照片：1995 天津大学百年校庆研究生院学术报告会（一等奖论文） “从 NP结构到超级计算 机分类理论”，天津大学百年校庆研究生院学术报告会（一等奖论文）， 1995年10月。 “A supercomputer classification theory from the hierarchy of NP problem”, the Student Academic Symposium of Graduate School to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Founding of Tianjin University, October 1995. The first prize paper. （1）证书的封皮 （2）证书的内容 （3）报告会封皮 （4）报告会的论文一览表 （5）报告会论文摘要汇编封皮 （6）报告会论文摘要汇编内容 （6-2）上图裁剪出的细节，经过自动曝光处理 相关链接： 2012-3-23， P对NP：请郝克刚教授等专家指教（一） http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-107667-550859.html 2011-09-15， A FULL PROOF to the P versus NP problem http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-107667-486692.html http://bbs.sciencenet.cn/thread-523235-1-1.html 2011-04-13， “P对NP（P versus NP, P vs NP）”问题的描述、难度、可能的答案 http://bbs.sciencenet.cn/thread-266338-1-1.html 2011-09-05， Vinay Deolalikar宣称自己证明了“P!= NP”（P 不等于 NP） http://bbs.sciencenet.cn/thread-106360-2-1.html 2011-09-06，My report and papers on the P versus NP problem (P vs NP) http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-107667-483639.html 1995 天津大学百年校庆研究生院学术报告会（一等奖论文），Student Academic Symposium of Graduate School to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Founding of Tianjin University http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=spaceuid=107667do=albumid=52751 感谢您的指教！ 感谢您指正以上任何错误！
中国的研究生的生涯里似乎缺少了一件重要东西：论文委员会。在美国的很多学校里，每个PhD学生在博士资格考试时设立一个考试委员会，如果资格考通过，这个委员会就变成该生的论文委员会，大约每半年跟学生开一次会，直到答辩。论文委员会就像一只忧心忡忡的老母鸡，不让昏头昏脑的小鸡跑得太出界。 论文委员会在中国研究生生活里的缺失在我看来是件很糟糕的事，希望校长们和教授委员会们将之提上议事日程。没有论文委员会对学生的长期定时看护，导师对学生的责任显然就更重大了。我认为博导的责任大致在三方面： 1，至少每半年跟每个学生会面一次，专门讨论该生的学业进展。在总结学生半年来的研究成果时，明确地、毫不含糊地指出好的、不好的、差劲的表现。跟学生一起制定一个双方都能接受的下一个半年的目标。会议要有书面记录。 2，参加每周的实验室例会。每周常规的实验室例会至关重要。要求学生在会前做好家庭作业，会上简明扼要地讲解自己的实验目的、结果、对结果的解释。要求学生不光对自己的项目，也要对实验室其他成员的项目给予充分的关怀，积极参与讨论。 3，慷慨地奖励学生。学生的智力贡献要通过科研论文作者排名或专利申请人排名得到恰当的肯定。要让学生亲自到国内国际学术会议去报告他们自己的科研发现。在学生迈入事业的下一个位置时尽力帮助，至少要写一封合情合理的推荐信。 A recent commentary in Nature prompted me to write a small piece in my blog on The ScienceNet.cn to reflect on my thoughts on the responsibility of a graduate student in ensuring timely advances of his or her career. In that piece I asked the students to 1) proactively arrange meetings with the boss; 2) write good quality reports with a note attached in the front to remind the boss the key issues in the report, and 3) raise questions but at the same time come up with solutions from the student’s perspective. Someone then says: Hey, what about the responsibilities of the advisers? Now the following are what I had the good fortune to observe when I was a student myself: 1) Be a responsible adviser Dedicate one meeting with each of the students at least once every six months. Give assessment on the student’s accomplishment thus far. Point out in unambiguous terms the good, the not so good, and the bad. Clearly outline the goals for the next six months. Make sure someone is taking notes during the meeting. 2) Make every effort to attend the weekly lab meetings The importance of a regular weekly lab meeting cannot be over-emphasized. Make sure that the students did their homework before coming to the meeting. Notebooks must be handy. Ask the students to speak succinctly on their own project, stating the purpose of the experiments, the findings, and the interpretations. Ask them to pay attention not only to their own projects but of the others, and actively take part in the discussion. 3) Reward the students for their hard work Reward the students generously. Make sure their intellectual contributions are recognized by proper authorship in scholarly publications as well as in patent applications. Have them personally present their discoveries at national and international conferences. Help the students as they advance to the next stop in their career. Write a candid recommendation letter when asked. Come to think about it, there is something missing in the Chinese systems of graduate studies. Every PhD student in the United States has a “Dissertation Committee” from the very beginning that meets with him or her every six months or so until dissertation defense. The committee behaves like a good old hen to make sure the often confused youngster not to go astray. The absence of a dissertation committee in the life of a Chinese graduate student is quite unfortunate in my opinion. The role of an adviser becomes all the more important under these circumstances.
