Fazlamesai Galaksi

Emre Sevinç: Kullanıcı katkısını bilime çevirmek: lebdemedenleblebi.com

Çrş, 01 Tem 2009 07:54:59 +0000

Web üzerinde oynanan oyunlara aşinayız. Peki web üzerinde beğendiğimiz bağlantıların, işaretlediğimiz imgelerin, yaptığımız yorumların, oynadığımız oyunların bazı başka problemleri çözmek için kullanılmasına alıştık mı?

Bu konuda birkaç örnek gördük, en önemli örnekleri Google Image Labeler ve gwap.com. İngilizcesi “Human Computation” olan bu kavramın daha düne kadar -Milliyet’in haberlerini etiketletmek için promosyon yapması dışında- Türkiye’den bir örneği çıkmamıştı.

Bu yöntem kullanılarak Türkçe sözcüklerin biçimbilimsel özelliklerinin tespit edilip edilemeyeceği sorusunu cevaplamaya çalışan bir tez üzerine çalışan Onur Güngör tarafından hazırlanan lebdemedenleblebi.com, tabu ve sessiz sinema oyunlarına ait bazı özellikler içeren eşzamanlı bir oyun aracılığıyla bahsi geçen soruya yanıt vermek için veri biriktirmeye çalışıyor.

Bir taraftan da bir topluluk sitesi olarak konumlandırılmaya çalışılan site, kullanıcıların gruplar yaratıp üye olmalarına ve bu grupları ana sayfaya çıkarmak için mücadele etmelerine de izin veriyor.

Bizce ilginç olan bu çalışma hakkında daha fazla bilgi için hakkında sayfasını ziyaret edebilir, destek vermek içinse lebdemedenleblebi.com adresini ziyaret edip oynamaya başlayabilirsiniz.

Emre Sevinç: Arthur Benjamin’s formula for changing math education and Istanbul Bilgi University’s CMN147 course

Sal, 30 Haz 2009 17:28:38 +0000

Arthur Benjamin’s points well taken. For the last 2 years we (CS department) have been implementing a CMN147 course at Istanbul Bilgi University and its title is Computational and Mathematical Numeracy for Social Scientists 1. The course is all about presenting the basic concepts of probability, statistics and using computers for that purpose. We are satisfied with the results and we look forward to providing the course to a wider audience.

You may log in as a guest user and watch the videos, too (in English).

Emre Sevinç: Ullman and Patterson Write on Research, Computer Science and How to Advise Students

Pzt, 29 Haz 2009 08:02:17 +0000

When I was finishing my Ph.D., I read a book based on interviews of people talking about their jobs to help decide what I would do next. What I learned from the book was that people were happy with their careers if they designed or built objects that lasted, such as the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge, or if they shaped people’s lives, such as patients or parishioners. Thus, I went into the job of assistant professor with the hypothesis that my long-lasting impact was not the papers but the people.

I was a student, and later faculty member, in an electrical engineering department, where the widely held opinion was that the way you wrote a thesis was to read many papers. Look at the last section, where there were always some “open problems.” Pick one, and work on it, until you are able to make a little progress. Then write a paper of your own about your progress, and don’t forget to include an “open problems” section, where you put in everything you were unable to do.

Unfortunately this approach, still widely practiced today, encourages mediocrity. It gives the illusion that research is about making small increments to someone else’s work. But worse, it almost guarantees that after a while, the work is driven by what can be solved, rather than what needs to be solved. People write papers, and the papers get accepted because they are reviewed by the people who wrote the papers being improved incrementally, but the influence beyond the world of paper-writing is minimal.

Jeffrey D. Ullman (who taught us compilers) and David A. Patterson (who taught us about computer architecture) have recently written two viewpoints which were published in Communications of the ACM. The title of Ullman’s paper is ‘Advising students for success‘ and Patterson’s is ‘Your students are your legacy‘

In these short articles those valuable computer scientists provide some very useful insights about what it means to do research, what can go wrong and the measures that should be taken in order to nurture a productive environment to boost new ideas and implementations, such as:

“* Show initiative, for fortune favors the bold. Don’t wait for professors to tell you what to do; if we were good managers, we probably wouldn’t be faculty. Explore, challenge assumptions, and don’t let lots of prior art discourage you.
* Sink or swim. We’ll offer you what we think are great projects with plenty of potential, and we’ll support you the best we can, but it’s what you do with the opportunity that makes or breaks your graduate student career.
* Educate your professor. We’re in a fast-moving field, so for us to give you good advice we need to know what you’re working on. Teach us!”

“Open collaborative laboratory. We were increasingly seeing people optimize their schedules to avoid disruptions by working from home when they didn’t have classes or meetings, since computers and networks were just as fast at home as in the office. The negative global impact of such a local optimization can be thought of as corollary of Metcalf’s Law: if the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users, even a small group leaving a network can significantly decrease its value. This drop in value can in turn cause others to leave, with the negative feedback loop continuing until the network nearly collapses.

In 2006, we experimented by creating a physical office area with contiguous open space for everyone in the project, including the faculty. We hoped that easy access to faculty would draw students to campus and that the open space would inspire innovation by increasing the chances of spontaneous discussions.

The open space makes it very convenient to quickly grab a group of interested people on a moment’s notice for a discussion rather than trying to wander around the building or exchange a volley of email messages to schedule a meeting. We have also been surprised to see new students in this space quickly act like senior graduate students. Apparently, easy access to faculty plus watching how senior graduate students operate helps new students move up the learning curve quickly.

The research retreats and open space also build esprit de corps, as we play together one afternoon at retreats—for example, skiing, paint ball, and river rafting—and in the lab we collectively watch presidential debates, movies, and big sports events.

The challenge of our open space is then to preserve concentration while enhancing communication, for otherwise people will still stay home. Distractions are reduced with large displays, headphones, and relying on cellphones instead of landline phones; the custom is to make and take calls outside the open space. We also included many small meeting rooms in which to hold vigorous conversations. The result is an open space about as quiet as a library or coffee shop, which is good enough for most to concentrate while encouraging spontaneous communication.”

“When I was finishing my Ph.D., I read a book based on interviews of people talking about their jobs to help decide what I would do next. What I learned from the book was that people were happy with their careers if they designed or built objects that lasted, such as the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge, or if they shaped people’s lives, such as patients or parishioners. Thus, I went into the job of assistant professor with the hypothesis that my long-lasting impact was not the papers but the people.

Thirty-two years later, I can confirm that hypothesis: your main academic legacy is the dozens of students you mentor, not the hundreds of papers you publish. My advice to advisors is to get your students off to a good start, create stimulating research environments, help them acquire research taste, be a good role model, bolster student confidence, teach them to speak well publicly, and help them up if they stumble, for students are the real coins of the academic realm.”

“A Newer Model: Project-Oriented Theses

It took many years to reach this point, but it is now fairly routine to have substantial software projects carried out in an academic setting. While there will always be the occasional thesis that is purely “pencil-and-paper,” a much more productive approach is to introduce beginning Ph.D. students to a project. Often they enjoy “learning by doing,” contributing to the software development, while learning the new notions that are being investigated by the project. Senior students often get the opportunity to help, and even to supervise, junior students.

The best example I’ve seen of how to use this mode effectively comes from my colleague Jennifer Widom. In a series of innovative projects (semistructured data, stream databases, and now uncertain databases), she has perfected a routine, consisting of:

1. Define a general goal for the research, and get a team of doctoral students working together.
2. Spend a substantial period of time, perhaps 6–12 months, in which the theory and models underlying the problem area are developed. (Jennifer says that this step—making the students part of the planning and modeling—is what distinguishes her approach.)
3. Then, start an implementation project. Get the students working on pieces. The goal of each project is a robust, distributable prototype, not something that can be carried intact to commercialization.
4. Allow students to identify their own aspect of the broader problem area on whose difficulties they will focus. Students develop their own ideas, which form the core of their thesis, and are able to validate the ideas by installing them in the larger system.

It is sad that many research-funding agencies, such as DARPA, have become so “mission-oriented” recently. While it may be possible to support a Ph.D. student doing part of a project implementation, Step 4 is left out; there is no room on the project for a student to explore original work outside the boundaries of the project. For example, I have heard from several independent sources that while the European Union has been supporting “research” generously, the support is sufficiently constrained by concrete deliverables that there is no way to support Step 4 on the projects. In countries where Ph.D. support comes from a state source, this arrangement presents no serious impediment. However, in countries where Ph.D. students are dependent on project support, it becomes hard to train first-rate researchers.”

“Students and Startups

One of the trickiest decisions an advisor has to make is how to deal with the student who wants to found a startup while they are working on their doctorate. Few people agree with me on this point, but I believe that, unless the startup idea is insane, they should go out and do the startup. My theory is that, while getting a doctorate and entering the research arena is a high calling, it is not the highest possible calling. A startup can have more impact on our lives than a thesis. Moreover, if they miss the opportunity to do a successful startup, then they have lost a great deal. If the startup flops, as many do, they have lost only a few years, and can resume work on a doctorate if they wish.

Sergey Brin never asked me whether or not he should quit the Ph.D. program and found Google, but I would have told him to do so had he asked. Another student, Anand Rajaraman, did ask my advice on this matter when he was about half a year from finishing. I told him to leave and be a founder of Junglee. The venture was quite successful. A few years later he returned to Stanford, started an entirely new thesis topic that abstracted some of what he had learned at Junglee, and is now Dr. Rajaraman.

