Sylvain Lefebvre has a nice post about how to structure code for producing research results; see here. (Full disclosure: Sylvain is my collaborator, but he is a superb researcher and coder, as evident from his resume.)
2011-09-17
2011-09-11
A year of no significance
1587, a Year of No Significance (Chinese: 萬曆十五年) is a book by historian Ray Huang (Chinese: 黃仁宇) which described how a sequence of seemingly insignificant events precipitated the eventual downfall of the Ming dynasty, as well as China itself. I remember getting totally fascinated by this book as a high school kid. The book is not flawless, but it is fascinating in highlighting how significant long term trends, which usually happen slowly, are often preceded by very small signs.
It is like the famous Chinese proverb, 一葉知秋: from a falling tree leaf one can know that the autumn is coming.
If future historians are going to write a similar book about the eventual downfall of the America (dynasty) as well as the entire West, the analogous year will be 2001, or probably even a specific day, September 11. Contrast to 1587, this is a year of *major* significance. But THE event is no less precipitating than those in 1587.
I am looking forward to read this book, and I hope it will be as enthralling as the one by Ray Huang.
2011-08-20
Chinks on the armor
Two landmark stores in my neighborhood Borders (Palo Alto) and Andronico (Stanford), closed shops recently.
I used to think that the Bay Area is so different from the rest of the America (and the rest of the world). It is the cream of the crop. It seems invulnerable. It felt almost nothing has changed, even after the dot com bubble, which it triggered. When America and the rest of the world set into recession after 2008, it managed to come up with a bubble on social networks. Companies are still hiring, and well paid jobs are plenty. It even landed several friends of mine who recently graduated from top Asian schools.
But I am not so sure now. The closure of these 2 shops, which I thought will be there forever, just felt different. Something has changed.
Are those the natural parts of relentless creative destructions, or signs of more ominent things to come?
2011-07-20
Name
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” – William Shakespeare
But this is true only if the name is not already loaded with other meanings and the name cannot reflexively influence the entity being named. For the name “rose”, it does not carry any meaning other than a specific breed of flowers that smell sweet. For the entity “rose”, it still smells sweet even if it is named otherwise (such as “dung”).
When it comes to naming, people would be an exact opposite case to roses. People’s names are usually already overloaded with meanings, and names can reflexively influence people’s behaviors and self perceptions. I have an uncle whose first name was “至愚” which roughly translates to *extremely stupid*, and my grandparents told me that it became an excuse (in a funny and joking way though) for my uncle to not perform well in school as a child. (He later changed his name to something better.)
In case you wonder, it is not uncommon for Chinese parents to name their heirs negatively, as the tradition believes that doing so can help avoid devil’s attention. But whatever discretion my grandfather has for that uncle disappeared when he named me “立一”, which roughly translates to *number one*, *the first*, or *the best*. Not a typical name in a culture that observes humility and conformity (and devil’s attention). Probably because of the name or probably because of the expectations, I have been trying to live up to my name since childhood, although unfortunately more on the non-humble/non-conforming side rather than on the being number-one side. And probably because of the devil’s attention, I always have difficulty accomplishing anything other than the best, even if I tried.
Every year during my birthday, I tried to find someone or something to be thankful. In the last few years I thanked my mom for the pain she has to endure to bear and raise me. But this year, I would like to thank the name that was given to me, and the family elders who came up with it. It has guided me well throughout my entire life. Every time I have doubts about myself or need to make hard decisions, my name already reminds me who I am and what I am supposed to do.
2011-05-16
SIGGRAH contributor discount
SIGGRAPH gives one contributor code to each technical paper so that at most one author can get a 50 percent registration discount. However, the discount is not accumulative, so (in effect) each author can receive at most one contributor code. By considering the fact that some authors may be on multiple papers, it becomes an interesting optimization problem on how to assign the contributor codes among all paper authors to maximize the total number of utilized discounts.
