HE potential AUT strike is keeping everyone occupied, so I have embarked on final persistent push to write and complete my thesis. This began on the 2^nd of the month and it primarily involve piecing together some past publications, elaborating where suitable, and glueing them sensibly.

When I first joined this scene of academic research, I was somewhat surprised to reveal that genuine and original content (as opposed to gross re-use) is not only perceived as acceptable; it is sometimes encouraged, as a matter of fact. I was truly disappointed to come to grips with this mentality, wherein peers say that good text should better remain unchanged and in most cases evolve or have some fine, cosmethic changes applied. If further progress is made, it can be appended to the existing text. This robs many people out of artistic integrity, in my humble opinion. It also leads to duplication and repeatability, which can make us feel like parrots.

The first mode of variation in a
poor appearance model of the brain

OME “dreadful deadline”, which I mentioned in my previous post, is thankfully behind us, after a short extension. To make matters much better, I have just received a notification of acceptance for another conference, which saturates my once-modest publications list. Tomorrow I may find out that another paper was accepted (of which I am not the first author though).

All in all, such decent progress will make it easier for me to complete the Ph.D. fairly early. I will be presenting my work in July and fingers remain crossed for TMI. When one gets showered by many achievements at once, it is hard not to make a vanity blog post. I hope others feel happy for me as I have already informed my entire family.

E are currently working on a paper which we believe can be included in the high-status journal. That journal is widely known as IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. This will, as a matter of fact, be a revised submission and it will hopefully make it into this publication with an impact factor of 4 (very high). This paper submission was mentioned several times before and, quite frankly, there is very little information to add.

So what is so dreadful about this particular submission deadline? Well, for a start, I have stayed awake for 24 hours straight yesterday. Then, I slept for just 4 hours and I expect the rest of the today to be rather similar to yesterday. I rarely let pressure and nervousness get to me, yet sometimes it inevitably happens, especially when peers are involved.

returned from a long vacation yesterday morning. It will take me a while to catch up with the workload and then resume a stable blogging pace. For the mean time, here are a couple photos from my stay at my cousin’s house in North Miami Beach.

A view on the yacht at sunset, taken from the garden

I am the person at the bottom. Not a good
photo, but I hadn’t much choice.

The conference in Virginia, by the way, turned out very well (for me, at least). Our work was overwhelmed by attention and, as it turned out a couple of days ago, it is likely to reach the world’s most formidable (in the good sense of the word) journal on medical imaging. It is work in progress, which joined two other in-progress submissions. Prospects are positive and the future seems bright.

The Movie Timeline is a nice little project which attempts to assign a film to each event since the beginning of time. To get the general idea, here is an arbitrary snippet:

1973 Bobby Darin dies (Beyond The Sea)
New York – Penny Lane becomes a regular on the tour bus (Almost Famous)
Las Vegas – Sam “Ace” Rothstein begins running a casino (Casino)
…

Although many of the entries are humorous, Hollywood has made it possible to watch a series of films which document Earth’s history.

The Maths Tower (right), which is adjacent to Computer Science (left) and was recently demolished

ATER this evening I shall attend a lecture, which will be delivered by an honourable guest: Irving Wladawsky-Berger. It takes place immediately after my meeting with the Supervisor, who happens to head the Department.

I don’t go to public talks as regularly as I used, but it’s probably because it no longer is a must. Attendance is not mandatory and absence is rarely frowned upon. I sometimes look back at them days when I attended lectures and exams. I have no yearnings whatsoever. My bad and sporadic sleeping habits had me fall asleep in virtually any early lecture. Examination has proven to be no-one’s favourite either.

The last exam I took dates back to June 2003. I remember this date rather vividly because, rather than celebrating this milstones, I prepared for an job interview that I had scheduled for the following day. At that stage, I was not at all nervous about exam. A quick ‘session’ involving Seinfeld episodes (I had all episodes on my hard-drive) become almost a must right before any exam, as a deliverer of light entertainment.

Either way, today I shall return to the Department of Computer Science to be part of what should be a fascinating presentation. As I slept 3 times today already, there is little or no chance of me falling asleep. Fingers crossed.

After some shallow exploration, I have found a template/example for poster preparation in L^AT_EX. It is only one among many, but I pressed on with that particular one almost blindly. I am currently in the process of preparing one poster for a conference I will attend in Arlington, Virginia within a couple of weeks (there will be no blogging in that period).

Ironically perhaps, the author of this ‘T_EX forgery’ is currently working at Microsoft. He has been quite a successful researcher and I even exchanged a few E-mails with him. Nonetheless, the scenario is rather odd. Employment in Microsoft lies in complete disagreement to intentions of such contribution to to our L^AT_EX community. T_EX often obviates the need for commercial, proprietary software such as Adobe Illustrator.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that another poster template produces visually-richer results. Yet, I have no experience with this L^AT_EX kit. If you have experience with other such packages and can also comment on them, please post them below for others to benefit from.

Previously, in my younger days of naive existence, I actually created a poster by handling a 6,000×4,000-pixel image in the GIMP. It was rather convenient, to be honest, but making subsequent changes was a tough task. You can find the amateur outcome on this site as a shrunk-down and down-sampled JPEG, as well as a lossy full-sized version. On my hard-drive I retain a ZIP archive which contains the 70-megabyte original bitmap. What a pixelated beast!