Being on the Right Path

Yesterday I was hiking along hte lines in the Ocean Beach in San Francisco. On my way back from the Legion of Honor back to the beach around the sunset time I saw an inter-continental ship sailing right towards the setting sun. In exact direct line. What a beautiful scenery. I thought this ship is on its way to salvation. Right towards the sun. Towards the light.

خلاصه ی کتاب دو قرن سکوت - زرینکوب

از مسایل مهم این کتاب اینه که بر خلاف این عرق ملی که ما الان داریم و رگ گردنمون بر می خیزه برای شکوه ایران زمین، در اون دوران طرز فکر مردم به نحو دیگه ایی بوده. مردم دل خوشی از دولت ساسانی نداشتن. دین هایی مثل آیین مانی که الهام از شرق (بودا) و غرب (مسیحیت) داشته یا آیین مزدک که الهاماتی از آیین زرتشت داشته یا حتی خود آیین بودا و یا مسیح این ها همه حکومت رو که به آتشکده و معابد بهای زیادی می داده تا موبدان بر حکومت خدا داد شاه صحه بگذارن به شدت می لرزونده. فساد زیادی در دین و میان موبدان زرتشتی به لحاظ سیاسی شدنش وجود داشته. حکومت ساسانی به شدت متزلزل بوده و نمی تونسته قدرت یک پارچه متمرکز رو تو چنگ خودش داشته باشه و هرج و مرج جامعه رو فراگرفته بوده. همین مسایل به ظاهر کوچکه که باعث میشه اعرابی که هیچی نداشتن کل مملکت رو به تسخیر خودشون دربیارن. اون ها با ارایه دینی که همه در نزد خدا برابر و برادرند مگر آنهایی که تقوی پیشه کنند بخش زیادی از ایرانیان رو مشتاق اون ایدولوژی کردند، آنهایی هم که نپذیرفتند یا باید جزیه می پرداختند و تحقیر می شدند و یا از دم تیغ می گذشتند. کم کم ایرانی ها متوجه شدند حکومت خلیفه اون ادعاهای اسلام رو برقرار نکرد و با استثمار مردم و کشور گشایی و زور گویی تنها جایگاه خودش رو با اسم جهاد در برابر کفار گسترده کرد.

از سوی دیگه، 

Applying Big Data Technology To Remote Sensing For Species Identification

 Understanding the processes governing ecological systems from local to global scales is crucial to determining how they will respond to and influence environmental, economical and geopolitical issues such as climate change, invasive species, fire hazards, and land use change. To collect the data necessary to model ecological processes across scales the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) was built starting in 2012 to conduct intensive monitoring and measurements across the United States. Hundreds of ecological and environmental data products ranging from small local samples to large scale remote sensing using aircraft will be monitored across over 81 different observatory sites. The volume, velocity, and variety of data generated by this effort is far greater than anything being currently collected or analyzed by ecologists. Therefore maximizing the knowledge gained from this data will require bridging the gap between different disciplines including ecology, computer science, statistics, and data science. To help develop interdisciplinary approaches to working with and understanding these data, we propose an applied, multidisciplinary, multi-modal, big data challenge to NIST Data Science Evaluation (DSE) series to be used as a stepping stone, with an initial focus on using a combination of airborne remote sensing data and field measurements of forests to characterize the structure of the plant community at large scales.

NEON sites across the United States

PhD Thesis Preparation

While preparing for thesis in UF latex format there were some issues, here I post the things that I went through:

Choke hold for Spark Speedup

In our experiments in Spark on a 64 core machine with 512GB RAM. Spark chokes beyond about 8 cores (~ 6x speedup) and our hypothesis is that the central garbage collector becomes a choke hold which avoids parallelism. This is unavoidable unless you take large chunks of memory per thread and use tricks and local memory managements to avoid a central bottleneck.

Markov Logic Networks in Action

Here we are going through packages dealing with Markov Logic Networks (MLNs) which is a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM):

Alchemy:

Mac Eclipse Debugging So Slow! Life saver tip!

If debugging in eclipse in mac has been so slow for you here is the solution: close the Variables window and what ever you wanna see hover over its variabel or add it to the watch list

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6893553/why-is-debugging-in-eclipse-pydev-so-slow-for-my-python-program

How to Receive Files in your Google Drive from Anyone

A school teacher wants to have a public drop box (not Dropbox) where students can upload homework assignments. A recruiter wants to have an online form where job applicants can upload their resumes. A designer may need a public drop box where clients can upload photographs easily.

Import iPhone Images to MAc without iPicture

Step 1Connect your iPhone to your Mac with its USB cord. Wait a moment for your Mac to recognize that it has been connected.

Step 2Click the "Finder" button in the Dock and click the "Applications" folder in the left pane. Scroll through the list of applications to "Image Capture" and double-click it to open it.

Step 3Select a location on your Mac for the Image Capture application to save your iPhone pictures. To delete the pictures from your iPhone upon completion, click "Options," open the "Options" tab and select "Delete Items from Camera after Downloading."

Step 4Click the "OK" button and then click the "Download All" button to transfer the photos. Once complete, you can disconnect your iPhone from your computer.
 

 

Source: http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/transfer-photos-iphone-mac-iphoto-29666.html

Scaling up Deep Learning Using a GPU Cluster

If you may know Andre Ng made a big noise by using deep learning for a cat detecting tool that cost about $1M. In this ICML paper, he describes how you can build pretty much the same thing for jsut about $20,000. Worth a read: Deep learning with COTS HPC systems

On Deciding between MongoDB vs MySQL

MongoDB offers sharding by key for horizontal scaling when doing fanout wirte or read depending on application: link

On the other hand

Deep Learning Plays Attari

Deep Mind, a subsidary of Google published an extended version of their 2013 paper in Nature along with source codes. Nature Paper. Code. The big picture: a deep network that has loss function as a function that maximizes its score. The input is the pixels of the screen (state) and output is action+score