Under the general scenarios, this looks like an NP hard problem. (Correct me if I am wrong, as I am very rusty about basic algorithm theories.) By constructing a pathological scenario with the right number of total authors and authors on each paper, this can be quite a difficult problem to solve.
Fortunately, the reality is much simpler; since the number of papers for each author is usually quite limited, the *relationship graph* among all authors contain many isolated islands (that can be solved independently). In fact, I have found that a very simple randomized algorithm would just work: visit the papers in a random order, and pick a random author that has yet received any contributor code.
The results for SIGGRAPH 2011 technical papers are as follows. For each paper, blue color indicates the author receiving the contributor code, red color indicates authors who receive codes from other papers, and gray color indicates authors who receive nothing.
(I hope ACM won’t ban me from attending SIGGRAPH.)
Physically-valid Statistical Motion Models for Human Motion Synthesis
Xiaolin Wei
Jianyuan Min
Jin-Xiang Chai
Motion Capture From Body-Mounted Cameras
Takaaki Shiratori
Hyun Soo Park
Leonid Sigal
Yaser Sheikh
Jessica Hodgins
Motion Reconstruction Using Sparse Accelerometer Data
Jochen Tautges
Arno Zinke
Bjorn Kruger
Jan Baumann
Andreas Weber
Thomas Helten
Meinard Muller
Hans-Peter Seidel
Bernd Eberhardt
Video-based Characters – Creating New Human Performances from a Multi-view Video Database
Feng Xu
Yebin Liu
Carsten Stoll
James Tompkin
Gaurav Bharaj
Qionghai Dai
Hans-Peter Seidel
Jan Kautz
Christian Theobalt
ShadowDraw: Real-Time User Guidance for Freehand Drawing
Yong Jae Lee
Larry Zitnick
Michael F. Cohen
OverCoat: An Implicit Canvas for 3D Painting
Johannes Schmid
Martin Sebastian Senn
Markus Gross
Robert Sumner
A Programmable System for Artistic Volumetric Lighting
Derek Nowrouzezahrai
Jared Johnson
Andrew Selle
Dylan Lacewell
Michael Kaschalk
Wojciech Jarosz
Coherent Noise for Non-Photorealistic Rendering
Michael Kass
Davide Pesare
Exploration of Continuous Variability in Collections of 3D Shapes
Maksim Ovsjanikov
Wilmot Li
Leonidas Guibas
Niloy J. Mitra
Characterizing Structural Relationships in Scenes Using Graph Kernels
Matthew Fisher
Manolis Savva
Pat Hanrahan
Probabilistic Reasoning for Assembly-Based 3D Modeling
Siddhartha Chaudhuri
Evangelos Kalogerakis
Leonidas Guibas
Vladlen Koltun
Shape google: Geometric words and expressions for invariant shape retrieval
Alexander Bronstein
Michael Bronstein
Leonidas Guibas
Maksim Ovsjanikov
Eulerian Solid Simulation With Contact
David I.W. Levin
Joshua Litven
Garrett L. Jones
Shinjiro Sueda
Dinesh Pai
Efficient Elasticity for Character Skinning with Contact and Collisions
Aleka McAdams
Yongning Zhu
Andrew Selle
Mark Empey
Rasmus Tamstorf
Joseph M. Teran
Eftychios Sifakis
Toward High-Quality Modal Contact Sound
Changxi Zheng
Doug James
A Nonsmooth Newton Solver for Capturing Exact Coulomb Friction in Fiber Assemblies
Florence Bertails-Descoubes
Florent Cadoux
Gilles Daviet
Vincent Acary
Large-Scale Dynamic Simulation of Highly Constrained Strands
