What should be included in a professional personal webpage.

What should be included in a professional personal webpage.

It should be a name card listing all your professional profile and records that give you extra credibility in your abilities that you want to emphasize.

LinkedIn : Probably the primary thing that you want potential recruiter/ employer know about you -- your education, experience, skills, etc.

Google Plus : This demonstrate your personal side in the bright way. Your bloggers, you tube channel, friend circles. Your activities are usually more 'appropriate' here as far as your potential employer/ coworker is concerned.

Skype: A much more enjoyable and intimate way of modern day communication, where the conversations don't get reduced to a emoji or one sentence. And there's no 'Facebook friend' that you barely know. It is the only way you talk to people you really intellectually and  emotionally linked with even though they are half a planet away.

For Programers :

GitHub : Undoubtedly the major hub of all coders. It demonstrates your contributions to the team, your talents,  and your work portfolio is a way that there's no room for bragging or humbling. The evidences speaks for themselves.

Stack overflow : Yes, programers have to do volunteering work as well. It shows that you are not a egoistic jerk or coding machine but a amicable person with a big heart. This is where you earn your respect from your peers.

Research Gate:  Where your publication can be inspected and where your collaborators can be seen. It shows explicitly your standing in the field. However, lots of excellent scholars don't use this kind of social network. So this is the best of entry level researcher to build their connections.

For Students :

DropBox : Where you share your common interests, school work, study material, or your secret project.

Do recruiter read cover letters ? https://www.quora.com/Do-recruiters-read-cover-letters

Bas Grasmayer, led and built up a team for a music tech startup.

5.3k Views

I can answer from the perspective of someone who built up a team of 40 at a startup.

To me, cover letters are important, because I'm trying to build a team, not a set of replaceable individuals. A CV tells me nothing about personality, interest or motivation. It's just experience and perhaps achievements (if done properly). Therefore, I'd always look in the cover letter for those points. A good cover letter almost always led to an invitation to a job interview, even if I was still a little bit unsure of the experience listed in the CV.

Here are some DO's and DON'T's.

DO:

• Indicate clear interest in the company and the job. Display familiarity with both. This helps anyone building up a team understand that you're motivated.
• Show motivation! Help me understand what drives you, how this fits into what you want to do. Demotivation in one person can drag a whole team down, so it's important for me to understand your motives.
• Describe your qualities in a way that I wouldn't be able to glean from your CV... Else you're using my limited time to tell me the same thing twice.
• Differentiate! Help me to understand why you're different from other people. Read some bios of people on LinkedIn to help you understand how to avoid saying the same thing as others, words like "creative", "self-motivated", or "team player" are unimpressive at best and have an adverse effect at worst.
• Try to understand the type of personalities in a company, and adjust tone accordingly. This is a little bit like dressing up for a job interview. Don't be overly formal with a music startup ;-)
• Keep it concise. No more than 3 paragraphs. Remove anything that's not absolutely necessary in this very first impression. Your goal is to get invited, not acquainted. The latter will happen in the interview process.

DON'T:

• Attach your cover letter. Put it in the email body. If you put it as an attachment, I might just look at your CV and skip the cover letter. I really don't understand people who attach their cover letters...
• Place your future bosses too high above you. Try to address them almost like equals. You might still be just at the start of your career, but show confidence in the fact that one day, you could be in their seat in some other company (if you're reading Quora, there's a good chance you will). Disclaimer! I've lived in different countries and this is culturally specific. This works well in companies with a modern Western mentality... In a company with a more oldschool mentality, this might not go over so well.
• Place yourself above potential future bosses. Then you're just being a dick and I won't want to work with you. Go start your own company or go work in some oldschool company where such attitudes belong.
• Leave the email body blank. Nor the subject line. Else I won't even understand what you're applying for... Or if you care at all. This happens more often than you'd think. About 20-30% of the applications I got had less than 20 words in the body.
• Copy + paste the same cover letter over and over. We can tell. At least adjust the part where you show interest and motivation. Show that you care.

