Illusion Slopes

Completed some overdue site maintenance over the past few weeks: RSS feed styling: With help from a template found on GitHub, I created a stylesheet for the RSS feed so that it looks nice when viewed in the browser.

In this post, we will show that functions of the form f(X)=1−∏i∈Ω∖X(1−pi)∏i∈X(1−qi) f(X) = 1 - \prod_{i \in \Omega \setminus X} (1 - p_i) \prod_{i \in X} (1 - q_i) are submodular for pi,qi∈[0,1]p_i, q_i \in [0, 1] where each pi≤qi,p_i \leq q_i, and examine

Finished reading, but still thinking about: 정유정, «종의 기원», a thriller.

For the past few updates of Guitarix, I have been having issues where changing the JACK server latency causes the audio output to go crazy.

I’ve been using the following fish alias fzl (“fuzzy list”) to run fzf (“fuzzy find”) in the current directory with a bat preview.

fortune is a classic UNIX program that displays random fortunes, pithy quotes, and the like: $ fortune If you think last Tuesday was a drag, wait till you see what happens tomorrow!

I’ve been playing electric guitar using only computer modeling software (without a physical amplifier) for about five years now.

A subset of the books I enjoyed this year: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, a novel about evangelical Christianity and cultural arrogance.

A puzzle based on the icebreaker game.

On September 29, I received my master’s degree in industrial engineering from Seoul National University!

In this post, we’ll use fake numbers and a simplified model to argue that the most college applicants should apply to far more colleges than they actually do.

Consider the following test question: Which of the following are US States?

I recently created Mulberry, a web app students can use to compute their optimal college application strategy.

One of my current projects involves editing several hours’ worth of subtitle files in the .srt format to accompany an online course in numerical optimization.

A harrowing thing that happens in research is that occasionally, you stumble upon a paper from 1979 (paywall) that appears to solve the exact problem that you’ve been working on for months, but that escaped your attention because it used different termino…

After reflecting on my unsustainable dependency on Google services, I have decided to bite the bullet and migrate my blog from Blogger to the open-source Jekyll, with hosting provided by GitHub.

This week, I defended my master’s thesis at Seoul National University.

I gave a brief presentation about the college application problem at a research fair hosted by our department.

In advance of a conference I will be attending with my labmates next month in Jeju, my thesis advisor and I have posted a preliminary version of “The College Application Problem” on arXiv.

I’ve spent a few days thinking about a facility location problem that we might call the school location problem.

This fall marks my final semester of coursework, and penultimate semester overall, of the master’s course in industrial engineering here at Seoul National University.

Existing computational models of admissions markets tend to fall at one of two extremes: Either they envision a centralized admissions process in which the school board runs an algorithm that says which students go where, or a decentralized process in whi…

Planet Money, an NPR show about economics, recently ran an episode entitled “The Marriage Pact” that deals precisely with my research topic.

They say that we perceive time by the accumulation of novel experiences, so that if you want to have a subjectively long life, you ought to do many spontaneous and hard-to-repeat things, but if you want to have a happy life, you ought to find one or two h…

In addition to the myth that it’s impossible for adults to “really” learn a foreign language, a widely held misconception about language learning is the notion that beginners must learn from native speakers.

It is a well-known result in psychology that measures of intelligence correlate across domains.

The more I learn, I find myself with fewer and fewer things to say.

I have been measuring the leaves of my houseplants.

In August, I surveyed my students about their motivation for learning English, their opinions about our class and my teaching style, and what resources they were using to study English outside of class.

They say that major lifestyle changes—even positive ones, like starting a new job or moving—are one of the biggest stressors out there.

Fun fact: the most-viewed post on this blog, by a long shot, is the one where I shared that I’d received a Critical Language Scholarship from the US Department of State to study Korean in Gwangju.

In an influential article reimagining how we teach art in the modern classroom, Olivia Gude observes that when students set about “looking for and developing images from inkblots, smoke marks, or wax drippings,” even the artistically checked-out ones begin

We pretend stability by tracking our life’s progress as a series of marginal changes, so that from each day to the next we can see that we are still ourselves, changed perhaps in substance, but never in identity.

I’ve just finished my first week of class at Chonnam National Universty here in Gwangju with CLS and everything is amazing!

I am blessed and honored to have received a Critical Language Scholarship from the US Department of State to study Korean language this summer at Chonnam University.

Here is a post with all kinds of crazy formatting so that I can test out my CSS.