Shinjiro Sueda
Garrett L. Jones
David I.W. Levin
Dinesh Pai
HDR-VDP-2: A calibrated visual metric for visibility and quality predictions in all luminance conditions
Rafal Mantiuk
Kil Joong Kim
Allan G. Rempel
Wolfgang Heidrich
A Versatile HDR Video Production System
Mike Tocci
Chris Kiser
Nora Tocci
Pradeep Sen
Perceptually Based Tone Mapping for Low-Light Conditions
Adam G. Kirk
James F. O’Brien
Illumination Decomposition for Material Recoloring with Consistent Interreflections
Rob Carroll
Ravi Ramamoorthi
Maneesh Agrawala
High-Quality Spatio-Temporal Rendering using Semi-Analytical Visibility
Carl Johan Gribel
Rasmus Barringer
Tomas Akenine-Moller
Frequency Analysis and Sheared Filtering for Shadow Light Fields of Complex Occluders
Kevin Egan
Florian Hecht
Fredo Durand
Ravi Ramamoorthi
Temporal Light Field Reconstruction for Rendering Distribution Effects
Jaakko Lehtinen
Timo Aila
Jiawen Chen
Samuli Laine
Fredo Durand
The Area Perspective Transform: A Homogeneous Transform for Efficient In-Volume Queries
Warren Hunt
Greg Johnson
Building Volumetric Appearance Models of Fabric using Micro CT Imaging
Shuang Zhao
Wenzel Jakob
Steve Marschner
Kavita Bala
Pocket Reflectometry
Peiran Ren
Jiaping Wang
John Snyder
Xin Tong
Baining Guo
Microgeometry Capture Using an Elastomeric Sensor
Micah Johnson
Forrester Cole
Alvin Raj
Edward Adelson
CATRA: Interactive Measuring and Modeling of Cataracts
Vitor F. Pamplona
Erick Baptista Passos
J Zizka
Manuel M. Oliveira
Esteban Clua
Ramesh Raskar
Blue-Noise Point Sampling using Kernel Density Model
Raanan Fattal
Efficient Maximal Poisson-Disk Sampling
Mohamed S. Ebeida
Anjul Patney
Scott A. Mitchell
Andrew Davidson
Patrick M. Knupp
John D. Owens
Differential Domain Analysis for Non-uniform Sampling
Li-Yi Wei
Rui Wang
Filtering Solid Gabor Noise
Ares Lagae
George Drettakis
GlobFit: Consistently Fitting Primitives by Discovering Global Relations
Yangyan Li
Xiaokun Wu
Yiorgos Chrysanthou
Andrei Sharf
Daniel Cohen-Or
Niloy J. Mitra
Global Registration of Dynamic Range Scans for Articulated Model Reconstruction
Will Chang
Matthias Zwicker
Texture-Lobes for Tree Modelling
Yotam Livny
Soeren Pirk
Zhanglin Cheng
Feilong Yan
Oliver Deussen
Daniel Cohen-Or
Baoquan Chen
L1-sparse Reconstruction of Sharp Point Set Surfaces
Haim Avron
Andrei Sharf
Chen Greif
Daniel Cohen-Or
Interactive and Anisotropic Geometry Processing Using the Screened Poisson Equation
Ming Chuang
Michael Kazhdan
Dinus: Double insertion, nonuniform, stationary subdivision surfaces
Kerstin Muller
Christoph Funfzig
Lars Reusche
Dianne Hansford
Gerald Farin
Hans Hagen
An Efficient Scheme for Curve and Surface Construction Based on a Set of Interpolatory Basis Functions
Ren-Jiang Zhang
Weiyin Ma
A Quantized-Diffusion Model for Rendering Translucent Materials
Eugene d’Eon
Geoffrey Irving
A Comprehensive Theory of Volumetric Radiance Estimation using Photon Points and Beams
Wojciech Jarosz
Derek Nowrouzezahrai
Iman Sadeghi
Henrik Wann Jensen
Progressive Photon Mapping: A Probabilistic Approach
Claude Knaus
Matthias Zwicker
Cache-Oblivious Ray Reordering
Bochang Moon
Youngyong Byun
Tae-Joon Kim
