Amazing correspondence

I always wondered looking at the facts that sometimes different disciplines in science/engineering have striking similarity in the final result : no matter what principles you are studying, the final equations look similar across multiple disciplines. One such example is the Arrhenius type dependence of many processes (generally if you have to overcome some energy barrier to do something then it is highly likely that you will end up getting an Arrhenius dependence). I just came across a simple relation called Amdahl's Law (https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/) which states that if you are parallelizing a computer program/code, the potential program speedup (x) can be defined by the fraction of code (p) that can be parallelized or,

          1
x = ------------;
         1 - p

Now while taking the polymer engineering class, I learned about the special case of Carother's equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carothers_equation) where the degree of polymerization (x_n) is related to the conversion (p) as follows:


              1
x_n = ------------
             1 - p

You need to have a very high amount of conversion (~ 99%) in order to get a really long polymer chain. What amazes me is the striking similarity between these two simple equations which are from two unrelated fields, but still analogous. Nature surely has only a few main principles or rules --  everything else can just be explained through analogy. We just have to unravel those simple rules -- are we there yet?

Bill Gate's Favorite Teacher : Salman Khan

He has created an internet sensation by making education free for all through online teaching.

Some links:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/23/technology/sal_khan_academy.fortune/index.htm

http://www.khanacademy.org/


Khan Academy is also one of  Google's 10^100 project winners
http://www.project10tothe100.com/

About Khan:

"
Born and raised in New Orleans -- the son of immigrants from India and what's now Bangladesh -- Khan was long an academic star. With his MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master's in electrical engineering and computer science.

"

About Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/about

Naturejobs on post-docs

What to consider before taking up a post-doc position: http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2010/100902/full/nj7311-120a.html

Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement talk 2005

Truly inspiring:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Whether you smoke one cigarette a week or more, the lung cells know it all

More at yahoo news: Secondhand Cigarette Smoke Alters Genes, Study Says
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201210300;_ylt=Ao4fwiqudsIB0mU1dd.66NFH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTM1dXNia2FrBGFzc2V0A3RpbWUvMjAxMDA4MjAvMDg1OTkyMDEyMTAzMDAEY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwM2BHBvcwM2BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDc2Vjb25kaGFuZGNp

On scientific career and more

Nature has some nice articles on the following topics:

Scientific career renewal: http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2010/100812/full/nj7308-893a.html

Metrics to measure productivity and to make decision for promotion etc: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100616/full/465860a.html

About sabbatical: http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2007/070816/full/nj7155-834a.html

Amazing predator videos from Nat Geo

Here is the link:

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/animals/reptiles-animals/snakes/cobra_eatsratsnake.html?source=email_inside

Want to know about the History of Indian mathematics?

Go here http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/Indians.html .

This sums it all:

QUOTE

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. the importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.

UNQUOTE

US DOE National Labs

See the list here: http://www.energy.gov/organization/labs-techcenters.htm

See the anagram of your name

Did you know New York Times can be reconfigured as "monkeys write" ? Check out what your name can be reconfigured as at http://wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html . This is an internet anagram server maintained by Anu Garg.

Got a spoiled kid? Take her to Indian slums

An American mom took her spoiled shopaholic teen to Indian slums to change her perspective about life. See part of "lucky ducks", the documentary here (her mom made this) through yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/video/world-15749633/curing-a-spoiled-rotten-teen-18988491

See what Stroustroup has to say about C++ and grad students

Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is the inventor of C++ programming language.

Read the full interview here :http://www.app2us.com/interviews/bjarne_stroustrup.htm.

Excerpts:

about applications that use C++

"
app2us: We understand that C++ is used in a wide variety of devices like cell phones, cameras and elevators. What is the most interesting device or application that uses C++?
Dr. Stroustrup: I'd say the Mars Rovers. Those are most interesting "gadgets". The Mars Rover project is one of the most impressive engineering feats to date and I'm proud that C++ is a prominent part of the systems involved; not just on the Rovers themselves, but also in the communications systems, testing, and image processing, and more. Obviously, more mundane applications, such as photoshop, the iPod GUI, and google's search engine, are more important in everyday life, but I find something like the Mars Rovers most inspiring. For a short list of applications, see http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html

"

and tips about grad students

"

app2us: What is your advice to graduate students aspiring to pursue a career in research?
Dr. Stroustrup: Focus on problems. Don't get obsessed with tools and convention; instead learn about some yet unsolved real-world problems and build a research program around principled approaches to solving such problems. Don't get obsessed with having a solution tomorrow. Learn to communicate well. It does not matter how good your ideas are if you cannot explain them to others. You need to communicate well (both giving information and taking it) both verbally and in writing. For those of us who do not have English as our native language, it is essential to get a good grasp of both professional and colloquial English. One nice thing about that is that there is so much good literature that can be of help: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/literature.html
I find that CS grad students *always* underestimate the importance of colloquial English and writing. They consequently loose out on much that could have been a pleasure as well as of great utility.

