The two figures above are similar in that the two lines in each of them are going into reverse directions.

These lines are called “negatively correlated”.� Basically, it means that if one line goes up, the other line goes down.

The context of these figures are very interesting.

The first figure shows the approval rating of Bush with the brown line and the crude oil price in the black line.� When the oil price goes up, the approval rating drops down. I wonder how Bush’s networth would look like on this figure.
In the second figure, the red line shows the wine consumption in the US, the green line shows the violent crime rate in the US.� It is certainly interesting to observe that when people drink more, the crime rate is lower.� Drink more wine – It reduces both the cholesterol level and the adrenaline level!

My trip to Chicago was an interesting one. Jill and Gordon spent quite some time to show me around. I like the architecture of the Baha’i Temple a lot. It is a hybrid of the styles of 9 religions, if I lived there, I would bring my laptop and spend the day there typing, this spacial feeling can be very thought-provoking I’m sure.

This reminds me of a glass temple I visited in Madrid, Spain. There was a fax machine on the ceiling, and anyone can send a message to that number. The received paper would fly from the fax machine and drift in the air and fall on the ground. That was a very neat idea, just like this idea of Baha’i Temple. There are quite a few of them around the world. The one in India looks very good.

Just across the street of the temple, we saw two deers in front of a house. That was very unbelievable. Click on the thumbnails to view the full-sized pictures.

The underocean cable is broken between the US and HK.� The biggest impact I had was probably the broken connection with Google, which I use all the time.� Today, I need to find a paper by Rebecca Henderson and Kim Clark, but I don’t remember the title.� Google used to be the best solution, but I could not connect to google.com or scholar.google.com.� All other search engines were inaccessible, too.� There are a few Chinese search engines, but they returned funny results for the term “henderson and clark”.

There are a few ways to get around this slow connection. One possibility is to use proxy servers.� There are many scanner softwares to search for proxy servers, and I got one: 148.233.159.58:3128.� The problem with proxy servers is that they are not reliable.� Soon I found that they are not usable again.

A second option is to go to the library and find physical copies of the journal “Administrative Sciences Quarterly” and browse through the titles.� I’d rather avoid this option because anything physical is too costly to me.

I found the third option.� I know the connection with China is not affected, so I simply visited google.cn.� This host is notoriously restrictive as it can not show anything political and pornographic.� Forturnately, I’m not using it for these purposes.� It took no time for me to find the paper titled “architectural innovation” and downloaded from JSTOR.

No use to click on the “cached view” of the pages in google.cn, as they are all referred to a cache server located in the US.� Though not perfect, google.cn did help me to solve my problems.

If you have problems accessing my blog, blame it on the earthquake in Taiwan. Here is a mail I received from our network admin:

Since earlier this morning you may have experienced slow
Internet access for quite a number of international sites,
or even find some sites unreachable.� Some popular sites
like Google, MSN and Yahoo are also affected.� As reported
by our Internet Service Provider (ISP) for HARNET, the
recent earthquake in Taiwan has damaged some international
submarine cables, thus causing network congestion as well
as connectivity problem for Internet access.� The cable
problem also affects other local universities as well as
the communication services of some other major ISPs here in
Hong Kong.

Right now the submarine cable provider is working on emergency
repair. We will post latest update on our Intranet page.

Thank you for your kind attention, and sorry for any
inconvenience thus caused.

ITSC

My server at MIT had a serious problem of hard drive failure.� I’m waiting for Steve to ship it to me, I’ll see if I can save anything.� But I do have a backup of my blog, that’s why this can be back online so soon.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a backup of my photos, so the photo gallery function will be missing from now on.� It should not be hard to establish a new one, but getting the old photos back is a big hassle, I’ll see when I have some time for that.� Before then, this will be a pure blog site without my famous nullbum.

If anyone else has any problems with XAMPP this is the exact process I followed to get it working

I added these lines to my Windows Hosts file (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc)
127.0.0.1 site1
127.0.0.1 site2

Added the following to the httpd-vhosts.conf file

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I’m traveling in Chicago now till next Wednesday.� My cellphone is 847-863-2901.

If you really need to find me, please use it.