Doke’s blog

 Via:http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html#YOU

Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student or What is Research? or The 4 R’s of Graduate School: Reading, Rithmetic, Research, and Writing

29-AUG-01. Updated 28-AUG-02.
Manuel Blum

READING:
Books are not scrolls.
Scrolls must be read like the Torah from one end to the other.
Books are random access — a great innovation over scrolls.
Make use of this innovation! Do NOT feel obliged to read a book from beginning to end.
Permit yourself to open a book and start reading from anywhere.
In the case of mathematics or physics or anything especially hard, try to find something anything that you can understand.
Read what you can.
Write in the margins. (You know how useful that can be.)
Next time you come back to that book, you’ll be able to read more.
You can gradually learn extraordinarily hard things this way.

Consider writing what you read as you read it.
This is especially true if you’re intent on reading something hard.

I remember a professor of Mathematics at MIT,
name of BERTRAM KOSTANT,
who would keep his door open whenever he was in his office, and he would always be at his desk writing.
Writing. Always writing.
Was he writing up his research? Maybe.
Writing up his ideas? Maybe.
I personally think he was reading, and writing what he was reading.
At least for me, writing what I read is one of the most enjoyable and profitable ways to learn hard material.
STUDYING:
You are all computer scientists.
You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do.
You know what TURING MACHINES can do.
For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply.
Turing Machines can compute any computable function.
Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata.
Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that
the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil.
Think about it.
It tells you something about the power of writing.
Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton.
With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.

THINKING:
CLAUDE SHANNON once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle.
His brother, who was passing by, said to him:
“You know: I could tell you something.”
That’s all his brother said.
Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle.
The great thing about this hint… is that you can always give it to yourself !!!
I advise you, when you’re stuck on a hard problem,
to imagine a little birdie or an older version of yourself whispering
“… I could tell you something…”

I once asked UMESH VAZIRANI how he was able,
as an undergraduate at MIT,
to take 6 courses each and every semester.
He said that he knew he didn’t have the time to work out his answers the hard way.
He had to find a shortcut.
You see, Umesh understood that problems often have short clever solutions.
There will come a time when you work on a problem long and hard but UNsuccessfully
And then you learn that someone else found a solution.
See this as the GREAT opportunity it is to learn something important.
Don’t let it pass you by.
Ask yourself: “How SHOULD I have been thinking to solve that problem?”
I have found that doing so is a powerful exercise.
Danny Sleator tells me that BOB FLOYD independently recommended exactly this exercise to his students.
He would lead them into asking themselves:
“How COULD I have led myself to that answer?”
Take the time to think it through.
It’s worth it.

There will come a time when you work on a problem long and hard and SUCCESSFULLY
And then you learn that someone else already published.
Hard as that may be for you to take, you must view this too as a great opportunity.
Don’t turn off. Read what got published.

You will be surprised how often the published paper turns out to be different in some significant way. Roughly
50% of the time, it is NOT at all the same as what you did.
25% of the time, it is the same but not as good.
25% of the time it is better.

This means that 50% of the time or more, you can still publish.

And what about the 25% time that what got published is better than your own?
In that case, you have a great opportunity to learn.
Ask yourself: “How SHOULD I have been thinking to solve the problem in this fine way?”

This is how I discovered, as a young engineer, that I should learn something enormously powerful called “Modern Algebra.”
It’s one reason I switched from Electrical Engineering as an undergraduate major to Mathematics as a Graduate major.
Of course, this was before there existed anything called Computer Science.
Still on THINKING…
The importance of PARADOX and CONTRADICTION.
When you can prove that a statement S is true,
and you can prove that the same statement S is false,
then you KNOW that that you’re on to something:
Something is wrong somewhere.
Never underestimate the power of a contradiction.
It is one of our most potent sources of knowledge.

Examples include the Liar Paradox “This statement is false.” with its applications to Set Theory and our understanding of language.
There are the seeming paradoxes of countability and uncountability,
In CS, there is the apparent paradox that leads to The Halting Problem.
Physics has lots of paradoxical material:
Quantum Theory. The Einstein-Rosen-Podulsky Paradox.
The relativistically speeding Twins.
The wave and particle nature of matter.

