Category: miscellaneous

I haven’t written for a while in this blog – I know this is not the way of looking after a blog! There are a few reasons that I didn’t post anything there:
1-My monitor was damaged (its vertical sweeping voltage generator was corrupted) and I couldn’t connect to the Internet using my own computer. I don’t feel easy to post from our lab.
2-I have started writing my thesis and it takes times and more than it mind!
3-I wanted to post a really useful(!) post, but it takes time to prepare one.

Well! That’s all!

As a M.S. student who is hopefully going to start his Ph.D. soon, this kind of advices are interesting to read: A Short Guide to PhD Graduate Study and What it means to do research.

To read latter: You and Your Research (Richard Hamming)

I read this Machine Learning mailing list policy for submission that suddenly a thought came to my mind. Read the shortened policy first:

* Meeting announcements. ….
* Publications of books or journal issues. In general, we accept announcements about the publication of multiple papers (e.g., journal issues) or books relevant to machine learning. Announcements about single papers such as articles or dissertations are not usually included.
* Career opportunities. …
* Software releases. …

I wonder if one can announce the release of a new academic weblog to such lists?! I think academic weblogs can change the way we do research and connect with each other significantly. Reading IlliGAL weblog or John Langford’s Machine Learning or a few others is a more useful for me than nth national XYQSD conference that I cannot attend. So, why not introduce such weblogs in our mailing lists?! (Of course, I am against those people who send their homepage or weblog address everywhere irrelevantly.)

Once upon a time, Najmeh Omidparvar (in Persian) and Mohammad Reza Nasab Abdolahi (in Persian) lived together happily. However, the day came that they wrote something wrong in their weblogs, so they must have been jailed. They went to prison to continue their life there – not supposedly to be happy anymore. They are sent to different cells to live alone and think about themselves. Well … they are supposed to be alone. BUT, they were not that alone. Their souls are together, AND they had their child. Yeap! They had their child in the prison! (Read More)

Interesting to read this article from TechnologyReview. It is about the political power of engineers in US and the world. According to the article, there are only a few engineers in U.S. Senate and the House. But the reverse is true in other parts of the world, specially in USSR, and middle east. It is true for my country (Iran/Persia) that there are many engineers who is doing political decisions.

What are your answers to the following questions:
-Three people in an office. Two of them bounce ideas back and forth to prove a new theorem while the third just tries to keep up. Should the third person be a co-author?
-Your advisor of the opposite sex has two tickets to a concert you really want to see and invites you to join him/her. Would you go? (As I am not girl, I haven’t the opportunity to think about this difficult question in my country!!!)
-…
You may like to see a few more similar questions in Computational Complexity weblog and read other people’s answers.

Yuri A. Gagarin (1934-1968)
When I orbited the Earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is. Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!

In such a day, 12th of April 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first human-being who flighted to the outer-space. His historical trip has many consequences; however, one of them is: The Earth is not that big as we thought before. Moreover, I think knowing that the universe is a very big place comparing with our planet might be also good for AI. Guess how!
Read More:
Yuri’s Night in Wikipedia
Yuri Gagarin in Wikipedia
Pictured Biography of Yuri Gagarin
I copy-pasted this post picture from here!

Interested in mathematical surfaces?! See 3D-XplorMath Surface Gallery. I wonder where the origin of these surfaces is, i.e. from what physical phenomena these kind of surfaces can arise?

Believe me or not, but I do not surf to find new technical weblogs these busy days, but surprisingly, they suddenly appear in front of my face.
I found this Machine Learning weblog which is written by John Langford an interesting one. However, I doubt that he could continue this way: he writes as he is writing his “Introduction to Machine Learning” textbook. I guess that he will change this style or the weblog will be stopped by a few months. However, it is only a guess and I hope that it was incorrect as I enjoy a technical weblog like this in my field. A possible solution may be letting other researchers to write in it. For instance, a collection of ten person might pass the critical mass(!) for this technical weblog to be self-living one.

I am not sure about the number of academic weblogs or articles written about them; however, this BBC News article is from the first ones that discuss the subject. Read Shola Adenekan’s “Academics give lessons on blogs”.