Newsletter NSSN nº7

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

This is our seventh 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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Math and Computer Science

Music

Science

Sport: mma

Newsletter NSSN nº6

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

This is our newsletter number 6, which means six weeks of newsletter so far. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursday or Friday. But I have been a bit busy, this is why I am publishing today – Saturday.

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)

Math and Computer Science

Research and Education tips

Music, Anime

Science

Sport: mma

  • Why Georges Saint Pierre Was Unstoppable
    • Hats off to GSP. The guy is an absolute example of resilience, hard work and obsessive goal-mentality. He has never showed a particular natural advantage, such as long reach, big punch, freak cardio, but he has always displayed the best conditioning, strong mentality and effective technique. Now this “normal” guy, who has suffered bullying in school, is regarded the greatest mma fighter who ever competed.
  • Some people may wonder why I like such a violent sport so much. And I have many reasons. Yes, it is violent, but it is not only that, and consider the risks involved are consensually agreed. More importantly, mma at the highest level of UFC requires so much from the athlete that it is hard to imagine: (a) of course, physically it is extreme; (b) the mental aspect is crucial inside the cage; (c) business plan and organization is other relevant aspect of a career, because the athlete himself/herself is a kind of brand that needs to be properly managed; (d) the social relationship with media and fans is also necessary; (f) fighting is the metaphor of life; (g) the skills set required in mma is huge; we see better techniques and intelligence overcoming raw power over and over again in mma.
  • Despite of looking like a superhuman sometimes, a mma fighter is still a human with fears and dreams. Max Rohskopf, the guy who gave up during his first fight in UFC, gave this impressive interview for mmafighting, openly talking about his feelings:
    • “I’ve done this my whole life. I’ve self-boycotted myself. Even when I was wrestling in high school, I was the best in the state and ended up getting third because I self-boycotted myself. I was one of the best guys in the country in college, was never an All-American when it counted, because I was telling myself that, for whatever reason, I don’t deserve it.”
    • “People who know me and who have talked to me will understand this kind of deeply: I’m so ambitious that walking around day-to-day, I’m almost never happy. (…) I’m always trying to do better, to get better and my weakness is sometimes I will try to run away from what’s happening because I’m hurting a little bit every single day. I’m trying to do something that I want more than anything and it’s hard sometimes to see that things aren’t the way you want them to be.”
    • Damn it, impossible not to feel some identification and empathy with him.

If you are new here, this newsletter varies in content, though it always includes math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.

Newsletter NSSN nº5

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

This is our newsletter number five. I expect to publish a newsletter every Thursday or Friday.

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).

Math and Computer Science

Music

Philosophy and Science

If you are new here, this newsletter varies in content, though it always includes math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, movies, sports, sciences, philosophy and possibly others.

Newsletter NSSN nº4

“Everything was white – Santa Claus was white – and everything bad was black; the little ugly duckling was a black duck, and the black cat was bad luck.” – Muhmmad Ali

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

This is our fourth newsletter. I expect to publish the NSSN once a week on Thursdays (I know, today is Friday, I am late).

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).

Math and Computer Science

  • What is symbolic artificial intelligence?
    • Since logic-based AI has been quite dominant for most of the time, it is surprising that the connectionist approach has became synonym of IA nowadays. This shift has occured, as far as I know, due to (1) the increase of computational power; (2) this power has became cheaper; (3) and we have more available data than ever (the internet and smartphone phenomenon). Then techniques like neural networks have turned to be practical, because they need to be feed with a lot of data and this process demands a lot of computational power. Thereafter data consuming machine learning has showed many impressive achievements, in particular in computer vision and natural language processing.
  • Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, the First Woman PhD in Computer Science Was a Nun
    • “Keller’s dissertation, written in CDC FORTRAN 63, was titled “Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns.” In 1965, she became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science.”
  • Python Data Science Handbook
  • Quantitative Economics with Python

Arts: Museums, Film

  • 12 World-Class Museums You Can Visit Online
  • Recife Frio (Cold Tropics, 2009) – dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
    • “In the tropical city of Recife, temperatures drop drastically and its inhabitants have to adapt. This ‘mockumentary’ gradually turns critical, looking at the climate, urban development and social interaction from every angle. Does a ray of sun pierce the clouds, after all? In Spanish, French and Portuguese, with English subtitles.”

Music

  • Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah (Official Video)
  • Time-stretched version of the album ‘Ambient 1: Music For Airports’ by Brian Eno
    • Video description: ‘Music for Airports’ was the first of four albums released in Brian Eno’s ‘Ambient’ series- a term which he coined to differentiate his minimalistic approach to the album’s material and “the products of the various purveyors of canned music”. The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent to diffuse the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. Eno conceived this idea while being stuck at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany in the mid-1970s. He had to spend several hours there and was extremely annoyed by the uninspired sound atmosphere. It was installed at the Marine Air Terminal of New York’s LaGuardia Airport for a brief period during the 1980s.

