• I asked: Which country cares more about Hong Kong? Google Trends said: Singapore.
• I asked: Which country cares more about Hong Kong Universities, Hong Kong schools, or Hong Kong colleges? Google Trends said: Singapore.
• I asked: Which country cares more about Hong Kong house? Google Trends said: Singapore.
• I asked: Which country cares more about Hong Kong food and Hong Kong shopping? Google Trends said: Singapore.
• I asked: Which country cares more about Hong Kong company? Google Trends said: Nigeria and Singapore.

One reason I can guess for this fact is that Internet connectivity in Singapore should be very good compared to other countries that are also interested in Hong Kong. Any more reasons about it?

Previous related posts: Which University in Hong Kong has the biggest website?

Take the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as an example, I first go to google.com.hk and input “info:polyu.edu.hk“. Then I follow the link saying “find web pages from the site polyu.edu.hk”. Finally, I get the result saying “about 502,000 from polyu.edu.hk”.

Here comes the result:

1. University of Hong Kong: about 2,790,000 from hku.hk
2. Chinese University of Hong Kong: about 2,460,000 from cuhk.edu.hk
3. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: about 1,000,000 from ust.hk
4. City University of Hong Kong: about 887,000 from cityu.edu.hk
5. Hong Kong Baptist University: about 592,000 from hkbu.edu.hk
6. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University: about 502,000 from polyu.edu.hk
7. Lingnan University: about 160,000 from ln.edu.hk
8. The Open University of Hong Kong: about 151,000 from ouhk.edu.hk

These results are done on January 27, 2006. They may be different later or if data was collected from other Google servers. However, I think the figures and the rankings should be very similar.

The Idea

The website Mentions of Hong Kong Universities (MHKU) has a simple and clear theme: what the rest of the world is saying about Hong Kong universities and their people.

Hong Kong has eight universities. It is quite frequently that local media and newspapers report on what is happening in these universities. While local media mentions of them are frequent and abundant, how about a worldwide mentions? Are there any people in the rest of the world mentioning about Hong Kong universities? What are they saying, why do they interest, and what are their viewpoints and opinions?

The Technologies and Services

The website is built with the uses of the following technologies and public Web services: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) as the software infrastructure, Wordpress as the web publishing platform, Google News and Yahoo News as the news sources services, RSS as the interface, del.icio.us, Technorati, FeedBurner, and Flickr as the helper services and enrichment of the website.

What’s Next?

Thereafter, I will spare around 2 hours per week to maintain the content and usefulness of this website. I will also use it as a playground to experiment with some other useful public Web services and APIs (application programming interfaces) around the website’s main theme.

Comments are welcomed and appreciated. You can use the commenting form or email me via this Google Mail account

1. University of Hong Kong (Traffic Rank for hku.hk: 1,047)
2. Chinese University of Hong Kong (Traffic Rank for cuhk.edu.hk: 1,746)
3. City University of Hong Kong (Traffic Rank for cityu.edu.hk: 1,849)
4. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Traffic Rank for polyu.edu.hk: 2,498)
5. Hong Kong Baptist University (Traffic Rank for hkbu.edu.hk: 3,692)
6. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Traffic Rank for ust.hk: 6,482)
7. The Hong Kong Institute of Education (Traffic Rank for ied.edu.hk: 9,981)
8. The Open University of Hong Kong (Traffic Rank for ouhk.edu.hk: 13,313)
9. Lingnan University (Traffic Rank for ln.edu.hk: 13,762)

I do not go into thinking about if the ranking means something, but I am sure there must be some factors that affect the ranking.

Alexa.com is an amazon.com company.

About Alexa: Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users. Alexa Related Links and Traffic Rankings are the embodiment of this vision, growing and getting better as more people join the Alexa community of smart Web surfers.

Members download and install a small program onto their computers. Those computers, when idel, will request data from the server of World Community Grid, then do some computations on this data, and then send the computation results back to the server. They will ask the server for a new set of data to perform another cycle of work.

As of 3 October 2005, there are 92,928 members around the world that contributed 149,689 computing devices. That scale of contributions is equivalent to around 17,234 years of computation if performed by a single computing machine. There are 194 members from Hong Kong that contributes 381 devices. According to this press release:

World Community Grid Gains Momentum in Hong Kong (20 Sep 2005)

The University of Hong Kong is the first Asia-Pacific academic institution to join World Community Grid.

I learns this news from Hong Kong South China Morning Post this morning. I then search the Internet to find some related information. I find the following worthwhile to have a look.

Supporting the Ningbo Campus

It was a newsletter article from the Information Services of the University of Nottingham. What interests me is the technical aspects and the main challenges in linking UNNC computer systems with the University’s systems in the UK.

After some search in the Internet, I finally reached a place called BISC (the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing). It is from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Berkeley University of California.

The principal constituents of soft computing (SC) are fuzzy logic (FL), neural network theory (NN) and probabilistic reasoning (PR), with the latter subsuming belief networks, evolutionary computing including DNA computing, chaos theory and parts of learning theory

What is soft computing? Soft computing differs from conventional (hard) computing in that, unlike hard computing, it is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth. In effect, the role model for soft computing is the human mind. The guiding principle of soft computing is: Exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth to achieve tractability, robustness and low solution cost. The basic ideas underlying soft computing in its current incarnation have links to many earlier influences, among them my 1965 paper on fuzzy sets; the 1973 paper on the analysis of complex systems and decision processes; and the 1979 report (1981 paper) on possibility theory and soft data analysis. The inclusion of neural network theory in soft computing came at a later point. At this juncture, the principal constituents of soft computing (SC) are fuzzy logic (FL), neural network theory (NN) and probabilistic reasoning (PR), with the latter subsuming belief networks, genetic algorithms, chaos theory and parts of learning theory. What is important to note is that SC is not a melange of FL, NN and PR. Rather, it is a partnership in which each of the partners contributes a distinct methodology for addressing problems in its domain. In this perspective, the principal contributions of FL, NN and PR are complementary rather than competitive.

To read more or learn more about Soft Computing, please click here!

University:

• Nanyang Technological University
• National University of Singapore
• Singapore Management University

Polytechnic:

• Nanyang Polytechnic
• Ngee Ann Polytechnic
• Republic Polytechnic
• Singapore Polytechnic
• Temasek Polytechnic

Other Institute:

• Information communication Institute of Singapore
• National Institute of Education
• SouthEast Asian Union College