Computing Then

Computing Then is an interesting look into the past of computing. With much focus on the "now" of computing and electronics, this is a nice break. I always enjoy the 16 & 32 years ago column in the IEEE Computer publication. I remember 16 years ago quite vividly but alas I am not 32 yet. The older I get, the less powers of 2 I get to experience. I doubt I will make 2^7.

Adaptive Compression of the Dynamic Range

Dynamic range compression is a technique used by audio engineers to optimise the distribution of frequencies in a mix. In popular music it is often abused, resulting in a flat and overly loud sound. An audio engineer applies some static parameters of threshold, knee, compression ratio, attack, delay and gain based on the typical listening environment of their anticipated user. This is why you can hear your favourite top 40 track in a noisy environment but you can barely hear classical music at the same volume level on your audio device. Therefore, I propose that these parameters should adapt to the environment of the user. If it is noisy, the compression ratio is pushed up and if it is quiet it can be relaxed. By intuition, I assume that this would be a relatively easy solution to solve with machine learning. My simple explanation with one of the parameters is trivial. I am sure more complex relationships exist between the parameters and user satisfaction. If someone could embed this in a popular music player with the correct audio source, it could be a winning combination. However, this requires an unmastered, or a minimally mastered audio source.

Dusty

This dust storm in Broken Hill just blew my mind. Looks so awesome!

Europe

I recently traveled to Europe to attend INEX.





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500 days

# uptime
06:01:30 up 509 days,  6:12,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Now that I have passed the 500 day mark I can bring myself to install a new distro. Time to say good bye to Slackware after 14 years and replace it with noobuntu server. Package management just seems easier. This is my last box with Slackware still on it.

K-tree, NMF and INEX 2008

Today I gave a presentation within my research group at QUT. It discusses the submissions I made for the XML Mining track at INEX 2008. This required classifying documents based on previously known examples (classification). Another task required grouping similar documents together with no prior information other than the documents themselves (clustering). I also looked at different ways to measure cluster quality using negentropy and document link graphs. The K-tree algorithm is part of my research. This is the first time it was applied to document clustering. The results for the entire track should be out soon. I will also be giving the presentation at the QLD IEEE Computational Intelligence Symposium.

Unqualified should is evil

I was recently discussing the use of the word should with my research supervisor. I detest the word because I believe that is often used very ambiguously.

To quote myself,

"It [the word should] seems sly to me. In my mind it makes the statement "I really want you to do this but I don't have the guts to say it to you directly". I do not mind the use of should when it is qualified. i.e. "you should take a shower if you don't want to stink". This way the intent is clearly stated and there is no ambiguity. If I tell you that "you should take a shower", it could mean that I think you should shower because I am hand-wavy dictator that does things because that's how I feel on the day or I just hate people that don't shower 15 times a day. The statement "you must shower now" clearly demonstrates that you are being draconian instead of being underhanded and ambiguous."

The word should is often used when someone thinks that it is the proper thing to do. The word proper implies someone else's idea of correctness. I strongly believe that people must not force their beliefs onto other people because it restricts different points of view. This sentence might seem to contradict itself because I am trying to force this belief onto you. However, I am only trying to convince you. You are free to take it or leave it. English is very ambiguous and this leads to my suspicion that it is pointless to form an argument in it.

If we look at different meanings of the word should then we find out how ambiguous it can be.

Dictionary.com

Google

Wiktionary

Maybe I should be doing my research instead of pronouncing my hatred of the word should (contradiction and bad pun intended).