You don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to think about startups. Great ideas can develop anywhere, and a responsible advisor will, when appropriate, present to their students the option that their work might form the basis of a commercial venture. I recall an email message from a student at another school asking the question: “can a piece of work be both a thesis and useful?” When I replied in the affirmative, I was then asked to explain this point to their advisor. That advisor was serving the student poorly, although their attitude seems fairly common. Even in the course of reviewing this Viewpoint, I encountered the view that a piece of technical work is more to be admired if it cannot be commercialized.”

Serbülent Ünsal: BDD (Behavior Driven Development) Roadmap

noreply@blogger.com (Nightwalker) — Cum, 26 Haz 2009 15:38:42 +0000

So after a week I finally start to see the big picture for BDD. And here is the roadmap for a beginner on BDD. I think it'll be helpful on the road.

İntroduction to Behavior Driven Development
http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd
http://behaviour-driven.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_driven_development

Jbehave2 Basics
http://jbehave.org/documentation/two-minute-tutorial/
http://www.bitmotif.com/java/jbehave-rave/

Jbehave2 Selenium and Matchers
http://blog.m.artins.net/tag/jbehave/

Jbehave2 Validations
http://www.testearly.com/2007/07/16/using-bdd-to-drive-development/

Mockito is your friend ( Also Jbehave's best friend )
http://code.google.com/p/mockito/wiki/FeaturesAndMotivations
http://mockito.googlecode.com/svn/branches/1.7/javadoc/org/mockito/Mockito.html

Deeper Jbehave2
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-cq09187/

Deeper Jbehave2 Part-2 ( Some codes are misssing in the tutorial )
http://www.ryangreenhall.com/articles/bdd-by-example.html

Behavior Driven Database Development
http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=78

Emre Sevinç: 2 Computer Science Seminars: Privacy, Social Networks, Trust, and Terrorism | On Modeling, Analysis, and Optimization of Packet Aggregation Systems

Prş, 25 Haz 2009 14:13:21 +0000

Boğaziçi Uni. Department of Computer Engineering, Engineering Building Vedat Yerlici Conference Hall, 29th June 2009, 09:30 – 12:30

Privacy, Social Networks, Trust, and Terrorism

Abstract

After a snapshot of the privacy topics likely to attract legislative activity in the new year, we’ll take a look at social networking web sites, where participants often live in a “panopticon-like” environment, since social networking sites and third party applications on them often have default settings that encourage sharing. However, “The Internet is a cruel historian.” and a professional individual who networks with potential employers generally prefers not to be confused with a person with the same name who is portrayed as a party animal.

If an attacker uses a social networking site to gather enough personal information to make a good guess at a user’s password or other authentication mechanism, he can change the user’s settings and personal history and (allow many others to) track the user’s comings and goings (as well as those of her “friends”). In one notable demonstration of this, (real) friends even created an account and a persona for a real person, a computer security expert, using information publicly available from the Internet, that was good enough to fool a sister of the victim. An unvetted malicious third party application that a naïve user allows to run with social networking programs could do the same thing. We’ll show some examples of social networking privacy issues.

Various trust-enhancing measures can be used to design privacy into new systems from the start, and we’ll discuss these and a number of guidelines that have been developed and are in use by large software firms to help design products with privacy and security built in, rather than bolted on.

We will conclude by discussing a recent U. S. National Research Council report on privacy in the struggle against terrorists, its framework for program assessment, and its conclusions about privacy, data mining, and related issues.

Lance J. Hoffman
Computer Science Department
The George Washington University
Washington DC 20052

On Modeling, Analysis, and Optimization of Packet Aggregation Systems

Abstract

In packet communication systems, a header is attached to the transmitted packet at each layer. The overhead due to the transmission of the individual header can have a significant impact on the performance of the communication system especially when the system operates in heavy load. In order to increase data throughput, a number of packets sharing a single header can be aggregated into a frame.

In this paper, we present a mathematical model for a packet aggregation system assuming a general distribution for the packet length. For a given header size, we obtain the minimum system utilization where packet aggregation improves the system performance. We also analyze the asymptotic behavior of such systems leading to a simple heuristic policy on the optimum aggregation level. It is shown that the impact of the variability of the packet length distribution on different system performance measures is rather insignificant when the system load is low or moderate.

We also show that the correlation of the sizes of the successive frames in the aggregation system increases rapidly as the system utilization increases. However, the packet length variability has little impact on the correlation.

Khosrow Sohraby
Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Program

09:30 – 10:00 Coffee and Tea
10:00 – 10:45 Talk by Prof. Hoffman
10:45 – 11:00 Discussion
11:00 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 12:00 Talk by Prof. Sohraby
12:00 – 12:15 Discussion

LCV: Please contact gaye.genc at boun.edu.tr to confirm your attendance until 10am 26th June 2009, Friday.

Short Bio of Lance J. Hoffman

Distinguished Research Professor
Computer Science Department
The George Washington University

Founder and Senior Staff Researcher,
Cyberspace Security Policy and Research Institute

Dr. Lance J. Hoffman is known for his pioneering research on computer security and risk analysis, and for his interdisciplinary work in computer privacy issues. Distinguished Research Professor of Computer Science at The George Washington University in Washington, D. C. and Founder of the School of Engineering’s Cyberspace Policy Institute (now Cyberspace Security Policy and Research Institute), he is in charge of the computer security and information assurance program in computer science.

Short Bio of Khosrow Sohraby

KHOSROW SOHRABY is currently the Curators’ Professor of Computer Science and Electrial Engineering at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He received B.Eng and M.Eng degrees from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 1979 and 1981, respectively, and Ph.D. degree in 1985 from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, all in Electrical Engineering. His current research interests include design and analysis of high speed computer and communications networks, traffic management and analysis, modern queueing theory, large-scale computations in performance analysis, multimedia networks, and networking aspects of wireless and mobile communications. He is an active member of IEEE Communications Society and has served as the guest editor of number of special issues of the Journal of Selected Areas in Communications and Communications Magazine.

Emre Sevinç: Haritada Boş Noktalar: Devletin Gizliliği ve Görünür Olanın Sınırları

Çrş, 24 Haz 2009 19:49:11 +0000

“Disiplinlerötesi” Konferans Dizisi – 12

Tarih: 26 Haziran 2009
Saat: 18:00
Yer: İTÜ Taşkışla

Garanti Galeri – Platform Garanti Güncel Sanat Merkezi ve 11. Uluslararası İstanbul Bienali Kırmızı İplik Konuşma ve Sohbetler Dizisi işbirliğiyle gerçekleştirilmektedir.

Coğrafya uzmanı ve sanatçı Trevor Paglen bizleri devlet sırlarının, örtülü ödeneklerin, gizli askeri üslerin ve “kayıp edilmiş” insanların dünyasında, askeri oluşumların ve istihbarat kurumlarının içyüzünü bilen kişilerce “kara dünya” olarak adlandırılan bir alanda yolculuğa çıkarıyor. Paglen, Nevada çölünde “var olmayan” Hava Kuvvetleri ve CIA üslerinden, Afganistan’daki gizli hapishanelere ve yaşadığımız yere ürkütücü derecede yakın olan çok daha puslu “kara bölgelere” doğru katettiğimiz bu yolda, konuşmasıyla bize rehberlik ediyor. Çalışmaları boyunca ürettiği ve topladığı yüzlerce imgeyi kullanarak, “kara dünya”nın iç çelişkilerinin, güncel zamanlar hakkındaki düşüncelerimizin bağlamını oluşturan tuhaf görsel, estetik ve epistemolojik kuralları nasıl yarattığını gösteriyor.

Trevor Paglen Berkeley, California’da yaşayan bir sanatçı, yazar ve California Berkeley Üniversitesi Coğrafya Bölümü’nde çalışan bir deneysel coğrafya uzmanı. Paglen, dünyayı anlamak üzere alışılmadık, ancak üzerinde titizlikle çalışılmış yöntemler inşa etmek için toplumsal bilimler, güncel sanat ve daha karanlık disiplinler arasındaki sınırları kasten bulanıklaştırıyor.

Sanatçının işleri, Berlin’de Transmediale.08 Festivali’nde, Pittsburgh’da Andy Warhol Müzesi’nde (2007), Philadelphia’daki Güncel Sanat Enstitüsü’nde (2007) ve Kunstraum Munich’te (2006) sergilendi.

Paglen’in, A.C. Thompson ile birlikte yazdığı ve 2006 yılında Melville House tarafından yayımlanan ilk kitabı Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (İşkence Taksisi: CIA’in Hayalet Uçuşlarının İzinde), ABD Merkezi Haber Alma Teşkilatı’nın (CIA) “olağandışı teslimat” programı hakkında sistematik bir bilgi sunan ilk kitap oldu. Yine Melville House tarafından 2007 yılında yayımlanan ikinci kitabı I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Sana Anlatabilirdim Ama Sonra Seni Yok Etmem Gerekirdi) ise okurlarına “kara” askeri programların görsel kültürünü inceleyen bir çalışma sunuyor.

Kaynak: Özgür Uçkan‘dan edindiğim bilgiye göre http://platformgarantienglish.blogspot.com/2009/05/haritada-bos-noktalar-devletin.html

Emre Sevinç: Where is the best place for science: USA or EU?