Here’s an ASIDE on my current work, also based on paradox:
I am personally interested in the Paradox of consciousness. Compare the following two views:
1. the view that the human is a MECHANISM, an automaton
with substantial but finite internal memory, programmed like
any computer to do whatever it does, and/or
2. the view that the human is a thoughtful observant
creature with a God-like free will; that it is a CONSCIOUS
ENTITY at the controls of a highly complex highly capable
mechanism, choosing what to do from among options served up
by/from its vast unconscious below.

In my view, both these views are correct. How can that be?

In his “Life of Johnson,” James Boswell quotes Samuel Johnson
as saying:
“All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience
is for it.”
Johnson was 18 years old when Newton (age 85) was buried.
Johnson knew that F=MA implied that humans are mechanisms.

“All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience
is for it.”

This ends my ASIDE.

Make a list for yourself of good ways to pursue a problem.
My own favorite is to try small examples. By comparison,
DAVID GRIES’s favorite is to put himself in the middle
of a (presumed) solution. An example is his coffee can problem:
Given a can of black and white coffee beans, do the following: Pull out two beans: if both are the same color, replace them with a white bean. If the two are different, replace them with a black bean. What color is the last bean?

Or try out the two methods on the Hershey Bar problem
[Give an optimal algorithm to break an mxn Hershey bar into
1×1 pieces. At each step, you can choose a single rectangle
of chocolate and crack it along one of its vertical or
horizontal lines. A single crack counts one step. You are to
make the fewest number of cracks]

Brains are muscles.
They grow strong with exercise.
And even if they’re strong, they grow weak without it.
In the months before Kasparov lost to Deep Blue,
his mother came after him.
She was worried that he wasn’t spending enough time
exercising himself (on chess).
Her worries proved well-founded.

THE PhD: GETTING STARTED
I remember a great summer job I once had at IVIC
(Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificos).
A top neurophysiologist, name of Svaetichin, gave me a splendid problem… one that I unfortunately could not solve.
The problem was to find a way to focus light on a single cell
of a goldfish retina so that the light would not spill over
onto any of the adjacent cells.
Svaetichin had tried making a pinhole in a sheet of black tin,
and shining his light thru the hole. This worked for moderate size holes, but failed for really small holes, which caused the light to diverge, to form diffraction patterns.

Since Svaetichin couldn’t solve the problem, I decided I couldn’t. Or perhaps it’s that I thought his problem physically unsolvable. In retrospect, I should have taken out books on physics, especially optics, read as much as I could, talked to others and kept on talking to him.
Svaetichin would have helped me if I had shown him I was reading thinking working.

Don’t expect your thesis advisor to give you a problem that he or she can answer. Of course, she might.
* She might give you a problem to which she already knows an answer.
* She might give you a problem that she thinks is answerable,
but that she hasn’t actually answered.
* She might give you a problem that is deadly hard.
* If the problem she gives you is hard enough,
I suggest you look for a NONSTANDARD answer.
More on this later after I get done cooking the thesis advisor.

Your thesis advisor may encourage you to work in an area
that she feels completely comfortable in… in which case you can rely on her for sage advice and sound guidance.
Or she may encourage you to work on something she knows little or nothing about, in which case it will be up to you to inform and teach her.
In the latter case, you will have to learn all you can for yourself…
You will have to learn from other faculty, from courses, from books, from journals. from peers.
Both kinds of advisors can work out for you.
I don’t know that one is necessarily better than the other.
But you should know which you got.

Whatever you do, you got to like doing it….
You got to like it so much that you’re willing to think about it, work on it, long after everyone else has moved on.

THE PhD: DEEP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT.
There’s a wonderful quote from ANATOLE FRANCE:
“A University Student”
– and this is especially true for a PhD Student –
“should know something about everything
and everything about something.”

You know the jokes about PhD’s…
A PhD knows more and more about less and less
until he knows everything about nothing.

When working on a PhD, you must focus on a topic so narrow that you can understand it completely.
It will seem at first that you’re working on the proverbial needle, a tiny fragment of the world, a minute crystal,
beautiful but in the scheme of things, microscopic.
Work with it. And the more you work with it, the more you penetrate it, the more you will come to see that your work, your subject, encompasses the world.
In time, you will come to see the world in your grain of sand.

To see a world in a grain of sand
Or a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

This gorgeous quartet is followed by a large number of sometimes deep sometimes questionable aphorisms, which I see much like the occasionally grinding work of a PhD thesis.
There’s all kinds of research you can do.
There’s research to prove what you know to be true.
There’s research — maybe better called SEARCH — to figure out what is true.
Some of the best such search succeeds in DISPROVING
what you initially believed to most certainly be true.

