My f***ing VAIO

Sorry for the long absence due to my personal problems. Last two months was not a very easy time for me. After that time, when I was planning to write an amazing post on ‘dance’, my laptop started playing with me!

I’ve bought my VAIO SZ740N5 about a couple of month ago. People warned me that this is just a crap; you can’t be sure how long your VAIO will work. But I didn’t listen! I thought that I am a very careful person and nothing terrible will happen! No shock, no software/hardware changes, no nothing! Nevertheless, about two weeks ago my touchpad started working inverted, randomly each time I boot or hibernate my machine! It f***ed me up! I did everything to solve the issue. I recovered it three times with Vista, XP and Ubuntu! I assigned the value ‘0’ to whole the bits in my hard disk and then formatted it thoroughly! I reinstalled the driver and anything you may consider! But it’s still the same shit! I talked to an analyst from Sony. I also studied different websites and forums including the notbookreview and the techsupport. It seems that there are many people having the same problem. However, Sony irresponsibly has not yet called for the laptops to be replaces. You have to be lucky to face the issue before your warranty ends. Otherwise you have to pay for their fault!

Moreover, other friends who have bought their VAIO in the same time as mine also reported different issues such as problems with their webcam and damages to the body in very unreasonable conditions!

Finally I strongly suggest you doubt if you are planning to buy a Sony laptop. Many better brands exist, including IBM and Toshiba.

Men On Top!

[You can skip the texts written in gray.]

A few years ago, Harvard University president, Lawrence Summers, has been harshly criticized for suggesting that the under-representation of women in engineering and some scientific fields may be due in part to inherent differences in intellectual abilities. Moreover, if you look at the history, you may find that most of the leaders of science, technology, philosophy and politics were men! This is while it has been shown that the average IQ is the same among both genders. The main purpose of this post is to seek for the reasons of this fact.

Scientists claim that there are many differences between men’s and women’s brain. ”Among people who do the research, it’s not so controversial. There are lots and lots of studies that show that men’s and women’s brains are different,” says Richard J. Haier, a professor of psychology in the pediatrics department of the University of California, Los Angeles medical school.

In recent years, neuroscientists have found that male and female brains are wired differently because of the role of testosterone and other male hormones during gestation. Brains growing under the influence of male hormones are slightly larger and have denser concentrations of neurons in some regions. Male brains also contain a greater proportion of gray matter, the part of the brain responsible for computation, while women have relatively more white matter, which specializes in making connections between brain cells. Intelligence tests have found that men, on average, perform better on spatial tasks that require mentally manipulating objects. Men also do better on tests of mathematical reasoning. Women tend to do better on tasks requiring verbal memory and distinguishing whether objects are similar.

Nevertheless, this is not the case! We can’t judge single individuals by the statements above! Moreover, these tell us that we must see women on top of many fields, including linguistics. While we know that most of the linguists are men. 

I believe that, curiosity, hard working, aspiration and being optimist are four absolutely essential things to be at the top of anything.

Undeniably, women work so hard. To my experience, they do quite well in research groups. They obtain great placements both in university entrance exams and during their studies. However I think that they are less curious and that is because they can’t risk much. They are also less optimist. This will cause a less consistency that forces them to leave the job, exactly when they are just one step to their goal! More important, generally men aim much higher than women. You rarely see a woman, deciding to solve a hard mathematical open problem! However, there are many among men. An old adage says think global, act local; I say think global, act global!

Update 15-May: Take a look at the first comment I’ve dropped for this post, (a reply to Mehrdad’s comment) to see another reason. I believe that it is the most important one!

The most shocking news of the year!

My father’s friend, Farhad Rahbar, the present chancellor of the University of Tehran has a great news for us! He has informed me of a very new contract, made between The University of Tehran and the Stanford University. Due to this contract the Stanford University’s delegates will supervise researches done in the University of Tehran!!! Delegates are professors from their school of engineering. This will highly increase the international rank of the University of Tehran.

Update 9 PM: Apologies for the April Fool’s Joke!

Breaking Moore’s law, before quantum computing era

[Special thanks to Mehrdad, who provided me the technical materials.]

It seems that we are still so fur from a general purpose quantum computer. So we’ll have to ask the Moore’s Law for a reprieve! Silicon photonics is the next technology that will give us a break before 2016.

Scientists from Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) have achieved a major advance using silicon manufacturing processes to create a novel “transistor-like” device that can encode data onto a light beam. As reported in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature, Intel researchers split a beam of light into two separate beams as it passed through silicon, then used a novel transistor-like device to hit one beam with an electric charge, inducing a phase shift. When the two beams of light are recombined, the phaseshift induced between the two arms makes the light exiting the chip go on and off at >1 GHz, 50× faster than previously produced on silicon. This on and off pattern of light can be translated into the 1s and 0s needed to transmit data.

Using this technology, NEC, the Japanese supercomputer maker, announced that it had made an advance in optical connections between chips that will pave the way for a supercomputer able to reach speeds up to 10 petaflops, or 10 million trillion instructions a second. That is about 20 times faster than the world’s fastest computer.