Sal, 23 Haz 2009 16:35:43 +0000

I was recently exchanging e-mails with a colleague of mine who happens to pursue his Ph.D. in one of the best universities in USA. I said that he was lucky, now that Obama was the president, the scientific research would be in a much better position compared to the previous administration. His reply took me by surprise:

“I don’t think even Obama can save this country. Europe is the place to be for science…”

What do you think?

Emre Sevinç: TED Talks: Philip Zimbardo prescribes a healthy take on time

Sal, 23 Haz 2009 12:00:07 +0000

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives.

Philip Zimbardo was the leader of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment — and an expert witness at Abu Ghraib. His book ‘The Lucifer Effect’ explores the nature of evil; now, in his new work, he studies the nature of heroism.

Emre Sağlam: Funny

Sal, 23 Haz 2009 11:01:44 +0000

Funny

Emre Sevinç: Beyond Google Music Search: Query By Humming or Whistling / Islık Çalarak Aradığınız Parçayı, Müziği Nasıl Bulursunuz?

Pzt, 22 Haz 2009 21:02:50 +0000

Islık çalarak bir müzik parçasının ismini nasıl öğrenirsiniz?

How can you find out a tune which you can hum or whistle but have no other cue?

Enter “Query by humming“: Query by humming (QbH) is a music retrieval system that branches off the original classification systems of title, artist, composer, and genre. It normally applies to songs or other music with a distinct single theme or melody. The system involves taking a user-hummed melody (input query) and comparing it to an existing database. The system then returns a ranked list of music closest to the input query.

A few services and articles that helps you to hum or whistle a tune and find out its name, composer, etc:

Emre Sevinç: Is Turkey Catching Up with France? - Türkiye Fransa’ya Yetişiyor Mu?

Pzt, 22 Haz 2009 14:09:22 +0000

“There are many differences between Turkey and France. But are the differences increasing or decreasing? From a public health perspective, the answer is obvious, Turkey is catching up.

Even if the population growth is still faster in Turkey than in France, the number of children per women today is almost the same, which means that the polulation growth in Turkey will slow down.”

Source: Gapminder - Turkey vs. France

Emre Sevinç: Seminer: Ses Fiziği, Oda ve Mekan Akustiği, Ses Arayüz Araçları

Pzt, 22 Haz 2009 11:53:16 +0000

Radial Engineering ve Primacoustic firmalarının başkanı Peter Janis, 30 Haziran 2009 Salı günü, Akalın Müzik işbirliği ile İstanbul Taksim Square Hotel toplantı salonunda Ses fiziği, Oda ve Mekan Akustiği, Ses Arabirimleri konularını içeren ve iki bölümden oluşan bir seminer verecek. Seminer ücretsiz olup başlama saati 14:00 olacak.

Seminerin ilk bölümünün konusu “Ses Mühendisleri için Akustik”. Bu bölüm temel akustik, basit matematik ve çarpmaya bağlı eko, ikincil yansımalar, oda modları ve rezonans gibi çoğu odanın tipik problemleri ile başlayacak. Devamında bu problemlerin ortadan kaldırılması için neler yapılabileceği, oda performansı arttırımı, büyük odalarda anlaşılabilirliğin geliştirilmesi ve vokal odaları gibi küçük odalarda problem frekansların ortadan kaldırılması üzerine verilecek bilgiler ile sürecek. LEDE (live-end, dead-end -canlı taraf, ölü taraf) çözümleri, stüdyolar için oda tasarımları, bas kapanlama, difüzyon ve panel plasmanı üzerinde durulacak. İlk bölüm rezonans ve transmisyon hatlarının ortadan kaldırılma metodları üzerine tartışma ile son bulacak.

Seminerin ikinci bölümünün konusu “Kayıt, Canlı Performans ve Yayın için Ses Arayüzleme”. Bu bölüm trafoların, mikrofonların ve enstrüman manyetiklerinin nasıl çalıştığına dair temel elektronik bilgiler verilerek başlayacak. Sonrasında sinyal seviyeleri hakkında bilgi, enstrümanlar ile ses ekipmanlarının etkileşiminde maksimum sinyal verimliliğine, en iyi tona ve tabii ki en düşük gürültü seviyesine sahip olmak için gerekli doğru ses araçlarının neler olduğu anlatılacak. “Ground loop” sonucu ortaya çıkan “hum” ve “buzz” problemleri hakkında bilgilendirme, aktif ve pasif ekipmanlar kullanarak bu problemlerin ortadan kaldırılmasına değinilecek. Daha sonra canlı enstrümanlar için ses dağıtım çözümleri, stüdyoda re-amp metodları ve konser/yayın uygulamalarında kullanılan sinyal dağıtıcıları hakkında verilecek bilgiler ile toplantı son bulacak.

Bu semineri Akalın Müzik, Radial Engineering ve Primacoustic şirketleri ortaklaşa düzenliyorlar. Seminere katılacaklar, o güne özel, Primacoustic ve Radial Engineering ürünlerinde %20 özel katılımcı indiriminden yararlanabilecekler. Ayrıca katılımcılar arasında yapılacak çekilişle bir şanslı katılımcı bir adet Primacoustic London 12a hazır oda akustik düzenleme kiti kazanacak.

Seminer salonunda katılımcılar için belli sayıda yer ayrıldığı için telefon ve e-posta adresine önceden rezervasyon yaptırmanız tavsiye ediliyor. Seminere katılmak veya seminer hakkında ayrıntılı bilgi almak için 0212 293 10 68 numaralı telefondan Akalın Müzik’i arayabilir, veya info@akalinmuzik.com.tr e-posta adresine bilgilerinizi gönderebilirsiniz.

Akalın Müzik’in bu seminer hakkındaki bültenine ulaşmak için: http://www.akalinmuzik.com.tr/ebulten/juneII/index.html

Muziktek.net forumlarındaki ilgili başlığa ulaşmak için: http://www.muziktek.net/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=21936

Peter Janis kimdir?

1958 Montreal Kanada doğumlu Janis, ses ve müzikle ilgilenmeye 7 yaşında almaya başladığı piyano dersleri ile başlamış. 1976′da başladığı müzik ekipmanları satış mağazası temsilciliğinden 1980′lerin başında Ottawa’nın en önde gelen ses firmasında konser seslendirme, arena sistemleri, gece kulübü seslendirmeleri ve kilise seslendirmeleri üzerinde çalışmış ve tecrübe kazanmış. Bu süreçte JBL, Peavey, AKG gibi firmaların eğitim seminerlerine katılarak kişisel gelişimini sürdüren Janis, bir yandan da Kuzey Alberta Teknoloji Enstitüsü’nde Elektrik Sistemleri üzerine ihtisasına devam etmiş. Edmonton’daki başarılarını farkeden CBS (şimdilerdeki adıyla Sony), kendisini o zamanlar sahibi olduğu Fender firmasının Kanada distribütörlüğünün Ürün Direktörlüğü’ne getirmiş.

Görevde bulunduğu süre içerisinde şirket portfolyosuna Akai, Alesis ve Casio gibi firmaların ürünlerini de katan Janis, Fender’in Kanada operasyonlarını sınırın güneyine taşıma kararı alması üzerine ayrılıp kendi firmasını kurmaya karar vermiş.

1991′de Ses Endüstrisine kablo, konnektör, trafo ve patchbay temin etmek amacıyla Radial Engineering’i kuran Janis, kısa sürede Otari miks ve kayıt sistemleri ile Telecast fiberoptik sistemlerinin distribütörlüğünü almış ve özellikle Telecast üzerinden broadcast endüstrisine yoğun hizmet vermeye başlamış.

Düşük maliyetli dijital kayıt sistemlerinin piyasaya çıkması ile ev kayıt ortamlarındaki akustik düzenleme sorunlarının farkına varan Janis, Sonex markasının Kanada distribütörlüğünü almakla işe girişmiş. Ancak bir takım güçlüklerin verdiği sabırsızlıkla kendi çözümlerini üretmek amacı ile 2000 yılında Primacoustic firmasını kurmuş.

Radial Engineering tarafında 1996′dan beri yüksek kaliteli DI Box üretimi yapmakta olan grup, 2001 yılından itibaren gitar pedalları, reamp arabirimleri ve amp/efekt switchleri de üretmekte ve sadece Radial kısmında yılda 50,000′den fazla ürün piyasaya vermektedir.

Günümüzde Radial’ın kullanıcıları arasında U2′dan Rolling Stones’a, The Eagles’dan Cirque Du Soleil ve AC/DC’ye kadar birçok zirve sanatçı ve ekip bulunmakta. Primacoustic’in bu yakınlardaki müşteri portfolyosunda ise Tommy Lee ve Nathan East gibi sanatçılar ve Grammy’li prodüktörler David Bottrill ve Butch Walker’ın stüdyolarının yanı sıra, Electronic Arts gibi bilgisayar oyunu firmaları bulunmakta. Firma bu aralar yayıncı NBC Sports ile 2010 Olimpiyatları üzerinde çalışmakta.

Emre Sevinç: My Favorite Running Paths - 2

Pzt, 22 Haz 2009 10:31:30 +0000

View Running path 2 in a larger map

A little bit extended running path compared to my initial running path.

Some numbers:

Approximately 4.15 km of walking (from home and back home) and then 3.5 km of running.