For example, Sir Fred Hoyle is said to have coined the phrase “Big Bang” at a time when he was looking to disprove it.

For a relatively minor but personal example:
When I was working on the MEDIAN problem,
my goal was to prove that any deterministic algorithm to find the MEDIAN of n integers must necessarily make roughly as many comparisons as it takes to sort n integers, i.e. n log n comparisons.
I was shocked to discover that the median of n integers can be found with just O(n) comparisons.

When working on proving some statement S true,
you should spend at least some time trying to prove it false.
Even if it’s true, trying to prove it false can give insight.
And in any case, too often, our intuition is dead wrong.

There is yet another sense in which, when working on a hard problem, you may find that the answer is NOT what you expected.
You may be looking for a YES or a NO; it may be something else.

Some years ago, JOHN HOPCROFT gave one of his PhD students the problem of deciding the Equivalence of Free Boolean Forms.
The specifics don’t matter.
The problem appeared as an open problem in Garey and Johnson.
The question was: Is the Equivalence problem NP-complete?
Or is it solvable in poly time?
Chandra, Wegman and I found a randomizing algorithm for this problelm. At the time this seemed to beg the question entirely. Only after writing it up did we really understand that we had given an efficient albeit randomizing algorithm to solve it, This shows, by the way, that the problem is not NP-complete if NP <> RP (Randomizing Poly-time), as seems likely.

Of course, this brings up the question whether P = NP.
The question of our time: Are NP-complete problems solvable in poly time?
Could anything I have said today be useful for so hard a problem as that?
Probably not. Nevertheless…
LEONID LEVIN believes as I do that whatever the answer to the P=NP? problem, it won’t be like anything you think it should be. And he has given some wonderful examples.
For one, he has given a FACTORING ALGORITHM that is proVably optimal, up to a multiplicative constant.
He proves that if his algorithm is exponential,
then every algorithm for FACTORING is exponential.
Equivalently, if any algorithm for factoring is poly-time,
then his algorithm is poly-time.
But we haven’t been able to tell the running time of his algorithm because, in a strong sense, it’s running time is unanalyzable.
Maybe as STEVEN RUDICH suggests, the P=NP? problem is undecidable in the standard formalization of Mathematics.

The point is that the answer may not lie where you expect it. Here’s a poem I wrote when I wondered at the fact that we must sometimes be dragged kicking and screaming in the right direction.
It’s a comparison to the blind spot in our eyes,
which isn’t really blind but makes things up for us.
It questions whether there might not be other things in this world that our brains, our minds, by their very nature, make up for us:

Blind Spots mb 15-MAY-96

All men have Blind Spots in their eyes,
That manufacture visions of their vale.
And shape that void where light’s unregistered,
With bold-faced unrepentant tales.

What other blind spots shape our minds and thoughts?
What other tales do won’dring minds unfurl
To woo us unbeguiled we would believe
To strange and nonexistent worlds?
ABOUT WRITING:
Here is the one quote that I have found most helpful and wise:

“First have something to say,
Second say it,
Third stop when you have said it,
and
Finally give it an accurate title.”
JOHN SHAW BILLINGS [1838-1913]

MY ADVICE TO YOU:
Don’t expect your thesis advisor to read your thesis. Some thesis advisors can and do give good feedback, but not all.
Still, make sure that SOMEBODY reads your thesis…
I especially recommend that you ask your peers.

Here’s another piece of advice that I have often had to give myself, and I here give you…
When you send a paper off to be published,
and it gets rejected…
Don’t be turned off by the mindless cretinous feedback
that you get to your well-thought-out beautifully-written work!
Be a MENSCH. Use the feedback to improve your paper!
Make it better. And send it back.
Finally, it is my most earnest wish that you should know something that is honestly amazingly true of you… That you are each of you UNIQUE and SPECIAL in some glorious way.

I wrote a poem to capture this, which I now use to end my sermon. It’s called “Fundamentals.”

FUNDAMENTALS
mb 05-JUN-96

Bird must soar. Skunk must stink.
Cat must prowl. Man must think.

What sets man apart from beast is his engine of
thought. His mind. His
BRAIN
makes him unique
and gives him his greatest pleasure.