A student asked me: I noticed something (say, a current) had impact on the cold tongue in a numerical model. I also read an interesting paper about the cold tongue. Therefore, I decided to study the impact of factors a, b, c, and d on the formation and maintenance of the cold tongue using a numerical model. Which model should I use? How should I proceed next? To avoid misguiding this student, I would prefer to talk about how to carry out a research project as a graduate student in general. If one needs funding to carry out a project, one needs to write a proposal first. A student may not need to obtain funding on his own, but a thesis proposal is generally required by the thesis committee, I hope. In such a proposal, one needs to cover (at least) the following: 1) Why is studying the cold tongue important? 2) What do we already know about the cold tongue? What are the remaining issues? (Read, read, and read more published papers.) 3) Which of these issues I can resolve? If I can answer these (limited) questions in my Ph.D. thesis, will that be good enough for me to graduate? Once you are sure the cold tongue study will lead you to your Ph.D. degree (and hopefully a job, too), you need to shop for a numerical model. Here are some more questions you need to ask yourself: 1) What kinds of models have people used to study the cold tongue? Maybe more specifically in this case, what kinds of numerical models have been used to study the cold tongue? 2) Which of these numerical models have successfully reproduced the cold tongue? 3) Do I have access to the computing facility that will allow me to carry out many numerical experiments if I pick Model B?This is very important for a project using a numerical model. Even a great chef cannot make a good dish without needed ingredients! Once you have picked a good model, you need to test it to see if the cold tongue is well simulated, and of no less importance, whether or not the factors a-d are all properly represented in the model. Only if these five ingredients are in your model, then you can study the impact of each factor on the cold tongue. Good luck! ps. Here are two closely related articles you may find useful: How to carry out a research project independently Scientific Writing for Beginners (1)-(8)
SOME MODEST ADVICE FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS Stephen C. Stearns Always Prepare for the Worst Some of the greatest catastrophes in graduate education could have been avoided by a little intelligent foresight. Be cynical. Assume that your proposed research might not work, and that one of your faculty advisors might become unsupportive - or even hostile. Plan for alternatives. Nobody Cares About You In fact, some professor care about you and some don't. Most probably do, but all are busy, which means in practice they cannot care about you because they don't have the time. You are on your own, and you had better get used to it. This has a lot of implications. Here are two important ones: 1) You had better decide early on that you are in charge of your program. The degree you get is yours to create. Your major professor can advise you and protect you to a certain extent from bureaucratic and financial demons, but he should not tell you what to do. That is up to you. If you need advice, ask for it: that's his job. 2) If you want to pick somebody's brains you'll have to go to him or her, because they won't be coming to you. You Must Know Why Your Work is Important When you first arrive, read and think widely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you read is hogwash until the author managed to convince you that it isn't. If you do not understand something, don't feel bad - it's not your fault, it's the author's. He didn't write clearly enough. If some authority figure tells you that you aren't accomplishing anything taking courses and you aren't gathering data, tell him what you're up to. If he persists tell him to bug off, because you know what you're doing, dammit. This is a hard stage to get through because you will feel guilty about not getting on your own research. You will continually be asking yourself, What and I doing here? Be patient. This stage is critical to your personal development and to maintaining the flow of new ideas into science. Here you decide what constitutes an important problem. You must arrive at this decision independently for two reasons. First, if someone hands you a problem, you won't feel that it is yours, you won't have that possessiveness that makes you want to work on it, defend it, fight for it, and make it come out beautifully. Secondly, your Ph.D. work will shape your future. It is your choice of a field in which to carry out a life's work. It is also important to the dynamic of science that your entry be well thought out. This is one point where you can start a new area of research. Remember, what sense does it make to start gathering data if you don't know - and I mean really know - why