~ Coolish

Salam alaikum,

was just checking egypt weather forecasts on Wolfram Alpha, I came to know that Wolfram alpha can now input TeX too.

This is awesome addition to the search tool.
For someone who is familiar with TeX syntax, it is pretty easy to manipulate with functions, play around with plots & datasets.

Even MS Words equation editor supports LaTeX commands..
:) makes your life worth living with equations like so;

coolish.. init?

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ To a Research Rookie

Salam alaikum,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

so i got this pm from someone somewhere the other day, that went like so;

On 09/14/10 8:14 PM, He wrote:

Hi...
I am a undergrad. fresh mechanical engineer from NUST-PNEC and I've keen interest in R&D but the problem is I don't want to go abroad or join defence organizations due to some personal reasons... I had the following questions in my mind:

1. How can I actively participate in R&D?
2. What is the advantage of writing a research paper?

Thnx in Advance..

--------------------

On the fly, i wrote back;

wa alaikum salam warahmatuLLAh brother,

am traveling, hence the delayed response.
its best to start with a salam -- if it ain't a generic statement you've sent to many besides me.
your questions are intriguing & need a detailed response, which i will inshallah, once feasible.
meanwhile, i'll be interested to know those personal reasons that hinder you from joining defense orgz back home.

wa'salam
- bother the brevity, courtesy of my doodad..err..iphone.

--------------------

I received yet another swift one this time;

5:33 AM, He wrote:

Asalam-o-Aliekm,

Jazakallah for correcting me... Well, I contacted professionals already in this field and i found that u were one of them... :)

I can wait for ur response.. but pls reply as soon as possible.

About defense, I ve seen some results like Dr. AQ Khan, therefore i feel uncomfortable.

Wsa'lam

--------------------

So yeah, once in shape i had to reply, which went like so;

Wa alaikum salam warahmatuLLAh,

wa iyyak, & here is the detailed reply i promised earlier on;

There are several ways of participating in R&D.
But prior to pointing em all, you first need to evaluate yourself, your skill-set and aptitude / interests to figure out if you are:

a) a theoretical guy
b) a practical guy
c) or both.

If you love to read n understand equations working behind a system, without giving a bunny's bum to the reality of the system / you are clueless about the where abouts of stuff in a car engine / never messed up with your computer hardware and OS for the fear of it -- then you should go into theoretical research.

If equations give you creeps and you love to destroy and fix things -- then you should be doing experimental research.

If you are jack of all -- then you are one great resource for this country.

Next you need to evaluate:
what are you interested in?
Solar energy / wind turbines / engineering design / structures / control systems, ... the list goes on & ever.
The best way is to shortlist the areas.

Finally, you need to see if you've acquired enough to carryout research in your area of interest. You need to either join a group already working in the area (in a university or a company), or find people / professionals / classmates interested in the same topic.

Now, in order to share your idea with other people for them to understand your thoughts, you need to write it down.

For that, first you need to jot down quite briefly what do you want to achieve?
what approach you will take?
and what do you expect?
this should be the first para and will be the abstract of the document.

Next, you need to write the introduction section, which will provide the motivation behind the idea ;
- why is this idea important? whats the need?
if anyone else has already worked on the idea, then;
- what did they do? and what are the shortcomings of their work if any?
& then your own approach in simplest words;
- whats soo new about it? and what are its advantages?

You'll then provide your method of tackling the problem, and give a prediction about its performance.

The most important thing is clarity of the document, i.e., when given to different people, each gets the same picture of your approach. Now thats not easy! (but not impossible either)

Why to go through so much pain?
So that, others can understand your idea, your approach and help you improve your idea. Someone can tell you its already thought about, giving you critical feedback; your approach lacks this and that. Someone could just suggest other possible approaches etc.
This will give you an idea if your idea is worth it or not.

Once the groundwork for your research has been laid down, you can carry it out, be it derivations, or making a system, or both.

Last but not the least, you need to tell the world what you did. This will require you to write a research paper, which will target a wider audience, and will provide more diverse feedback and thus your research will continue to improve on...inshAllah.

hth..
n good luck!
---
by the by, some suggested reads;
~ tips for technical paper
~ how to have a bad carrier in research

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ Innovation exploitation

Salam alaik,

Prediction or extrapolation offers the ultimate test of the information-content one possesses.
This process is most evident in toddlers, trying to explore the world around learning to walk n talk.
The ability that the Creator; Allah, has bestowed upon them is to be curious enough to learn_by_making_mistakes.
In other words, this ability allows one to compare an expected_out_come against actual _out_come.