"

Truly, thoughts of a great mind indeed!

Matlab uses LAPACK for matrix manipulations

Matlab, a commercial package for math calculations use many open-source libraries for calculations. Some of them are BLAS, LAPACK, CGAL, etc.

http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/clevescorner/winter2000.cleve.html

Complete UAV Guide

Look at the current and future un-manned aerial vehicle technologies at Popular Science:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/gallery/2010-02/gallery-future-drones

What makes a good PhD student?

Read what Nature has to say about this:

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2006/060511/full/nj7090-252b.html

Also check out the file at the end of this article which has all these tips in great details.


Hope this is useful for all the aspiring and the current PhD students.

The above link is a re-post of a very old post of my blog (2006) :
http://tathabhatt.blogspot.com/2006/05/what-makes-good-phd-student.html

What's the meaning of your name?

Find out what google thinks about you, and who you are to the online community. Try googlism.

Here is what my name means:
http://www.googlism.com/who_is/t/tathagata/

Experimentation with time lapse video

Bunch of low shutter-speed snaps put together in a video for an experimental time lapse video.

How I did this:

1. Used Canon Vixia HF 200 camcorder mounted on a tripod, in picture mode (shutter priority Tv mode). Shutter speed was set at the lowest (1/2 sec) to capture nice motion blurs of speeding cars. This also makes a smooth transition between snaps for the pleasure of your eyes, otherwise a normal/auto shutter speed will make it waver or flicker.

2. Exposure was set in auto mode (I did not lock it as all the pictures were taken within a short time, say, 30 minutes or so which does not change the outside sunlight/brightness so much). You can lock it if you think the brightness may change. Actually, you can see at the last part of the video how the evening slowly sets in and this causes the brightness to change, but it was intentional.

3. Having collected all the pictures, I used a Linux terminal to use the open source ffmpeg package to pack up all the snapshots in a video. In total I had 231 pictures and the frame rate was set to 15 fps. I also merged a soundtrack using -i option.
I used this command:
ffmpeg -r 15 -b 1800 -i file%04d.JPG -i music.mp3 -acodec copy -shortest movie.mp4

ffmpeg is a very efficient library and it keeps the file size within limit without much loss of quality. There are hundreds of parameters to ffmpeg and it is kind of difficult to master all of them. For help, see the ffmpeg documentation at http://ffmpeg.org/documentation.html. You can do wonders with ffmpeg! And it is free!!

The bottom line is that you have to chose a good shutter speed and an acceptable frame rate to get a nice video. You can do many combination and decide which one looks good but it is very time consuming. I did some trials and decided on something which is not the best solution, but optimal.

Measuring productivity of scientists: h index

The Wikipedia article is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index.

"...a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited by others at least h times" goes the definition. So if you have an h index of 10
then you have your first 10 papers which have been cited at least 10 times each. You may have a total of 50 papers but other papers have not yet been cited "their index number" times each.

If your 11th paper has been cited 10 times, then still your h index is 10. So h index would become 11 if that paper gets one more citation. The 'h' referes to Prof. Hirsch of UCSD who developed this method.

"Hirsch has demonstrated that h has high predictive value for whether a scientist has won honors like National Academy membership or the Nobel Prize."

"The h-index grows as citations accumulate and thus it depends on the 'academic age' of a researcher."

"Hirsch suggested that, for physicists, a value for h of about 10–12 might be a useful guideline for tenure decisions at major research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences."


So, now you get a clear road-map as to what you have to do in your life to become someone, isn't it? It's all about 'h' index if you are an academic/researcher/scientist.

