刘泰郞的父亲讲话全文

中新网温哥华12月13日电，一周前在渥太华唐人街遇害的中国留学生刘泰郞的父亲，在今天上午举行的追悼会上代表遇害者家长讲话，深情感谢各方的关怀与协助，并祝全世界所有的华人平安幸福。

以下是刘泰郞的父亲讲话全文。

尊敬的中国驻加拿大大使馆、尊敬的渥太华市政厅、尊敬的渥太华市警局、尊敬的亚冈昆学院、尊敬的卡尔顿大学、亲爱的同学们、同胞们，对于你们的到来和出席，我代表刘泰郎、田林海的家长向你们表示衷心的感谢！

中国有句老话说道“白发人送黑发人”这是人生最大的不幸，在我的人生最艰难的时候，在我们精神面临崩溃的时候，在异国他乡，在寒冷的渥太华，在我们心如刀割万念俱灰的时候，你们成了我们唯一的亲人，谢谢你们。

谢谢中国驻加拿大使馆第一时间派人赶到案发现场，并通过国内的有关部门以最快的速度通知我们双方家长，协助我们迅速赶赴加拿大，并给予我们诸多帮助。

感谢侨界、学界、商界等华人社团为孩子们组织各种悼念活动。那无言的泪水、摇曳的烛光，不但为孩子们照亮了通往天堂的路，也成为了我们家长继续勇敢地活下去的坚强理由。走出国门，我才真正知道作为一个中国人是多么的骄傲，我更要祝福在渥太华留学的更多的孩子们健康平安，祝全世界所有的华人平安幸福！

感谢渥太华亚冈昆学院给予的同情和慰问，正是这些爱心和温暖帮助我们度过了一个个不眠夜晚。如果泰郎、林海在天有灵，他们一定能得到安慰。我们也知道渥太华警方正在日夜紧张工作，积极行动，我们强烈要求、日夜期盼，恶人早日落网。为了尽快归案，我们信任加拿大政府的明确态度，相信渥太华警方的能力和效率，正义审判的到来一定不会太远。

泰郎和林海是两个优秀的孩子，他们远渡重洋来到加拿大求学，肩负全家人的光荣和梦想。作为家长，我们宁可少花点钱，宁可自己受多点累，也怕苦了他们。可怜天下父母心，但他们在异国他乡，并没有过上天堂的生活。他们睡过地下室，几天几夜吃不上饭；他们孤独寂寞，常常夜半哭泣，也为了节约费用两年不曾回家团聚，挫折使他们坚强，磨难催人奋进。终于在儿子的日记里，我听到了他的吼声“勇敢一点”；终于在儿子的日记里，我读到了报效父母的心声。林海、泰郎他们在进步，在一天天长大，一天天成熟。直到今天，我们双方父母一致认为送他们出国没有错，送他们来渥太华求学也没有错。泰郎和林海两个可爱阳光的孩子，在生命的花季、青春的妙龄，无声地凋零在异国他乡，没有来的及跟我们说一句话，带走了我们的梦想，带走了我们的希望，带走了我们的明天。

爸爸妈妈把你们送出来，爸爸妈妈再把你们接回去。爸爸妈妈来接你们回家。孩子，别害怕，照你说的，再勇敢一点，有这么多的人，中国人、外国人，他们都是你的朋友，他们都来为你们送行。泰郎、林海，我的儿子，我的小朋友，我们走吧，我们回家，这一次我们再也不会离开你，回到生你养你的那片土地，那里没有罪恶，你再也不会听到枪声！

最后请允许我代表刘泰郎和田林海的家人，对所有今天到场的朋友和关心他们、鼓励他们的好心人，以及关注此事的所有善良真诚的人们，对你们表示最深的感谢。谢谢大家！请大家起立，让我们目送刘泰郎和田林海的灵柩出礼堂，真心地祝愿他们在天堂安息！朋友，一路走好！

Such a long journey

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey ...
T.S. Eliot, 'Journey of the Magi'

Inspired by Prof. Ravin Balakrishnan, I decided to read "Such a long journey" by Rohinton Mistry -- a book painted scenes so vividly with words.

Just like its name, it was quite a journey to read it. It took over one year to flip through its 413 pages, and through which the papers light browned and the edges curved. The story slowly evolved around Gustad Noble -- a mid-aged Indian bank clerk in Bombay. His laughters, and mostly his sorrows and struggles together with his wife, sons, daughter, and friends in the tidewater of internal corruption and external threats in an enormous developing nation.

