Natasha (my daughter) was in Europe and was heading home today for the start of classes. Her plane had to turn around, however, because there was a smoke on board! All the passengers were OK, but the plane had to dump fuel in the sea and go to Amsterdam. She wasn't clear about home much smoke there was, but even a little it unsettling.
This is what appeared recently on one of the news web sites:
KLM's flight 671 en route from Amsterdam to Montreal returned to Schiphol airport this afternoon shortly after taking off at 14:30. The return of the passenger jet was caused by one or more technical problems.
According to the Aviation Herald: "The crew subsequently reported they had smoke in the cabin and cockpit and requested to level off at FL130 and keep close to Amsterdam." Then they returned safely.
Natasha told me that the cabin was filled with grey smoke that was very apparent, and that it was also (more so?) in the cockpit. She said that the crew was running around with fire extinguishers attempting to find the source of the smoke, but without success.
This is the kind of moment when you want a real human pilot on the loop. While autopilots are great for routine flying and never suffer from fatigue, emergencies are not their forte.
Computer science is becoming increasing popular again, after a huge upswing in the 1990's, a lull after the dot-com meltdown in 2001 and a gradual growth since then. In the last few years computer science departments all across the US and Canada have been seeing enrollments grow, and i the last year or two they have ben growing quite a lot. At McGill, we have seen a steady but gradual growth in enrollment for a few year, but it is now becoming a surge.
In the last few days, there are been some notable popular manifestations of this trend. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year's resolution to lead to program and posted it on Twitter:
My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with
Codecademy in 2012! Join me. codeyear.com #codeyear
A major salary survey is about to be released that shows CS salaries have been rising (when many other sectors are not seeing growth) and "Midsize and large companies are both aiming to hire more IT pros. The midsize are seeking IT executives (such as VPs of information services and technical services), as well as programmers, database specialists, systems analysts, and voice/wireless communication pros. Enterprises are moving IT and data center operations back in-house, which means greater demand for data center managers and supervisors."
For a long time I have been using the Zope Photo product to create on-line image sets. I have been managing a branch on my own for Zope2, and realized I should release it since the original branch has become obsolete.
The Photo product (i.e. package) has been updated to version 4.0 and supports Zope 4.0, EXIF tags and generally works better with modern versions of Zope.
It is highly-configurable, template-based, and has stored backed by the Zope2 database engine. The original was developed by Ron Bickers and was later adopted and updated by Soren Roug (now Head of software development group at the European Environment Agency).
The plugin (product) has always provided multiple configurable sizes of the photo. Photo Folders provide a way to manage a group of Photo objects by providing a way to specify display sizes and properties for all contained photos.
Key changes are: more EXIF format support, better support for very large images, more EXIF GPS tags are supported, support for newer Zope methods, various bug fixes.
I am buying these books for Christmas (for people who don't read my blog). A bit of classic science fiction, and some contemporary high-rated sports and fitness. With luck, I might get to read some of these on the rebound.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to ... Born to Run at Amazon.ca (Canada) Born to Run at Amazon.com
Glasshouse
In the twenty-seventh century, accelerated technology dictates the memories and personalities of people. With most of his own memories deleted, Robin enters The Glasshouse-an experimental polity where he finds himself at the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche. Glasshouse at Amazon.ca (Canada) Glasshouse at Amazon.com
I the last couple of weeks I became the parent of a new baby. Oddly. there are quite a few other parents. Also, our child has 6 legs, 3 eyes, and aluminum body.
We have recently constructed the latest robot in the Aqua family, which has a few new design innovations that can be back-ported into some of the older robots too.
To compare the performance of exploration and validation, both algorithms were tested on a variety of random graphs. The first set of parameterized random graphs was generated by starting with a complete 2D lattice (i.e. a grid) and deleting a specified fraction of randomly selected edges such that the graph remains connected. This first family of graphs should be familiar to those who have been forced to drive a car in Montreal (where roads are often under repair in the summer), and are termed Montreal graphs with deletion factor p, or Montreal(p), p ∈ (0,1).
-- from a paper in 1997. I think maybe the term was first used in 1994.
I put this first on my Google Plus stream, so I guess this counts as a cross-post.
Today I gave a one-hour talk at the IEEE 9th International Symposium on Robotics and Sensor Environments (ROSE). I talked about our work in underwater robotics (as I often do) and specifically dealt with summarization, terrain identification and a tiny bit about human-robot interaction.
One of the components of the talk was work by my former student Philippe Giguere, now a professor and Laval University in Quebec City. He was in the audience which made that part of the presentation feel a bit weird to me -- here I was reminiscing about work he had done with me and almost sharing the odd inside joke with him while this audience was listening. It was a very nice audience and they asked a lot of good questions, which left me with a generally positive vibe. Not a bad way to start a Sunday morning, after all!
The key coauthors of the work I presented, in addition to Philippe, are Yogesh Girdhar and Junaed Sattar.
The summarization part of the talk is covered (at a very high level) in my TEDxMcGIll talk shown here.
