First Experiences

Doing things for the first time is hard, it is really good that we experience “almost” every thing when we are still kids.

Boy’s summer camp

Two weeks ago I went to a boy’s summer camp as a volunteer to help them. Actually one of my friends, Jake, has been going there for three years and this year he also brought me to there. I was there for two days, it was fun. Camp was beside a lake near the Red Deer river in the south west of Sunder.

During the time which I was there a lot of things reminded me a chapter of a book which I read about three years ago. The book’s name is Funny in Farsi, it is been written by a woman who has spend her childhood in USA as an emigrant. She has an incredible story telling ability and a very funny sense of hummers in her writings. Those make Firoozeh Dumas’s books really interesting and amusing. I am wondering that weather her books are also interesting for people not from her home country or it is just wonderful for readers familiar with that culture. I will be really happy if somebody help me with that, although I am going to ask my “foreign”friends to read it.

Anyway, being in the camp and remembering a chapter of her book about her awful experience in the summer camp made me to read that book for the second time, this time in the original language. I really enjoy it, sometimes which I am sad, and coincidentally in these weeks I almost always am, it cheers me up. Every night when I start reading, at the beginning I think that I am not in its mood, but after 10 minuets I found myself laughing loudly!!!

I will write a full post about both of her books, Funny in Farsi and Laughing without an accent when I read them. Meanwhile take a look at her website and watch this interview:

Graduate life is too long

Yesterday I received my Study Permit, expiration date is the end of November of 2011. At that time I will have been a PhD student for exactly 4 years and 3 months. When I thought about that date and my life I felt depressed. You know, it is a long time which still seems is not enough!

Study Permit

My advice is that don’t start you PhD program unless you have think enough about its looooooong length.

Talking like J. D. Salinger

During last two weeks I was reading this book, The Catcher in the Rye. The book was helluva good. At the beginning I thought Holden is one of those stupid morons who can’t do anything right, if you want to know the truth. But as I went on, I found out that he is very smart and all. He kills me sometimes, especially when he was talking about his younger sister Pheobe. However sometimes he drove me damn near crazy, like when he was running out of dough, yet he bought drinks for girls.

I’ve had a lot of friends, maybe that’s because I’s goddamn bad with girls. I am not a flit or anything, I mean it. I am just shy like a bastard when I meet a girl. Not only girls, but whenever I am with new people I am shy as hell, for god’s sakes. Anyway I’ve had about ten thousands friends, of all different types smart, good looking, pockey, sonuvabitch, those who never say hi or anything when they see you, and any other goddamn type you can think of. So all the time I was reading the book, I tried to find someone who is like this old Holden. But I couldn’t, I really could not. He is not like anybody I know. HE has a damn complicated personality, he is a bastard liar and at the same time he flunks oral expression class because other students don’t let a guy to talk about his sick uncle. Although his favorite drink is Scotch and soda, he kindda falls in love with a nun just because she likes Romeo and Juliet and Julius. He pays five (ten) bucks for a throw, then he feels depressed when he hangs her green dress in the closet[1]. He remains in same room with a jerk just because he whistle as good as hell[2]. Although he hasn’t been with old Phoebe for a long time, he exactly knows she’ll love his hunting hat. Although he swears all the time, he get crazy when he sees a “fuck you” on the wall of school. Although he can remember old Jane’s hands were helluva comfortable to hold[3], he never feels like giving her a buzz. These kind of contradictions make him a unique person. If you have ten thousands friends, you’d never find one of them who is like old Holden, I really mean it.

However he is not like anybody else, he is still very ordinary and that makes him and his story helluva interesting. He gets hit easily when he start fighting with his roommate. He feels yellow and all when elevator boy comes to his room to ask for more five bucks. He makes stupid big decision for his life and all of sudden he forgets about that completely. he falls asleep when somebody talks to him seriously. He is interested in sex life of his old roommate. Those things make you to imagine yourself in his place and will cause you to appreciate the whole story more. That’s why I recommend you very strongly to read that old novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

A cool problem for Machine Learning guys: Football Prediction

Some days ago, my office-mate YFG sent me a link which was about a competition for predicting results in college football games. The competition is set up by TopCoder website and main sponsor is ESPN. In this competition you should predict this year’s results (2008 season) based on statistical information of last three years (2004-2007). Although we do not know anything about (American) football, I think we can still use some machine learning methods to come up with quite good results.

In my opinion such challenges are a good way for ML guys to test their methods and learn some subtle points which are really important in any practical application. Moreover it will help you to be more enthusiastic and to feel you are working on some cool stuffs. Besides those “academic” benefits, we can also earn money up to 70,000 USD. So lets ROCK it! Here is a diagram which shows deadlines for each sub-season predictions

PhD Facts

I found this link very accidently, it is quite interesting:

Things I learnt during, and about, my PhD

I think you can have two different feeling about it, disappointing and motivating. At first glance it sounds disappointing because it talks about the bad side of being a PhD student. But if you think more deeply about it you will find out pretty motivating, especially if you are a person like me. When you find out there are other students who have similar problems like you then you fell better. You will have a feeling that you are not the only one who struggle with distractions like internet, the only one who think is mathematically-illiterate, and the only one has boring,useless meetings with their supervisors.

So the only way to encourage people in something is not to tell them the good aspects of it, you can also tell them it’s bad aspects. By this you will make (some of) them to think they are not the only one with those problems.

Finally Cancer beats Randy Pausch

It is really a sad thing to talk about, yet Randy Pausch died on July 25th after a long honouralbe battle with his Pancreatic cancer. In the case you have not heard about him, he was a professor in the computer science department in the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). In August of 2007 he has been told that he will be alive just for more 3-6 months. Before that he had done about 1 year surgery and chemotherapy to cure his pancreatic cancer. Here you can find more detailed information. After that he did not give up and he continue his usual life. During that time he took a lecture in CMU called “The Last Lecture” in which he talked about achieving his childhood’s dreams. That lecture become very famous such that right now it has more than 5.5 million views on the YouTube,. Here is that video:

When I watched it again I really felt sorry for him. In this video he is really energetic and “alive”. In the beginning of lecture he cracked some funny jocks to make audiences glad in the case they feel sad for him.Moreover he did some push-ups to show them that he is in the full health condition. It really makes me sad when I watch it again, poor guy … . He also had a blog in which he talked about his treatments and progresses. In the last month he had no posts until a friend of him wrote two posts on July 24th and 25th, the “last post”. Here is the first page of CMU website after his death:

In my opinion the most important thing we can learn from him is in his fantastic quote “You can’t control the cards you’r dealt, just how you play the hand“