through the trouble of ranking them. Instead, I'll just upload 6 of them in no particular order. I hope none of you mind (not like you got much choice in the matter).
So, in case you hadn't already noticed, here's a random photo of the hotness that is Natalie Portman. It's not a great quality scan, but I love the picture anyway. And of course, now that I'm obsessed with photography, I now can tell that this is a nice use of depth of field, having her dreamy eyes in sharp focus and the rest of her gradually getting out of focus.
Anyway, here's my number 5 favorite kitty cat photo (yeah, if you've already gone through my Flickr account, all of these will be familiar). Ready? One… two… three… Awwww!
That's all for now! Come back later! How much later? How should I know? That's why they invented RSS feeds.
A journalism fling?
Update 12/1/05 Forgot to credit Gene Healy for a link. Whoops!
Last week, I saw Good Night, and Good Luck at one of the South Bay Movie Fiends gatherings that I organize. This film, along with the previous movie we saw, Capote, got me thinking about my future.
This requires some explanation.
Some of you know that I've long been contemplating a change in career. I've already talked through this at length on my LiveJournal (note that this entry is only visible to friends), so let me just rehash it briefly.
Continue reading "A journalism fling?"Maximizing utility is just a model
For my Microeconomics night class, our professor surprisingly assigned us a murder mystery short novel, The Fatal Equilibrium. This was, however, no ordinary mystery, but one that was a mix of murder… and economics (what, you thought I was going to say underwater basketweaving?). The author, Marshall Jevons, is actually the pseudonym for two economics professors, William Breit and Kenneth G. Elzinger.
It's not classic literature by any means. You'd occasionally find economics lectures somewhat crudely squeezed into the dialogue. They made it appear somewhat more plausible than your average Mathnet episode, as the characters were mostly college professors, the kind of people who probably squeeze lectures into normal dialogue all the time in real life. But it was plainly obvious what parts of the story were intended as entertainment and what parts were education. Still, it was a neat way to review topics such as price elasticity and consumer surplus and to see how it related to real-world examples. And one passage in particular struck me.
Continue reading "Maximizing utility is just a model"The Factors Behind a Country's Choice of a Multi-Party or Two-Party System
This is a term paper I wrote for my Political Science night class in Comparative Governments (which was a big reason I haven't been blogging). My wife thought this was extreme overkill for an undergraduate course at a community college (and yes, I got an A), but I was really interested in the topic, and this was the first academic paper I've written in a long, long time. Although note, I've since made some minor changes from the original paper to make it a bit more accessible and thus less academic.
There are a multitude of factors that affect whether a country becomes a multi-party democracy or a two-party democracy. They include the level of institutionalization of a country's existing political parties, whether the government is a presidential system or a parliamentary system, the level of diversity in the country's electorate, and the type of electoral system chosen. Comparing the importance of these factors is beyond the scope of this paper, although it appears that the last one is the most significant factor. It is, however, worth noting that the choice of electoral system itself is affected by several factors, including some of the ones already listed above.
Continue reading "The Factors Behind a Country's Choice of a Multi-Party or Two-Party System"Light Posting Ahead
Well, when I said, “But I’ll try to keep it light for at least a little while to give everyone (esp. myself) a breather,” I did mean light in tone, not quantity. Oops. Unfortunately, post frequency is probably going to stay light for a while due to my night class.
My “Principles of Macroeconomics” course at Mission College is over, and I got an A (yay me!). Actually not that big a deal, given that it's a community college, and I came into it already knowing a thing or two about the subject (although I still learned a lot). Plus, the workload wasn't as bad as I expected, given that there wasn't too much reading (I could get through a chapter in one or two nights, and we generally took 2-3 weeks per chapter), and the homework problems were easy if you understood the material.
Well, this semester, I'm taking a Political Science course, “Comparative Governments.” Political Science is another subject in which I've never ever taken a class (my wife keeps remarking on her shock at how Berkeley's College of Engineering doesn't require you to have the same core that most other colleges do). Unlike economics, however, I don't have much background knowledge. Unless you count being a news and political junkie and bit of a voting theory geek (although this class won't cover that). And if the first two chapters are any indication, this class'll be harder going for me.
Of course, I could be wrong again, as I warned about lighter posting for my economics class, and it didn't really happen. But I'd thought I'd give y'all a heads-up.
Continue reading "Light Posting Ahead"