Society

If you are new here, this newsletter varies in content, though it always includes math and computer science stuffs. Beside that, other subjects are: arts, sports, science, philosophy and possibly others.

Newsletter NSSN nº3

Know how to learn. Then, want to learn. – Katherine Johnson (Photo: Annie Leibovitz)

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

This is our third newsletter. I expect to publish a newsletter every Thursday.

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).

Math and Computer Science

Arts: Painting, Photograph, Film

  • Maybe next time. [I appreciate indications]

Music

  • Maybe next time. [I appreciate indications]

Philosophy and Science

  • “Most people learn nothing from experience, except confirmation of their prejudices.” – Bertrand Russell, The Lessons of Experience (23 September 1931)
  • “Carnap Meets Foucault: Conceptual Engineering and Genealogical Investigations”.
    • Catarina Dutilh Novaes is one of the most capable philosophers I know and I truly admire her. I met her at the 2019 Brazilian Logic Conference (EBL), when I made a loose presentation of my work on description logic formalization of Brazilian Consumer Protection Law.
    • In “Elucidations”, a University of Chicago Philosophy Podcast (Episode 37), she discussed her views on methods in philosophy, which I generally agree with. She defends the most fruitful way of doing philosophy is not caring about demarcation issues (“this is not philosophy, then we should not go into that way”); major philosophers, such as Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Frege and others, thought their work as a part of a broader scientific enterprise of investigation, so that they made contributions to different fields beside philosophy itself. An interdisciplinary approach, not only in philosophy, can be quite productive and it is related to a polymath mindset.

Sports

  • 10 Most Overqualified Fighters in MMA
    • Firstly this list is super cool, because it breaks the stereotype of a fighter as a stupid mass of muscles.
    • The #1 Rosi Sexton is kind of genious, as her biography indicates. Her entry in Wikipedia describes her as a “mathematician, athlete, sports therapist, osteopath, writer and musician”. Being polymath is not only difficult, but also is correlated with successfulness and major accomplishments.
    • So what are you interested in?

Newsletter NSSN nº2

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

This is our newsletter number two. I expect to publish a newsletter every Thursday.

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).

Math and Computer Science

  • Symbolic Mathematics Finally Yields to Neural Networks
    • Despite some recent advances, Connectionist Artificial Intelligence still struggles with dealing with symbolic reasoning.
  • Mechanical Turing Machine in Wood
    • As far as I know, you can encode a Turing Machine using a programming language or any formal system in order to show this language or system is Turing-complete. This is itself not so easy, but doing that in a mechanical wood machine is way too hard.
  • 10 Extraordinary GitHub Repositories for All Developers
  • The Logic Supergroup is an alliance of logicians in quarantine.
  • Leaving academia for the private sector: Seven years later
    • “Seven years ago, I was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I had tenure, excellent students, and a solid research record. I loved to write and I loved teaching. But I started to feel that I’d regret it later if I didn’t make a major career move and try something different. So after a few years of preparation, I quit and took a job as a junior-level software engineer at a startup in Chicago.”
    • “Although my formal academic background was certainly helpful, the other skills of any good academic are more helpful. Teaching experience, the ability to write clearly and concisely, evaluate evidence and argue for your opinion, and public speaking experience are much more important.”
    • “In a business setting, you’re constantly called upon to present your work, justify your approach, teach others (and learn from others), and so on. Universities do a lousy job of training students in these skills. But as an experienced professor, you’ll usually learn these things over time.”

Arts: Painting, Photograph, Film

  • Maybe next time.

Music

  • Maybe next time.

Philosophy and Science

Which bird are you?

Sports

  • I have been thinking in writing something about MMA (mixed martial arts). I used to watch many mma events when I lived in Brazil, but now that I live in Italy the time zone is not very convenient. Maybe next time.

Newsletter NSSN nº1

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

This is our first newsletter. I hope to publish a newsletter every Thursday.

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).

Math and Computer Science

Arts: Painting, Photograph, Film

Music

Philosophy and Science

  • The Raven Paradox, by Sabine Hossenfelder
    • I have gotten in contact with this “paradox” long ago and it has really puzzled me.
  • Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
    • “As a doctor, I am reminded every day of the fragility of the human body, how closely mortality lurks just around the corner. As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, however, I am also reminded how empty life can be if we have no sense of meaning or purpose. An awareness of our mortality, of our precious finitude, can, paradoxically, move us to seek – and, if necessary, create – the meaning that we so desperately crave.”

Sports

  • “Murph“
    • This is a very tough Crossfit protocol of training. I have never practiced Crossfit formally, but I am used to train by myself the way they train in Crossfit. Recently I did a “Murph” in 68 minutes, which is great, but I still want to reach a time below 60 minutes. I especially like this one, because it is super simple and at the same time truly difficult.

Who can learn math?