The language is beautiful, attractive even to a person who normally treat English books as sleeping aids. Here comes the rain:

"Rain had started in the early morning: great sheets of water pouring out of dark skies ... The rain crashed deafeningly on the bus shelter's corrugated metal roof. The air was heavy and disagreeable. Traffic lay like a soporous monster on the shiny wet surface of the road, throbbing and spewing out its effluvium, rousing itself now and again to move a little, sluggishly. The petrol and diesel fumes were strong and noisome; they seemed to have disolved in the very moisture; and the moisture blanketed everything".

It took a year to read a book, and a lifetime to learn the language.

Online Internet Community

Such a wonderful world, I have to say, enabled by the amazing technologies.

Imagining messaging with people across the ocean, and hearing their voices like inches away ...

Working in the field of IT for so many years, it's not until recently, I started to feel the passion some of the pioneers disclaimed. I am amazed by the power of technology and its ability to unleash the human potential, and begin to really appreciate my career direction.

In research, social computing is one of the sizzling topics, and with messaging, blogging, and online communities, I started to receive its real benefits. Today, I can hardly tolerate any moments without the mighty Internet, where searching, communicating, browsing are integrated into our hearts and souls.

Email is the past tense; VoIP (voice over IP or internet telephone), messaging, and Blogs are the ongoing buzz words, and the future -- imagine the infinity! Maybe your cell phone will pocket all the community information with you, and connect to any of your friends will be as easy as using the desktop ...

How can we better prepared for it? Each of us will have several images or identities, including the physical self and the virtual self. Maybe we will have an identity designed only for social ocassions, and another for career and professional lives, or even one for each hobby or interest. Human beings are multi-faceted by nature, but it's the technology provides us the chance to fully explore and enjoy its benefits.

A more complete individual in future will have the ability to decorate his/her images in both worlds (both physical and virtual), and get involved in both communities, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish which is more important in one's life.

Fascinated by the unlimited possbilities, maybe it's time to think about how to get involved in social computing more seriously!

Random Thoughts

My roommate moved to a different city, and now I have the place for myself. This is a quite night, and suddenly have a feeling to write something down.

My roommate has the same last name as me. He has been to Canada for more than 5 years. Like most immigrants, his journey is a mixture of different tastes, but he always kept his attitude and had a kind heart.

He is a good cook, and enjoying it. Everyday, he can make a banquet for himself. I remember before we moved together, he used to invite me and another friend to his place for dinner, and within a few minutes, he can produce something delicious. For a lazy cook like me, he becomes a great inspiration, and I learned a few dishes from him. These skills will probably benefit me in many years to come.

He loves playing badminton. Him and another friend of mine are badminton fans, and that's how we met and knew each other, but compare to them, I am not as dedicated. Too many things distract me from playing it every week, but they always kept their schedule.

He also has a kind heart and like to help people in trouble. I remember when another friend of mine had a family emergency, my roommate gave him a check with considerable amount.

His girlfriend lives in another country. They haven't seen each other for 5 years, but they exchanges phone calls everyday: a classic love story.

Now, he is working in a different city, and I hope everything will be the best for him.

Fenghua Salon: today, Fenghua Salon's application for recognition by UofT has been approved. A great news! Without noticing, I have been involved in this organization for more than 2 years. I found it a wonderful place with intriguing and kind people. The original Fenghua Salon was founded by Steven Xiao, a northern Chinese with a great sense of humor and dedication. Although a few of us helped, he is still the determining factor for it to happen. He set a good example on making things happen with dedication. Later, with the contribution of many other volunteers, Fenghua Salon now has more than 300 members. With the approval of Fenghua Salon @ UofT, we can now rent rooms and equipments for organizing more interesting events. It will be 'fun' to bring more fun to our community.

www.sszhao.com
It's interesting to find out that someone else uses the word sszhao, and that site is indeed quite interesting.

The Components of Mindfulness

I was fortunate to go to this talk today at UofT on components of Mindfulness. I don't remember everything I heard, but roughly, mindfulness includes three parts.

1. Total concentration
2. Mindful reflection (without greed, hatred, accumulate spiritual gain)
3. Insightful (understand the properties of objects)

I am glad to find the Buddhism study group at UofT, and excited to know there is a conference on Mindfulness on Oct. 15 from 9 am - 5 pm at Bahen center.

