Category: miscellaneous

We, the undersigned, regretfully have to inform all the inhabitants of our planet earth that one of the greatest parts of the historical heritage of human race is on the verge of permanent extinction. The Islamic Republic of Iran has embarked on the finalizing stages of a dam construction in south of Iran that will ultimately drown the archeological sites of Pasargad and Persepolice, the ancient capital of the Archimedean Empire – a rich and complex site that, since its inception, has been considered by all writers of antiquity as one of the wonders of the ancient world and, thus, a part of the cultural heritage of the human race. Sign this petition here!

My site has been filtered by most Iranian ISPs. It is a bit strange that the government have decided to censor my weblogs (Anti Memoirs (in Farsi) and Thesilog).

Spammers! Welcome to the Hell!

Look at this Computing Chris weblog. It is written by Chris Leonard, a publishing editor of Elsevier for theoretical computer science journals. Welcome Chris!

I guess, but I’m not sure, that my papers’ reviewers read this blog. When it comes near the decision time, I have a few visitors who are searching my name on the web and find this site!

I guess it would be a little late, but you may enjoy reading this AAAI-05 blog. Its description reveals everything: Student blog for the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05) and 17th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-05) 9-13 July 2005, Pittsburgh.
Marvin Minsky’s fan can read these two posts: 1 and 2!

NASA’s Deep Impact is a really astonishing project. You may know by now that the mission is about sending a spacecraft toward comet Temple 1 to make an artificial impact with it. This way, one can seek the material beneath the surface of that comet which has the same age as the solar system. This helps us to find out more about the early ages of solar system.
IMO, the mission would be considered as science fiction ten or twenty years ago.

1) Friday was a very surprising day for us. Iran’s presidential election got into a very unbelievable result (read + + +). The reformist candidate, Mostafa Moin -who was believed to get many votes- was humbled by fifth-place finish. On the other hand, Mahmoud Ahmadinejah –a fundamentalist mayor of Tehran- got many votes and stood in the second place. He and Rafsanjani will continue their fight next week in the second round of election.
I do not intend to analyze the situation or even inform you about the dark ages we may face if this Ahmadinejad become our president. Instead, I want to concentrate on the predictability of such elections.
2) No one in blogosphere predicted this situation. They guessed that Moin would get the first or second place. But it did not happen and all of us are in a great shock. I hypothesize the following fact:

Internet community does not reflect what is going on the society. Internet polls may have an order of magnitude difference with reality. I guess this becomes truer (in the Fuzzy sense?!) whenever the society is pre-modern or under-development.

Let me discuss it in the notion of statistical learning theory: Consider the whole society as a set A0. Those people who use Internet considerably and discuss about their opinion in that media make a subset of A0, naming it A1. If we consider the general belief as X, we can define probability measure P0 over set A0 that indicates the probability of selecting each instances of X. The same is true for A1 and P1. I hypothesize that one may not estimate E[f(X)] over P0 by making i.i.d. samples from A1 by probability measure P1. Well … a very evident fact?! Yeap! OK!
Anyway, be careful to assess the commonsense using the Internet media.

3) A few days ago, I thought about making something like Fuzzy Cognitive Map to model the society and predict its behavior. I am not that aware of the society modelling literature, but it might be interesting subject to work on. One may talk about the model’s predictability and the effect of model’s error to the prediction. Is the society –that must be modeled- chaotic or stable to a fixed point? Or in other words, can we make a model that even if it has some errors predicts well?

Welcome to the DARK AGE!

Iran defeated Bahrain last night and became qualified to attend Germany soccer worldcup 2006.
See a few after-effects of this victory:

(some more pictures from BBC) and a piece of English news!