Emre Sevinç: Software Developer and Cognitive Psychologist Positions

Cts, 20 Haz 2009 11:55:02 +0000

From: “Christa Houser”

Open Positions (multiple): Senior Software Developer and Senior Cognitive Psychologist to work on Carney’s LearningDNA™ project (see below for descriptions of each, as well as a company overview)

Company: Carney, Inc.
Location: US- Washington, D.C. area
Timing: Short (minimum 6-9 months) and long term positions available immediately
Contact: Michelle Brown, michelle brown at teamcarney com

Note: John Carney and Brian Duffy will be attending the 2009 UMAP Conference in Trento, Italy next week. Please feel free to contact them at john.carney@teamcarney.com if you wish to meet with them at the conference.

Project:

Carney’s LearningDNA project seeks to accelerate performance through the development of a model that will measurably improve the learning experience in an immersive virtual learning environment.

Within Carney’s LearningDNA system, user models built over time will communicate with immersive virtual- and other adaptive learning environments to define a unique path through the training or simulation for each individual, thus accelerating both the learning curve and the performance of each user. Third party assessment results can be added by the user to further build the user profile within the system. The learner both gains insight into their own skills and abilities and reduces time to acquire new skills by maintaining his/her profile.

In the project, Carney is creating a learner-owned ubiquitous user model that can securely interoperate with any number of learning and training environments. This user model will grow and evolve, mirroring the learner, and at any time will be able to present itself to a learning system through an application protocol interface (API) as an accurate representative of the student. Each participating learning system will write back to the user model based on the learner’s progress in the system, providing additional information on the user. Information captured by the model might include detailed information about the user’s knowledge base, personality, and any other characteristics that impact the user’s learning needs and subsequent performance.

Title: Senior Software Developer

Qualifications

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

The Senior Software Developer must have:

At least 5-7 years experience with requirements definition and analysis
At least 5-7 years experience with user interface design and implementation
At least 3-5 years experience with multi-tier application architecture
At least 3-5 years experience with advanced database and indexing concepts such as …
At least 2-3 years experience with cryptography and steganography
A master’s degree in a technical field such as computer science, computer engineering, or electrical engineering

Other qualifications
The Senior Software developer may also have:

Knowledge of advanced software development environments such as C++, C#, .NET, JAVA, XML/XSL
At least 3-5 years of experience with current multimedia programming tools such as Flash, Active Server Pages, AJAX, and JavaScript
Expertise in user modeling, data encryption, and/or creating web-based wikis
A Ph.D. in a technical field

Position Overview

The Senior Software Developer is responsible for designing and developing complex data storage and retrieval systems to support research efforts related to User Modeling, Performance-based Simulations, and Intelligent User Interfaces. Senior Software Developers work closely with other members of the cognitive and instructional research team to produce high quality technical solutions to help achieve challenging research objectives.

Project Specific Responsibilities:

Create and manage sophisticated database storage, retrieval, and searching algorithms
Support information dissemination efforts for ongoing research tasks
Work directly with internal client resources to define requirements, functional specification and acceptance criteria
Synthesize and organize cross-functional team and client input to ensure timely and accurate project deliverables
Collaborate with instructional designers to identify knowledge impact opportunities and challenges
Document technology functions and features including the production of job aids for team members

Organizational Responsibilities:

Actively apply feedback received to day-to-day work and strive to improve performance
Accurately complete and submit time/status reports in a timely manner
Comply with all corporate policies and procedures
Seek opportunities for innovation every day
Provide a remarkable client experience to both internal and external clients

Title: Cognitive Psychologist

Qualifications

The Cognitive Psychologist must have:

At least 3-5 years experience in developing and validating competencies
At least 5-7 years experience developing, implementing, and interpreting qualitative and quantitative assessments
Published research and expertise in the areas of human performance, knowledge acquisition, and/or personality and performance profiling
A Ph.D. in cognitive psychology or a closely related field such as behavioral psychology, cognitive neuroscience, or I-O psychology. (Applicants will be considered if in process of finishing dissertation).

Other qualifications
Applicants who have worked with any of the following are desired:

Personality and other attribute assessments
Cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the areas of cognitive load and working memory
Assessing competency gaps
Predicting performance based on knowledge, attributes, and/or personality
Learning management systems

Position Overview

The Cognitive Psychologist will be responsible for providing specific expertise to the project team. S/he will work closely with other members of the Cognitive and Instructional Research team to produce high quality technical solutions to help achieve challenging research objectives.

Project Specific Responsibilities:

Provide expertise to the project team related to:
- developing, validating, and assessing competencies
- developing and interpreting surveys and assessments
- tying performance to predictors such as knowledge, attributes, and/or personality

Support information dissemination efforts for ongoing research tasks
Work directly with internal client resources to develop and achieve research goals
Collaborate with instructional designers to identify knowledge impact opportunities and challenges

Organizational Responsibilities:

Company Overview (www.teamcarney.com)

The mission at Carney is to help individuals and organizations perform at the speed of need. Through the effective, innovative and creative use of technology and best practices, Carney has successfully implemented effective Performance Improvement solutions. Carney’s 5 year plan is to expand its learning and training services to encompass a comprehensive service offering as well as building a Human Capital Development discipline.

Carney, Inc. was incorporated in January 1994 in Alexandria, Virginia. Our focus is improving performance through the facilitation of learning along with knowledge sharing and management. While aggressively pursuing growth, Carney has maintained its high standards of excellence and its creative use of technology. This is accomplished through a talented group of employees and an unwavering dedication to quality and client service.

Carney employs a team of creative and technical professionals to develop solutions; the process that drives the interaction and performance of these professionals we call Instructioneering™. The team includes performance solutions consultants/designers, subject matter experts, instructors, knowledge management consultants, writers, project managers, graphic artists, animators, video and audio professionals, programmers, and product testers.

Carney’s Old Town Alexandria facility (just 5 minutes from Washington, DC) is fully equipped to produce professional audio, high definition video, and 3D modeling and animation. The facility also has a secure production suite for classified project work.

Carney is an EEO/AA Employer.
Carney Inc.

http://www.teamcarney.com

Emre Sağlam: My flight horror story

Cum, 19 Haz 2009 17:09:10 +0000

EDIT: (06/20/2009 13:30 istanbul time) I made it! I caught the NY – İstanbul flight! I’m tired now I’ll write more details on it later.

Here is my story so far.
My booked/confirmed itinary was DCA – Chicago O’hare – Istanbul. DCA – O’hare being at 7:40 (EST) and O’hare – istanbul at 10:20 (CDT).

I was at the DCA airport around 5:40 and checked in for my flight. It was already delayed to 8:40 at the time I was there. At first they wanted to send me with an earlier flight at 5:50pm which got delayed to 6:30ish. And then the UA rep saw only 3 seats available and a very long wait line for that flight and she decided that I cannot make that one. It took only 20 minutes after that to delay that flight to 9:10 then to 9:20.

So very nice customer service rep from United Airlines (UA) booked me on an American Airlines (AA) flight to O’hare which was scheduled to depart at 8:40ish.

When the flight time came the AA flight got delayed to 9:15 so all hopes got lost since there was no way of catching my flight at Chicago. I waited for the nice gentleman to complete the boarding since he was the only one there then he advised to talk to the gate people for UA since the original ticket was with them.

For the ones who doesn’t know DCA, basically everything ends around 9:30. So I caught a group of UA people, who were extremely nice and helpful to me. Although they were about to go home and I was the only passenger there they waited for me to help me fix the situation.

However my flight from chicago to istanbul was operated by Turkish Airlines (THY). They said that they cannot do anything about this flight and they even called THY but the person on the line for THY had no idea what to do. it was about 10:20pm and the UA lady booked me to the next flight to O’hare at 5:50PM next day and said at least you’ll have a confirmed seat next day.

Then I went home and tried to call Orbitz to get some help. The only thing that they did is to get a hold to THY representative in Turkey (it took 48 minutes to do that). After they transferred my call to THY, the THY representative tried to help me but couldn’t do anything more than citing that there is no seat available on the next istanbul flight from Chicago.

I offered him to book me to NY to Istanbul flight but he was clueless. He tried to help me but nothing has been done. He called me back and forth from Turkey couple of times ending with no result.

I also tried to call THY NY office numerous times. On each attempt my calls went to a voicemail that has no recordings to indicate that the line is indeed a THY line.

It was 2 am. I was dead tired and went to sleep. Woke up at 7am. Called the orbitz again to get a refund and book another flight to Turkey this time without THY. Of course unless you don’t want to lose half of your money you spent on the ticket, this is not an option. At some point of the orbitz agent offered me 200+ dollars to book the flight…

Orbitz agent put me back into contact with THY (another 45 mins). This time a better agent from THY tried to help and I transferred me to someone who actually knows what she is doing, after telling her the story all over again, she promised me to call me back in 15 mins. I got a call from another THY agent 30 mins later. It was about 10:15 AM already. He knew what the problem was and he booked me to NY – istanbul flight which is at 4:30 pm (EST)

I bought an Acela (so called “fast” train) ticket to NYC ($177.00) and got in the train at 12:00pm. I’m currently in the train as I’m writing this. My plan is to catch earliest LIRR train from NY Penn station to Jamaica station and take Airtran from there to JFK.

I have absolutely no hope to catch the JFK-Istanbul flight unless it is delayed for an hour. But nobody can say that I didn’t try.

