This is my blog about internships, married life, traveling, Jesus, graduate school, the web (more specifically databases, data mining, information retrieval, and anything I feel like writing about).
Yes we are the number one party school according the princeton review. While most have given the credit solely to fraternities I submit to you it take more than greeks to be a quality number one party school! Below I list 5 reasons why we have the crown:
National Championships --> We are used to celebrating, we planned for more championship parties this year expecting success and even if we lost we wouldn't never cancel the party, we just change the name.
Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship (Chi Alpha) --> This organization I am a part of is comparable to a college youth group. They may have single handedly pumped the school up to a number one ranking. This group of authentic disciples of Christ are not ashamed to celebrate their salvation!!
Tim Tebow --> This iconic figure also inspired many to celebrate in his name.
Budget Cuts --> The Budget cuts in the state of Florida cause UF to cut some Jobs. Why they were looking for new positions friends threw them going away parties.
I Love New York, Flavor of Love, Grey's Anatomy, etc --> These TV shows were extremely popular to the college-aged crowd at UF. Whats better than to throw an episode watching party once a week.
These are just a few reasons. It's important to note that not everybody has drinks at their parties (e.g. XA). So people shouldn't correlate the high party ranking with drinking - even though clubs/bars are right across the street from the newly rennovate Library West. So Gator Nation be proud of this #1 ranking!! This is the first in many more to come in the 2008-2009 school year!
With the recent unleashing of the self proclaimed "google stopper" cuil, many people were left extremely underwhelmed, myself included. I was wondering how much better this could be. How close could cuil come to reading my mind?!?! While the results wasn't what I expected, the interface was beautiful.
Google filed a patent for its search result interface [citation needed], everybody has been producing similar search result pages. IMHO Cuil steps out of the box a little more than I have seen giving more information without having to move my ornery touchpad. They display information on either two or three column including pictures. So now instead of looking at words I will be scanning the pictures associated with each page to find what I am looking for. They also keep an index of page results on the bottom of the page (which is probably needed). They also cluster (categorize) the results and let you search with in this clusters.
My suggestion to Cuil is to keep the interface but trash the search engine and leverage googles'. That would make life perfect for me.
For everybody who wasn't impressed with Cuil's debut, here are two youtube videos which are definitely more entertaining that you think. Introducing the ZOOperstars:
It seems a new "old" programming language is gathering of late. Erlang developed in 1987 by Ericsson has attracted programmers because of it is built to support "distributed, fault-tolerant, and insert buzz current word".
Erlang was originally built to support difficult demands of ATM/Telecom switches. Ericsson found the other programming languages wanting and decided to create their own. Below are some notes on their design emphasis. (This information was obtained from a google tech talk.)
Fault tolerance --> Isolate errors so they don't disturb other processes. Instead of swiss army knives seperate knife, nail clipper, cork screw. Process supervision. OTP is a process supervision framework for Erlang.
Non-stop --> "error-free", updatable. Hot code replacement. Erlang keeps two or more versions of code so you can update code without "restarting the server."
Concurrent --> All processs are equal (simple round robin scheduling is better)
Distrubuted, scalable and heterogeneous --> inter-process communication. Erlang uses a virtual machine, compile to a byte code. Symmetric Multi-Processing: Multi cores may choose which process you execute from a scheduling queue.
soft real-time --> Some small delays ok. Advanced GC/memmang mechanisms.
"prototypeability" --> Start off quickly with our program to see if it works. Declarative programming. Run time linking.
So why now? The language and these design issues very compatible with the whole "CloudDB' trend. In fact, CouchDB, an opensource distributed database, is written Erlang as well as Amazon's SimpleDB. Other people may be using it to develop their system but have not admitted it. In any case there will be more jobs for Erlang programmers.
It is not a sure thing for Erlang to arise as the standard Cloud Computing standard. C++ and Java remain strong the the Enterprise realm. New Java message passing frameworks such as Kilim. continue to increase the flexibility of Java.
Erlang has room to evolve. A growing user base and the strong design of its roots at the least prove it to be marketable.
I listened to a couple sermons recently one by Sean Smith while he was at First Assembly, another at the Triumphant Church, and another on BBN radio. Below are are notes to the sermons in no particular order. The sermons may be mixed and intertwined Also I added links to his sermons below if you are interested in listening.
VideoAudio :: Sean Smith Sermons @ First Assembly 7/7/08
[2 Chronicles 7:14] If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
This verse show a good way to approach God in our time of crisis. First we should be motivated. The word "humble" in the hebrew has the idea of "submitting" or yeilding. So we should learn to purpose ourselves to seek after God. Next, is supplication. We should pray, being devoted to him we have every right to make our needs be known to him. We should have deep care for the spritual needs of another. Dedicate yourself to seeking God while recognizing the holiness of Him.
"Belive the Love" Faith works by Love [Galatians 5:6] At the root of unbelief is the lack of love. When you need to troubleshoot some situation that you are in, it is important to start from the beginning. So we should check our faith, an we know because of Galations 5:6 that we should check our Love.
