UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our newsletter nº 15. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday, but not always.
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
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Stephen Wolfram defends the universe, the nature in its most fundamental aspects is discrete, not continuous as our experience suggests. This is quite an interesting discussion that is both philosophy and physics.
Note that our visual perception of movements (at least in movies) looks continuous, though the events we perceive are in fact discrete, that is, a sequence of (discrete) frames that gives us a perception of continuity. Indeed, the human vision is largely discrete.
I particularly like the platform, because of its hands-on approach, instead of videos – though it seems better for Python, for which there are more material. Even if you are not interested in a data science job, I believe having some data analytical skills is generally useful.
This may be huge and I got really excited. I would guess life is more common than we think in the universe, though not intelligent life. I bet that there are traces of life in Mars, Enceladus, Titan and Europa.
When I was 16, I read half of this book and tried to implement the ideas in my routine. It really helped me in my social skills, which were poor in that time. Though the book was published in November 1936, most likely based on the experience of the author, it seems there is some sociobiological basis for his advices, even without the author realize. I think it is worth taking a look at that summary.
Firas Zahabi give us an interesting advice: Not too hard, not too easy. That is a good procedure to design our study and personal projects, beyond (physical) training. If things are too hard, we will feel frustrated and wish to give up. However, if things are too easy, we will not feel very motivated, because of the lack of challenge.
Bolzano from 1200m above sea level. Source: my picture.
UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our fourteenth newsletter. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday, but not always.
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
If you bet this newsletter may be interesting for you, please consider subscribing to the blog (at the end of homepage there is a subscription box; please check out your spam box after subscribing)
“In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in mathematical logic, reportedly made a sweeping prediction that continues to excite and irritate mathematicians — that “at some unspecified future time, mathematicians would be replaced by computers.” Cohen, legendary for his daring methods in set theory, predicted that all of mathematics could be automated, including the writing of proofs.”
I have some familiarity with symbolic AI and, in my humble opinion, this approach will have more success when, and if, it is able to somehow take advantage of the huge amount of data and processing power we have nowadays, just like deep learning is able to do.
This theorem is especially interesting because it suggests mathematics is not necessarily usefully related to the empirical world, since it is physically impossible to make infinite equal balls out of only one single ball. Despite mathematics can be used as a model of empirical phenomena, it holds completely by itself, like a game you can make the rules. Georg Cantor would have said that “the essence of mathematics is its freedom”.
Good free resource. From my perspective, studying the foundation of the technology is the most valuable study, because it lasts way more than the mere familiarity with specific tools and it enables you to adapt more easily to new tools and frameworks. Moreover, foundational studies have wide range of applications.
Recently I have done a hiking in a mountain with a Professor Werner Nutt, who is obviously much older than me. We went up about 1000 m and then we went it down – always walking. I consider myself a very fit person, perhaps fitter than an average fit person. Nevertheless, it was incredibly difficult for me and I had to rest several times. Indeed, I was only able to make it thanks to willpower, since my body was telling me to give up. On the other hand, the Professor made it quite easily. Exercises are different and different exercises require proper adaptations. Hiking in the mountains is certainly very unusual for me. I am much more adapted to power training, plyometrics, strength training in general.
The opposite of ontology is not non-ontology, but just bad ontology. (GUIZZARDI, 2020)
I would like to comment the idea that having an ontology is inevitable in multiple levels, in the sense that our thoughts about numerous things and our information systems assume explicitly or implicitly an inventory composing the general structure of the world and elements of the domain in question. Because of that, as our enterprise (of anything) grows, it becomes more and more necessary to explicitly manage its respective ontology.
Imagine you want to create a business, say, a restaurant. Sooner or later you will consider things like how many chairs you need, how they should be organized, maybe a sort of couch, how the very environment should be, the dishes and their ingredients, kitchenware… But you will also think about more abstract things such as estimated revenue, expenses, profit and even the public image of your business for the eyes of the customers. If your business is small enough, you may use just a pen and paper to organize your ideas. Maybe you know some business template to represent your business and help you to draw a general view of it – for example the Business Model Canvas.