you're doing it? Psychological Problems are the Biggest Barriers You must establish a firm psychological stance early in your graduate career to keep from being buffeted by the many demands that will be made on your time. If you don't watch out, the pressures of course work, teaching, language requirements and who know what else will push you around like a large, docile molecule in Brownian motion. Here are a few things to watch out for: 1. The initiation-rite nature of the Ph.D. and it's power to convince you that your value as a person is being judged. No matter how hard you try, you won't be able to avoid this one. No one does. It stems from the open-ended nature of the thesis problem. You have to decide what a good thesis is. A thesis can always be made better, which gets you into an infinite regress of possible improvements. Recognize that you cannot produce a perfect thesis. There are going to be flaws in it, as there are in everything. Settle down to make it as good as you can within the limits of time, money, energy, encouragement, and thought at your disposal. You can alleviate this problem by jumping all the explicit hurdles early in the game. Get all of your course requirements and examinations out of the way as soon as possible. Not only do you thereby clear the decks for your thesis, but you also convince yourself, by successfully jumping each hurdle, that your probably are good enough after all. 1 Nothing elicits dominant behavior like subservient behavior. Expect and demand to be treated like a colleague. The paper requirements are the explicit hurdle you will have to jump, but the implicit hurdle is attaining the status of a colleague. Act like one and you'll be treated like one. 2 Graduate school is only one of the tools that you have at hand for shaping your development. Be prepared to quit for awhile if something better comes up. There are three good reasons to do this. First, a real opportunity could arise that is more productive and challenging than anything you could do in graduate school and that involves a long enough block of time to justify dropping out. Examples include field work in Africa on a project not directly related to your Ph.D. work, a contract for software development, an opportunity to work as an aide in the nation's capital in the formulation of science policy, or an internship at a major newspaper or magazine as a science journalist. Secondly, only be keeping this option open can you function with true independence as a graduate student. If you perceive graduate school as your only option, you will be psychologically labile, inclined to get a bit desperate and insecure, and you will not be able to give your best. Thirdly, if things really are not working out for you, then you are only hurting yourself and denying resources to others by staying in graduate school. There are a lot of interesting things to do in life besides being a scientist, and in some the job market is a lot better. If science is not turning you on, perhaps you should try something else. However, do not go off half-cocked. This is a serious decision. Be sure to talk to fellow graduate students and sympathetic faculty before making up your mind. Avoid taking Lectures - They're Usually Inefficient If you already have a good background in your field, then minimize the number of additional courses you take. This recommendation may seem counter-intuitive, but it has a sound basis. Right now, you need to learn how to think for yourself. This requires active engagement, not passive listening and regurgitation. To learn to think, you need two things: large blocks of time, and as much one-on-one interaction as you can get with someone who thinks more clearly than you do. Courses just get in the way, and if you are well motivated, then reading and discussion is much more efficient and broadening than lectures. It is often a good idea to get together with a few colleagues, organize a seminar on a subject of interest, and invite a few faculty to take part. They'll probably be delighted. After all, it will be interesting for them, they'll love your initiative - and it will give them credit for teaching a course for which they don't have to do any work. How can you lose? These comments of course do not apply to courses that teach specific skills: e.g., electron microscopy, histological technique, scuba diving. Write a Proposal and Get it Criticized A research proposal serves many functions. 1 By summarizing your year's thinking and reading, it ensures that you have gotten something out of it. 2 It makes it possible for you to defend your independence by providing a concrete demonstration that you used your time well. 3 It literally makes it possible for others to help you. What you have in mind is too complex to be communicated verbally - too subtle, and in too many parts. It must be put down in a well-organized, clearly and concisely written document that can be circulated to a few good minds. Only with a proposal before them can the give you constructive criticism. 