In the not-such-good-news department, the union that represents the clerical and technical staff at McGIll University (MUNACA) have had a strike vote and seem certain to go on a general strike Thursday September 1st at 6am. They seem to be are asking for a lot -- as far as I can tell, much more than the university can possibly ever give apparently including a 49 per cent wage increase over 3 years. That does not bode well for a quick settlement, but who knows what's a bargaining ploy and what's a firm requirement.
Thursday is also the first day of classes at McGill, so it may be difficult for many of the new students. The people on strike are clerical staff and lab technicians. This includes many student advisors, as well as the people who make administer lots of stuff and make sure that people get paid. Jobs are being covered by management where permitted, and some essential services such as animal care will not be touched, but I will over a thousand people absent this won't be trivial. I hope most departments have already processed the paperwork for their student teaching assistants who may depend on getting their salaries in a timely way.
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Update: according to widely-distributed reports of the bargaining process: MUNACA (the support staff union) "entered the negotiations demanding a three-year salary increase of 49.9%, and is currently asking for 28.9% over the three years, of which 3% is a scale increase and 6.64% an automatic progression increase per year for a total of 9.4% per year over a three-year contract." The university seems to be offering much less than this, and there seem to be many other issues. It looks like it's going to be a long time.
I am lucky enough to work in a milieu where I meet smart teenagers and twenty-somethings all the time, and they are often brilliant. Of course, being relatively young they tend to be relatively short on experience. Most of the time, though, they know their own strengths and weaknesses (and if anything suffer from being too modest). That contact made the article about a very rich 26-year-old touting his age and experience relative to his 25-year-old competitors especially amusing.
We went to see the "Tribute to Nerds" show at the annual Montreal Comedy Festival last night. It was totally sold out.
There were some great highlights and I especially liked the spot by Kumail NANJIANI, but a substantial fraction the comedy from several of the other comedians on stage was based on tired old "nerd stereotypes" which was rather disappointing. The hosts Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar from the TV show Big Bang Theory did a good job, (even though they read from a teleprompter much of the time and didn't actually attempt to do traditional standup themselves). They pitched a range of jokes include showing shots of famous IT personalities ("here's Mark Zuckerberg, who invented a social network so he wouldn’tt have to meet people"). Dan Mintz also had a really excellent act that was presented with an unusual deadpan style.
It was still a good time, but didn't live up to my expectations. I did have a headache going in though. Of course, live stand up if intrinsically both hit-and-miss, and also very dependent on your mood at the time.
Last week I was at the Google Faculty Summit in New York City. It is was interesting how careful the Google people were about avoiding "creepy" applications. They purposely avoid a lot of data cross linking just to be "clean", more so than I had expected or realized. This was especially important in the context of their new social network Google Plus (which I get to below). There are cool things they could do, maybe even easily, but which they avoid just to stay on the safe side of what people are comfortable with. That's quite impressive as a policy, and an interesting tradeoff between medium term coolness and long term continuance of user trust.
I think making users trusting is, rightly, a top priority for Google since everything else is dependent on that. Simply providing fantastic serve: that's a relatively easy thing, but trust is this evanescent ineffable thing you can't buy.
One of the topics they talked about was the challenge of keeping the huge legions of Google servers efficiently deployed. John Wilkes talk amount this configuration management issue in the context of their upcoming new system for handling it called Omega.
New York, of course, was the crazy exciting hub of activity is always has been. I stayed in the Standard Hotel in the meat packing district, which is a hub of the fashion industry, and right near the
While flying to Taipei I had a stopover in Hong Kong. I figured I wanted to scoot into town and check it out. The word on the web regarding the feasibility of this, and how long it takes, was inconclusive. Well on the way to Taipei I tried out a practice run to the city without actually leaving the airport area: through security, change money, find transportation, stash baggage, etc. Is gave me the confidence, and some key info, to actually make the run on the way home. Here are my findings and tips, for the Hong Kong newbie on a tight time budget.
First off, with 4 hours in Hong Kong airport, a quick dash into the city is possible and, if you have never been there before, quite interesting and worthwhile.
Hong Kong street scene
Hong Kong airport, at least when I have been there, is very efficient and you can get in and out fairly efficiently. In particular, getting into the airport worked very smoothly. (I have seen substantial lineups getting out.)
The train/subway from the airport to the city is the way to go, and much preferred over a taxi. This is because the train is fast, immune to traffic jams, and cost effective, and the distance from the airport to the city is surprisingly long. The train is very modern and puts most Canadian, American and European public transit to shame. It even features an animated graphic that shows you just where you are along the trajectory ever moment.
If possible, try to have local currency on hand since finding the exchange and waiting in line to get currency can blow a good 20 minutes.
Good places to visit on a very time time budget are Mong Kok or Hong Kong (downtown). I think Hong Kong proper is a bit better since it avoids train transfer, and thus saves a few moments and the risk of making a mistake of some kind.
Gregory Dudek's blog on robotics, science, computing and related topics. Gregory Dudek is a professor, Director of the School of Computer Science, and former Director of the Center for Intelligent Machines, at McGIll University.