It is clear that starting up any business requires a conceptualization related to what your specific business is about and even related to what any business is about. You need a kind of mental model, which might be expressed in words on the paper or just inside your head, discriminating entities in the domain and relations between these entities. And that is the inevitable ontology!
If the enterprise you have in mind is large enough, you will likely need to explicitly think of its ontology through some tools, trying to keep your representation consistent. The Business Model Canvas is a tool of this kind; it can be seen as a very basic conceptual model expressing the ontology of business. However, there exist several conceptual modeling languages (v. g., UML, ER diagrams), including some focused on business (v. g., BPMN, Archimate), for addressing the task of representing clearly a shared “world view” in a general level in order to provide understanding and communication among humans, even if mediated by information artifacts.
Source: GUARINO; GUIZZARDI; MYLOPOULOS, 2020.
Formal Ontology is the discipline concerned with domain analysis, conceptual clarification and meaning negotiation (GUIZZARDI, 2020). The word ‘ontology’ is confusing. It may mean the philosophical study of being, the study on what there is – an important part of metaphysics in philosophy. But in Computer Science ‘ontology’ may mean (1) a conceptual model describing a domain (business, for example), (2) a formal specification of this conceptual model (say, in a form of a set of description logic axioms), (3) or even the (executable) information artifact of this specification (say, an OWL file); likely there are many more meanings of ontology in Computer Science.
Now let us go back to our example of restaurant business: imagine you need an information system to track and deal with the operations in and related to your business. How does this information system look like? It seems it must have a lot of the same concepts and relations that you had imagined since the beginning when you were thinking in creating the business. This is so because an information system is a representation of a certain conceptualization of reality; it contains information structures that represent abstractions over certain portions of the world, capturing aspects that are relevant for a class of problems at hand; therefore, all information systems make ontological commitments. (GUIZZARDI, 2020)
In a paper called “Another Look at Data” (1967), George Mealy argues that “data are fragments of a theory of the real world, and data processing juggles representations of these fragments of theory […] The issue is ontology, or the question of what exists”. As a consequence of this view called “representation view of information systems”, the quality of an information system depends on how truthful its information structures are to the aspects of reality it purports to represent. These structures must represent all the important aspects of the underlying conceptualization in an unambiguous way and constrain the possible states of that information system to the states that represent intended states of affairs according to that conceptualization (GUIZZARDI, 2020). That is, the structures must guarantee all and only intended states of affairs with regard to the conceptualization of the respective domain.
Two information systems that record information about organ transplants. They commit to a theory about the existence of certain entities such as persons, surgeons, transplants, donors, donees (organ recipients), etc. There may be a problem of semantic interoperability between them. Source: GUIZZARDI, 2020.
As you can see by the figure above, different conceptualizations attached to different information systems might give rise to problems of semantic interoperability such as false agreement. Ontologies can be seen as meaning contracts (GUIZZARDI, 2020) capturing the conceptualizations represented in information artifacts, then helping to deal with problems like this one.
I hope I have given an idea why having an ontology is inevitable and why explicitly working on the ontology in question is important for enterprises and information systems.
UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our thirteenth newsletter. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday, but not always.
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
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“A powerful technique called SAT solving could work on the notorious Collatz conjecture. But it’s a long shot.”
“SAT solving involves taking problems, turning them into computer-friendly statements that use propositional logic, and using computers to determine whether there’s a way to make those statements true. Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you’re a parent trying to arrange childcare. One babysitter can work all week except Tuesday and Thursday. Another can work all week except Tuesday and Friday. A third can work all week except Thursday and Friday. You need to cover Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Can you do it?”
SAT is the first problem that was proven to be NP-complete (Cook–Levin theorem). However, nowadays SAT-algorithms are able to solve problem instances involving tens of thousands of variables and formulas consisting of millions of symbols, which is enough to deal with many practical problems stated as SAT problems. As Moshe Vardi points out, our experience has shown us that some computational problems whose worst-case complexity is hard may not be that hard in practice.
I have finished reading the manga Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. Do I recommend it? Well, I enjoyed it, but, in my humble assessment, it is not that good; I mean, it entertains you, though it is not well developed, such as Hunter x Hunter, containing a lot of cliches (“the orphans”, “the good guy”, “the noisy coward”, “the silent mysterious guy”, “the evil guy” and so on). You may like the story, but it is not a great piece of work.
