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