16 years ago

I forgot to mention that today we celebrate/commemorate the Romanian revolution from 1989. Celebrate because we gained our freedom, commemorate because of the (post)communists that confiscated the revolution and of the hundreds of people that died in the masquerade that followed the flight and catch of Ceausescu. Nobody payed for that...

Note: in Romanian "comemora" means to remember a sad or tragic event, as opposed to celebrate which means to remember a joyful event; in English I think this distinction between celebrate and commemorate it's not very clear.

New book

I'm reading "Loving Sabotage" by Amelie Nothomb (the Romanian translation). The book describes a strange, cruel world as seen through the eyes of a little girl. Not entirely plausible, but interesting in how she descovers the meaning of love.

Driving in Bucharest

If you ever want to drive in Bucharest you have to answer the question in this test firts! For those who don't speak Romanian the question is: Which vehicle will leave first the crossroad in the picture above?
The answers are:
A. The tram.
B. The truck.
C. The trolley bus.

Firefox 1.5

It's official! Firefox 1.5 was released yesterday. I used the beta versions for a while now, and I think it's faster and more stable then the previous version. So get it while it's hot :)

New book

Now reading A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, the Romanian translation. It's a funny novel, about a guy that doesn't adapt at all to the society, but it's forced to do so by some circumstances.

David vs. Google

An interesting article in a German newspaper covering the evolution of Ask Jeeves search engine and the man behind it, Apostolos Gerasoulis. They say Ask Jeeves uses a better search algorithm than Google. I tried a search on "failure", a currently well known Google bombing, and Ask Jeeves returned some meaningfull results. It also has a feature called "zooming" where they offer some alternative search terms that could find better answers for you.

Universe in a nutshell

I finished reading "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking. He describes the current search in physics for a universal theory that would describe the universe, and reconcile the relativity theory with quantum mechanics. I knew some of the theories explained there from other books of science popularization, but this one is very well written and entertaining. There is also one chapter not related to physics theories, but to the potential evolution of the human society.
I think this is the weaker part of the book, as I don't think we will be in competition with any artificial intelligence any time soon, if ever. Nice to see the reference he mades to Popper and his epistemology. I think everyone doing science should be aware of Popper's theory and the limits of our knowledge.

Google and Sun

Google and Sun announced a partenership which will see Google toolbar bundled together with Java. That's a strange (at least for me) bundle to download, but many are speculating that what they really want to do is to integrate somehow OpenOffice.org into the services offered by Google. This will be, suposely, a big competition chanlange to Microsoft, and many (see for example here) want to see the "good guy" (Google) fighting the "bad guy". I guess they will "fight" eventually, but not as good versus evil (although Google tries to picture itself as being on the good side of the force, see their slogan "don't do evil"), but just as two companies looking for revenues and profits.
I have to admit that even myself look sometimes at Google as being "on the good side of the force" :)

Partial solar eclipse

Live partial solar eclipse in Bucharest right now! We're lucky the clouds are gone after the heavy rain of yesterday; one of my co-workers brought the special eclipse watching glasses he has from the eclipse in 1999, so we all watched it.

Measuring teacher's quality

The Romanian minister of education proposed recently that teacher's salaries should be linked to their performance in teaching. But how would you measure teaching quality? Clearly not by the grades pupils receive, cause in this case everybody would start giving 10 grades (in Romania grades are from 1 to 10). Instead you should measure the (improvement in the) scores pupils receive at national standardized tests, but this is also not trivial. Here's an article about a study made in US on this topic, measuring teacher's quality. Note that in US a teacher is hired by a school, and after a few years his performance is evaluated and he can get a tenure, i.e. a permanent appointment. In Romania, to obtain a permanent position (i.e. titular) you have to pass a contest, without any proof of your real teaching capabilities.

Summer is gone

It rained all day today in Bucharest, probably fall wanted us to notice her.
Maybe this will mean more time for reading, as I started a couple of books and didn't finish them.
Currently I read "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. It's funny how a non-techie describes all the technological changes that took place in the last decade and changed the world.

Machine translation

Machine translation is one of the holly grails of artificial intelligence. The first approach to this problem was to construct a set of rules by studying the grammars of the two languages (called symbolic approach), but, as with other problems in AI, statistical tehniques (inferring "rules" from many translations of documents from one langauge to the other) seem to be more succesful now.
Each year NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology in US) organizes a contest of machine translation software. The results for this year shows Google as the front runner. I'm proud to see University of Maryland (where I got my master degree) as a top contestant. I know they have a good research group in this area. Go Terps! :)

Photos from Italy

I posted some pictures from my trip to Italy. They're not the best, you have to remove my face from some of them to obtain a better view :)

I visited Rome plus Naples and its surroundings (Pompeii, Sorento, and the Capri island). A lot of beautifull things to view in both places, and the time was short for seeing and "digesting" everything. So I hope to go back to see more of Italy "in the next future", as a friend of mine would say :)

Sunset over Ischia island, while on the route from Capri to Naples 

Live dog in Pompeii :) 

Cave Canem mosaic in Pompeii 

Overview of Naples with a clouded Vesuvius in the left corner 

Me and the Colosseum in Rome 

Back to work

My vacation is over (pictures will be added later, if ever, as usually :), and I came back to work today, wondering again (as I entered my male only office) why is this imbalance between men and women working in computer science? :) I kinda found an answer today: in countries where math classes are mandatory for longer in secondary and high school, the imbalance seems to be weaker.
Read the details here.
So I should try to persuade the people in charge with our education system to add more math classes in the high-school, regardless of the speciality (in Romania high schools usually specialize in sciences or humanities) of a particular school :)

Open source beer and a vacation

Applying computer science ideas to real life just got a big boost with the new open source beer developed by the students of a Danish university :) A more detailed story here. Am I lagging behind in applying computer science to real life? Did these guys need a vacation, or maybe I'm the one who needs one? I definitely need one, so I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks. That means staying away from any computer as much as possible, so this blog will be on vacation too.

Cheers! :)