Herez a make up example to explain: a child has some cool toy with black n white colors on it which he likes. Now he looks at the black n white colored stove & ponders, "hmmm... this (stove) looks cool, must be playable." Poor child burns his hand but learns a great deal - albeit the hard way - that all black n white stuff ain't so cool.
There was an error in the prediction - a great deal in this case - but lesson learnt was lasting nonetheless.

A less forgiving case is that of exercise questions at the end of chapters, written by seasoned authors.
A student uses the information given in the chapter to solve the exercise questions (which are not plug_this_formula_n_get_answer sort), only to find out that he couldn't quite get hold of it.
He goes back, reads up the same info over again from the perspective of the question, & try giving it another shot based on that info.
He, actually, is predicting & then improving on his grip about the subject from his initial error.

Same is the concept of Kalman filtering, i'm into these days.

Its a probability-based digital filter capable of filtering 'white noise', using its own error-information.

Here, the difference between a prediction and reality is called "innovation", & learning is all about exploiting that "innovation".

more on it laterz sometime.. inshAllah

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ Soaring the Simulation

Salam alaik,

Thinking Vectors & Matrices.. its either my way or MATLAB's way..

On a semi-sarcastic side note though, Guys having C or Java background write a MATLAB script just as they'd do that in C, i.e. using loops.
MATLAB is all about vectors & matrices.. so loops could be avoided consideably.
To wit - Consider this simple example;

Lets say we've got two vectors, like so;

a = [1 2 3]' and, b = [4 5 6]'

Now if we wantna take the dot product in C, we would write something like this for loop in C;

c[i] = a[i]*b[i];

While in MATLAB its simply;

c = a'*b; %(a Transposed x b),

So, in essence it does the looping for us.. clean & simple.

Coming back to Simulations..
A cool tool for writing communication system simulations; MATLAB, offers two approaches to do so;

1. MATLAB scripting language.
2. Simulink blocksets.

The former is recommended for the proof_of_concept development usually required in academic & research projects, while the latter is for rapid prototyping in time-constrained industrial projects.
I, for one, usually use the first approach, as my work involves research & development.
The key to make a script time-efficient is to;

a. Think in vectors and matrices.
b. Avoid unnecessary loops here & there.
c. Initialize large vectors and matrices before use.

With these simple tips one could make life quite easy.

Happy scripting...

But wait..

Sometimes the curves you get from MATLAB simulations aren't smooth enough, even after several 100th of runs. I usually smooth them out using:

sgolayfilt(your_variable, m, F)

where m=2,F=21.

Result: cool looking curves, at the expense of one additional line in simulation section of your paper.

Furthermore, I also change the font size & width of the curves using;

h = plot(my_x, my_y); hold on; grid on;
set(h, 'linewidth', 3);
set(get(h, 'parent'), 'fontsize', 14);

Result: .. even cooler 

;o)

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ Casting out the Colors

Salam alaik,

MATLAB generates cool looking colored ps-files.
Unfortunately thoguh, most of the conferences & periodicals ask for gray scale images instead.
It gives you a big pain_in_the_neck tryna find suitable colors that could be distinguished at gray-scale level, esp in cases when markers don't serve the purpose well enough.

So..
I've discovered a simple Color to gray scale trick.
How to get around it is a little more tricky.
& by the end of the toil u'll get MATLAB generated PS-files, by editing the ps file directly.

First off, search for lines similar to;

/c8 { 1.00000 0.000000 0.000000 sr} bdef

Now lets dissect down this piece by piece..

/c8: According to my calculations '/c' means color here and '8' is numbering that may vary.

{1.00000 0.000000 0.000000 sr}: The RGB values; all values should be same & less than one for grey-scale. Note that all 'zeros' mean black, and all 'ones' mean white. Darker values are harder to distinguish, so I suggest giving more gap in values chosen between 0-0.5. While, less gaps can be afforded for values between 0.5-1.0.