Review : Connectography by Parag Khanna

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna
My rating: 1 of 5 stars





















The one start is not as much the book itself but the great disappointment of my high expectation after reading so much acclamations on Goodreads. The irrational hype must be cooled down. The book spent great proportion talking about China and East Asia, where I grew up. I didn't learn anything new in those parts. In addition, the author doesn't seem to be an expert in global trend, despite he was an adviser to US national Intelligence Council, and US Special Operations Forces. Compare with another geopolitics journalists, Robert Kaplan, Parag Khanna's portrayal of the global geopolitics is not only bland, but superficial. The magna title 'connectography' is nothing but a hyperbole. There's nothing new except for its cover. Honestly, after browsing it in the last two week, I don't want to finish it because I have already know better than him. Unlike Thomas L. Friedman, the author of his much celebrated book, 'The World is Flat,' Mr. Khanna's work is at most a caricature. His understanding about China, Korea, and other so called 'the rising east' powers is actually insufficient. In terms of the development of IT and fin-tech infrastructure, China is catching up with the U.S (even ahead believe or not). China and Korea's online-gaming industry and culture is surfacing as another significant subculture. The author didn't point out why China invest heavily on foreign countries aside form seising their natural resources. It is not only an offense strategy countering the West political powers, but also a defense measure that prevents economy bubble happened in Japan. China doesn't need so much natural resource as its great construction period is slowing down. It is more a way to develop export market of its products and services to consume the over-production of its millions of factories to prevent the great recession that Americans experienced after WWII. As far as China study goes, the content in the book doesn't brace the volume of such a ambitious title.

As for other old connections - gas pipeline, goods supply chain, migrations, the author was also scratching the surface. I expected to see more in-depth analysis on talent migration, such as the prediction of possible brain power drain of developing countries, and the possible impact to local culture, as long as how it affects superpowers' global strategies on attracting global talents. I hold a different view of globalization from the author. I see the rise of hypertube and Tesla the new paradigm of future connections. Already close areas, such as Seattle, SF and LA, or Boston, NY, will become more connected. Uber, autopilot and Tesla will reduce the cost of transportation of man and goods, both money-wise and environment-wise. Our reliance on oil and gas will decline when the building solar city gain its popularity. Germany just announced industry 4.0, declaring a era of customized manufacturing against mono-model mass production. Many companies are shifting their factories back from China. These facts are not matching the pattern the author proposed.

However, the author got it right. We are entering a new era of less traditional sovereigns such as cultural background, nationality, and location. Its much easier to work abroad nowadays, as far as regulations go. Many skilled workers left their countries to seek a new identity, better quality of life, better chance to realize one's dream. However, the competition for working VISAs in the UK and the US is still difficult to many people. We got multiple identity thanks to Internet and social networks. We might be more identified with someone hundred miles away than our neighbors. This will only be more true when the VR technology catching on. The author's world view seemed to be over-conservative and unimaginative since most graphs depicts our world very similar to Columbus's world centuries ago.

This book is neither revolutionary since all its claims are not more sensational than what I read on newspapers. All his claims are either clichés or predictable. You can't even call them observations of a new trend. Most of them are just what is happening as the way it was. I would rather enjoy Ray Kurzweil's dramatic style more , even though his crazy prophecy of singularity is another extreme. That said, at least it is something fresh, and scholarly crazy.














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Autumn

Tübingen

Do we have free will ? My current view to the question.

Do we have free will ? 

What is free will ? 

No one knows the answer because the free will is, by its nature, a perceptual idea that differs from person to person. Is free will the ability to make 'free' decisions regardless possible cost/ reward, or the ability to generate a motivation and goal that is not given by others ? Is it a special quality that is inseparable from human beings, the unique, chosen species of the world, therefore impossible to be analyzed whatsoever, or something that is totally experiential that cannot be appealed to words ?

 If we don't initially agree on what the free will is, we are not going to be able to discuss it.

Here, I adopted the most popular view of what the free will is. That is, free will is the ability to make decisions voluntarily. The ability to make choices by our own not affected by the possible outcomes, our experience, or our previous choices. This implies that it should be totally random, unpredictable, if the task is not relating to any kind of goals. 

