This translation is a substantial revision from the drafts from viscan, Chen, and Jiangxh.

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A fresh female college graduate went to a company to apply for an accountant position. While in the interview, she was immediately turned down because the company wanted to hire a senior accountant. Instead of leaving dejectedly, she pled with the interviewer, “Please at least give me another chance to take the written exam.” Unable to dissuade her, the interviewer allowed her to take the exam. It turned out that the girl passed the written exam with the highest score. Then she proceeded to a final interview with the human resources manager.

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In the first chapter of his bestselling book “The Purpose Driven Life,” Rick Warren claimed that the purpose of life is not for ourselves, but for His purpose. God creates us and uses us to work for His purpose. In other words, only through submitting ourselves to God and starting our quest of lives from Him can we understand ourselves and live purpose driven lives.

However, Rick Warren deliberately skipped one critical question: what is the purpose of God? The rest of his book ignored this question. Instead, it went ahead ranting how one should act like a servant to God and follow the Bible.

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James Hamilton in his blog is talking about the possibility of recession in the next year, 2006-2007. Fairly technical.

The main point is that statistical models are pointless in predicting the future (even the next year). When it comes to the reality, all economic models have failed us till now. All models are wrong but some are useful. Macroeconomic models are useless.

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Health care system is a problem in the US, so is in the China. The US health care system is far less efficient than those of the rest of industrilized countries. US politicians don’t understand that it is the population health in the whole societynot the insurance policy itself that we should focus on.

Ironically, Chinese government tries to imitate the US health care system. The result, as we all know, is a miserable failure.

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well it’s a long way from Star, Mississippi
to the big stage I’m Singin’ on tonight
and sometimes the butterflies still get me
when I’m in the spotlight
and some people seem to think that I’ve changed
that I’m different than I was back then
but in my soul I know that I’m the same way
that I’ve really always been
…
Mississippi Girl (mp3) in the album Fireflies

Star, Mississippi is a small rural town. But it has been blessed to secretly enjoy a great voice for eighteen years. Now all over the country is resounding with the town’s name. Thanks to its proud daughter Faith Hill.

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Boy, we’ve come a long way. My data object system gets more and more complicate. I have also corrected many errors (stealthily) in my previous posts. If you haven’t reread my previous posts, let me recapitulate the status quo of the data object system.

We have several atomic object types: number, character, logical value, missing value, and raw value. Vectors comprise these object types are atomic vectors. They are building blocks in our system. The type of vector is determined by its components. To avoid confusion, we now call the object type “mode”, and reserve “class” for a more extensive classification purpose. Therefore, for every object, it has four default attributes: class, mode, length, and name. It also has at least one method: indexing method.

A list class is a versatile tool which can combine all kinds of objects into one object. A data.frame class is a table like object type which is developed from the list class. Thus, the mode of the data.frame class is “list”, which indicates that data.frame is indeed a list.

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OK, let’s continue our expedition on data. In the previous section, I introduced the list class (object type) in the need of combining different types of vectors such as numbers and strings into one object. However, that introduction is somewhat unfair to the list class. In fact, list can consist of any objects including list objects. That is, it can be recursive. This is true in R/S, and I believe there are comparable object types in C++ and JAVA. After all, you need something versatile enough to accommodate the whole universe.

Now we have the almighty list class and we have also said that vector is the basis of all objects in our data object system, which means list also belongs to the vector class. This is kind of confusing. All objects inside a vector must have the same class but list can include any objects. How could a list also be a vector? Please read on.

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During last couple days, I have been programming in R intensively. To be honest, although I have been following R since v0.9, R is never a major tool for my daily activities. Most of my route analyses are better done in SAS or Stata than in R.

It has been said that R (or S) is currently the best statistical language, which I have not much objection to. But the learning curve of R is definitely steeper than those of Stata and other software. Again one could say that nothing is easy to learn if you want to do any serious stuff.

No matter which tool people are using in their data analysis, it appears to me that few of them bother to think about a fundamental question: what are data?

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It was Saturday night. Sue was the brightest star in the whole universe. Several netters were throwing a birthday party for her. Sue was particularly surprised and excited to see Leo, a humorous and matured gentleman. He was also younger than she thought. At the first sight of seeing him, she had determined to get close to him, really close.

Sue and Leo had been huddling together and flattering each other for a long time. Sue’s intelligence and gorgeous body impressed Leo. For better or worse, Sue was so open mind that she allowed him to “evaluate” her breast. The touch, like magic, broke down all the barriers between them. Sue felt a surge of urgency: she wanted to have him in whole, right now!

Sue completely lost her control. She ran around house naked, kissed Leo passionately, ignored all warnings from friends, and inevitably, had sex with Leo that night.

After Sue emerged from the basement the next morning, friends were mad at them. They reproached them openly. Adults, they accused, should be responsible for their behavior, let alone there were three kids in the house.

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Wong’s 2046 is an erotic movie, so do Wong’s previous shots such as “in the mood of love.” I haven’t seen the “2046” and probably will never see it. It is not of my taste (including the type of women in the movie).

In fact, I don’t need to see the movie to know what will happen in it. Wong’s movies always start with a sluggish man who claims himself some sort of past celebrity, lodges in a dirty place, and is surrounded by sexually unsatisfied women. Sure, those women are call girls, rebellious ladies, or husband-on-leave. But it doesn’t matter. Sex is the major theme in these movies. The sexual activities will be silent, lewd, but masked. You can see legs but no butts. Note: it is said that Ziyi Zhang, who has determined to become the sexist movie star ever, will demonstrate some fancy sexual techniques in the movie.

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