Elle Yuan Wang’s Blog

Medical schools?

Thu, 4 Jul 2013 11:51:05 -0400

My recent assignment granted me a special visit to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. One thing about medical education in China many Americans might find utter surprising is that there are bachelors of medicine degrees there. And you can be a doctor after you earn this degree.

Is online searching really better?

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:43:46 -0400

A sudden revelation here.

So even if a top-selling book has sold for 20 million copies, you could still have not a clue about it.

This is especially true since I was doing some random search online to find out what are those best-selling books that I could read in the summer. Of course, there are the truly ubiquitous names like “Harry Potter”, “The Da Vinci Code”, and there’s also “50 Shades of Grey”. Without a second thought, I requested this book from the wonderful “Borrow Direct” services of Columbia University Libraries.

Here then another thought hit me... Is Google research really the best if one of the true “virtues” of it being “keywords” locating so as to satisfy our random curiosities? I often get amazed at how many books people have written on any given topic, or shall I say “keyword”? What is going to happen if we put every keyword we want to search into a library search box instead of Google? Would this prompt more “deep” learning?

What I learned today?

Tue, 4 Jun 2013 01:02:57 -0400

I never bothered to check the difference between Grand Central and Penn Station. Well, I thought NYC is pretty large, so it makes sense to have two train stations.

Well, tonight, I had to check online how I can take a train from Manhattan to White Plains. It turned out that I can only take the train from Grand Central. So apparently, these two stations are not interchangeable!

For those of you who shared the same mental model on this me:

Grand Central: This is where you take a Metro North commuter train to places north of NYC, like Southern Connecticut, White Plains, etc.

Penn Station: This is where you take a train to New Jersey (NJ Transit), Long Island (LIRR), and other parts of the country (Amtrak).

Continued on the path studying neuroscience

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:54:46 -0400

It is simply so fascinating!

The difference between studying computer science and neuroscience:

They both tell fascinating functioning abilities; one is something you can use, the other being part of your body. Think about that!!!