Pio Claudio
Hye-sun Kim
Yun-ji Ban
Seung Woo Nam
Sung-Eui Yoon
Expression Flow for 3D-Aware Face Component Transfer
Fei Yang
Jue Wang
Eli Shechtman
Lubomir Bourdev
Dimitris Metaxas
Image-Guided Weathering: A New Approach Applied to Flow Phenomena
Carles Bosch
Pierre-Yves Laffont
Holly Rushmeier
Julie Dorsey
George Drettakis
Exploring Photobios
Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
Rahul Garg
Steven M. Seitz
Eli Shechtman
Discrete Element Textures
Chongyang Ma
Li-Yi Wei
Xin Tong
Space-time Planning with Parameterized Locomotion Controllers
Sergey Levine
Yongjoon Lee
Vladlen Koltun
Zoran Popovic
Articulated Swimming Creatures
Jie Tan
Yuting Gu
Greg Turk
C. Karen Liu
Locomotion Skills for Simulated Quadrupeds
Stelian Coros
Andrej Karpathy
Ben Jones
Lionel Reveret
Michiel van de Panne
Composite Control of Physically Simulated Characters
Uldarico Muico
Character Animation in Two-player Adversarial Games
Kevin Wampler
Erik Andersen
Evan Herbst
Yongjoon Lee
Zoran Popovic
Color Compatibility from Large Datasets
Peter O’Donovan
Aseem Agarwala
Aaron Hertzmann
Edge-Aware Color Appearance
Min H. Kim
Tobias Ritschel
Jan Kautz
Example-based Image Color and Tone Style Enhancement
Baoyuan Wang
Yizhou Yu
Ying-Qing Xu
Switchable Primaries Using Shiftable Layers of Color Filter Arrays
Behzad Sajadi
Aditi Majumder
Kazuhiro Hiwada
Ramesh Raskar
Contributing Vertices-Based Minkowski Sum of a Non-Convex–Convex Pair of Polyhedra
Hichem Barki
Florence Denis
Florent Dupont
MeshFlow: Interactive Visualization of Mesh Construction Sequences
Jonathan Denning
William Kerr
Fabio Pellacini
LR: Compact Connectivity Representation for Triangle Meshes
Topraj Gurung
Mark Luffel
Peter Lindstrom
Jarek Rossignac
On the Velocity of an Implicit Surface
Jos Stam
Ryan Schmidt
Data-Driven Elastic Models for Cloth: Modeling and Measurement
Huamin Wang
James F. O’Brien
Ravi Ramamoorthi
Frame-based Elastic Models
Benjamin Gilles
Guillaume Bousquet
Francois Faure
Dinesh Pai
Example-Based Elastic Materials
Sebastian Martin
Bernhard Thomaszewski
Eitan Grinspun
Markus Gross
Sparse Meshless Models of Complex Deformable Objects
Francois Faure
Benjamin Gilles
Guillaume Bousquet
Dinesh Pai
Antialiasing Recovery
Lei Yang
Pedro V. Sander
Jason Lawrence
Hugues Hoppe
Local Laplacian Filters: Edge-aware Image Processing with a Laplacian Pyramid
Sylvain Paris
Samuel W. Hasinoff
Jan Kautz
Domain Transform for Edge-Aware Image and Video Processing
Eduardo S. L. Gastal
Manuel M. Oliveira
Non-Rigid Dense Correspondence with Applications for Image Enhancement
Yoav Hacohen
Eli Shechtman
Dan Goldman
Dani Lischinski
Leveraging Motion Capture and 3D Scanning for High-Fidelity Facial Performance Acquisition
Haoda Huang
Jin-Xiang Chai
Xin Tong
Hsiang-Tao Wu
High-Quality Passive Facial Performance Capture Using Anchor Frames
Thabo Beeler
Fabian Hahn
Derek Bradley
Bernd Bickel
Paul Beardsley
Craig Gotsman
Bob Sumner
Markus Gross
Interactive Region-based Linear 3D Face Models
Jose Rafael Tena
Fernando de la Torre
Iain Matthews
Realtime Performance-Based Facial Animation
Thibaut Weise
Sofien Bouaziz
Hao Li
Mark Pauly