Weird Oscar moment

A lady crashes in on another director's acceptance speech and speaks about the film as if it was her acceptance speech. It turns out she has a legitimate claim on the Oscar as one of the producers and the two were having some conflicts about who will give the acceptance speech. Read more and watch the video here:

http://oscars.movies.yahoo.com/blog/69-the-story-behind-the-oscars-weird-lady-kanye-moment

Which university grads earn the most and in which disciplines?

payscale.com has the answer and here is the news piece from yahoo:

http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/career-articles-college_grads_which_ones_earn_the_most-1103

Most notably:

QUOTE

School Name / Starting Median Salary / Mid-Career Median Salary

1. Dartmouth College: $58,200 / $129,000
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): $71,100 / $126,000
3. Harvard University: $60,000 / $126,000
4. Harvey Mudd College: $71,000 / $125,000
5. Stanford University: $67,500 / $124,000
6. Princeton University: $65,000 / $124,000
7. Colgate University: $51,900 / $122,000
8. University of Notre Dame: $55,300 / $121,000
9. Yale University: $56,000 / $120,000
10. University of Pennsylvania: $60,400 / $118,000

Undergraduate Degree / Starting Median Salary / Mid-Career Median Salary

1. Aerospace Engineering: $59,600 / $109,000
2. Chemical Engineering: $65,700 / $107,000
3. Computer Engineering: $61,700 / $105,000
4. Electrical Engineering: $60,200 / $102,000
5. Economics: $50,200 / $101,000
6. Physics: $51,100 / $98,800
7. Mechanical Engineering: $58,900 / $98,300
8. Computer Science: $56,400 / $97,400
9. Industrial Engineering: $57,100 / $95,000
10. Environmental Engineering: $53,400 / $94,500

UNQUOTE

US duo does an Indian folk dance in Vancouver 2010

And they won silver....I think they deserved a Gold medal :) Nicely pulled off.

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/assetid=e713aa15-112f-4d1c-8665-77bec00aa9f1.html#daviswhite+rise+second+place

The gold medal winners are here with their Flamenco dance for the OD (original dance category): http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/assetid=b346ff2c-603a-4bee-a2a3-867d35d2e6d6.html

Get these photo tips from the pros at Nat Geo

Watch these videos here:

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/specials/photography-specials/photo-tips/accessories-photo-tips.html

Can you solve this challenge?

I have not tried yet but you may have a look. I also don't know what kind of questions would be there. It is from The Source (sourcecon): Challenge 3: The Last Hope. Check it out! Heard that they are giving away some rewards if you are the first guy to solve it.

http://www.sourcecon.com/news/2010/02/15/challenge%C2%A03%C2%A0the%C2%A0last%C2%A0hope/

Pittsburgh snow storm 2010: some visuals

We witnessed a record snow fall this time (Feb 5-6, 2010) which only happens once in maybe, 15 years. I heard it last snowed like this in 1993. Anyway, since it is in the weekend and we cannot venture out because of the obvious reasons (see the following pics/clips) I decided to use my HD camcorder to shoot from my 15th floor apartment and show you some amazing visuals from top. I can see the sprawling landscape draped in white from Hill District to Mt. Washington in front of me with a spectacular view of the Monongahela river. Okay, I stop writing here as these pictures are really worth a thousand words (and the videos are many more). Click on the pics to see X-large. Enjoy!

Some cool pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some videos: 

(with music)

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.


Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

(without music)

Top ten funny youtube videos

See the best here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRH3iTQPrk .
Other videos: http://mashable.com/2009/07/11/funny-viral-videos/

Rabindra Rachanabali

A nice website (thanks to BE college and IIT Kharagpur) with all the works of Tagore:

http://www.rabindra-rachanabali.nltr.org/node/1

acknldg.susmitadi

How to create an iPad design in adobe photoshop

A nice tutorial for all Adobe PS nubees.
http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-create-a-detailed-apple-ipad-icon-in-photoshop

The art of being socially acceptable from childhood

A new study shows what matters most: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100202/sc_livescience/studiesrevealwhykidsgetbulliedandrejected

Samsad English to Bengali dictionary online

Now a days I need it to refresh my bengali language skills:

You can get it here http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/biswas-bengali/

Caught in action? legal eagles might use evidence from google street views

Interesting stuff: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/google-camera-nabs-alleged-tree-killer/

end

10 best free iPhone apps for babies/toddlers

See here http://www.examiner.com/x-608-Early-Childhood-Parenting-Examiner~y2009m12d11-10-best-iPhone-iPod-Touch-apps-for-toddlers

Do you know of some more?