Morale of the story:

Don’t fly from USA to Turkey on any flight that makes a connection in the USA. Try to book a flight that connects from Europe. (Lufthansa, KLM, Air France, whichever)
THY customer service and presence in the USA must be improved dramatically, until the time I see serious positive steps taken from them, THY will be my last option.
If you have a connection flight and it’s delayed to the extend that you cannot catch your connection, still take that flight and stay at your connection. It’s much better to deal it on the spot than dealing on the phone.
The overall flight quality and spontaneity is decreasing exponentially. Charging a lot of money as tax on an airfare and still seeing no improvement on the air travel is sad.

Emre Sevinç: Basic Immune Simulator Programmer Position - Multi-agent Systems

Cum, 19 Haz 2009 15:40:07 +0000

From Virginia A. Folcik Nivar:

“I am looking to hire a full-time post-doc, masters or experienced Computer Science graduate to work on the Basic Immune Simulator at The Ohio State University.

The project will be described at Swarmfest in less than two weeks. The abstract is on the Swarmfest webpage. Java programming skills required and some knowledge of Immunology/Biology preferred. Immediate eligibility to work in the USA required. Please contact me via this e-mail if interested.

Thanks,
Virginia A. Folcik Nivar, Ph.D.”

Emre Sağlam: Desperation

Prş, 18 Haz 2009 22:32:27 +0000

This must be the new definition of the desperation. Poor Microsoft. I’m kinda speechless…

Poor Microsoft

Emre Sevinç: ÖSS’den Çıkıp Bilgisayar Bilimlerine Gelin: Test Sürüşüne Bekliyoruz

Prş, 18 Haz 2009 14:00:24 +0000

“ÖSS bitti, sırada üniversite ve bölüm seçme telaşı var. Doğru kararı vermek için pek çok etkeni göz önünde bulundurmak gerekli. Gelecekteki kariyerini bilgisayar bilimleri üzerine kurmayı düşünen gençlerimizi 22 Temmuz Çarşamba günü test sürüşüne bekliyoruz. Bilgisayar bilimlerinin büyüleyici dünyasında kısa bir yolculuğa çıkmaya ve maceraya hazır mısınız?”

Kayıt yaptırmak için http://cs.bilgi.edu.tr

YouTube HD kalitesi ile izlemek için: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLODXnpPmkQ

Emre Sevinç: Politikacı-ölçer: Politikacılar Aldıkları Parayı Ne Kadar Hak Ediyorlar?

Prş, 18 Haz 2009 11:11:55 +0000

Politikacılar Kaç Para Alıyor ve Ne Kadar İyi Yönetiyor?

Güzel ve faydalı bir veri görselleştirme örneği ile karşılaştım dün.

Yukarıdaki grafik çeşitli ülkelerin parlamenterlerinin performanslarını ölçüyor. Grafiği oluşturmak için GSMH ile İyi Yönetişim İndeksi kullanılmış (demokrasi indeksi, BM insani gelişim ve yolsuzluk indeksinin bir karışımı). Kısaca bir ülke merkezdeki sarı artı sembolünden ne kadar uzaksa o ülkenin parlamenterleri o kadar çok para kazanıyor ve ülkenin çizgisinin saatin tersi yönünde yaptığı açı ne kadar büyükse o ülkedeki yönetim o kadar kötü.

Örneğin Belçika ile İsviçre’yi kıyaslayacak olursak Belçika merkeze daha uzakta yani politikacıları daha çok para alıyor ancak yönetim bakımından İsviçre daha iyi çünkü yatayla yaptığı açı Belçika’nın açısına kıyasla çok daha az.

Kaynaklar:

infosthetics.com

What World MPs Really Make

Emre Sevinç: Maestronun Dönüşü: Keynes ve Güncel Ekonomik Kriz

Prş, 18 Haz 2009 09:58:14 +0000

Konuşmacı: Lord Robert Skidelsky
Tarih: 23 Haziran 2009
Saat: 16:00
Yer: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi, Dolapdere Kampüsü, BS1 (Büyük Salon 1) (harita için tıklayınız)

Maestronun Dönüşü: Keynes ve Ekonomik Kriz

Emre Başar: Fwd: Fw: İlt: Re: Chock Ajayibbbb

Sal, 16 Haz 2009 11:59:16 +0000

Şu hayatta böyle bir başlık yazmadan ölmeyeyim dedim. Yeri gelmişken bağlayayım, araba alırken test sürüşü yapıyoruz, işletim sistemi kurmadan önce live cd ile deniyoruz, ÖSS'ye girenlerin nesi eksik? Onlar için de bir test sürüşü var.

Emre Sevinç: Maestro Speaks: Jose Abreu on Kids Transformed by Music

Sal, 16 Haz 2009 10:11:14 +0000

Jose Antonio Abreu: Maestro

The gulf between the rich and the poor in Venezuela is one of the worst in the world. Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist, musician, and reformer, founded El Sistema (”the system”) in 1975 to help Venezuelan kids take part in classical music. After 30 years (and 10 political administrations), El Sistema is a nationwide organization of 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras, and 270 music centers — and close to 250,000 young musicians.

El Sistema uses music education to help kids from impoverished circumstances achieve their full potential and learn values that favor their growth. The talented musicians have become a source of national pride. Several El Sistema students have gone on to major international careers, including Gustavo Dudamel, soon to be the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the bassist Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest musician ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic.

There is a simple concept behind Abreu’s work: for him an orchestra is first and foremost about togetherness, a place where children learn to listen to each other and to respect one another.

“Music has to be recognized as an … agent of social development in the highest sense, because it transmits the highest values — solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to express sublime feelings.”

José Antonio Abreu

The original link to video: http://www.ted.com/talks/jose_abreu_on_kids_transformed_by_music.html

PS: You can join the cause, spread the word and help Abreu’s purpose by visiting http://apps.facebook.com/causes/290357/66991079?fb_page_id=29092950651&m=6987e7df

Serbülent Ünsal: Demir almak günü gelmişse zamandan...

noreply@blogger.com (Nightwalker) — Pzt, 15 Haz 2009 20:58:40 +0000

Ayrılık hep zor gelmiştir bana. Hele bir de bunu bloglamak istediğinizde işiniz daha da zorlaşıyormuş.
Fazla uzatmamaya çalışacağım. 18 aydır profesyonel olarak yaptığım Pardus geliştiriciliğini artık amatör olarak sürdüreceğim.

Yeni işime bu gün başladım ama bu başka bir yazıya kalsın. Bütün bu macera boyunca tanıdığım, hepsinin bilgilerinden vizyonundan faydalandığım tüm ekip arkadaşlarıma, en zor zamanlarda camiamızı organize edip yardıma gelen Oi ekibine ve bu süre boyunca pek çok sorunda beraber çalıştığımız bir çoğunu yalnız ismen tanıdığım camia üyelerimize her şey için çok teşekkür ederim.

Nedense kelimeler akmıyor ekrana klavyeden, en iyisi şimdilik burada kesmek.

"So long and thanks for all the fish"

Emre Sağlam: Look twice, save a life.

Paz, 14 Haz 2009 19:13:56 +0000

Tomorrow is ride to work day. So drivers, please be extra careful tomorrow.

Please take a second look for motorcycles. Thank you!

Emre Sağlam: Photoblog – V-Strom

Paz, 14 Haz 2009 17:27:07 +0000

V-Strom, originally uploaded by Emre Saglam.

V-Strom on the Blue Ridge Parkway

Emre Sevinç: Kaynağın Aslı: Seçkinler ve Sosyal Mesafe

Paz, 14 Haz 2009 11:22:42 +0000

Prof. Dr. Füsun Üstel ve Doç. Dr. Birol Caymaz tarafından gerçekleştirilen, İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Sivil Toplum Çalışlmaları Merkezi tarafından desteklenen ve Açık Toplum Vakfı tarafından yayımlanan Seçkinler ve Sosyal Mesafe başlıklı raporun tam metnine http://www.aciktoplumvakfi.org.tr/pdf/seckinler-ve-sosyal-mesafe.pdf adresinden erişmek ve okumak mümkün. Raporla ilgili muhtelif yorumlara ve tartışmalara ise buradan erişebilirsiniz.

Not: Bunu böyle açık açık yazmamın sebebi gazetelerimiz, dergilerimiz, web sitelerimiz sağolsunlar bir konuda haber yaptıkları zaman ilgili kaynağın kendisine web bağlantısı vermeyi zul mü görüyorlar, büyük bir çile mi addediyorlar, nedendir bilinmez ilaç için dahi kaynağa doğruda bağlantı veren bir haber, site, vs. bulmak mümkün olmuyor. Her seferinde Google’da ara tara, uğraş dur. Çok mu zor, değil, e peki madem o kadar zor değil dergiler, gazeteler, siteler neden yapmıyor bu iki saniyelik ama faydalı işi? Bilmiyorum.

Emre Sevinç: Beyin Müziği

Paz, 14 Haz 2009 08:17:38 +0000

Beyin Müziği

Son yıllarda müziğin bilişsel gelişim, öğrenme ve duygusal kararlılık üzerine etkileri gittikçe daha çok araştırılır oldu. Acaba beyin dalgalarınızı tespit eden bir cihaz bunları birer parametre kabul edip bir tür müziğe dönüştürüp kaydetse ve daha sonra bunu size dinletse nasıl olurdu? ABD’deki Department of Homeland Security’deki araştırmacılar acil durum ekiplerinde çalışan personele yardımcı olmak için “Brain Music” (Beyin Müziği) isimli bir program üzerinde çalışıyorlar. Hedef zorlu şartlarda çalışan insanların stres ve eğitim miktarını artırmadan en iyi seviyede performans sağlamaları.