I would like to briefly talk about my mentality change concerning to learn mathematics, because I know many others think the way I thought and, therefore, they avoid a career in STEM, just like I did.

Around my sixteens, when I finished my high school and had to choose the university course I would do, I knew I was not particularly good at math. Do not misunderstand me: my math grades were among my best grades; sometimes I even taught math to my colleagues, helping them to prepare for an exam. However, I knew other people who were much better than me at math; I knew I could not quickly solve a math problem I have never seen before; I knew I was no Albert Einstein, i. e., I knew I was not a “math person”, according to what I thought; I was just average at math. And that is why in the end I went to law, not to a STEM career. I thought I was not good enough at math for being a professional in any STEM area.

Only a long time after my high school, when I was a lawyer already, I slowly realized my very ideas about what math is about were completely wrong: instead of a bunch of impressive tricky formulas and procedures to solve numerical problems, mathematics is much more about deductions, patterns, frameworks, languages, imagination and deep abstract ideas. Being fast in solving a math problem is not for “math person”; it is for computers and calculators; being good at math requires understanding, not brisk application of algorithms.

However, does such understanding depend on being a “math person”? Not at all! Actually, the very idea of being a “math person” is misleading, according to some experts (more useful references below). I do not want to dispute if there are some people somehow genetically privileged in regard to learning anything (not only math); in sports, for example, we cannot deny some people have a better body for accomplishing certain tasks – say, in combat sports longer strikers excel in controlling the distance, so that they are able to hit without being hit. Nevertheless, how successful you can be in any profession involves variables beyond fortuitous genes, such as lucky (not only in specific moments, but also in the conditions in which you were born), social relationships and huge amount of hours of dedication, frustration and patience related to a given activity.

In the end, you do not need to be an outlier in order to be a successful professional in STEM. It is not even possible that everybody can be a Terence Tao or a Steven Jobs or a Lionel Messi, because by definition outliers are few in any domain.

I was fortunate that I could take a (extra) course in mathematical logic with Professor Ruy de Queiroz at UFPE, so that I could have a better understanding on what math is about. Also, the old blog of Professor Adonai Sannt’Anna (Mathematics and Society) has helped me to undo some of my misunderstandings. Other resources that has helped me and may help you too are the following:

In summary, the answer to the question of the title is that, provided a person does not have any serious cognitive deficit, anyone can learn math. I mean, anyone can learn Calculus, Logic, Linear Algebra, Probability and other university level math courses, and anyone can even do research in math related areas. This does not mean you will be the next David Hilbert, but maybe you will.

First things first

This is the first post of the blog. Then I will present myself and the purpose of the blog.

WHO AM I?

I am a Brazilian PhD student in Computer Science at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Unibz), Italy. However, I have a heterodox academic background in this regard, considering I hold a Bachelor, a Master and a PhD degree in Law by Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil. I have even worked as a lawyer for some time in Brazil.

During my PhD in Law, with intensive collaboration and support of researchers from Computer Science department of UFPE, I studied knowledge representation methods applied to legal domain – in particular, building description logic and OWL legal ontologies. The reason I made this move was that since the end of my Bachelor I got in touch with logic because of my philosophy studies. Later I had very fortunate opportunities that made me see connections between logic and computer science, and I fell in love with all of this. I have never been happy with Law, but only later in my life I could really find out what I really like. Then I made that move toward Computer Science, taking advantage of my experience as a researcher and teacher, and my studies in logic and philosophy.

I am truly grateful for being accepted by CS department of Unibz and I have realized it is quite interdisciplinary department: there are people from Psychology, Philosophy, Cognitive Science and of course Informatics related areas.

Under the supervision of Prof. Giancarlo Guizzardi and Prof. Enrico Franconi, I am researching about patterns and anti-patterns in ontology-driven conceptual modeling languages, like OntoUML. Though my research has just begun, I am already part of a project in which we must develop conceptual models for domain of cybersecurity in Risk Management. Hopefully my experience in building legal ontologies helps in this task.

WHAT IS THIS BLOG ABOUT?

Just like I already did above, this blog intends to talk about my research and about what I have been studying, including math and computer science stuffs. Also I expect to write about my experience itself as a foreign PhD student in Bolzano, which has not been an easy thing, especially in pandemic times (COVID-19 crisis). I guess I can learn and think better, if I write down these things. Therefore, this blog was conceived for my own improvement (including the very practice of writing in English), but maybe you find it interesting too (see what comes next).

OUR NEWSLETTER

UPDATE October 2020: The newsletter NSSN is now released once a month, not weekly.

In order to publish more regular posts and more generally useful material, I intend to write a weekly newsletter post containing interesting things I found in the last seven days. What kind of things will you see? Recommendations with a brief discussion of links, videos, texts, movies and other stuffs related to Science, Mathematics, Technology, Philosophy, Law, Arts, Sports, maybe even Animes and Mangas… Let’s see what happen. 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).

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