For more information, one can get it at www.religion.utoronto.ca/

On the way back, I found an English translation of the poem I liked by Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Ch'an (Zne):

There is no bodhi tree,
Nor mind of mirror bright,
Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?

Ken Sevcik

Reading my email after dinner, and the gmail notifier popped up the shocking title "Ken Sevcik". A sudden heavy feeling flew into my heart. Immediately following the link, the message started by "With deepest regrets ...", and I knew it happened.

Professor Sevcik was one of the faculties I knew personally (althought I only had the opportunity to meet him once for 30 minutes) outside my field. It's about two years ago, when I was at the transitional period of switching supervisors. My research interest at that time was information visualization, and Ken was one of the few professors who had a related background (data visualization). I heard from Prof. Jackson that Ken had developed cancer and could no longer take new students, but Prof. Jackson also recommended me to discuss my research with Ken, and hinted the great benefits it could bring. I was very glad that I followed his advice. I emailed Ken to book an appointment, and to my surprise, the response was quick and kind. I remembered I missed the first appointment due to poor scheduling on my side, but Ken didn't blame me at all, and happily accepted my second appointment attempt.

The meeting happened at a summer evening(as I remembered), when Ken needed to come from home to the lab specifically to meet me and perform some other works. The discussion carried out very well, and Ken gave me many tips on research. Two of the great tips I still remembered were:

When looking at the past literature, both too much or two few work on a particular field might not be a good sign, where too much may indicate that this field has been saturated, while too few may indicate that there is nothing much or it's too difficult to achieve any results in this field.

When looking for research directions or ideas, it's often useful to read the 10 best and most recent publications in a field, and look for their problems, and research results can often come from solving these problems.

After our meeting, we also had a friendly chat on his past experience at China. Ken had a Chinese painting on the office wall, and it properly depicted a soothing environment for a great and kind researcher. Ken told me that he had visited China for several weeks and taught lessons at Zhejiang University. He enjoyed his experience there, and to me, it immediately brought me much closer to him. Although he had cancer at that time, but I can feel the positive energy embedded from his soul, and it's my great pleasure to meet him that day.

Two years have passed, and there were a few more occasions I saw Ken. Once at Bill Buxton's talk on mountain exploration and visualization, and once at a student talk from MIT. I also met him once in the elevator at Bahen, and he kindly nodded to me and smiled. At these occasions, he looked very healthy, and I really hoped he could recover.

But the sad news still arrived today. Ken's departure is really a tremedous loss of University of Toronto as well as Canada. Ken is one of the few ACM fellows Canada had, and a role model for young Ph.D. students like us. I believe in Buddhism, so I believe in afterlife. By my heart I know that Ken will enjoy a happy afterlife, and his contribution in this world will continue to encourage generations to come.

Chinese Economic Talk by Lawrence Lau

I listened to an interesting talk from Lawrence Lau, the President of Hong Kong University about Chinese economy at MSR. The room 1021 at 113 is overwhelmed by a crowd of researchers with diverse backgrounds. In fact, this is the crowdest talk I had experienced on a research or non-research topic. It seems that President Lau did know how to pick a hot topic.

The talk itself reveals many interesting facts, but the slides are a little dry, and for many people who are non-Chinese, they probably didn't receive too much new information from it during the 90 minutes. However, there are several important messages I have received from this talk that are very precious and wise, in my view.

Lau talked about several things:

1. the long term prospect of China's economy is positive. As a conservative person, I always tend to evaluate things with negative views, but Lau's talk makes me convinced that China does has a good base for long term prospect, and an average of 7% growth rate is probably sustainable for the next few decades.

2. RMB is not undervalued very much in a short term. The evidences he gives are China runs low surplus which itself is an indication of a fair value of the currency. Also, he raises the view of Stephen Roach (Chief Economist of Morgan Stanley) that if the control on currency outflow is lifted, the value of RMB will actually go down.

3. The risk of inflation is low due to large amount labor reserves from the rural area.

4. Some other minor things about how to deal with software piracy, the difference between the provincial data and central data, etc.

Overall, the conclusion seems to be:

a. China will be fine in the next few decades, and we should be more optimistic about Chinese economy.
b. Don't worry about RMB appreciation too much. Keep your dollars for now.
c. We can still buy cheap products in China from many years to come.