Bounded Biharmonic Weights for Real-Time Deformation
Alec Jacobson
Ilya Baran
Jovan Popovic
Olga Sorkine
Blended Intrinsic Maps
Vladimir G. Kim
Yaron Lipman
Thomas Funkhouser
Biharmonic Distance
Yaron Lipman
Raif Rustamov
Thomas Funkhouser
Photo-Inspired Model-Driven 3D Object Modeling
Kai Xu
Hanlin Zheng
Hao Zhang
Daniel Cohen-Or
Ligang Liu
Yueshan Xiong
Two-Scale Particle Simulation
Barbara Solenthaler
Markus Gross
Real-Time Eulerian Water Simulation Using a Restricted Tall Cell Grid
Nuttapong Chentanez
Matthias Mueller
A PML-Based Nonreflective Boundary for Free Surface Fluid Animation
Andreas Soderstrom
Matts Karlsson
Ken Museth
Guide shapes for high resolution naturalistic liquid simulation
Michael Nielsen
Robert Bridson
Animating Fire With Sound
Jeffrey Chadwick
Doug James
Converting 3D Furniture Models to Fabricatable Parts and Connectors
Manfred Lau
Akira Ohgawara
Jun Mitani
Takeo Igarashi
Make it Home: Automatic Optimization of Furniture Arrangement
Lap-Fai Yu
Sai-Kit Yeung
Chi-Keung Tang
Demetri Terzopoulos
Tony F. Chan
Stanley Osher
Interactive Furniture Layout Using Interior Design Guidelines
Paul Merrell
Eric Schkufza
Zeyang Li
Maneesh Agrawala
Vladlen Koltun
Interactive Architectural Modeling with Procedural Extrusions
Tom Kelly
Peter Wonka
Metropolis Procedural Modeling
Jerry O. Talton
Yu Lou
Steve Lesser
Jared Duke
Radomir Mech
Vladlen Koltun
Sensitive Couture for Interactive Garment Design
Nobuyuki Umetani
Danny Kaufman
Takeo Igarashi
Eitan Grinspun
Real-Time Large-Deformation Substructuring
Jernej Barbic
Yili Zhao
Solid Simulation with Oriented Particles
Matthias Mueller
Nuttapong Chentanez
Physics-Inspired Upsampling for Cloth Simulation in Games
Ladislav Kavan
Daniel Gerszewski
Adam Bargteil
Peter-Pike Sloan
Image and Video Upscaling from Local Self-Examples
Gilad Freeman
Raanan Fattal
Scalable and Coherent Video Resizing with Per-Frame Optimization
Yu-Shuen Wang
Jen-Hung Hsiao
Olga Sorkine
Tong-Yee Lee
Subspace Video Stabilization
Feng Liu
Michael Gleicher
Jue Wang
Hailin Jin
Aseem Agarwala
Tonal Stabilization of Video
Zeev Farbman
Dani Lischinski
Making Burr Puzzles from 3D Models
Shi-Qing Xin
Chi-Fu Lai
Chi-Wing Fu
Tien-Tsin Wong
Ying He
Daniel Cohen-Or
A Geometric Study of V-style Pop-ups: Theories and Algorithms
Xian-Ying Li
Tao Ju
Yan Gu
Shi-Min Hu
Depixelizing Pixel Art
Johannes Kopf
Dani Lischinski
Digital Micrography
Ron Maharik
Mikhail Bessmeltsev
Alla Sheffer
Ariel Shamir
Nathan Carr
Computational Stereo Camera System With Programmable Control Loop
Simon Heinzle
Pierre Greisen
David Gallup
Christine Chen
Daniel Saner
Aljoscha Smolic
Andreas Peter Burg
Wojciech Matusik
Markus Gross
Highlighted DOF Photography: Shining Light on Focus
Jaewon Kim
Roarke Horstmeyer
Ig-Jae Kim
Ramesh Raskar
Layered 3D: Tomographic Image Synthesis for Attenuation-based Light Field and High Dynamic Range Displays
Gordon Wetzstein
Douglas Lanman
Wolfgang Heidrich
Ramesh Raskar
A Perceptual Model for Disparity
Piotr Didyk
Tobias Ritschel
Elmar Eisemann
Karol Myszkowski
Hans-Peter Seidel
Circular arc structures
Pengbo Bo
Helmut Pottmann
Martin Kilian
Wenping Wang
Johannes Wallner
Discrete Laplacians on General Polygonal Meshes
