Achievement... for what?

I read this article in the New York Times the other day titled For girls, it's be yourself, and be perfect, too, about a group of overachieving girls in the US. These girls were successful in everything -- in academics, in community service, in creativity -- literally everything. They got perfect scores in their SATs, and perfect GPAs.

And yet, a bunch of them did not make it into their first-choice colleges.

Reading this, I wonder what the world is going to be like for the next generation. Remembering my own portfolio when I went to college, I would seriously doubt if I could get into the same schools today, with the same achievements. I hear stories from friends with young children -- toddlers, even -- who are already going to after-school tutoring classes five, seven times a week. I see my friends and colleagues, who are already stressed out beyond belief from work. And then I see some of those people who are less successful and achieved, and are having difficulty making ends meet.

Is this what the coming world is going to be like? That if you aren't in first place, a superachiever, you can't survive? And if that's the case... many of my friends keep themselves going with a cocktail of vitamins and supplements. That's keeping them going now, but how much abuse can the body take before it collapses? And what does that mean for our children and their generation?

It's a sobering thought.

Sometimes I really hate computers

I am usually not one who's down on IT and computers as a rule (maybe I'm still young and naive, but I'm usually left being the one who defends IT and engineering when my older, more experienced peers start talking about how unattractive the field is), but sometimes, I really, really, really hate this day and age when everything is automatic and relies on computers.

I was trying to submit my journal paper this afternoon. Like most of the CS journals out there nowadays, the entire process is automatic -- you fill in forms with the title, abstract, contact author etc, then upload your cover letter and paper in Word format (why in the world would ANYBODY use Word -- but that's for another post, another day), and then it coverts it to HTML and pdf formats automatically.

And that's when the problem started. My document has both English and Chinese in it, and apparently there are some conversion problems with the Chinese characters. They kept on coming out as weird symbols, no matter what font I changed them to. More frustratingly, only some of those characters would get changed, but those that "didn't work" varied from trial to trial, and I couldn't not find any consistency between trials. And on occasion, I would get this "Conversion failed" message from the server, for no reason at all that I could discern.

I ended up fighting with that silly site for 3 hours, after which I just gave up and emailed the editors with a message telling them not to look at the PDF document. Sigh. You'd think that a COMPUTER SCIENCE journal could somehow get this correct, but alas, no.