2 ila 6 dakika uzunluğundaki parçalar genellikle tek bir enstrüman ile seslendiriliyor (piyano). Çeşitli beyin durumlarını yansıtan parçalar daha sonra kategorize edilip çalışanlara sunuluyor. Rahatlatıcı bir parça bir Chopin sonatını andırırken dikkatli bir ruh halini yansıtan parça Mozart’ı anımsatıyor. Rahatlatıcı parçaların stresi azalttığı ve uyku kalitesini artırdığı, dikkate yönelik parçaların ise konsantrasyonu ve karar verme yeteneklerini artırdığı gözlemlenmiş durumda. Beyin dalgalarına dayanarak oluşturulan müzikler ilk olarak bir grup itfaiye personeli üzerinde denenecek. Dikkati artırıcı örnek bir müziği http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/multimedia/snapshots/st_brain_music_active.mp3 adresinden dinleyebilirsiniz.

Söz konusu müzikler Human Bionics‘in geliştirmiş olduğu BMT (Brain Music Therapy) sistemi ile bestelenmiş. Konuyla ilgili detaylı bilgilere http://www.brainmusictreatment.com adresinden ulaşmak mümkün. Aynı web sitesinde bu konuda yazılmış bir makale listesi de mevcut.

Kaynak: http://www.dhs.gov/xres/programs/gc_1242652643060.shtm

Emre Sevinç: Battlestar Galactica, Pythagoras and Cylon of Croton

Cum, 12 Haz 2009 13:56:08 +0000

From Wikipedia’s Pythagoras article:

“Towards the end of his life he (Pythagoras) fled to Metapontum because of a plot against him and his followers by a noble of Croton named Cylon. He died in Metapontum around 90 years old from unknown causes.

…

The akousmatikoi were not allowed to see Pythagoras and they were not taught the inner secrets of the cult. Instead they were taught laws of behavior and morality in the form of cryptic, brief sayings that had hidden meanings. The akousmatikoi recognized the mathematikoi as real Pythagoreans, but not vice versa. After the murder of a number of the mathematikoi by the cohorts of Cylon, a resentful disciple, the two groups split from each other entirely, with Pythagoras’s wife Theano and their two daughters leading the mathematikoi.”

Emre Sevinç: Illinois Institute of Technology: minus T

Prş, 11 Haz 2009 13:20:35 +0000

He was a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology — which was called “minus T” by some mathematicians (”IIT” — get it?) — and I knew him slightly

Paul Halmos (1985). ‘I want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography‘.

Emre Sağlam: Twit and Shout plugin for Wordpress

Çrş, 10 Haz 2009 16:37:48 +0000

So I finished the skeleton of my plugin and I just tested, it’s working.

It basically sends a twitter update to my twitter account (That I’m not using at all) whenever I publish a new article entry on my blog with a link to the new entry. Also the link to the entry is converted to tinyurl. I do that with php cUrl libraries. This is not the most elegant way of doing it, I’d rather open sockets and do it but I don’t have much time to spend on this

The plugin currently works, I know how to send a message each time my article is published, I know how to add an admin sub menu to the Settings main menu.I also know how to display a proper form to do admin settings for my plugin.

I still don’t know how to save my plugin’s variables to the wp_options table. There is way, I know, but I didn’t have time to investigate it. This is to save/edit the twitter username/password and also maybe the twitter update message to the WP database so that it’s not in the cleartext in plugins. (Easier for dummies )

Next version will handle these issues, then I will release it to the public. (btw, there are at least 5 plugins already doing this so you really don’t need mine)

Emre Sevinç: What makes a pro?

Sal, 09 Haz 2009 14:25:35 +0000

“I read once that the true mark of a pro — at anything — is that he understands, loves, and is good at even the drudgery of his profession.” — Paul Halmos (1985). ‘I want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography‘.

Emre Sevinç: Who is a mathematician?

Sal, 09 Haz 2009 08:49:07 +0000

“A mathematician, then, will be defined in what follows as someone who has published the proof of at least one non-trivial theorem.” — Jean Dieudonné; from the book ‘Is Mathematics Inevitable? A Miscellany‘ (2008), edited by Underwood Dudley.

Emre Sağlam: Documentaries

Sal, 09 Haz 2009 02:41:46 +0000

I think I’m a documentary freak… I watch a lot of documentaries of all types. Although I believe that “the reality is for the people who lack imagination”, I certainly love documentaries. Mostly I watch titles that are about the things that are not going well in the world. And I feel depressed afterwards… But I still like knowing things that most of the people have no idea or ignore or never want to know.

While recommending some of the documentaries to my close circle, I usually hear the argument that the documentaries are sometimes very biased, but hey, it’s up to you to decide at the end to have an opinion… No one is forcing you to believe blindly. So whoever comments on documentaries being biased under this topic, I will not approve it if you really don’t come up with a good explanation

Also, Netflix is a great place to “rent” them since they carry a wide variety. So if you are in the US of A, and like documentaries, I highly recommend Netflix. And since Netflix likes to stream the titles that nobody likes to watch, usually there is a high chance that you will find a documentary without even receiving in the mail For other people around the world, there are always torrents Information is contagious, and you should get contaminated with every kind of it, even by illegaly downloading them hehe. (Juuust kidding)

So here are some documentaries I enjoyed for the last few years in no specific order.

I’m leaving out some major documentaries like Planet Earth, etc… since a lot of people already know them. I’m also open to the suggestions in the comment section.

Emre Sevinç: Cardano @ Antwerp

Paz, 07 Haz 2009 10:38:31 +0000

“Of all these places, I tarried only in Antwerp, Basle, and Besancon. My friends in Antwerp made every effort to retain me.” — The Book of My Life, Jerome Cardan (1575), Chapter Twenty-nine. Journeys

From the book ‘Is Mathematics Inevitable? A Miscellany‘ (edited by Underwood Dudley).

Emre Sevinç: The Mind’s Eye: MIT Technology Day 2009 Live Streaming

Cts, 06 Haz 2009 19:00:54 +0000

The MIT Alumni Association is pleased to announce live web streaming of the annual MIT Technology Day program from Kresge Auditorium on Saturday, 6 June 2009, from 9:00 am to 12:45 pm EDT. Please note that there will be one 30 minute break from 10:35 to 11:05 am.

http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/techday/2009/

This year’s program, The Mind’s Eye, will include introductory remarks by President Susan Hockfield, and presentations by MIT Professors Rebecca Saxe PhD ‘03 on how the brain invents the mind, Pawan Sinha ‘92, PhD ‘95 on learning to see, and Patrick Henry Winston ‘65, SM ‘67, PhD ‘70 on computers with commonsense (see below for complete titles and abstracts).

This promises to be a very exciting program. If you cannot join us for the live web stream, it will be available at the link above beginning on Monday, 8 June 2009 at 3:00 pm (15:00) EDT.

Titles and Abstracts of the three faculty presentations:

How the Brain Invents the Mind

When we look at other people, the features visible on the outside are only a small part of what we see. We are much more interested in seeing, or inferring, what’s going on inside: other people’s thoughts, beliefs and desires. If a person checks her watch, is she uncertain about the time, late for an appointment, or bored with the conversation? If a person shoots his friend on a hunting trip, did he intend revenge or just mistake his friend for a partridge? One of the most amazing discoveries of recent human cognitive neuroscience is that humans use a specific group of brain regions for thinking about thoughts. These brain regions are intrinsically interesting, and also provide a case study in the deeper and broader question: how does the brain - an electrical and biological machine - construct abstract thoughts?

Rebecca Saxe PhD ‘03
Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Fred and Carole
Middleton Career Development Professorship

Learning to See

We open our eyes and see a world that makes sense. Parsing the complex visual array into meaningful objects comes so naturally to us that we often do not think of just how amazing an accomplishment this is. Indeed, no computer system even comes close to this level of proficiency. How do we acquire these impressive visual skills? In order to study this process experimentally, we have recently launched Project Prakash, a synergistic humanitarian and scientific initiative that helps provide sight to children suffering from treatable congenital blindness, and characterizes their subsequent visual development. The effort has begun providing insights into the early stages of learning to see, while directly improving the lives of many children who were otherwise doomed to a life of blindness.

Pawan Sinha ‘92, PhD ‘95
Associate Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences MIT

Computers with Commonsense

About 50,000 years ago, something magical happened to the human species. We humans emerged from Africa, spread throughout the world, and, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, painted the caves at Lascaux in France and got to work on the pyramids in Egypt. What was that magical quality that makes us so different from chimpanzees?

About 50 years ago, students in artificial intelligence laboratories began to write programs exhibiting useful and impressive expert behavior, but from the perspective of commonsense, all computers remain as stupid as stones. Can we ever understand what happened in our own evolution well enough to build a truly intelligent machine?

Fortunately for the computationally oriented, the past decade or two of Brain and Cognitive Sciences research has generated copious clues and insights. Today, MIT students, staff, and faculty use those clues and insights to study how we use sentences to convey information about the world, how sentences link up into stories that determine cultural biases, why sentence-driven imagination is essential to human thinking, and, overall, what commonsense is all about.

Such studies not only promise a greater understanding of human thinking and world-changing applications, but also explanations for why computers in the classroom can do more harm than good and suggestions for how we can make ourselves smarter.