Also recently, Sun Microsystems has been granted a $44 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract from the US Department of Defense on a project of building a supercomputer using this technology, that could break Moore’s Law.

According to Sun, if it is successful with its interconnect design, new computers will have the potential to be more than one thousand times faster than its current generation. The end result could be a new virtual supercomputer that is more efficient, faster and cheaper than anything available on the market now.

Suspension

Guys,

Because of lack of viewers, I won’t drop any post here for a while!

Is P=NP, or Can Heisenberg’s Uncertainty be wrong?

One of the problems that I always ask my students to think about is ”Can we generalize the paper by Lloyd and Abrams to violate the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?”

I’ve read something related in a magazine and decided to see if we can discuss it here! 

We are entering a golden age of the particle physics!!!

[This article is a summary of another article from SciAm Feb 08. The photos are also taken from there. Please let me know if any copy right law prohibits this!]

For a decade or more, particle physicists have been eagerly awaiting a chance to explore that domain, sometimes called the terascale because of the energy range involved: a trillion electron volts, or 1 TeV.

The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion. The LHC is scheduled to begin operation in May 2008. 

You could think of it as the biggest, most powerful microscope in the history of science. Which is coming to revolutionize our understanding of the particle physics!

The machine is designed to produce beams with 40 times the intensity, or luminosity, of the Tevatron’s beams. When it is fully loaded and at maximum energy, all the circulating particles will carry energy roughly equal to the kinetic energy of about 900 cars traveling at 100 kilometers per hour, or enough to heat the water for nearly 2,000 liters of coffee!

Nearly 100 million  channels of data streaming from each of its two largest detectors would fill 100,000 CDs every second, enough to produce a stack to the moon in six months. So instead of attempting to record it all, the experiments will have what are called trigger and data acquisition systems, which act like vast spam filters, immediately discarding almost all the information and sending the data from only the most promising looking 100 events each second to the LHC’s central computing system at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics and the collider’s home, for archiving and later analysis.

Now, it’s time to ask about the task that this giant collider is going to do.

The current Standard Model of particle physics begins to unravel when probed much beyond the range of current particle accelerators. So no matter what the Large Hadron collider finds, it is going to take physics into new territory.[Chris Quigg writes]

In this new world, we expect to learn what distinguishes two of the forces of nature—electromagnetism and the weak interactions—with broad implications for our conception of the everyday world. We will gain a new understanding of simple and profound questions: Why are there atoms? What makes stable structures possible?

The search for the Higgs particle is a pivotal step, but only the first step. Beyond it lie phenomena that may clarify why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces of nature and that could reveal what the unknown dark matter that fills the universe is. Even deeper lies the prospect of insights into the different forms of matter, the unity of outwardly distinct particle categories and the nature of spacetime.

But there are five goals for the LHC

REDISCOVER THE STANDARD MODEL
The first goal of the collider is not to probe the new but to confirm the old. The machine will produce familiar particles in prodigious numbers (several top quarks per second, for example) and scrutinize them with increasing refinement. Not only does this test the machine and its instruments, it sets precise benchmarks for determining whether new phenomena are indeed new.

DETERMINE WHAT BREAKS THE ELECTROWEAK SYMMETRY
The collider will seek the Higgs boson (or what stands in its place) and determine its properties. Does the Higgs provide mass not only to the W and Z particles but also to the quarks and leptons?

SEARCH FOR NEW FORCES OF NATURE
New force particles would decay into known particles such as electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. Such forces would indicate new symmetries of nature and might guide physicists toward a unified understanding of all the interactions.

PRODUCE DARK MATTER CANDIDATES
By observing neutral, stable particles created in high-energy collisions, the collider could help solve one of astronomy’s greatest puzzles and test researchers’ understanding of the history of the universe.

ABOVE ALL, EXPLORE!
The collider will examine its immense new domain for evidence of hidden spacetime dimensions, new strong interactions, supersymmetry and the totally unexpected. Physicists will have to be attentive to connections among today’s great questions and alert to new questions the collider will open up.

And these are quite a lot! They are about to revolutionize our understanding of particle physics!

Are women going to fire men from the universe?!

[In this post you may see some words, spelled with extra capital Qs! They are just to escape from being fQiQlQtered!]

Good news for lQeQsQbians who want to have biological children related to both parents: a new stem-cell technique could allow scientists to convert female cells into sQpQeQrm. Use that sQpQeQrm to fQeQrQtilize an egg, and voila: children with two female biological parents. [From the Technology Review]

Once I read this news and decided to write a post on it. Unfortunately, I still live in Iran! I have an unlimited access to the fQiQlQternet! I searched for the issue, then I achieved the following result:

The Persian text means: “According to the laws of Islamic Republic of Iran, access to this website is forbidden.” I wonder how do Iranian biologists, sQeQxQologists and other scientists find their articles through the fQiQlQternet! By the way, I’ve found this a good one to start with! Then you can search for “Karim Nayernia” in PubMed for more information.