But fundamental as is thought for human beings,
there is stuff more basic still that underlies and
DRIVES
not only man
but all great beasts,

And that is nature’s call to each of us… to be special.
To be distinguished in some way. To be
UNIQUE.
To BE something, to DO something, BETTER than everyone else.

Like the leather nosed chimpanzee,
dragging noisy cans and branches,
frightening peers into submission,

One does not have to be brilliant, a genius, to be special.
To do something better than anyone/everyone else. To be
UNMATCHED,
One has only to choose an END
any END
that MATTERS
that INSPIRES
YOU
And then DO IT.

Tags: research, science

 Via:http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html#

 J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

Copyright of JK Rowling, June 5, 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

Tags: Harry Potter, speech

speech transcript

Thank you very, very much. Well, this isn’t exactly the party I’d planned, but I sure like the company.

(APPLAUSE) And I want to start today by saying how grateful I am to all of you, to everyone who poured your hearts and your hopes into this campaign, who drove for miles and lined the streets waving homemade signs, who scrimped and saved to raise money, who knocked on doors and made calls, who talked, sometimes argued with your friends and neighbors…

(APPLAUSE)

… who e-mailed and contributed online, who invested so much in our common enterprise, to the moms and dads who came to our events, who lifted their little girls and little boys on their shoulders and whispered in their ears, “See, you can be anything you want to be.”

(APPLAUSE)

To the young people…

(APPLAUSE)

… like 13-year-old Anne Riddell (ph) from Mayfield, Ohio, who had been saving for two years to go to Disney World and decided to use her savings instead to travel to Pennsylvania with her mom and volunteer there, as well.

To the veterans, to the childhood friends, to New Yorkers and Arkansans…

(APPLAUSE)

… who traveled across the country, telling anyone who would listen why you supported me. And to all of those women in their 80s and their 90s…

(APPLAUSE)

… born before women could vote, who cast their votes for our campaign. I’ve told you before about Florence Stein (ph) of South Dakota who was 88 years old and insisted that her daughter bring an absentee ballot to her hospice bedside. Her daughter and a friend put an American flag behind her bed and helped her fill out the ballot.

She passed away soon after and, under state law, her ballot didn’t count, but her daughter later told a reporter, “My dad’s an ornery, old cowboy, and he didn’t like it when he heard Mom’s vote wouldn’t be counted. I don’t think he had voted in 20 years, but he voted in place of my mom.”

(APPLAUSE)

So to all those who voted for me and to whom I pledged my utmost, my commitment to you and to the progress we seek is unyielding.

You have inspired and touched me with the stories of the joys and sorrows that make up the fabric of our lives. And you have humbled me with your commitment to our country. Eighteen million of you, from all walks of life…

(APPLAUSE)

… women and men, young and old, Latino and Asian, African- American and Caucasian…

(APPLAUSE)

… rich, poor, and middle-class, gay and straight, you have stood with me.

(APPLAUSE)

And I will continue to stand strong with you every time, every place, in every way that I can. The dreams we share are worth fighting for.

Remember, we fought for the single mom with the young daughter, juggling work and school, who told me, “I’m doing it all to better myself for her.”

We fought for the woman who grabbed my hand and asked me, “What are you going to do to make sure I have health care?” and began to cry, because even though she works three jobs, she can’t afford insurance.

We fought for the young man in the Marine Corps t-shirt who waited months for medical care and said, “Take care of my buddies over there, and then will you please take care of me?”

(APPLAUSE)

We fought for all those who’ve lost jobs and health care, who can’t afford gas or groceries or college, who have felt invisible to their president these last seven years.

I entered this race because I have an old-fashioned conviction that public service is about helping people solve their problems and live their dreams. I’ve had every opportunity and blessing in my own life, and I want the same for all Americans.

And until that day comes, you’ll always find me on the front lines of democracy, fighting for the future.

(APPLAUSE)

The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama, the next president of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him.

(APPLAUSE)

And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me.

(APPLAUSE)

gas and those groceries, and still have a little left over at the end of the month, an economy that lifts all of our people and ensures that our prosperity is broadly distributed and shared.We all want a health care system that is universal, high-quality and affordable…

(APPLAUSE)

… so that parents don’t have to choose between care for themselves or their children or be stuck in dead-end jobs simply to keep their insurance.