Patrick Henry Winston ‘65, SM ‘67, PhD ‘70
Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, MIT

Emre Sevinç: Genes2Cognition: From DNA to Behavior

Cum, 05 Haz 2009 14:14:41 +0000

“Genes to Cognition (G2C) Online examines thinking and disorders of thinking across six levels of analysis:

Genes ↔ Biochemicals ↔ Cells ↔ Brain ↔ Cognition (Behavior) ↔ Environment
These are color-coded to help you navigate. Each major content area examines ideas and research from many of these different levels. We hope that site visitors will integrate information from the levels to gain a broader understanding of topic areas. Ultimately, this networking process mimics the nature of science: amalgamating information from many different domains to form a complete picture of the world.

There are two ways of exploring the site: 1) Interact with the dynamic networks maps to explore more than 750 items of unique content, or 2) Follow the Selected Items ‘Subway Line’ for a tour of highlighted content.

Genes to Cognition - Main Topics

G2C Online features a variety of content: 2- and 3-D animation, demonstrations, interactive maps, text articles, and video interviews. If you get lost, the History button at bottom-left can take you back to a previous item. You can also use the Search and Glossary buttons to help with your exploration.”

3D Interactive Brain Map

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory people created a wonderful and interactive site which can be utilized to learn more about molecular biology and brain sciences. They have created lots of concept maps:

A concept map

Just a minor glitch: I believe it would be a better visualization had they used directed edges between nodes because a relationship between two concepts is not necessarily symmetric).

Emre Sevinç: Turkey: The Most Engaged Online Audience in Europe

Prş, 04 Haz 2009 14:35:07 +0000

A Turkish blogger posts:

comScore 27.05.2009

Internet Users in Turkey Spend More Time Online and Consume More Pages than Users in Other European Countries

London, U.K., May 27, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its first report examining the online behavior of Internet users in Turkey, based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. In April 2009, more than 17 million people in Turkey age 15 and older accessed the Internet from a home or work location, consuming an average 3,044 pages per visitor.

Seventh Largest Online Population in Europe

Of the 17 European countries individually reported by comScore, Germany’s online audience was the largest with 40 million visitors in April 2009, followed by the U.K. (36.8 million visitors), and France (36.3 million visitors). The Internet audience in Turkey was the seventh largest with 17.8 million visitors, making it the second largest country in Eastern Europe behind Russia (31.3 million visitors). Internet users in Turkey were also found to be the most engaged users in Europe, spending an average 32 hours and viewing an average 3,044 pages of content per month.

Emre Sevinç: Corporatism in Science and Math: Mathematician Missing - Part 2

Çrş, 03 Haz 2009 11:47:09 +0000

“It may be hard to believe that a mathematician of Grothendieck’s caliber could not find an adequate academic position in France after he left the IHES. I am convinced that if Grothendieck had been a former student of the Ecole Normale and if he had been part of the system, a position commensurate with his mathematical achievements would have been found for him. Let me digress on this a minute. When Pierre-Gilles de Gennes got his physics Nobel Prize in 1991, there was an official ceremony in his honor at the Sorbonne, with speeches by de Gennes himself and the minister (Lionel Jospin). On this occasion de Gennes branded corporatism as the plague of French science. Certainly this applies to physics, and even more to mathematics. What this means is that it is all important whether you are from the Ecole Normale or Ecole Polytechnique, in whose lab you are accepted, whether you are at the CNRS, the academy, a suitable political party, and so on. If you are in one of those groups, they will help you and you have to help them. In the case of Grothendieck, he was nothing (not even having at the time French or any other citizenship). He was nobody’s responsibility; he was just an embarrassment.

… the disposal of Grothendieck will remain a disgrace in the history of twentieth century mathematics.

… In 1981 he speaks of a ‘bash in face’ (un coup de poing en pleine guele) when his candidacy for a professor position was rejected by a committee comprising three of his former students.”

From ‘The Mathematician’s Brain: A Personal Tour Through the Essentials of Mathematics and Some of the Great Minds Behind Them‘ by David Ruelle

Emre Sağlam: Call reports in FreePBX

Sal, 02 Haz 2009 15:33:46 +0000

I’ve been having hard time to understand the CDR reports from FreePBX. There were a lot of duplicates, lots of couple of second connection entries, etc… All I needed is to set a criteria and see the reports related to that criteria.

So here is how it goes:

I need only ANSWERED calls.
I need only calls longer than 30 seconds.
I need last 24 hours and also last month call reports.
I want the script to be able to run on cron whenever I want to, so the output should be purely “emailable”
At the end of the report I need the total talk time.

So I came up with this perl script. If you need similar stuff, please don’t hesitate to use it.

Here is a little howto:

First you need to edit the script to fit your database settings, it’s pretty self explanatory in the script itself.

cdrreports -d gives you the daily report (or the last 24 hours to be more precise)
cdrreports -m gives you the monthly report (or the last 30 days to be more precise)
if you run cdrreports without any arguments, it will give you all the calls you made so far.

Lastly, the way I use this script is by running from two cronjobs. One at night for the last 24 hours, and one every 1st day of the month for the monthly reports. It’s up to you how to use it

Emre Sevinç: Law of the day: Weil’s logarithmic law of choosing people for work

Sal, 02 Haz 2009 08:04:07 +0000

“André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters.” — Paul Halmos [1].

1- ‘I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography‘, page 123.

Emre Sevinç: Law of the day: Stigler’s law of eponymy

Pzt, 01 Haz 2009 17:45:55 +0000

Stigler’s law of eponymy is a process proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication “Stigler’s law of eponymy” [1]. In its simplest and strongest form it says: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”

“Stigler’s Law was discovered many times before Stigler named it.”

“Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it” is an adage attributed to Alfred North Whitehead.

Here is a short list of misnamed theorems.

Emre Sağlam: Tales of Monkey Island

Pzt, 01 Haz 2009 17:39:50 +0000

It looks like there is a new wave of Monkey Island series coming from Telltale Games and Lucas Arts: Tales of Monkey Island

I just watched the trailer, it kind of seems promising. It looks like it will be released for PC and also for Wii. The game consist of 5 chapters. It will be out July 7th and there is a pre-order link on the front page. The price tag is ~ $35.

Guybrush Threepwood

Emre Sevinç: The Computer Mediated Communication Corpus

Pzt, 01 Haz 2009 11:52:21 +0000

A new text corpus, the Computer Mediated Communication Corpus, consisting of individual communication (in English) is now available.

Over 900 text samples of participants’ views on 6 pre-determined topics in 6 genres: blog, chat, email, essay, group discussion, and phone interview are available. Thirty six samples of 21 individuals are complete: 6 subjects in each of 6 genres. The gender of each participant is flagged.

Visit http://cmccorpus.cs.loyola.edu/ to learn more, register, and download the corpus.

Emre Sevinç: Pessimistic views on computer science in particular and science in general

Paz, 31 May 2009 19:47:30 +0000

Somehow a few articles that I’ve already read some time ago came together under this heading. Here are some bits and pieces to contemplate upon again and again:

From ‘Computing Science Education: The Road not Taken‘ by Niklaus Wirth

It is instructive to compare a mathematics text book with a computer text book in a high school curriculum. I had the misfortune to do so at some length, and to put it simply: we suck. I assume that we are sending a strong message: don’t even consider computer science as a career unless you are a masochist.

Surely, in this post-modern academic environment the professor has long ago ceased to be the wise, learned man, penetrating deeper and deeper into his beloved subject in his quiet study. The modern professor is the manager of a large team of researchers, the keen fund raiser maintaining close relationships with the key funding agencies, and the untiring author of exciting project proposals and astonishing success stories. It would be suicidal in this highly competitive business to waste time pondering about how to best present trivial subjects to a mass of beginners. When it comes to course material, software and tools, the obvious choice is what lies on the shelf and has been adopted by everyone else anyway. In this fight for success and survival it is best to join the bandwagon. Achievement is measured in the size of a team, the number of publications generated and citations discovered, conferences visited and resources consumed, but not in the devotion to teaching, which is not measurable anyway. Surely, this academic life style is often contrary to the better knowledge of the individual, but is enforced by pressure to convert places of learning into profit centers of high visibility, and it borders on prostitution.

From ‘Systems Software Research is Irrelevant‘ by Rob Pike:

What is Systems Research these days?

Web caches, Web servers, file systems, network packet delays, all that stuff. Performance, peripherals, and applications, but not kernels or even user-level applications.

Mostly, though, it’s just a lot of measurement, a misinterpretation and misapplication of the scientific method.

Too much phenomenology: invention has been replaced by observation. Today we see papers comparing interrupt latency on Linux vs. Windows. They may be interesting, they may even be relevant, but they aren’t research.

In a misguided attempt to seem scientific, there’s too much measurement: performance minutiae and bad charts.

By contrast, a new language or OS can make the machine feel different, give excitement, novelty. But today that’s done by a cool Web site or a higher CPU clock rate or some cute little device that should be a computer but isn’t.

The art is gone.

But art is not science, and that’s part of the point. Systems research cannot be just science; there must be engineering, design, and art.

From ‘Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University‘ by Mark Tarver:

This year, 2007, marks the marks the eighth year at which I ceased to be a tenured lecturer in the UK, what is called I think, a tenured professor in the USA. I’ve never worked out whether I was, in American terms, an assistant professor or an associate professor. But it really doesn’t matter, because today I am neither. You see I simply walked out and quit the job. And this is my story. If there is a greater significance to it than the personal fortunes of one man, it is because my story is also the story of the decline and fall of the British university and the corruption of the academic ideal . That is why this essay carries two titles - a personal one and a social one. This is because I was privileged to be part of an historical drama. As the Chinese say, I have lived in interesting times.

