Misconceptions about education and schooling held by traditional Chinese parents
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A large part of the reason I have put my autobiography online is to help students with authoritarian parents cope with their parents’ interference in their education. Previously, a person whose parents disagreed with his or her educational or career choices had the option of trying to hide them from their parents. With the Internet, this has become essentially impossible.
Because most people aren’t going to read my rather long autobiography, I have distilled what I want to say on the misconceptions held by traditional Chinese parents about education and schooling into a few important points which I will discuss below. This way, any student caught in the situation that I was in can print this out and use it to tell their parents that they are on the path to destroying his or her academic career… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Frequently Asked Questions about my name
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Q. Is your name really “Davinci Logan Yonge-Mallo”?
A. That’s what it says on my legal documents.
Q. Okay, then. Let’s begin with the surname. “Yonge” is obviously an Anglicised version of your Chinese surname, but where does “Mallo” come from?
A. Actually, “Yonge” is the name of my favourite street in Toronto… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
An essay on open notebook science
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I have written an essay advocating the adoption of open notebook science by the computer science community. The essay is self-referential in that it discusses the process of collaboratively writing papers online, and is itself written using MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. I invite suggestions and comments on the discussion page for the essay.
I have tried to keep the essay as impersonal as possible. The benefits given in the essay of keeping an open notebook apply to any scientist, but I especially have some very personal reasons, if not for advocating the practice, then at least for engaging in it myself… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Using jsMath with WordPress, bbPress, and Wikindx
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There’s really no special trick to using jsMath with WordPress, bbPress, or Wikindx — just follow the installation instructions.
Essentially, you just need to add the following code in the header of your web site (where “path.to” should be replaced with the URL to your installation of jsMath):
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://path.to/jsMath/easy/load.js"></script>
For this web site, the above line was added to the headers of each of the template files of the component software packages.
One minor trick to getting jsMath to work with Wikindx is that all special characters have to be escaped properly\(\)… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
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My parents have always worked very hard throughout my life to cut me off from people who inspired, encouraged, or helped me to make the most of myself. They attacked me for socialising with people who motivated me to do well in school and provided me with opportunities to practise many of the skills I would later need in university while I was still in high school. They discouraged, prevented, or forbid me from associating with people who supported me. They did everything that they could to deprive me of the intellectual cultural background shared by my future colleagues, and continually criticised me for being in the company of the kind of people that my teachers and my classmates’ parents were always trying to inspire their students and children, respectively, to become. But the fact is that throughout my life there has always been a perfect correlation between my productivity and my sociability, and my parents’ eradication of my enjoyment of the company of others led inevitably to the collapse of my ability to do any work whatsoever.
The only way for me to return to work was to complete my Research Proposal. I couldn’t write it, because every time I sat down to write all I could think about was how my father had beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for writing about essentially the same thing back in high school… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
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I scrapped my plans for the seminar, and in fact, I essentially did not go to school for several months. Anything that was related to quantum computing became very depressing to me. A series of events related to research into quantum foundations and information, collectively called “Taming the Quantum World”, was scheduled to take place that summer at IQC and PI. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of being surrounded by people who would have told me what a moron my father was, if they had known about his opinions on their research, even though I had wanted to be there. I also had to avoid the other graduate students at IQC because I didn’t want to hear any discussions about QIP and their plans for going to India.
One of the activities that I undertook to cheer myself up was a hiking trip to the Bruce Peninsula with several people, including Mina, who became my girlfriend over that summer. My parents had thoroughly destroyed my ability even just to be in the presence of my academic colleagues by continually attacking them and their research throughout my life, but despite their persistent efforts they had not managed to eradicate my social life entirely, and I still had friends who supported me.
In the meantime, I applied to have my surname legally changed… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
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I suppose that I should explain why, even though my parents had caused me so much pain and were actively opposed to everything that I did, I did not break off contact with them much earlier. In retrospect, I wish that I had run away from home in high school. Not having done so is the biggest regret of my life.
I had actually discussed in high school with some friends my intention to run away from home, but I was talked out of it. It wasn’t that they had given me reasons not to run away; they were the reasons not to run away… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
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The locations of some of the upcoming conferences and events at the time were also a source of depression for me. I wrote in a previous post that none of the people my supervisor worked with were Iranians, but one of his co-authors, whose papers I was studying, did have a connection to Iran. Dr. Barry Sanders of the University of Calgary, who shared my belief that it was very important for scientists from Iran and the West to interact with each other, was instrumental in playing a part in organising the International Iran Conference on Quantum Information, which was to take place in September 2007 on Kish Island in Iran. And the QIP workshop 2008, which was actually in December of 2007, was held in New Delhi, India.
Now these were countries that I had wanted to visit for personal reasons… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 9: exposed
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One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive parents is that it is often impossible to explain your motivations to others. I expressed to Dr. Cleve that I wanted to look for a research topic connected with engineering, and he was glad to assist me with this. But I never fully explained to him all of the restrictions that I was under, and I guess he must have been frustrated that I wasn’t as enthusiastic about many of his suggestions as I would have been if I didn’t have my parents’ reaction to them to consider.
Because I couldn’t find a way to disguise my research or to connect it to a topic that was acceptable to my parents, I was under a lot of stress while I carried it out. It’s very difficult to conduct scientific research unless one is excited about a topic, and it’s very difficult to be excited about a topic that causes one to experience physical and psychological pain. (I think even a masochist enjoys physical pain only because it gives him psychological pleasure.) My life in the Ph.D. program as a quantum computing researcher consisted of exactly the activities that my father had punished me so severely for in high school: … » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
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The next several posts were especially difficult for me to write, but they are also the most important in my autobiographical series. Every post in the series up to now had been written for the purpose of setting up these ones.
In the previous posts, I have described the damage caused by my parents’ anti-intellectualism and their hatred of science to my scientific career. They have been persecuting me for my interest in science, and more broadly for my intellectual interests in general, ever since they came to Canada. They kept up their attacks on my scientific research throughout high school, right through university, and even into graduate school. By the time I entered the Ph.D. program in computer science and switched into quantum computing as my research area — which my parents had forbidden me to study under pain of being disowned — the regular day-to-day activities of a scientific researcher, such as reading papers or having discussions with colleagues, would cause me to experience physical pain.
Obviously, this prevented me from focusing on my work or making any progress in my research. A question that naturally arises is, “Why would you put so much effort into doing something that is so painful to you?” Or, equivalently, “Why not be doing something else?”… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]