This isn’t just an issue for me. It is a passion and a cause, and it is a fight I will continue until every single American is insured, no exceptions and no excuses.

(APPLAUSE)

We all want an America defined by deep and meaningful equality, from civil rights to labor rights, from women’s rights to gay rights…

(APPLAUSE)

… from ending discrimination to promoting unionization, to providing help for the most important job there is: caring for our families.

And we all want to restore America’s standing in the world, to end the war in Iraq, and once again lead by the power of our values…

(APPLAUSE)

… and to join with our allies to confront our shared challenges, from poverty and genocide to terrorism and global warming.

You know, I’ve been involved in politics and public life in one way or another for four decades. And during those…

(APPLAUSE)

During those 40 years, our country has voted 10 times for president. Democrats won only three of those times, and the man who won two of those elections is with us today.

(APPLAUSE)

We made tremendous progress during the ’90s under a Democratic president, with a flourishing economy and our leadership for peace and security respected around the world.

Just think how much more progress we could have made over the past 40 years if we’d had a Democratic president. Think about the lost opportunities of these past seven years on the environment and the economy, on health care and civil rights, on education, foreign policy and the Supreme Court.

Imagine how far…

(APPLAUSE)

… we could have come, how much we could have achieved if we had just had a Democrat in the White House.

(APPLAUSE)

We cannot let this moment slip away. We have come too far and accomplished too much.

Now, the journey ahead will not be easy. Some will say we can’t do it, that it’s too hard, we’re just not up to the task. But for as long as America has existed, it has been the American way to reject can’t-do claims and to choose instead to stretch the boundaries of the possible through hard work, determination, and a pioneering spirit.

It is this belief, this optimism that Senator Obama and I share and that has inspired so many millions of our supporters to make their voices heard. So today I am standing with Senator Obama to say: Yes, we can!

(APPLAUSE)

And that together we will work — we’ll have to work hard to achieve universal health care. But on the day we live in an America where no child, no man, and no woman is without health insurance, we will live in a stronger America. That’s why we need to help elect Barack Obama our president.

(APPLAUSE)

We’ll have to work hard to get back to fiscal responsibility and a strong middle class. But on the day we live in an America whose middle class is thriving and growing again, where all Americans, no matter where they live or where their ancestors came from, can earn a decent living, we will live in a stronger America. And that is why we must help elect Barack Obama our president.

(APPLAUSE)

We’ll have to work hard to foster the innovation that will make us energy independent and lift the threat of global warming from our children’s future. But on the day we live in an America fueled by renewable energy, we will live in a stronger America. And that is why we have to help elect Barack Obama our president.

(APPLAUSE)

We’ll have to work hard to bring our troops home from Iraq and get them the support they’ve earned by their service. But on the day we live in an America that’s as loyal to our troops as they have been to us, we will live in a stronger America. And that is why we must help elect Barack Obama our president.

(APPLAUSE)

This election is a turning-point election. And it is critical that we all understand what our choice really is. Will we go forward together, or will we stall and slip backwards?

Now, think how much progress we’ve already made. When we first started, people everywhere asked the same questions. Could a woman really serve as commander-in-chief? Well, I think we answered that one.

(APPLAUSE)

Could an African-American really be our president? And Senator Obama has answered that one. (APPLAUSE)

Together, Senator Obama and I achieved milestones essential to our progress as a nation, part of our perpetual duty to form a more perfect union.

Now, on a personal note, when I was asked what it means to be a woman running for president, I always gave the same answer, that I was proud to be running as a woman, but I was running because I thought I’d be the best president. But…

(APPLAUSE)

But I am a woman and, like millions of women, I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that respects and embraces the potential of every last one of us.

(APPLAUSE)

I ran as a daughter who benefited from opportunities my mother never dreamed of. I ran as a mother who worries about my daughter’s future and a mother who wants to leave all children brighter tomorrows.

To build that future I see, we must make sure that women and men alike understand the struggles of their grandmothers and their mothers, and that women enjoy equal opportunities, equal pay, and equal respect.

(APPLAUSE)

Let us…

(APPLAUSE)

Let us resolve and work toward achieving very simple propositions: There are no acceptable limits, and there are no acceptable prejudices in the 21st century in our country.

(APPLAUSE)

You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories…

(APPLAUSE)

… unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States. And that is truly remarkable, my friends.