How to un-install ubuntu from a vista-ubuntu dual booting machine and then upgrade vista to windows 7 and then install vmware to use latest ubuntu with windows 7 simultaneously

I am going to this as a DIY project in the next couple of days as my 2 year old hp dv2700 requires a face lift. I am dualbooting with ubuntu (gutsy gibbon) and vista. But want a virtual box with windows 7 and karmic koala. Steps to follow:

1. un-install ubuntu from vista-ubuntu m/c (use EasyBCD to deleted GRUB and re-write MBR and then delete linux partition using "storage manager" of vista and include that "free space" in vista)

Read this link: http://quainttech.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-remove-ubuntu-from-vista-dual.html : The most important post is given below (@Sanjeev):

"Thanks for this.
I was however on the road and needed the extra HDD space on my laptop and since I wasn't using the dual boot Ubuntu anyway I decided to get rid of it. Now comes the hard part - No Vista install media!!!
I found a way to do it extremely simply because I needed to change the Vista bootloader also (I was triple booting XP/Vista/Ubuntu...)So here are the steps -

Download and install EasyBCD (google for it you'll find it easy and it's free...)
Fire up EasyBCD (you may have to choose Allow if you have UAC on) and choose 'Manage Bootloader' in the toolbox on the left
In the first option choose the radio button which says 'Reinstall Vista Bootloader' and hit the Write MBR button
Reboot and you have your Vista bootloader back!! Delete the Ubuntu Partition using Storage Manager and you are now good to go..."

2. upgrade to windows 7 with upgrade DVD (delete old windows files to increase space)
3. install vmware work station 7.0 (this wiki/how-to link is from pitt so may not be public http://collab.sam.pitt.edu/node/469)
4. install the latest ubuntu (get the iso image from ubuntu site) using vmware in windows 7 (again this wiki link may not be public  http://collab.sam.pitt.edu/node/465)

For points 3 and 4 above you may go to http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/ws_pubs.html but first get a vmware copy. An academic license is free, I guess.

That's it!!

Linux tutorials from IBM

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/linux/libraryview.jsp?topic_by=All+topics+and+related+products&sort_order=desc&lcl_sort_order=desc&search_by=&search_flag=&type_by=Tutorials&show_abstract=true&sort_by=Date&end_no=100&show_all=false?S_TACT=105AGX03&S_CMP=LPLINUX

Your kid's social life and you

Worth reading though my time has not come yet!!
http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/are-you-ruining-your-kids-social-lives-567778/

Anybody who can help this poor kid?

The above picture is of a child who needs special intervention as she is kind of mute as her mother is deaf-mute (deaf and cannot speak). This child is not a typical deaf-mute like her mom who, on the other hand, is a deaf-mute since birth. Her story is little different and I don't know the name of this medical condition (or diagnosis). The interesting thing is that her older sister does not live with her mom (she is away living with her maternal uncle) and because of that she can speak clearly but this unfortunate girl does not know how to speak words. She has seen her mother communicating with others with the help of sign language and she being very close to her mom from birth could not acquire the skills to speak words like her older sis. This is partly because she tries to imitate her mom when she needs to communicate and she thinks that it is the natural way. I saw this happy and jolly girl when I visited India (she is actually our neighbor and belongs to a poor family) and felt utterly bad for her. She plays with other kids normally and mingles with everyone but she cannot communicate with words: all she can do is just make some sound to imitate words that she wants to express. I am sure with medical intervention (like speech therapy) she will be able to speak because she is not a born deaf-mute like her mom which is evident from the fact that she can listen to what others are saying and tries to reply accordingly. Unfortunately, nobody seems to care about her problem (which is kind of common in rural India) and she is being denied this wonderful gift of language. Anybody out there knows about this condition and the treatment options? Any help will be highly appreciated.

How to deliver good presentations: learn from Steve Jobs

See here http://lifehacker.com/5449141/deliver-polished-presentations-steve-jobs-style

See me in google street view (rotate to right to view)

View Larger Map

A recent blog I wrote for a course at Pitt

This is the blog that I just wrote as a submission for homework of ENGR2402 course at the University of Pittsburgh, Introduction to Collaborative Scientific Programming. Also, available at http://collab.sam.pitt.edu/blog/31 . This gives you some information about what I am doing in my research at this moment.