4 You need practice writing. We all do. 5. Having located your problem and satisfied yourself that it is important, you will have to convince your colleagues that you are not totally demented and, in fact, deserve support. One way to organize a proposal to accomplish this goal is. a. A brief statement of what you propose, couched as a question or hypothesis. b. Why it is important scientifically, not why it is important to you personally, and how it fits into the broader scheme of ideas in your field. c. A literature review that substantiates (b). d. Describe your problem as a series of subproblems that can each be attacked in a series of small steps. Devise experiments, observations or analyses that will permit you to exclude alternatives at each stage. Line them up and start knocking them down. By transforming the big problem into a series of smaller ones, you always know what to do next, you lower the energy threshold to begin work, you identify the part that will take the longest or cause the most problems, and you have available a list of things to do when something doesn't work out. 5 Write down a list of the major problems that could arise and ruin the whole project. Then write down a list of alternatives that you will do if things actually do go wrong. 7. It is not a bad idea to design two or three projects and start them in parallel to see which one has the best practical chance of succeeding. There could be two or three model systems that all seem to have equally good chances on paper of providing appropriate tests for your ideas, but in fact practical problems may exclude some of them. It is much more efficient to discover this at the start than to design and execute two or three projects in succession after the first fails for practical reasons. 6 Pick a date for the presentation of your thesis and work backwards in constructing a schedule of how you are going to use your time. You can expect a stab or terror at this point. Don't worry - it goes on like this for awhile, then it gradually gets worse. 7 Spend two to three weeks writing the proposal after you've finished your reading, then give it to as many good critics as you can find. Hope that their comments are tough, and respond as constructively as you can. 8 Get at it. You already have the introduction to your thesis written, and you have only been here 12 to 18 months. Manage Your Advisors Keep your advisors aware of what you are doing, but do not bother them. Be an interesting presence, not a pest. At least once a year, submit a written progress report 1-2 pages long on your own initiative. They will appreciate it and be impressed. Anticipate and work to avoid personality problems. If you do not get along with your professors, change advisors early on. Be very careful about choosing your advisors in the first place. Most important is their interest in your interest. Types of Theses Never elaborate a baroque excrescence on top of existing but shaky ideas. Go right to the foundations and test the implicit but unexamined assumptions of an important body of work, or lay the foundations for a new research thrust. There are, of course, other types of theses: 1 The classical thesis involves the formulation of a deductive model that makes novel and surprising predictions which you then test objectively and confirm under conditions unfavorable to the hypothesis. Rarely done and highly prized. 2A critique of the foundations of an important body of research. Again, rare and valuable and a sure winner if properly executed. 3The purely theoretical thesis. This takes courage, especially in a department loaded with bedrock empiricists, but can be pulled off if you are genuinely good at math and logic. 4 Gather data that someone else can synthesize. This is the worst kind of thesis, but in a pinch it will get you through. To certain kinds of people lots of data, even if they don't test a hypothesis, will always be impressive. At least the results show that you worked hard, a fact with which you can blackmail your committee into giving you the doctorate. There are really as many kinds of theses as there are graduate students. The four types listed serve as limited cases of the good, the bad and the ugly. Doctoral work is a chance for you to try you had at a number of different research styles and to discover which suits you best: theory, field work, or lab work. Ideally, you will balance all three and become the rare person who can translate the theory for the empiricists and the real world for the theoreticians. Start Publishing Early Don't kid yourself. You may have gotten into this game out of love for plants and animals, your curiosity about nature, and your drive to know the truth, but you won't be able to get a job and stay in it unless you publish. You need to publish substantial articles in internationally recognized, referred journals. Without them, you can forget a career in