An common inner conflict

HERE seems to be a certain apathy among girls towards computer science. This does not necessarily extend to all fields that are engineering-related. My older sister studied computer science, but decided to leave a year early due to lack of interest and passion. She was very much capable of graduating and was a top student in her class. Yet, she had no incentive to staying up all night or becoming obsessed with technology, which was associated with what she perceived as “nerds”. She now works on a Masters degree in management.

These thoughts were stirred up by an article that appeared in the
Boston Globe only yesterday.

Women shunning a field once seen as welcoming

MEDFORD — As a young high school teacher in 1982, Diane Souvaine leapt into graduate school for computer science having taken only one class in the subject.

F I ever undertake a repetltive task that pertains to research, I wish to either automate it using existing (preferably free) tools, script it (e.g. bash, Perl or MATLAB which is by all means expenesive), or costomise the desktop environment to minimize the number of moves, clicks, etc. Productivity through convenience can be achieved using clipboard stacks, mouse focus policies and so forth.

I find Linux to be a powerful tool in research. Windows, for instance, could not replace the multi-tasking capabiltities and expresiveness of Linux. Macs likewise, although they are most popular among designers, technical designers included. They are not, as far as I can tell, an optimal programming platform considering the price which they sell for. Singularity from Microsoft is intended to address the deficiencies related to Windows in the research sector. It is Singularity, as well as Monad, that ought to endow Microsoft with the platform that suits so-called “power users”. Monad is a command-line tool for Windows, that has been hacked a few months ago and will therefore be excluded from Windows Vista. In the mean time, KDE will remain my favourite desktop environment. Linus Torvalds could give a polite nod.

Desktop environement productivity tools and essays:

• Desktop Mouse Gestures
• Program Invocation Methods
• Keyboard Accelerators
• Previews on Desktop

S I approach the end of my Ph.D., I need to keep an open eye on job openings and vacancies in academia. I wish to do so in the least time-consuming way. What better way than feeds of information that give a rapid daily flow?

Vacancies are delivered as search results for a query or criteria specified by the user, e.g. location, sector. This has the same characteristic and advantages that RSS technology typically offers:

• Narrower scope and less visual clutter
• Littler user intervention, ‘pull technology’ versus ‘push technology’ such as E-mail
• Summarisation (title versus detailed description, link/s)
• Flagging of new content as opposed to previously-read entries.

There are many more arguments in defence of feeds, but they will be missing the point of this post and are worth a discussion in their own right. The following are job vacancies Web sites, which I know provide RSS feeds:

• Monster RSS – International coverage, sub-divided by job type
• Jobs.ac.uk RSS – Jobs in academia world-wide with emphasis on the United Kingdom
• CWJobs – Jobs in IT (United Kingdom). Search for terms, then use the RSS button/facility, currently at the top

[On to personal ramblings] Earlier today I read a more official announcement about the Google headquarters in Dublin. I have known about this for several months as I am/was considered for a Software Engineer/System Administrator position there. I also pointed to photos from the Googleplex in London before. In general, I have openly expresses disdain, skepticism and anger, as well as support, admiration, and sympathy for Google in the past. Their affinity to and backing of Open Source software probably transcends the controversy though.

Related items:

• Weather RSS Feeds
• Syndicating News
• Search Results as RSS, Google Results as RSS Feeds, Keeping Track of Google, Yahoo RSS
• RSS Feeds for Journals

VER at the Computer Vision Digest, I recently mentioned the IEEE in the context of RSS feeds for journals. It is most pleasant to see RSS feeds penetrating even the world of academia, which usually lags behind in terms of state-of-the-art anything. The IEEE makes the admirable exception, as always.

Several weeks ago I also mentioned my two submissions to IEEE conferences, as well as two other successes. Everything seems to have settled on the right route, which grants me a quick Ph.D. at the age of 24. This was by no means easy for me; I will not pretend it has ever been the case. The first year was sluggish and unpromising. As a matter fact, I was warranted (or rather warned about) a difficult program with potentially rewarding outcomes. This warning was raised on the very first week, as soon as I joined the Division.

