Is this for Real?!

56-year-old Mabel Ong held up as example during Budget Statement

56-year-old Mabel Ong stepped into the limelight in Singapore's Budget on Thursday.

She was held up as an example of how many Singaporeans have a positive attitude when it comes to work and skills upgrading.

And she is one of those who will benefit from the help the government is providing to low income workers.

The mini-bar supervisor earns $800 monthly and lives with her elderly mother in a three-room flat.

Even though grateful for the extra money, Mabel said she would rather not receive any hand-outs.

"I am happy... but I think I better upgrade myself, so that my salary increment will be bigger and I'll get more pay, then I can spend more happily. Don't wait for others to help you, but earn it yourself," said Mabel, a mini-bar supervisor at Oriental Hotel.

Source: CNA

My Birth Date

After this week ends, there will only be four weeks of classes left, which will then be followed by the finals. Time sure flies by here... I just had a (semi-disastrous) midterm last night, keeping my fingers crossed on that one. Tomorrow morning will be my last midterm. Yeah! Then it will be time to continue working on my parallel BTree code...

Anyway, I was reading the ST this morning and noticed that we are going to get the full GST hike at one go. Of all dates, it has to fall on my birthday. Come to think of it, July 1st seems like a pretty popular date. Let me try to recall what else happened on that date...

1. Hong Kong becoming part of China
2. SAF day.
3. hmm.. can't remember anymore haha.. I thought that was more.

Wikipedia has a full list anyway... Interesting read..

No Social Life..

After having a chat with YJ about the apparent lack of community spirit among our fellow countrymen at Stanford, I decided to rant about social life here. Sadly, my comments might just be far from the truth since I am largely a hermit.

So it's been about five months since I came to the Farm. Compared to good old Ithaca, the work/study opportunities are limitless. I was, and still am, immensely impressed by the amount of brain-juice this place has.

Yesterday, I attended a talk by David Patterson, the co-author of the industry bible for computer architecture. (The other co-author happens to be the school president by the way.) The number of textbook writers and leading researchers here is simply amazing.

Being in Silicon Valley does have its benefits after all.

However, the social life seems kind of lacking. Everyone seems to be very much caught up in work. Everywhere I go, I hear people talking about their work. The much larger graduate population here might be the reason for this; I still remember one of my TAs saying that as a graduate student, research just occupies his mind all the time.

I also find it hard to feel the presence of student groups here. The equivalent of Ho Plaza here is filled with people and tables only during a career fair. There's usually no tabling, and if there is, it is just two or three lonely-looking tables. Most people either zip past in their bicycles or walk a distance away (I'm guilty of the latter). It makes me wonder how many active student groups there really are. Maybe all the activity is in the undergraduate dorms and I am missing out.

Then again, having to finish my MS in nine months automatically makes me miss out on a lot of things. If I had the choice, I will probably take one more quarter.

CNY is coming up in two weeks. Suddenly, I miss good old Cornell and our annual CNY dinner.

Intel Announces 45nm Transistors! + other news

The biggest news the past week, in my opinion at least, was Intel's announcement of the next generation 45nm transistors (hurrah!). It was quickly followed by a similar announcement from the IBM alliance, which includes Intel's arch-rival AMD, and I believe Toshiba as well.

I am not sure if it's just me, but I felt that there was a lot of 'fanfare' surrounding the whole thing; I mean, I hardly noticed the advent of the 65nm node. So I thought I noticed the news because I had grown more geeky and started reading eetimes. Then my professor came into class one day and commented about the huge media coverage.

Anyway, I thought it was all very exciting, but I shan't bore the non-EEs with the details.

On another note, I found the absurdity of certain media reports (including our very own ST) very entertaining and hilarious at times. But first, here's a good one which is largely correct:

"...Each company said it has devised a way to replace problematic but vital materials in the transistors of computer chips that have begun leaking too much electric current as the circuitry on those chips gets smaller...

Technology experts said it is the most dramatic overhaul of transistor technology for computer chips since the 1960s and is crucial in allowing semiconductor companies to continue making ever-smaller devices that are also energy-efficient."

And here is a hilarious one:

"...However, past the 65nm barrier, the silicon used to manufacture critical elements of the switches known as gate dielectrics no longer performs as it does at larger scales.As a result, currents passing through the transistors leak and reduce the effectiveness of the chip.To prevent this, researchers have had to develop new materials to contain the current at such small scales. The class of silicon substitutes are known as high-k metals... (emphasis mine)"

Now I found that absolutely hilarious; there is no such thing as high-k metals, just high-k dielectrics. Some other reports I read claimed that the new transistors replaced silicon dioxide with metal! That is replacing an insulator with a conductor, which doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, from what I have read so far, it seems like the new innovation is to replace the polysilicon gate with a metal gate, and replace the silicon dioxide with a high-k dielectric (hafnium oxide). So there, if that was confusing, it must have confused the poor journalist writing the article...

Alright, enough whining about inaccurate reporting. Now for a quick update..

I have been really busy the past few weeks (as evident from the dearth of posts). Classes have been heavy, but mostly enjoyable so far. This past week has been particularly rough, I think my sleep cycle has been shifted permanently from sleeping at 12-ish to sleeping at 1-ish or 2. I just completed a programming assignment due Mon, three homeworks due Wed, and one homework due Thu. I still got one more assignment due Thu that shouldn't take too long.

But, there is no time to relax... Two midterms next week, another two the week after (also CNY week). That's excluding all the weekly homeworks... sigh. Thinking about it makes me tired. I shall get to bed now. Hope that I will update again soon. =)