Sport: home workout
As I said before, sometimes I work out at home, even inside my room. Recently I was able to finish in only 30 minutes and 45 seconds the following training:
100 squats,
100 push-ups,
100 pull-ups.
I partitioned the training into five rounds of 20 of each one, though, during the exercise, I changed it a bit, according to my condition. I set the time limit as 30 minutes in order to force myself to give my best to complete a tough training. I particularly like this strategy.
Different kinds of exercises and their effects on brain regions. Click HERE for more information. This picture was taken from a slide in the course Science of Exercise in Coursera.
UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our twelfth newsletter. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday.
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
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Recently I have watched Demon Slayer, an anime realeased last year. It is based on the manga published between 2016 and this year (it is already concluded). In my humble opinion, it is a pretty good anime, in particular the animation and the drawing. The story is not super complex, but it was good enough to captivate me. The link above is part of the soundtrack.
Is spoiler that bad? Now I am reading the manga of Demon Slayer, but I got to know of future parts of the plot because of my search about it. Many people hate to know beforehand what will happen in a story. I am not this kind. Of course, if possible, I prefer not knowing, but I believe a good story can be read/watched and reread/rewatched over and over again, making you feel something everytime, making you think of something everytime. Indeed, this is a criteria I use to evaluate a story: say, if a movie offers solely a thriller with a plot twist, then rewatching it is not interesting anymore; on the other hand, if it offers well-built characters and narrative, then watching it again will possibly give you novel grasp of the story or will just make you feel something for reliving it.
Sport: mindset, brain and exercises, free resources
Khabib’s father has recently passed away. They were very close. When asked about his feelings, he was impressively honest: “If I tell you with a straight face that it doesn’t affect my training me that would be a lie, it does affect me, I think about him all the time”. Then he says: “Any challenge either breaks you or makes you stronger. We’ll see what it does to me in time.“
I have been training conditioning and strength for some time, either in the gym or by myself in outdoor gyms or even at home. I am somewhat disciplined for training regularly, because it really helps me to keep a healthy mind; otherwise I can get quite depressed. There are many known connections between different exercises and human brain, and the course Science of Exercise in Coursera addresses this and other issues. I completed it during the quarantine and I strongly recommend it.
Recently I found two interesting websites for understanding the muscles activated by certain exercises. They can really help people of different levels:
I did not post the Newsletter last week, because I have been busy writing a paper for a conference – an intended systematic review of the literature on security ontology studies for Ontobras. Beside of the Newsletter, I hope to write more often on some stuffs I have been studying recently. But here I want to talk a bit about my experience as a foreigner PhD student in pandemic times. After all, this blog is also about what is it like doing a PhD in CS in my personal experience.
Firstly I arrived in Italy in November 2019. I did not know anybody at all in Italy. Luckly however some people I met before and after the travel helped me a lot. Avoiding the details, let me thank Fabian Steinhauer, Anna and her mother Ulli, Claudenir, Glenda, and Evellin. I am truly grateful for their help. And that is the first thing I wish to highlight about a PhD experience abroad: in this moment being helped by experienced people is invaluable. I mean, aside from the staff members of the university (to whom I am grateful as well), these people have assisted me to get through many challenges this whole change implies.
At the beginning I was trying to find myself and my own research with the support of my supervisors and other people, living the university environment and trying to figure out how things work. Then sooner rather than later pandemic and its consequences came up. And since the university was closed and the researchers were obliged to home office, suddenly I lost most of my social life, which revolved around the university. Indeed, some of my colleagues even came back to their cities or countries.
On the other hand, as the PhD program goes, more things are demanded from us. In particular, beside of the demand of the very PhD program, I always feel I must demand more from myself, because doing a good job now represents more opportunities later. Well, we all know doing a PhD is tough, but it becames tougher thanks to pandemic.
I am not complaining at all. That is life. It is what it is. I have been trying my best to adapt myself to this whole new situation. I have lived worse things before in Brazil, things I wish I would not have lived, though this pandemic is certainly a novel one. I am describing all this because I guess many other students around the world find themselves in a similar condition. But unfortunately not all of them will get through it the best way.
UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our newsletter eleven. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday.
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
If you bet this newsletter may be interesting for you, please consider subscribing to the blog (at the end of homepage there is a subscription box; please check out your spam box after subscribing)
Nine philosophers explore the various issues and questions raised by the newly released language model, GPT-3, in this edition of Philosophers On, guest edited by Annette Zimmerman.
“Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King’s College London, takes listeners through the history of philosophy, “without any gaps.” The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.”
UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our tenth newsletter. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday. Yeah, I know, I am late this time…
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
If you bet this newsletter may be interesting for you, please consider subscribing to the blog (at the end of homepage there is a subscription box; please check out your spam box after subscribing)
Interesting project. One of the reason I went to Computer Science was the fact that I have realized that every area can be well combined with CS, and philosophy is no exception. Better: CS is taking over everything. Just look around…
“The theorem was never about the theorem. It was always about the proof,” said Michael Bode, a mathematics professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
“I love new proofs of old theorems for the same reason I love new roads and shortcuts to places I’ve already been,” said Sophia Restad, a graduate student at Kansas State University. These new paths provide mathematicians with a figurative sense of place for intellectual activity.
“Pythagoras is immortally linked to the discovery and proof of a theorem that bears his name – even though there is no evidence of his discovering and/or proving the theorem. There is concrete evidence that the Pythagorean Theorem was discovered and proven by Babylonian mathematicians 1000 years before Pythagoras was born.”
I guess Babylonian did not prove the theorem, because they did not have our concept of (mathematical) proof. It seems they had an empirical grasp of the Pythagorean Theorem. Anyway it is still impressive that they knew the theorem way before the Greeks.
“The optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter — students watched most of the way through these short videos. In fact, the average engagement time of any video maxes out at 6 minutes, regardless of its length. And engagement times decrease as videos lengthen: For instance, on average students spent around 3 minutes on videos that are longer than 12 minutes, which means that they engaged with less than a quarter of the content. Finally, certificate-earning students engaged more with videos, presumably because they had greater motivation to learn the material.”
UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our newsletter number 9. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday.
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
If you bet this newsletter may be interesting for you, please consider subscribing to the blog (at the end of homepage there is a subscription box; please check out your spam box after subscribing)
Muscle-up is one of my favorite exercise, because it activates several groups of muscles. And I think it is really cool too. It is impressive that the world record is just 26 consecutive muscle-ups, whereas the record of consecutive standard pull-ups is 232. Most Consecutive One-Armed pull-up is 22.
Well, I am just 20 away from the world record of most consecutive muscle-ups…
Bourbaki congress at Dieulefit in 1938. From left, Simone Weil, Charles Pisot, André Weil, Jean Dieudonné (sitting), Claude Chabauty, Charles Ehresmann, and Jean Delsarte. (Source: Wikipedia)
UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.
This is our eighth newsletter. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday.
This newsletter varies in content, though it always includes a bit of math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.
If you bet this newsletter may be interesting for you, please consider subscribing to the blog (at the end of homepage there is a subscription box; please check out your spam box after subscribing)
I always say fusion energy is one of the three scientific advances I wish the most. I truly would like to witness such achievement, because it would help to solve some huge problems of our civilization: (a) energy supply, obviously; (b) climate change, for part of our current energy production comes from fossil fuels; (c) environmental damage, including air pollution. Imagine if cities and factories could have its energy completely provided by clean sources. Imagine if we had virtually unlimited amount of energy, and the only big problem would turn out to be distribution of energy.
If you are curious about the other scientific achievement I am interested in, they are:
Discovery of life, even fossilized microorganisms, outside the Earth (extraterrestrial life).
Everytime I talk about mma here, I try to discuss something beyond mma, as you can see in NSSN nº6. This video is one more example of this kind of discussion: mma is highly mental, it requires fine fast combination of what you think and how you move your body. At the big stage the fighter must deal with the multitude of emotions. There are many things we can learn from the mental aspect of this game for our daily life: how to deal with tough situations, how to stay calm, how to handle public attention, how to keep focused, and so on.
Not So Short Notes 