Older blog entries for amars (starting at number 380)

Checking in. At this point it's been what? 16 months since my last post? I'm pleased to see that after so much time Advogato hasn't changed (much). I've always admired advogato for it's dead simplicity, it's been somewhat of an inspiration as I develop Something More Than a Machine, but after revisiting, I look at SMTaM and think it's not simple enough.

16 Apr 2005 (updated 16 Apr 2005 at 05:11 UTC) »

I started in on the Yahoo! API for possible use with my Intelligent Systems term project. I was pleased to find the following in the example code...

// Yahoo Web Services PHP Example Code
// Rasmus Lerdorf

To follow-up on my last post, my quest for employment is at an end, for now. I start Monday at my new job as a programmer for a local (but well-funded) startup. This weekend will be my last at the sushi restaurant in which I am currently only working weekends.

19 Jan 2005 (updated 11 Aug 2005 at 14:24 UTC) »

I'm back. The cruise was fun, the break semi-relaxing and the new semester (my first as a legitimate graduate student) is going well. Over the break, I graduated and after a long hiatus during which I focused on finishing my degree, I am back looking for a job. My resume is accesible at my univ-provided webspace. The ASCII version is [NO LONGER] inluded below

deekayen: If wikipedia is any indication, UTD is probably the best place in Texas that is best for me. They have an excellent Applied Cognition and Neuroscience program as well as a computer science department that is rapidly gaining national attention. The faculty and student body have proven to me to be top-notch and i've already had a taste of graduate school as I will enter the program having already taken 15 hrs of graduate level coursework. I was given much flexibility in my academic path as an undergraduate and the same will be true in the graduate level.

It has been almost a year since my last post, and reading the last entries topic, the topic of this post has much relevance. In four weeks I graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science from The University of Texas at Dallas specializing in Intelligent Systems. My final project is a neural network that can recognize and classify speech data. I trained it to recognize spoken digits between one and ten and will be presenting it before a number of groups in the coming weeks.

After school is out, I have a month or so vacation before I start the Masters Program in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience at UTD. During the break, I will be going on a cruise to Mexico, Cozumel and Belize with my girlfriend at some point. When school starts back up again I will probably be looking for a job or internship in my field.

25 Nov 2003 (updated 25 Nov 2003 at 03:14 UTC) »

I just realized that the trustmetric is very much an Artificial Neural Network. It also serves the purpose of an ANN, the idea is to look at someone and predict a certain level of competency, or trust.

17 Nov 2003 (updated 17 Nov 2003 at 18:07 UTC) »

I checked and determined that the word, "patrioterrorism" does not yet exist, or at least, has not made it's way into common usage, so i'm taking the opportunity to take credit for it's definition. However, it can be seen in two ways, depending on your perspective. Some could call what we do overseas acts of patrioterrorism, as thousdands of soldiers commit acts of terrorism in the name of their own country. The other way to look at it, is in times of the USA PATRIOT Act and Victory Act, a patrioterrorist, or act of patrioterrorism is a patriot labeled a terrorist for standing up against the government and speaking out against it.

The United States Government is very much actively monitoring it's citizens and political groups for signs of "terrorism," the FBI and other organizations have been attending peaceful assemblies of politically-minded organizations for the purpose of monitoring them. In these times when you are either with us or against us, those who oppose things like the USA PATRIOT Act and VICTORY Act can easily be labeled anti-american by assholes in high positions and a history of political dissent can be enough of a reason to raise suspicion as a terrorist.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act and VICTORY Act, there is a fine line between patriot and terrorist.

10 Nov 2003 (updated 10 Nov 2003 at 22:09 UTC) »

I hadn't heard about the DREAM Act until deekayen pointed it out. Though, I disagree with his position.

I have always been a firm believer in the necessity of education. On the surface, it is easy to dismiss the DREAM Act as free money for illegal immigrants and suggest that it encourages and supports the violation of law and is a burden for society, but it's really more complicated than that. As future presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich puts it, education is the only proven method for reducing poverty and the DREAM Act is designed to do just that and give immigrants the opportunity to pursure an education and become productive members of society.

There are some provisions though. The DREAM Act is not designed merely for any illegal immigrant that makes their way to this country, it is intended for the children of illegal immigrants, who have not only established residence for 5 years but have also graduated high school in the United States. This provision is designed to recognize the fact that many children do not have a say in the decision to come to the U.S. and it is wrong to hold them fully liable for the immigration status derived from their parents and thus should be given as much an opportunity to succeed in this society as their classmates.

Also, the DREAM Act does not necessarily mean free money for immigrants. DREAM Act beneficiaries are ineligible for Federal Financial Aid Grants, Pell Grants and Federal Special Education Opportunity Grants. Instead, the DREAM Act returns to states the right to decide who is eligible for in-state tuition and provides eligibility for Federal Loans and Federal Work-Study Programs.

I was surprised to find that Orin Hatch was responsible for introducing this bill to the Senate, at least now he's done some good. Another surprising bit of information is that this bill is bipartisan and supported by both parties. I believe the DREAM Act can do some good and will support it. In the long run, it may actually end up saving money, it's a far better solution than, say, denying someone access to quality education and waiting for them to become a burden to society in other ways. But even if it doesn't save money it's worth doing, education should be a far higher priority in this country and we, as a society benefit more from educating people than by not, at any cost.

371 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!