Marc Alexa
Max Wardetzky
HOT: Hodge-Optimized Triangulations
Patrick Mullen
Pooran Memari
Fernando de Goes
Mathieu Desbrun
Spin Transformations of Discrete Surfaces
Keenan Crane
Ulrich Pinkall
Peter Schroder
Interactive Editing of Massive Imagery Made Simple: Turning Atlanta into Atlantis
Brian Summa
Giorgio Scorzelli
Ming Jiang
Peer-Timo Bremer
Valerio Pascucci
Geodesic Image and Video Editing
Antonio Criminisi
Toby Sharp
Carsten Rother
Patrick Perez
Matting and Compositing of Transparent and Refractive Objects
Sai-Kit Yeung
Chi-Keung Tang
Michael S. Brown
Sing Bing Kang
Nonlinear Revision Control for Images
Hsiang-Ting Chen
Li-Yi Wei
Chun-Fa Chang
Clipless Dual-Space Bounds for Faster Stochastic Rasterization
Samuli Laine
Timo Aila
Tero Karras
Jaakko Lehtinen
Decoupled Sampling for Graphics Pipelines
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
Jaakko Lehtinen
Jiawen Chen
Michael Doggett
Fredo Durand
Spark: Modular, Composable Shaders for Graphics Hardware
Tim Foley
Pat Hanrahan
Physically Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering
Matthias Hullin
Elmar Eisemann
Hans-Peter Seidel
Sungkil Lee
2011-04-13
My attitude towards rejections
Thank you very much for providing all the motivations I need.
I am going to prove you wrong by outperforming whomever you think is better than me.
My meaning of life
Life is a (serious) game, so play hard, be triumphant, and (most importantly) have fun. The game is very short and you might only play it once, so do not waste your time.
2011-04-11
How to give a paper presentation
Congratulations that your paper has been accepted to the most prestigious conference in your academic field. You can have a sigh of relief and take a vacation. You deserve it.
But your job is not over yet. You still have to present the paper.
It is important
The presentation is essentially a promo for your paper, and to some degree, for yourself. So it is to your advantage to give a good talk. And if you are relatively junior in the field, you should do it yourself (instead of your adviser or another co-author). This will give you the necessary exposure and recognition.
It is a sales pitch
This can be a personal preference, but for me, a conference talk is more of an advertisement than an education. A very common mistake is trying to cram in all the information into a presentation, hoping that the audience will understand everything. Unfortunately, the talk slots are usually too short and the audience too distracted for this to happen.
Instead, consider the conference as a social event, and your talk a sales pitch. Your goal is to attract people to get interested in your paper, so that they will later spend time reading it. And if you can give a good talk, it also helps sell you as a good researcher. This can translate into long term benefits, like job offers.
Content
The content of your talk should be mainly about the following: (1) why people should care about your paper, (2) why they should read it after your talk, and (3) what are the key points of your paper. Remember, it is more of an advertisement (1 and 2) than education (3).