It is hard to Belive the Love. In John 17:23, Jesus is praying and he expresses his desire that we know that God sent him and that we should know that God love us just as much as he loves Jesus. Amazing! Yet hard to belive, that God really loves us. If we get a revelation of this, it will reck our lives, changing our lives completely! - I pray that whoever reads this can get a glimpse of your love.
God is Love, and since God loves us so much we should also love one another, that is how God's love is perfected in us. While we were still terrible people God sent his Son to die as a substitute of our sins. [1 John 4:7-12].
The world says "I love you but if you hurt me I am going to let you loose." But unbelivers need to experience the goodness of God.
Sometimes we don't worship until we feel good. Do we wait for a good feeling before we go to work? We worship ouur savior regardless of how we feel. We love God regardless of how we feel.
We need God's word to keep us grounded so we will not waiver.
"Breakthrough the wilderness" This is when you are more taxed than relaxed. You feel isolated, the source of your inspiration is tapped out. A Wilderness is a hallway to your next destination.
[Isaiah 43:19] "Behold, I will do a new thing ... I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert."
A new thing is like:
An item never possesd
A place never visited
A thought never formed -> you need to know new stuff to survive in the wilderness
An action never taken
A wilderness is like a circumstantial fast where we can't depend on anybody but God. When we come through it we can say "If it had not been for the Lord on my side."
When we come out of the wilderness we should be totally different. Like make over shows where people go into a backroom and come out looking beautiful because some specialist was working on them. We go into the wilderness where God is working on us so we can come out looking brand new!
Wilderness is like the time where you have a promise and stuff is not lining up with you. Feeling like you have a delay in your life may throw you into a wilderness.
During this time we should be careful, that is when temptation is at its strongest. The power of temptation is the state it find you in to cause you to fall. Then people may become frustrated because God has you in a particular season.
When you are going through the wilderness there is no due north. It is hard when people ask you how you are doing because you may not know.
[Genesis 21:14] Hagar Abraham's baby mama went through a wilderness. Keys to personal break through:
(1 )You must have Desert develop desires. In the Desert God wants us to release a cry in our life. We need to be desperate with God even after serving him for a while. There needs to be a new cry from your heart. The Sun may evaporate water in a lake to the clouds which then produces rain to go back into the lake. The move of God first begins because the Son of God shines on you to evaporate the water inside of you for God to rain down on you again. The move of God starts when the spirit inside of you heats up. God wants you to be in touch with where you are. Be persistent. WE LACK PERSISTENCE, a lot of the forefathers in the faith, and grandparents had persistence that is why we are here today.
(2) Don't wander from your word. You may receive a word of encouragement, remember it. Or the enemy make your problem seem bigger than the solution we carry. We need to not only hear what God has said, but to also hear the voice of God now! Issac would have been dead if Abraham did not hear God telling him to stop. Hagar received a word about Ishmael a long time ago but she almost lost it.
(3) Rescues our vision. It is often what we don't see in the spirit that holds us back. Gen 21:19 -- God Opened her eyes so that we saw a well. The well was always there God opened her eyes. We panicked and we were blinded by our situation.
Today, I had an insightful conversation with someone who had an interesting viewpoint concerning the differences in the published work of schools in the east (e.g. GA Tech) and schools in the west coasts of the US. The basic idea behind his viewpoint was that schools in the east tend to approach scientific problems more as engineers than as scientist. More specifically, when attacking a problem, schools in the east tend to spend less time on defining the problem they are attacking and more time engineering a solution.
While I do not have the expertise to agree or disagree with his statement, the important take away from the conversation was that the most important step in the scientific process is to define the problem. I guess he is saying the investigation of a well defined problem is the difference between scientist and engineers. Engineering focus on the result while scientist focus on the process.
Later , I realized that the day before I had a conversation with a PhD student who proved his point. When I asked him how he went about publishing papers he told me he does not really start off with that as a goal. Instead, he said as a PhD student he is given projects to work on and if a paper is produced out of it then that is a plus. His words definitely did not agree with my spirit. What I would have liked to hear is - "I am given problems and I work with my adviser to understand and formally define the problem. Next, I take time and perform a literature review on the work in the problem's area. Following those steps, I develop algorithms and run experiments on them and compile the results. I can publish anytime after the problem is defined."
Below is a list version of how to attack attach research problems - this is obviously not the only method.
Find the problem --> Finding the problem may occur in one of three ways. First, after reading papers we may find facets of other's research which is untouched or difficult, and still has room to improve the state of the art. Secondly, we may see a practical problem occuring or notice something that is inefficient, whether that be through the newspaper, tv, friends, colleagues, etc. Lastly, because computer science has tentacles which may reach towards other areas, it may be possible to map the fields terminology and processes to the cs domain (an example of this is the general area of "Neural Networks").
Fully define the problem and its domain --> This step is of the utmost importance and must be completed before moving any further. Fully define the problem until it is well defined, sorted out, and ready to be attacked. This prevents people from questioning the foundations your research. A bonus of this step is that it allows you to do an elevator pitch to friends and colleagues at conferences.
Related Research --> Don't reinvent the wheel and stand on the shoulders of giants. Find and record all related work.
Develop Solution --> Figure out the best solution then design experiments to test solutions. When producing algorithms your foundations should be secure so you credibility is not taken.