Mixing granular flow with HPC 

Hi, my name is Tathagata Bhattacharya (I go by just Tatha). I am pursuing my PhD in the Granular Transport Group of Chemical and Petroleum Engg. under the supervision of Prof. J J McCarthy. Before joining the PhD program, I was working in a corporate R&D lab for couple of years following my masters. I love to do interdisciplinary research as my background involves a combination of mechanical engg (undergraduate), materials science (masters) and chemical engg (PhD). I am proficient in C and Matlab. I also learned C++ during my undergraduate studies but never used it seriously in any recent project. Therefore, I am also looking forward to brushing up my C++ skills through this course.

Let me give you some background of the work that our group is interested in. In our group, we seek to unravel the mysterious behavior of granular matter from a fundamental aspect, and to accomplish that goal, we employ modeling and simulation in conjunction with controlled experiments. Granular materials are ubiquitous in everyday life: they range from cosmetic powders to vitamin pills, from jelly beans to sugar, from beach sand to the rings of Saturn, and from breakfast cereals, grains to interstellar dust. Although very common, granular materials pose unique challenges and exhibit counter-intuitive behavior that makes research in this field exciting and stimulating. Granular materials possess the potential to exhibit new physics in certain situations if a controlled experiment is closely observed. Understanding the fundamental behavior of these materials can make or break a vast number of man-made and natural processes. In fact, this class of materials ranks second, behind water, on the scale of priorities of human activities and endeavors. Hence, even a fractional advancement in our understanding of the behavior of granular materials can have a profound impact on our economic and general well-being. It is estimated that more than 60% of the manufactured goods in the USA alone rely on particle technology (or the understanding of granular materials). So, that was the motivation behind our work. Let's dig into a little detail of what my work actually entails.

The main objective of my work is to gain an understanding of the factors affecting mixing, segregation and related phenomena of granular mixtures. Mixing of granular materials is essentially accompanied by segregation; however the fundamentals of the processes are not well understood. Small differences in either size or density lead to flow-induced segregation, a complex phenomenon without parallel in fluids. While a qualitative understanding of the mechanisms of segregation has existed for some time now, there are remarkably few models, which give quantitative predictions of the extent of mixing and segregation. Such information is particularly important in the analysis and design of industrial mixing operations in the chemical, mineral, metallurgical, pharmaceutical, food, ceramic, environmental and construction industries. I am using the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to investigate the mixing and segregation of granular material in a prototypical solids mixer -- a rotating drum. We also use other idealized equipments (like a chute or hopper), which have great engineering importance to test our hypothesis or models. DEM calculates the trajectories of individual particles based on Newton's laws of motion by employing suitable contact force models and a collision detection algorithm (like molecular dynamic simulations). In this approach, properties of particles such as size, shape, and density can be directly specified and we believe that DEM is a suitable tool for analyzing segregation. Details such as velocity and concentration profiles for every component in a mixture can be obtained. However, the number of particles and their shapes that can be simulated in DEM is limited by today's computer power, such that many engineering scale processes are beyond the reach of DEM. Therefore, this is a great opportunity where this particular course may come handy in addressing some of the limitations that DEM has. For example, we use a serial code (written in C, developed in-house, distributed under GPL) where it takes weeks (even months!) to obtain meaningful results. So far we have simulated a few thousand to a hundred thousand particles using that code. Profiling of the code revealed that the bottleneck seems to be the contact detection algorithm. Therefore, speed up is possible if we employ the tools of high performance computing (HPC) such as parallelization, GPU computing, etc, and use efficient search algorithms (computer scientists are very good at that!). So, my research work has all the elements of a typical physics problem where it can challenge the ability of present day computers and algorithms. A true multidisciplinary approach is necessary to address the challenges. Therefore, I am eagerly looking forward to learning the basics of these HPC tools from this course and if possible, collaborate with others with common interest. My expectations for this course are quite high where I expect that I should be able to obtain the working knowledge to modify my code and fit it with the HPC tools to speed it up. This will increase the usability and utility of the code to encompass many other engineering problems, which are beyond the reach of the code. Also, as the course name suggests, I am eager to know how open source projects are executed through a collaborative platform. I hope that we will get some glimpses of online collaborations through this course.