Nowadays I work on my submission to an IEEE journal, namely Transactions in Medical Imaging. I must admit that their L^AT_EX templates have been made simple to use — something which I am very pleased with because I am T_EX-illiterate ( I normally use L_yX as a front-end). We are aiming for the special issue on validation.

NB: because this item will be of little interest to many, I have just added a new category aptly named “Personal” and assigned this item to it. If you wish to subscribe to just a few particular topics, see the feeds page where a broader category breakdown gets listed. I still try hard not to ‘noisify’ the blog with personal chit-chats and raves.

It appears as though the “drink one glass of wine every day” advice is based on fallacies.

Any heart gains from drinking alcohol in moderation are likely outweighed by the harm, say researchers.

The findings in The Lancet suggest that drinking a glass or two of wine a day may not be such a good idea.

[...]

There was a period of time when I drank a glass of wine on occasions, sometimes daily (I was significantly younger). There is an augmented argument that any research, or even contention which people are willing to or believe, will be embraced without hesitance. ‘Benefits’ of caffeine come to mind. This is one among many recent articles, but the one I originally read was in The Independent. Last week I read about beer as a cancer treatment. Wishful thinking is probably what feeds those statements and drives (if not finances) the research.

[sarcasm] “Mind you doctor, I’ll just have some more beer, but purely for medicinal purposes of course…” [/sarcasm].

Contextually related: Coffee Beer

An appearance model of the brain after
perturbation has been applied to its training set

ATER today I will deliver an important presenation on my recent research work. This work has been done in collaboration with UCL for the past few months. This comes amidst 2 days of talks (the first day was yesterday), which slow down my activity on the Internet.

The presentation file that I practice with is in OpenOffice 1 format. This relates to my discussion on one-file presentations versus the more open and sparse (and in my opinion correct) form, as argued and published a couple of days ago. In-depth details on academic progress are periodically posted in MARS, which is a separate, research-related section that jointly resides on this domain.

An example multi-file, Web-based presentation (click to start)

ENCENTLY, I have being passively swayed (“forced” rather) towards using WYSIWYG applications for composition of a presentation. I have done that as a teenager, but I sure know the issues associated with the paradigm. I use OpenOffice at the moment, in conjuction with colleagues who stubbornly stick to PowerPoint.

As sad as this may sound, it seems obvious that, judging by the large, conferences do not accept presentations in formats such as HTML, even if they are as advanced and rich as S5 (exemplified above). Many conference them make PowerPoint the sole option, thus snubbing anybody who does not use Windows or is unwilling to invest in expensive licences that lead to vendor lock-in. Fortunately, I work in O/S-tolerant environments, so I rarely need to suffer from such narrow-mindedness.

WYSIWYG is a good paradigm in principle. Alas, as explained several times in the past (e.g. Dangers of Abstraction), WYSIWYG tends to be lossy. Also, re-use becomes as serious problem; searching and indexing likewise. The idea of encapsulating objects like arrows and circles in a single file, along with videos, images and text is ‘unhealthy’ to say the least. A binary presentation is not one which is open for standards-based tools to interpret. It is also poorly-structured.

OpenDocument does not make it trivial for one to extract individual objects unless various tools are used. Therefore, I am reluctant to ever use OpenOffice and yet I recommend and promote it. Hypocrisy? I say “nay”. Its entry barrier is low, and if not the cost, then open formats should make the difference and end the vendor/product dependency. OpenOffice will never suffer from the same pitfalls Microsoft vainly ignore.

An HTML presentation has its text stored separately (under e.g. index.html). Additionally, there are videos and graphics as individual files in their own isolated directory. The technology which drives S5, as in this particular case, involves a collection of stylesheets which are easily exchangeable, interchangeable, and are stored aside, together with their associated graphics. Lastly, there is JavaScript to integrates this technology and make keyboard navigation, buttons and the like a practical reality.

To finish off with a rant, why is it that ‘simplicity’ ended up attaining a huge tar-like file which is obscure in terms of its content? If it were not for Microsoft Office, would somebody else have done the same? Some time ago I heard that Office files were bound to become a compressed files which contain all the peripheral files, e.g. images and graphs, completely apart. XML is frequently echoed by the media in this context. Could this be related to Microsoft’s recent proposal to open up their formats?