The Fifth Month of PhD

In another seven months, I will either be deported back to Malaysia without completing a PhD, or successfully passed the benchmark of first year. I have three days before hitting the end of my fifth month here at Cambridge, and entering the sixth month of this caffeine-pumped, worries-filled life of mine.

Developing a proper research area and questions is something which has been bugging me since day one of my PhD. I know everyone is worried, especially the Man Above (MA). I do have some ideas forming at the back of my mind right now, but I'd have to test them out before talking to him. MA is a kind supervisor, but it is due to my own guilt of not doing enough that I find him fearsome. I guess I'd have to slowly work out that fear and guilt I feel within me when it comes to speaking to MA.

I'm still keen on doing forensics-related research which has connection with my team's main work on Molecular Evolutionary Genomic Analysis. It all has to do with my previous Masters research on DNA profiling. It is all possible, but I'd need to read more before presenting the baby to him. Let's just say I'm interested in the works on Kenneth K. Kidd for now...

Source: http://blog.illumina.com/img/dna_mag_300.jpg

Word Count using Python 3

In two days' time I need to submit the oral presentation slides to the IDB Scholars Scientific Symposium organiser. I need to re-organise the data which I got from my Masters dissertation since I sorta made a mess with the data analysis back then. Looking at it almost a year later amazed me how oft I was! *chuckles* I guess I did progress slightly after being at Cambridge for four months. Today is the first day (maybe 2nd day) of my 5th month.

BTW, my MFSc. (Erasmus Mundus) project was of DNA profiling.

As I was arranging the edited data with all the missing alleles and I got to the point of... "Err... How many lines are there in this document?" I know I can always use MS-Word's wordcount function, but I am feeling kinda adventurous, I used Python 3 script which I've recently learned... And they worked fine. So anyone who want to do word count, the script is as below.

data = open ("filename")
# e.g. of "filename" is "C:/Users/KherXing/treasure.txt"

n_lines = 0
n_words = 0
n_chars = 0

for line in data:
    n_lines += 1
    line_words = line.split()
    n_words += len (line_words)
    n_chars += len (line)

data.close ()
print (n_lines, n_words, n_chars)