Actually, there is one more: (4) what a cool and smart guy you are. But you really need to know what you are doing. And if you do, you are beyond this post already.
Practice
Finally, practice your talk, both with yourself and in front of an audience. If you are relatively inexperienced or have a certain degree of glossophobia (most people do), practice enough times so that you can give the talk while sleeping. I practiced at least 20 times for my first SIGGRAPH talk, even though nowadays I usually do just once or twice to avoid cruising through my talk with a too rigid or scripted performance.
2011-02-02
A tale of two brothers
A long time ago in a place far far away, a pair of twin brothers were born. Their parents worked long hours, so they were put with different day care families. One of them, nicknamed Rat, lived with his grandfather. The other one, nicknamed Dog, lived with a retired nanny.
The grandfather was a former college professor who had nobody around to lecture on, so he force-fed Rat everything he knew, like chess, history, and classics literature. The grandfather was also a retired army officer, so he instilled discipline and self-control into Rat’s mentality and life style. Through this rigorous training, Rat absorbed everything happily, even though some of the subjects were clearly beyond his age (e.g. classics which should be for high school, not kindergarten, kids). At first grade he knew that history books are filled with lies written by the winners, and at fourth grade he beat his grandfather in a chess match. He was so ahead of his classmates that he found school very boring and thus got into a lot of troubles. To channel his excessive energy, Rat tried to pick up college calculus at fifth grade, but did not succeed until he was 15. Because he derived so much pleasure and satisfaction through learning new subjects and outperforming his peers, Rat spent more and more of his time studying, which further enhanced his satisfaction and achievement. He was in such a virtuous cycle that he did not recall taking any day off including holidays and weekends.
The retired nanny was barely literate, so she did not teach Dog much useful. She got up late and spent most of her time watching TV, so Dog did not learn a disciplined life style. Dog was slightly behind his classmates when he started school, and found school work arduous and unrewarding. Thus, he did not spend a lot of time studying, which made him further behind, which in turn further discouraged him. It also did not help that his father constantly compared him to his twin brother. Dog was in such a vicious cycle that he never fully realized his potential, even though he is an identical twin to his brother.
This tale is mostly fictitious (Dog is entirely made up even though Rat is partially based on myself), but I want to use it to illustrate three very important scientific principles applied to education, especially during early childhood.
Initial condition
Physics taught us that even a tiny little difference in the initial conditions can lead to dramatic differences in the eventual outcomes. This is why early childhood education is so important. By nature, kids do not want to be disciplined, so parents will have to enforce that. This is one of the biggest differences between Chinese and American mentalities for education, and for this, I am totally on the Chinese side. I would not have been what I am today if it were not for the rigorous training I received from my family when I was a little kid.
Compound interest
This is probably the most powerful concept in math and finance. Intelligence and confidence are accumulated in an exponential rather than a linear rate, due to the self feedback loop. Even a tiny difference in how hard you study everyday can lead to huge differences in the long run. I remember seeing a study showing the magic of merely studying one hour more per day. In my personal case, I did not take holidays or weekends off, and that is an automatic 40 percent more work than ordinary folks! I do not even have to be particularly smart or talented to outperform them.
Anchoring effect
This is one of the most well known effects in psychology. People judge things in a relative instead of absolutely scale (e.g. they are happier to receive 20 dollars if everyone else receives only 10 than to receive 40 dollars if everyone else receives 80). In the story above, Dog has absolutely the capability to be like his twin brother, but was frustrated by being compared/anchored relative to Rat and his classmates.
And of course, if the three principles are combined together their total effects would be even more significant.
In summary, if you really care for your children, give them tough love: instill discipline from early childhood, ask them to work as hard as they can in a daily basis, and try to encourage instead of frustrate them through proper peer comparison (e.g. identifying an aspect that the kids performs well relative to others and use that as an motivation). I do not have any kids now, but if I do that would be how I am going to bring them up.