Allow me to cite a paragraph from here  , to demonstrate scientist's effort on this issue. 

quote::

16.5.1 The Libet experiment

The classic experiment in the research field of human volition was performed by Libet (297). In this experiment, subjects decide on their own when to move their right hand. After each trial subjects report when they felt the ‘urge to move’, with respect to a rapidly rotating hand of a clock. The reported ‘urge to move’ is in fact about 200ms earlier than the actual movement. Most interestingly, however, electrical brain activity measured by EEG recordings indicates that the brain exhibits signals of preparatory activity already several hundred milliseconds before the reported ‘urge to move’. Thus, if we accept to interpret the felt ‘urge to move’ as the conscious decision to move the hand, then we must also accept the fact that the brain has unconsciously prepared our decision.

A modern and debated variant of the Libet experiment is shown in Fig. 16.11A. The main difference to the original Libet experiment (where the decision was limited to ‘move’ or ‘not move’) is that subjects now hold two buttons, one in the left and the other in the right hand (490). Subjects are free to decide when to move and press either of the two buttons. While subjects perform the experiment, they watch a stream of letters at a rate of two letters per second. At the end of each trial, they indicate at which letter they had felt the ‘urge to move’. The reported letter serves as a timing reference for the subsequent analysis.

During the experiment, brain activity was recorded through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using statistical pattern classification techniques, the authors aimed at predicting the final response outcome (left or right) based on the activity patterns in localized brain areas. If brain activity contained no cue about the final decision, the prediction would be always 50 percent. However, the authors found that activity patterns in fronto-polar cortex 5 seconds before the reported ‘urge to move’ allowed them to predict the final choice (left or right) with a precision of 55 - 60 percent (490) which is above chance but far from a reliable prediction.

quote over ::

The experiment predicted the decision 5s before the subject report they 'feel the urge to move' with 60 % accuracy by monitoring fMRI image of brain activity. Not satisfactory, but somewhat tells us it is not totally unpredictable. There are different models that model the process of decision making in neuronal level. According to the author, the free will to make decision is still under debate, because our decision may be changed drastically at the last millisecond because some novel events change the landscape of Liapunov function during the course the state falls to the attractor.  

 ' We don't do what we want, we want what we do.' Speaking of to identify the moment of 'feeling the urge to act', I cannot avoid mentioning the widely accepted view that we don't generate the urge voluntarily. Our motivation is by large controlled by a variety of hormones, dopamine, and serotonin. These chemicals are the source of the feeling of happiness, sense of belonging, pleasure of orgasm, etc. Our deepest motivations are conditioned by this genetically programmed constraints. If you do something because you feel good, usually it can be boiled down to either social or biological rewards conditioning.  Who can deny, that the happiness is the reward that no one can resists ?

  In rare conditions, we have free will when the outcomes do not affect us consequently. But maybe even in that case the decision process is determined by the random variable embedded in the neuron population. At best, we have free will within constraints of the life we lead in terms of motivation.  However, it brings about a important implication. When we chose to suffer the consequence when there are better options, free will may be operating.  For instance, any self-sacrifice, or suicidal action of sane, healthy people could be explained by free will.

  A mother reported when she observed her bi-polar child, she immediately realized that the insane person has little control to their actions, they don't have free will. It gave rise to a very peculiar yet inspiring point of view that defines the free will in way complement to our previous definition. That is, the free will is not the ability to act according to your urge, but the ability to inhibit the urge. We can design a experiment in light of this. A experiment tests subjects ability to resist being conditioned. When we can control our urges, which usually, if not always, stem from genetically programmed conditions, we are enforcing our free will. 'Free will accompanies voluntary suffering.' this conclusion is not only cogent, but has rich sociological connotation.

  Another interesting view is, no, we don't have free will, since we are in anyway either constrained by biological curse, or sociological cause. The environment either shaped our body, or shaped our mind. Our thought is a product of our experience, or our collected experience, our culture. The view also indicates the essence of the problem is paradoxical because we recursively have to attribute the free will a physical source, a small brain pulling the lever inside our brain, and a smaller brain and so on.  Do we want what we do, or do we do what we want ? Do we have egg first, or chicken first ? 

The paradox may be untangled by introducing the concept of co-evolving. Free will does not emerge at once, but shapes gradually during the process of decision making. That is free will and decision may not be causal related, but co-product.  Or, according to this answer,  that real free will means being able to look at our decisions and actions and understand them in terms of a narrative which identifies ourselves within them. Free will means saying "I did this, because xyz." And maybe we're wrong about the xyz, and maybe you get freer the better you understand yourself over time.