That little doo-dad will clear the remainder of the picture. Like so;
Here is an example of a color image;

Now ,we require 6 gray-scale values. I used [0 0.3 0.55 0.65 0.75 0.85], & VOILA!
Here is the result;

aint that a neat trick right there?
It actually isn't much of a trick..
see if u could come up with more trix.

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ Fiddling with Figures

Salam alaik,

People've got an awesome practice of saving figures in the simulation script just after results are finalized.

Its a jolly good habit for all i can tell, since it pretty much prevents a lot of future headache.

No rocket science there..
The function to save a MATLAB figure file "saveas"; can save in several formats including fig (matlab figure), bmp (bitmap - though not recommended), ai (adobe illustrator), psc2 (colored post-script - recommended for latex), so on n so forth.

Fig files are useful in another sense, i.e., the data is automatically secured with it. n i'll show you in a minute -inshAllah- how data could be extracted from the saved fig files;

1. Open the saved .fig file using open function. e.g., open abc.fig
2. Use gcf to get the current figure pointer/handler and save it in a variable, e.g., h = gcf
3. Use get command to get hold of the children of the gcf, H = get(h, 'children')
4. Finally, search for the handle of the child which containts all the plots.
5. Suppose H(2) is the child with all the plots, then use H2 = get(H(2), 'children')
6. Now use set(H2(i)), where i = 1 to number of plots, to list all the properties and change their values.
7. Similarly, use the get(H2(i)) to fetch the values of all the properties.

For example, the script below extracts data from the plots.

clear all;

% open the .fig file

open test.fig; 

% get the current graph handle

h = gcf; 

% get the children of the figure file

H = get(h, 'Children');

% For this specific case the 2nd child has all the plots

H2 = get(H(2), 'Children');

Y = [];

for i = 1:length(H2)

% get the data of y-axis

    Y = [Y; get(H2(i), 'YData')];

end

Here is a test.fig, i fiddled with using the above script;

..enjoy.
n happy scripting!

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ M-ary Constellations

Salam alaik,

M-ary Phase shift keying (PSK) is not only simple but mathematically elegant too.

The symbol values are the Mth root of unity & is given like so:

exp(j.2.\pi.m/M), where m = 0, ..., M-1.

Use the same expression in MATLAB with a bit of rotation for fun :p

% the number of constellation points
M = 16;
m = 0:M-1;

% obtaining the constellation points with pi/M rotation
PSK_16 = exp(j*2*pi*m/M - j*pi/M);

Here is the plot I quickly designed; the Mth roots of unity with rotation..

Try out this 'M-ary_Quadrature_Amplitude_Modulated_Constellation' construction for yourself, & lemme know how good you go.

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ G-volution

Asalam alaikum,

The other day i was thoroughly amazed to know that my audi A6 mechanic is infact a molecular biologist
:O
i asked him as to what on earth was he doing in a car-ridden garage instead?
To my unsurprise though, he pointed towards his awesomely handsome earnings, his BMW & his yemeni nationality barring him from government run high-profile specialized (& saudialized) laboratories.
He asked me to teach him english linguistic skills (on top of presenting a persian cat as a gift).
I asked him to teach me arabic instead, & keep his pet since his lil kids were all teary on their father's decision.

On the more -
I'm interested in this system;
(a want & not a need)

►http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyy8Z-39aOs

Returning -

Telecommunications, especially mobile communication has been through drastic changes in recent years, & there is no sign of stopping to rest anytime sooner.

Remember the days when mobile unit was hard to fit in deepest of pockets with a single technology? & now a palm device holds a whole plethora of multiple technologies!..

The vision of doing better, & faster has lead us from narrow band digital 2G, to wide-band 3G with internet access, with us knocking the doors of all IP packet switched network; Next-Gen ultra-boardband 4G - where G stands for generation & not just guesstimation.

Fourth-generation (4G) mobile systems dictate entirely new approaches & novel infrastructure solutions to seamlessly integrate the existing wireless technologies including wireless broadband (WiBro), 802.16e, CDMA, wireless LAN, Bluetooth, and etc.

The key features of 4G mobile systems can be summarized as follows.
First, 4G mobile systems are all-IP based heterogeneous networks that allow users to use any system at any time and anywhere.
Then, 4G mobile systems provide end-users with high-speed, large volume, good quality, global coverage, and flexibility to roam between different types of technologies.
Finally, 4G mobile systems provide high-data-rate services to accommodate numerous multimedia applications such as video conferencing, on-line gaming, etc.

