Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by cain

North American vs. UK PhD

cain — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 02:06:57 +0800

A little background... I did my undergraduate studies in Canada, where Experimental Psychology/Neuroscience PhD programmes typically take 5 years to complete, although i know of many bright young researchers who take 6 or even 7 years to finish. Now these are BSc -> PhD programmes that do not award a Master degree.

I've been looking at some PhD programmes in the UK recently and much to my surprise, one can complete a PhD in the UK within 3 years! I read up on it online and found that one of the reasons PhD programmes are much shorter in the UK is because there are less coursework and less teaching responsibilities required of the student.

I'm wondering if those holding a UK PhD would be at a disadvantage when compared to North American PhD graduates, as they're both trained in research but the latter would have considerably more teaching experience?

Online shopping survey

cain — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 03:10:23 +0800

Friend of mine needs your help for her Master's thesis! Please click -> [here] for the link to a questionnaire on online shopping habits. Just 10~15 minutes of your time, and it's all for science!

Thanks!

What is College For?

cain — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:51:54 +0800

Seeking some fresh ideas instead of the boring 'ol to-get-a-good-job, preparation-for-life-ahead stuff.

Besides, it's a good question worth looking into. Especially if you're in this section of the forum

What To Ask The Admissions Officer?

cain — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:23:13 +0800

I'm meeting up with an admissions officer the week after the next. Part of the email i got from the admissions officer reads: "Our discussion at a university fair or a meeting would be an opportunity to discuss anything you want to know about the University and studying in the USA. You may have questions about the admissions process, campus housing, scholarship assistance, or the student visa process."

Now i understand that i shouldn't be asking anything that i can already find out from the university's website. So, what should i ask then? Would appreciate any suggestions you guys have.

A-Levels or Christian Universities?

cain — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:49:45 +0800

Monitor go to sleep

cain — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:44:32 +0800

My sis has a problem with her pc. Everytime she switches the PC on, the monitor will go to sleep after a few seconds. The LED light changes to the sleeping color and the screen went blank. The fan is still running.

She hadn't changed any settings before this happened. Nothing in the CPU has been touched or tampered with. In fact, she didn't wanna open the CPU to check inside because she doesn't wanna void the warranty. She already tried re-plugging the plugs and stuff to make sure it wasn't because of a poor connection.

Any idea what's wrong with it? Is it the CPU or the monitor's problem?

Veoh

cain — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:15:55 +0800

I've been using Veoh for about a month now, since BTing doesn't work. I've searched the forum but didn't find any posts about this. So here goes.

QUOTE

What is Veoh?
Veoh is an independent, Internet Television Broadcasting System that uses the Internet and peer-to-peer distribution technology to create essentially unlimited capacity for long form and broadcast quality video content. Unlike traditional television broadcasting systems such as cable or satellite television, Veoh is an OPEN system that allows ANYONE to broadcast video directly to hundreds of millions of consumers who have a PC and broadband connection. This provides limitless choices for viewers to find things that interest them from a much wider range of programmers than are available on their cable or satellite system.

How is Veoh different than BitTorrent?
BitTorrent is the technology behind much of the current peer-to-peer sharing on the Internet. While BitTorrent is not itself a network, it allows small Internet networks to be created to share files. BitTorrent is a prime example of an open network; anything added to the network can be copied and added to another network.

The primary weakness that makes BitTorrent unsuitable for video broadcasting is that when you broadcast a file, you must remain online at all times. BitTorrent uses the concept of a seed, which is the original place that the content was broadcasted, to start file sharing. It is common to find useless BitTorrent seeds, because the original server is no longer online, has changed IP addresses, or has simply revoked the seed. BitTorrent forces the broadcaster to act as a server, if only to provide seeding. Again, your computer becomes a single point-of-failure and your costs and levels of effort increase.

BitTorrent's other issue is that it is not designed to support more than a few thousand users on a single network. This prevents its use in a global video hosting network.

The thing i like about Veoh
- No need to worry about Screamyx BT throttling! Although the speed varies from 30kbps to 80kbps in my case, but i'm satisfied with the 50-60kbps i nomally get.
- Can get full video downloads, as in 700-800MB movies and 350MB tv shows.

Cons
- Due to copyright issues, the movies that are uploaded are usually taken off the site in a day or two. So, if i'm really lucky to catch that movie very soon after it was uploaded, i might be able to download the movie.
- Not many tv shows available and not as up-to-date as torrents, in most cases.

I downloaded all 11 episodes of Heroes off Veoh recently, in 2 days on-and-off. And the Death Note anime gets uploaded to Veoh very fast after it's aired too!

It' not perfect, since it's still on beta mode. Just thought some people out here might wanna know about it.

http://www.veoh.com/

Physics degree

cain — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:36:24 +0800

I have decided to get a physics degree after i do a foundation in science. I searched online and this is what i've got:

Taylors
Monash
Unitar
MMU
APIIT
AIMST
Curtin
Swinburne
Brickfields
Nottingham
HELP
INTI
KDU
KBU
Nilai International
Open Uni
SIT
TPM Academy
Uni Teknologi Petronas
UCSI

None of the above offers Physics degree. Finally, i found that UTAR offers Bachelor of Science (Hons). Yay!!! Now i'm looking for other options. Anyone knows of any local unis that offers physics degree?

Also, is it possible that i do my foundation in one uni and degree in another?

Astronomy?

cain — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:27:27 +0800

So after some rest after SPM, i finally started to think about pre-u courses i might take.

So i have great interest in astronomy since i was a kid and i all this while i thought i'd take up astronomy course in uni since i like the subject so much. But then as i grow older, i started considering about future job prospects. And everyone around me was like, "Astronomy ah? You wanna go to space ah?" "Astronomy? Cannot cari makan one wor~"

I've asked around and found that it's highly unlikely there will be astronomy courses offered locally though it's not uncommon in other countries. Going overseas might be a problem if i couldn't get a scholarship, which i'm not quite confident in getting one since my SPM forecast results wasn't good.

So here's my problem. Should i go for Physics, which is in some ways similar to astronomy? Or should i just consider other courses? Just fyi, the level of interest i have in Astronomy like the star on the top of the xmas tree and everything else, no matter how much interest i have in, is at the level of the presents beneath the xmas tree.

And btw, i prefer to take foundation/american transfer degree instead of a-levels/sam. Which is why i need to think about the courses i wanna take now. Sorry for the long post. Hope someone can help me out here. Thanks!