Oh, I mentioned Karim Nayernia! He is a Persian biomedical scientist and a professor in the University of Newcastle.

 

I by myself believe that the answer to the title of this post is NO! Because not all the women are lQeQsQbians!

The questions that I have to answer!!!

These days, any computer scientist who is working on quantum computing is asked some common questions. I put them into two categories:

First, the questions like “What will you do if quantum computing doesn’t pan out in the next 20 years?” or “What if quantum computing is fundamentally impossible?”

Second, ones which ask you about your opinion about the D-Wave Systems.

I came here to answer these questions once for ever. However, I’ve found Scott Aaronson FAQs the best possible answers to the former. The best thing, I think, to do for the latter is to read this in Technology Review, and then search “D-wave” in Scott’s blog, then compare with what you read in Geordie’s! Or else, you can wait until the end of 2008 and see if they’ll present a 1024 qubit quantum computer or not!

I believe that it is best to judge yourself. Nevertheless, I am also skeptic, as many of the famous computer scientists are. However, I wouldn’t say “by the end of 2008″ if I wanted to bluff about such matter!

Backward Educational System

[Note that this is not the technical version of the article. This is written just as a blog post. You can directly ask me for the technical version.]

In our new world that the speed of developments of sciences is incredibly high, traditional educational systems are no more useful. In this article I introduce a new educational system, based on backward chaining, which can be substituted with the traditional ones. I believe that it is more effective while the students can find their original goals through an active academic process.

The contents are:
1. Definition of Backward Chaining-(In this chapter you’ll realize from where we got the intuition.)
2. The Backward educational system
3. Conclusion

Definition of Backward Chaining

Backward chaining is a means of utilizing a set of condition-action rules. In backward chaining, we work back from possible conclusions of the system to the evidence, using the rules backwards. Thus backward chaining behaves in a goal-directed manner. Consider the following example:

Suppose we want the system to answer the query ‘Is X a tiger?’ A backward chaining engine starts with our query as its goal. The engine will then try to prove the goal by inferring the then part of a rule in the knowledge base. Rule 3 matches. To prove rule 3, the engine needs to prove the premise (the if part of the rule). This leads to two subgoals: X is a carnivore; X has stripes the engine will now try to match the first of the two subgoals, ‘X is a carnivore,’ with the goals in the knowledge base. Rule 1 matches. The engine must now attempt to match the premise ‘if X eats meat’. This becomes the next subgoal. Because there are no rules which have ‘X eats meat’ as a goal, the system will prompt the user. Because the user responds ‘yes’, the engine has proven that X is a carnivore. Now, the engine must prove one more subgoal, ‘X has stripes,’ to reach the goal. Because there are no rules which have ‘X has stripes’ as a goal, the system must prompt the user. The user responds ‘yes,’ which allows the engine to reach its second subgoal. Since both subgoals have been proven, the main goal is also proven.

Backward chaining systems are more effective at analysis or diagnosis, which involve breaking complex problems down into smaller ones via subgoaling. You may have seen the examples of backward chaining in various problems such as troubleshooting a car or diagnosing a disease. Backward chaining is also a very common method in artificial intelligence. Now, we will see how one can design a backward educational system.

The Backward educational system

People are naturally curious. In their learning process, they are searching for the goals, with the highest priority, which are unsatisfied and their ego makes them the focus of their cognitive attention. If all goals are satisfied, or no precise goal is defined, then the system has no focus on that cycle. As a result they will soon forget what they were learnt without focus and this will make serious problems during the time they find their goals and decide to pursue. They might think either they are not good in the prerequisites, or the target is so hard to achieve! And this is while people are not good, ONLY in the stuff they have forgotten or have no motivation to practice!
A skill is applicable if its target which you learn this skill for is not satisfied and its requirements are satisfied.

The process is to use the students’ curiosity as a motivation and let them to choose their applicable skills to learn. Imagine a university in which the following program is considered as an undergraduate program:

-The Module of Everything: In this module they study every possible field they can follow after their graduation in general. They will realize what can they do after the undergraduate course.(one year)
-Prerequisites Period: In this period they study their applicable skills, related to the target they have chosen.(two years)
-Research Module: In this module they learn how to search for a specific topic. In addition to that they choose a topic to do a research.(one year)

We just need an appropriate system for assessment. This is ridiculous to evaluate ones knowledge with a piece of paper, in a limited time and limited resources! This is just to test his memory! A proper assessment is one which examines ones ingenuity and creativity, one which tests how much of the topic is understood by the student. My suggestion is to give them some general problems during the courses. The most complete answers, from different points of view receive the highest score. Just like when you want to submit a paper to the real scientific world. At the end of the semester, the students who didn’t manage to give solutions to any of the problems must do a project on a related topic. The project must worth from educational point of view. Presentations certainly are part of the assessment.

conclusion

Since the traditional educational systems use a forward chaining process, I claim that they bound the student’s creativity and do not let them to find their visions and focus on them. I define a backward educational system for undergraduate studies and a method for assessment. Researchers have proven that this system is more effective even for students with mental retardation.