science. This sounds brutal, but there are good reasons for it, and it can be a joyful challenge and fulfillment. Science is shared knowledge. Until the results are effectively communicated, they in effect do not exist. Publishing is part of the job, and until it is done, the work is not complete. You must master the skill of writing clear, concise, well-organized scientific papers. Here are some tips about getting into the publishing game. 1 Co-author a paper with someone who has more experience. Approach a professor who is working on an interesting project and offer your services in return for a junior authorship. He'll appreciate the help and will give you lots of comments on the paper because his name will be on it. 2 Do not expect your first paper to be world-shattering. A lot of eminent people began with a minor piece of work. The amount of information reported in the average scientific paper may be less than you think. Work up to the major journals by publishing one or two short - but competent - papers in less well-recognized journals. You will quickly discover that no matter what the reputation of the journal, all editorial boards defend the quality of their project with jealous pride - and they should! 3 If it is good enough, publish your research proposal as a critical review paper. If it is publishable you've probably chosen the right field to work in. 4 Do not write your thesis as a monograph. Write it as a series of publishable manuscripts, and submit the early enough so that at least one or two chapters of your thesis can be presented as reprints of published articles. 5 Buy and use a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Read it before you sit down to write your first paper, then read it again at least once a year for the next three or four years. Day's book, How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, is also excellent. 6 Get your work reviewed before you submit it to the journal by someone who has the time to criticize your writing as well as your ideas and organization. Don't Look Down on a Master's Thesis The only reason not to do a master's is to fulfill the generally false conceit that you're too good for that sort of thing. The master's has a number of advantages. 1 It gives you a natural way of changing schools if you want to. You can use this to broaden your background. Moreover, your ideas on what constitutes an important problem will probably be changing rapidly a this stage of your development. Your knowledge of who is doing what, and where, will be expanding rapidly. If you decide to change universities, this is the best way to do it. You leave behind people satisfied with your performance and in a position to provide well-informed letters of recommendation. You arrive with most of your Ph.D. requirements satisfied. 2 You get much-needed experience in research and writing in a context less threatening than doctoral research. You break yourself in gradually. In research, you learn the size of a soluble problem. People who have done master's work usually have a much easier time with the Ph.D. 3 You get a publication. 4 What's your hurry? If you enter the job market too quickly, you won't be well prepared. Better to go a bit more slowly, build up a substantial background, and present yourself a bit later as a person with more and broader experience. Postscript This comment was originally entitled Cynical aids towards getting a graduate degree, or psychological and practical tools to use in acquiring and maintaining control over your own life. It originated as a handout for the Ecolunch Seminar in the Department of Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, on a Monday in the spring of 1976. Ecolunch was, and is, a Berkeley institution, a forum where graduate students present their work in progress and receive constructive criticism. At the start of the semester, however, no one is ready to talk. This was such a time. On Friday morning at Museum Coffee, Frank Pitelka, who was in charge of Ecolunch for that semester, asked me to make the presentation on the following Monday. Asked is probably a misleading representation of Frank's style that morning. Frank bullied me into it. I had just given a departmental seminar on the Ph.D. work I had done at British Columbia, and did not have much new to say about biology. Frank's style brought out the rebel in me. I agreed on the condition that I had complete freedom to say whatever I wanted to, and that the theme would be advice to graduate students. Frank agreed without apparent qualms. Then I charged upstairs to Ray Huey's office to plot the attack. I whipped out an outline, Ray responded with a more optimistic and complementary version (see the following Commentary article), and I wrote a draft at white heat that afternoon. We felt like plotters. We were plotters. There were acts of self-definition in the air. On Monday, I recall that I made a pretty aggressive presentation in which, to emphasize how