Yet the vision still continues...

What comes up is 5G..
& what stores in for 5G?
Well, for one, one of the candidate candy ideas is the use of 'Cognition' in communicating mobile.
The vision to give emotions & feelings to the mobile set itself to sense its surroundings.

The motivation behind cognition is efficient utilization of one of the most precious (& costly for telecom companies for that matter) resources in telecom; the frequency band.  Since even at its busiest, current technology is not capable to consume the alloted band completely & every now & then chunks of this precious resource are left unused here & there; referred to as spectrum holes.

5G promises to utilize this otherwise wasted portions of frequency, by putting intelligence or cognition in a mobile set. Two types of users are envisioned in this recent paradigm; primary users, secondary users.

Primary users have priority over secondary users, i.e.; secondary users could only gobble up the leftover pieces of the pie (frequency band).
The challenge is in finding those left-overs portions, as they keep on changing their position and size.
This calls on for sensing of the environment (radio sensing), and then analyzing it (radio scene analysis) and finally predicting the next empty slot. Only then 5G technology will have the ability carryout a meaningful communication.

Cognitive Radio is the new hype..
cog. rad. band wagon is now the focus of attention & tremendous research efforts are going down this direction.

wonder how many generations will come n go..
& like ever propping up dimensions (specially after the discovery of quantum mechanics) we'll end up with like 15 G or something..

So lets just make hay while the sun shines!

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ Finally..

Salam alaikum warahmatuLLAh,

Over the past couple of months i grew so very weary of 'theses' word, that i wanted to scratch it out from peep's vocabulary.

But that would've been pretty much an exercise_in_futile, since mothers & spouses have extraordinary memory (& vocabulary).

Today, after submitting it finally (for iterations & acceptance) i can safely exhale a sigh of relief..
After doing my part, I've left the rest to Allah..
& I guess i can relax now.. alhamduliLLAh.

I feel like going out for swinging while standing on the swing-seat, blowing bubbles & what not.

..I guess, im just too overwhelmed & should go take a nap instead.

But before i get going, i need to say jazakAllah khair to everyone.. specially my family for supporting me, bearing up with me & praying for me over the years.. & also to my brother-some friends.

JazakAllah khairan ahsan al jaza..

~*~*~*~*~~*~*~*~*~

~ The Woody

Salam alaikum,

aahh..
Sometimes I so feel like that woodpecker Seth talks about in The Dip; tapping on a thousand trees..staying busy but getting nowhere :/

He quotes on a starving woodpecker like so;

"A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty thousand times on one tree and get dinner."

Lets see now, where to place the blame for this incessant inability in persistence :p
ahaa yes..
I think part of it is to be blamed on multitasking.
The F-state to be precise.

E.Hallowell coined two great terms in his work Crazy Busy;
C-state and F-state.

C-state is clear, calm, cool, collected, consistent, concentrated, convivial, careful, curious, creative, courteous, and coordinated.

F-state fractures focus, is frenzied, feckless, flailing, fearful, forgetful, flustered, furious, fractious, feverish, and frantic.

Pretty neat, init?

So, multitasking leads to F-state and activates different parts of the brain than C-state.
Just giving F-state a name and being aware of it helps to back out of it.

Countless articles tell a tale how multitasking makes us..

~ Search Again

Salam alaikum,

"I worked on a similar kind of shiite during my Ph.D., & trust me no one's gonna read it except yourself & your poor poor supervisor.
Just so you know..
oh btw, its been more than a decade & was until recently still trying to solve 'that bit' i wrote in my thesis.. until i gave up all hope!"

I was left breathless.. well almost.

Research is pretty much a whole new search of virtually anything you're interested in - as long as you have enough time & funds for that matter :)

And if you're ready to do it without time or funds; then your research morphs into passion.
Much like the case with my brazilian professor, who was still solving a problem 11 years down the line.. & curiously he still smiles :p

The research strategy has usually three main pillars. Together they create an environment which ensures that good ideas can pass as rapidly as possible from a lab to a stage where they are of real social (or economic) benefit.


The first pillar is the basic and fundamental research.
It takes place in dark dedicated dungeons (err..labs) inside concrete campuses, behind closed doors & up in our heads somewhere..