After seven years of the new regime, I had the opportunity to compare the class of 1999 with the class of 1992. In 1992 I set an course in Artificial Intelligence requiring students to solve six exercises, including building a Prolog interpreter. In 1999, six exercises had shrunk to one; which was a 12 line Prolog program for which eight weeks were allotted for students to write it. A special class was laid on for students to learn this and many attended, including students who had attended a course incorporating logic programming the previous term. It was a battle to get the students to do this, not least because two senior lecturers criticised the exercise as presenting too much of a challenge to the students. My Brazilian Ph.D. student who superintended some of these students, told me that the level of attainment of some of our British final year students was lower than that of the first year Brazilian students.

Teaching was not the only criterion of assessment. Research was another and, from the point of view of getting promotion, more important. Teaching being increasingly dreadful, research was both an escape ladder away from the coal face and a means of securing a raise. The mandarins in charge of education decreed that research was to be assessed, and that meant counting things. Quite what things and how wasn’t too clear, but the general answer was that the more you wrote, the better you were. So lecturers began scribbling with the frenetic intensity of battery hens on overtime, producing paper after paper, challenging increasingly harassed librarians to find the space for them. New journals and conferences blossomed and conference hopping became a means to self-promotion. Little matter if your effort was read only by you and your mates. It was there and it counted.

Today this ideology is totally dominant all over the world, including North America. You can routinely find lecturers with more than a hundred published papers and you marvel at these paradigms of human creativity. These are people, you think, who are fit to challenge Mozart who wrote a hundred pieces or more of music. And then you get puzzled that, in this modern world, there should be so many Mozarts - almost one for every department.

From ‘How Should Research be Organised? [PDF]‘ by Donald Gillies:

This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 presents a criticism of the Research Assessment Exercise (or RAE) which has been used to organise research in the UK from 1986 to 2008. The RAE is based on peer review, and the criticism consists in pointing out a surprising flaw in peer review. Many works which in retrospect are seen as constituting major advances were judged by contemporaries of the researcher, his peers, to be valueless. An example of this is provided by Frege whose Begrisschrift was judged in 6 contemporary reviews to have made no advance in the subject. Nowadays it is seen as having introduced mathematical logic in its modern form.

Part 2 of the book criticises the new system (the Research Excellence Framework, or REF) which has been introduced in the UK to replace the RAE. Where this does not continue to use peer review, it uses metrics such as citation indices. A citation index judges the merit of a research paper by the number of times it is cited by other researchers. However, the papers of pink diamonds like Frege and Semmelweis whose work is not appreciated by their contemporaries will not be cited by their contemporaries. So they will do badly on metrics such as citation indices as well as on peer review. So the new system has exactly the same fault as the one it replaces. It is likely to result in pink diamonds being thrown away, and hence in progress in research being held up.

We do live in interesting times and maybe these pessimistic views are not that pessimistic but just realistic. Once again these kind of articles make think about ’slowing down’ instead of going so fast and ‘innovative’.

Emre Sevinç: New Releases of SMULTRON and TreeAligner Available

Paz, 31 May 2009 06:00:04 +0000

The Parallel Treebank Group at the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zürich is proud to announce the availability of new releases for SMULTRON, an aligned parallel treebank, and the TreeAligner, a tool for annotating, browsing and querying parallel treebanks.

SMULTRON v1.1
=============
SMULTRON (Stockholm MULtilingual TReebank) is a parallel treebank which contains around 1000 sentences in English, German and Swedish. The sentences have been PoS-tagged and annotated with phrase structure trees. The trees have been aligned across languages on sentence, phrase and word level. Additionally, the German and Swedish monolingual treebanks contain lemma information. The SMULTRON corpus is freely available for research purposes, please see the registration page: http://www.cl.uzh.ch/kitt/smultron/

New in version 1.1:

* new German-Swedish alignments
* various annotation errors fixed
* compatibility updates for the new TreeAligner

TreeAligner v1.1
================
The TreeAligner is a graphical tool for creating aligned parallel treebanks by drawing alignment links between phrases. The monolingual treebanks must currently be encoded in TIGER-XML.

The TreeAligner also allows querying the aligned treebanks, using an extended version of the TIGER corpus query language.

Easy installers for the TreeAligner are available for Windows and Ubuntu:

http://www.cl.uzh.ch/kitt/treealigner/wiki/TreeAlignerDownload

The source code is available as a package or from public repositories:

http://www.cl.uzh.ch/kitt/hg/sta/branch-1.1/

All code is licensed under the GPLv2.

New in version 1.1:

* improved annotation workflow & tree interactivity
* corpus information display (feature values etc.)
* automatic alignment suggestions (experimental feature)
* monolingual queries for parallel treebanks
* much faster query evaluation engine
* query language extensions for restricted universal quantification:
http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/arvo/cl/volk/papers/Marek_Lundborg_Volk__KONVENS_2008.pdf
* improved tree layout algorithm
* sampler from the SMULTRON corpus included in the installers

If you are interested, please join us on the TreeAligner mailing list:

https://lists.ifi.uzh.ch/listinfo/treealigner

Emre Sevinç: Google @ Belgium

Prş, 28 May 2009 09:36:25 +0000

Realizing job adverts such as ‘Data Center Site Director - Saint-Ghislain, Google Inc’ and ‘Data Center Infrastructure Project Manager - Saint-Ghislain, Google Inc’ at monster.be, I think the Google’s Belgium data center at Saint-Ghislain has become operative finally.

Good for Belgium

Emre Sevinç: V.O.I.C.E.: A computer corpus of English as a lingua franca

Çrş, 27 May 2009 13:28:36 +0000

The most wide-spread contemporary use of English throughout the world is that of English as a lingua franca (ELF), i.e. English used as a common means of communication between speakers from different first-language backgrounds. A Hungarian educationalist coming to Copenhagen to discuss qualification equivalences in European higher education with her Danish, Finnish and Portuguese colleagues; a Korean sales representative negotiating a contract with his German client in Luxembourg; a Spanish Erasmus student chatting with local colleagues in a student hall in Vienna: they all communicate in English as a lingua franca.

VOICE, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, is a structured collection of language data, the first computer-readable corpus capturing spoken ELF interactions of this kind.

VOICE 1.0 Online is now available as a free-of-charge resource for non-commercial research purposes.

Source: https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/index.php

Emre Sevinç: Corpus linguistics: Diamond, New Yorker Case and a 10 million $ lawsuit

Çrş, 27 May 2009 11:43:57 +0000

Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article seems to have caused a lot of trouble. I have read two blog posts by Jessica Palmer: ‘The Diamond Mess‘ and ‘Jared Diamond hides behind the “it wasn’t science” defense‘.

The story itself is very interesting and also very important in terms of scientific, journalistic and ethical integrity. Besides these important topics there was another thing that attracted my attention, the linguistic analyses based on data, namely corpus linguistics:

Taken together, the linguistic analyses indicate that it is extremely unlikely that The New Yorker quotations are accurate verbatim representations of language that originated in speech. To put it simply, normal people do not talk using the grammatical structures represented in these quotations.

A detailed account of the analyses is available at the Language Log: ‘Diamond, the New Yorker, and corpus linguistics‘.

It is interesting to see the role played by linguistics in a 10 million $ lawsuit.

Emre Sevinç: Promoting Data Visualization as a First Step

Sal, 26 May 2009 13:17:19 +0000

After having read the ‘Supervised Classification’ chapter of ‘Interactive and Dynamic Graphics for Data Analysis: With R and GGobi (Use R)‘ and thinking about how scientific visualization helps even with sophisticated numerical methods such as SVM (Support Vector Machines), I have come across a very relevant blog entry titled ‘Data visualization as a first step…and also an intermediate step and a last step‘. Following the links I have found an impressive article on the importance of data visualization by Michael D. Maltz: ‘Look Before You Analyze: Visualizing Data in Criminal Justice [PDF]‘

Time to delve deeper into wonderful GGobi software. Thanks to Andrew Gelman for refreshing my motivation.

Emre Sevinç: Omega 3 Fatty Acids: Are they good for your intelligence? Data visualization to the rescue!

Sal, 26 May 2009 12:18:21 +0000

Fish doesn’t think because fish knows everything.

The literature is abundant with some unconclusive results related to the effects of omega 3 fatty acids on memory, intelligence and cognition in general. As if they were not enough, I wanted to add another data point to the already confusing situation.

First let’s compare a few countries based on their fish (thus Omega 3 fatty acids) consumption (data taken from Fishery Statistical Collections - Consumption of Fish and Fishery Products: FAOSTAT - Consumption tool):

Year: 2003

Now let’s visit The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009 by World Economic Forum and look at some high technology export statistics (data taken from http://www.insead.edu/v1/gitr/wef/main/analysis/barchartcomparison.cfm):

Years: 2008-2009

The data show two things:

Denmark, Sweden and USA share top positions in the Global Information Technology Report while Turkey scores very low.
The countries who are found to be very competitive in terms of global technology development also consume more Omega 3 fatty acids.

Yes, yes I know nature, brain, correlation, causation, etc. are really complex matters but still…

PS: This blog entry was inspired by the following cognitive science blog entry: The Human Mind - Get Smarter