busy faculty members were, I kept looking at my watch. Near the end I glanced at my watch one last time, said I had to rush off to an appointment, left the room suddenly without taking questions, and slammed the door. They waited. I never came back, but Ray took over and presented his alternative view. Ray told me later that Bill Lidicker turned to him and said, You mean he's not coming back? I wasn't. Fortunately, they took it well. They were and are a group of real gentlemen. I mention these things to explain the tone of our pieces. We would not write them that way now, having been professors ourselves for some years. We never intended to publish them, having regarded the presentations as a one-time skit, but our notes were xeroxed and passed around, and eventually they spread around the United States. In the fall of 1986 I got a letter from Pete Morin at Rutgers suggesting that we publish the notes. Its survival for ten years in the graduate student grapevine convinced me that there might actually be a demand for them. I had lost my original, and Pete kindly sent me a copy, which turned to be a nth generation version with marginal notes by a number of different graduate students. On rereading it, I find that I agree with the basic message as much as ever, but that many of the details do not apply outside the context of large American universities. Ten years later, I have one after-thought. Publish Regularly, but Not Too Much The pressure to publish has corroded the quality of journals and the quality of intellectual life. It is far better to have published a few papers of high quality that are widely read, then it is to have published a long string of minor articles that are quickly forgotten. You do have to be realistic. You will need publications to get a post-doc, and you will need more to get a faculty position and then tenure. However, to the extent that you can gather your work together in substantial packages of real quality, you will be doing both yourself and your field a favor. Most people publish only a few papers that make any difference. Most papers are cited little or not at all. About 10% of the articles published receive 90% of the citations. A paper that is not cited is time and effort wasted. Go for quality, not for quantity. This will take courage and stubbornness, but you won't regret it. If you are publishing one or two carefully considered, substantial papers in good, refereed journals each year, you're doing very well - and you've taken enough time to do the job right. Acknowledgments Thanks to Frank Pitelka for providing an opportunity, to Ray Huey for being a coconspirator and sounding board and for providing a number of the comments presented here, to the various unknown graduate students who kept these ideas in circulation during the last decade, and to Pete Morin for suggesting that we write them for publication. Some Useful References Day, R.A. 1983. How to write and publish a scientific paper. Second edition. ISI Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 181 pp. wise and witty. Smith, R.V. 1984. Graduate research - a guide for students in the sciences. ISI Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. 182 pp. complete and practical. Strunk, W., Jr., and E.B. White. 1979. The elements of style. Third Edition. Macmillan, New York, New York, USA. 92 pp. the paradigm of concision. Stephen C. Stearns Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Yale University P.O. Box 208106 New Haven, CT 06520-8106 USA
what's the difference between abstract and introduction? This afternoon, one of my students asked me a question about the graduate theses: what's the difference between abstract and introduction? It's a common and complex question for the beginners, esp. for the undergraduates. Here, wecan find some suggestions for this question: At first glance, it might seem that the introduction and the abstract are very similar because they both present the research problem and objectives as well as briefly reviewing methodology, main findings and main conclusions. However, there are important differences between the two: Introduction: an introduction leads the reader into the subject of study by giving the state of art of knowledge in the area, the lacunae, and reasons for undertaking the present study. it should be short, but does not have a word limit; Main purpose is to introduce the research by presenting its context or background. Introductions usually go from general to specific, introducing the research problem and how it will be investigated. Abstract: An abstract is a sort of summary of the entire paper. It should be specific about the main findings and not vague. It will also specify what was the aims and goals of the study. so, It has a maximum word limit; It is a summary of the whole research; Its main purpose is to summarize the research--particularly the objective and the main finding/conclusion, Not to introduce the research area.
标签: graduate