(APPLAUSE)

To those who are disappointed that we couldn’t go all of the way, especially the young people who put so much into this campaign, it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours.

Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. And, when you stumble, keep faith. And, when you’re knocked down, get right back up and never listen to anyone who says you can’t or shouldn’t go on.

As we gather here today in this historic, magnificent building, the 50th woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast 50 women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House.

(APPLAUSE)

Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it…

(APPLAUSE)

… and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.

That has always been the history of progress in America. Think of the suffragists who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 and those who kept fighting until women could cast their votes.

Think of the abolitionists who struggled and died to see the end of slavery. Think of the civil rights heroes and foot soldiers who marched, protested, and risked their lives to bring about the end of segregation and Jim Crow.

(APPLAUSE)

Because of them, I grew up taking for granted that women could vote and, because of them, my daughter grew up taking for granted that children of all colors could go to school together.

Because of them, Barack Obama and I could wage a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination. Because of them and because of you, children today will grow up taking for granted that an African-American or a woman can, yes, become the president of the United States. And so…

(APPLAUSE)

… when that day arrives, and a woman takes the oath of office as our president, we will all stand taller, proud of the values of our nation, proud that every little girl can dream big and that her dreams can come true in America.

And all of you will know that, because of your passion and hard work, you helped pave the way for that day. So I want to say to my supporters: When you hear people saying or think to yourself, “If only, or, “What if,” I say, please, don’t go there. Every moment wasted looking back keeps us from moving forward.

(APPLAUSE)

Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been. We have to work together for what still can be. And that is why I will work my heart out to make sure that Senator Obama is our next president.

(APPLAUSE)

And I hope and pray that all of you will join me in that effort.

(APPLAUSE)

To my supporters and colleagues in Congress, to the governors and mayors, elected officials who stood with me in good times and bad, thank you for your strength and leadership.

To my friends in our labor unions who stood strong every step of the way, I thank you and pledge my support to you.

To my friends from every stage of my life, your love and ongoing commitment sustained me every single day.

To my family, especially Bill and Chelsea and my mother, you mean the world to me, and I thank you for all you have done.

(APPLAUSE)

And to my extraordinary staff, volunteers and supporters…

(APPLAUSE)

… thank you for working those long, hard hours. Thank you for dropping everything, leaving work or school, traveling to places that you’ve never been, sometimes for months on end. And thanks to your families, as well, because your sacrifice was theirs, too. All of you were there for me every step of the way.

Now, being human, we are imperfect. That’s why we need each other, to catch each other when we falter, to encourage each other when we lose heart. Some may lead, some may follow, but none of us can go it alone.

The changes we’re working for are changes that we can only accomplish together. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights that belong to us as individuals. But our lives, our freedom, our happiness are best enjoyed, best protected, and best advanced when we do work together.

That is what we will do now, as we join forces with Senator Obama and his campaign. We will make history together, as we write the next chapter in America’s story. We will stand united for the values we hold dear, for the vision of progress we share, and for the country we love.

There is nothing more American than that.

And looking out at you today, I have never felt so blessed. The challenges that I have faced in this campaign…

(APPLAUSE)

… are nothing compared to those that millions of Americans face every day in their own lives.

So today I’m going to count my blessings and keep on going. I’m going to keep doing what I was doing long before the cameras ever showed up and what I’ll be doing long after they’re gone: working to give every American the same opportunities I had and working to ensure that every child has the chance to grow up and achieve his or her God- given potential.

I will do it with a heart filled with gratitude, with a deep and abiding love for our country, and with nothing but optimism and confidence for the days ahead.

This is now our time to do all that we can to make sure that, in this election, we add another Democratic president to that very small list of the last 40 years and that we take back our country and once again move with progress and commitment to the future.

Thank you all. And God bless you, and God bless America.

(APPLAUSE)

Tags: Hillary, speech

　　Time: March 28, 2002

　　Venue: Chengdu International Exhibition & Convention Centre

　　Topic: Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities for China’s Younger Generation

　　Champion: Sun Ning, Beijing Foreign Studies University

　　Like many young people of my age in China, I want to see my country get prosperous and enjoy respect in the international community. But it seems to me that mere patriotism is not just enough. It is vitally important that we young people do more serious thinking and broaden our minds to bigger issues.

　　–Excerpt from Sun Ning’s speech

Tags: Speaking Competition, speech