#statingTheObvious
I’ve been observing a trend lately, and the geek in me is not very fond of it. A lot of people who share links online, are doing it wrong. We have a (natural) tendency to just click and paste the link we want to share into the box which says “Share”. What some of us completely ignore is that Google provides a specific button to share a hyperlink.
Even Facebook had this system in place for sharing links, but they removed it a few months back. I don’t want Google to go in the same direction.
Of course you can say what difference does it make? Well, it is not pleasing to the eye. Let me show you an example:
The post on the top is definitely more pleasing to the eye than the second one. You have to agree!
Of course I can’t force anyone to do this, but it would be nice if we all follow the same protocol (which is in place because it is good).
It’s been a long long time since I posted anyting on the blog. I have made minor tweaks, such as changing the theme and adding a page which contains my shared Google Calendar[1]; but I’ve not shared anything interesting that I stumbled upon in the past one and a half year. This does not mean that I have stopped discovering new, interesting stuff. It’s just that I had forgotten the true purpose behind starting this blog – the purpose is not for me to write articles of literary genius, make commentaries, or attempt at writing fiction. The true purpose was for me to be able to share with people, the joy and pleasure which I derive out of finding cool, interesting stuff on the net. This too I’d realized during the Summer. After that, I’ve just been too lazy. So now I plan to right a few wrongs, starting today!
I have been feeling a very strong urge to write something (anything) since the last few days. So this will just be random blabber. It’s been too long since I last wrote an entry (the only one 
). Now my friends suggest that I should not "kill" this blog. So I promise I will not let that happen and use the blog as a medium to share as much as I can. In the mean time Tiwari has started a pretty decent blog which has its own flavour.
Now, I had suggested to my friends that while we are on our internships, it will be a very good idea to have blogs where we can share our experiences and sometimes talk about our work. It happened that I myself couldn’t stand up to it, and here I am writing for the first time after a month!
One thing that prompted me to write was that I am very pleased with myself over how things have changed over the past weekend. My initial work here involved quite a lot of reading, which I of course enjoyed. But after that I had to switch to the monotonous task of reading a huge piece of Lisp code. It was fun initially as I got to learn some amount of Common Lisp. But the past weak was extremely monotonous as I didn’t get to learn anything new and was just reading code. This weekend I finally emerged out of this cycle and picked up "Analogy Making as Perception" which I regard as the second-best text in the field of Computer Modelling of Analogy Making, the best being the first book to be sold on Amazon. I got back into the reading mode which I like being in. I finished the book yesterday and I am extremely satisfied with myself. Now I plan to read "The Selfish Gene" and "The Society of Mind". I think I don’t want to read any more code. This will probably result in me not doing anything new, in the sense of contributing to the field of Cognitive Science. But somehow that does not concern me too much. I also have a Summer School from the 5th, which means I have hardly 3 weeks to work on whatever I would like to make of this Internship (if you can call it so). The Summer School is really THE bright spot in my visit to Sofia, as it gives me the assurance that even if I continue doing the reading stuff, it won’t be a big blow. I hope though that I don’t get too carried away by this. I would like to make as much use of this opportunity as possible. I hope you can give me some suggestion on this!
Apart from the internship part, I have not done too much here. I don’t like going out much as I am alone. I did go out once to see the city. It has some very old churches. I was very pissed off when the freaking camera stopped working the day I decided to go out. I hope I’ll be able to buy a new Camera by the next weekend and may be go somewhere!
Meanwhile I have also been reading other blogs (a lot of them). Reading gives me a sense of satisfaction which very few things in this world give. I hope I can continue all this as we enter one of the most dreaded semester of our four-year term at IIT.
I would also love to discuss some issues from my research, but that in some later post. I hope I’ll be able to come up with something more interesting the next time.
Thank you.
Comments awaited.
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
The time seems apt for me to write my first “proper” blog-post. Two days back I happened to stumble-upon (using the excellent firefox add-on) a very interesting theorem in socio-economic theory, called Arrow’s theorem. I read it, clicked “I Like It!” and closed it. That was not enough to make me write a blog post on it. Before I describe more about it, I would just like to add one of my strong beliefs: The more you read, the more things start reappearing before you in different contexts. Arrow’s theorem similarly seems to have no superficial connection to either CS or mathematics. But when I saw it in a Discrete Math book I was going through, I once again realised that my opinion was getting stronger day by day.
Arrow’s (Impossibility) Theorem:
[I feel it is easier for me to describe it in terms of elections, so I am using this approach]
Suppose there is an election being held. Let 
1. Non-dictatorship
One single person should not be able to completely influence the outcome.
2. Unrestricted domain(or universality)
The social welfare function should account for all preferences among all voters to yield a unique and complete ranking of societal choices. Thus:
* The voting mechanism must account for all individual preferences.
* It must do so in a manner that results in a complete ranking of preferences for society.
* It must deterministically provide the same ranking each time voters’ preferences are presented the same way.
3. Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA)
The social welfare function should provide the same ranking of preferences among a subset of options as it would for a complete set of options. Changes in individuals’ rankings of irrelevant alternatives (ones outside the subset) should have no impact on the societal ranking of the relevant subset.
4 a. Positive association of social and individual values (or monotonicity)
If any individual modifies his or her preference order by promoting a certain option, then the societal preference order should respond only by promoting that same option or not changing, never by placing it lower than before. An individual should not be able to hurt an option by ranking it higher.
4 b. Non-imposition(or citizen sovereignty)
Every possible societal preference order should be achievable by some set of individual preference orders. This means that the social welfare function is surjective: It has an unrestricted target space.
I am running out of time here. So shall give the proof of the theorem using the theory of Posets in a subsequent post.
Suggestions & Comments awaited.
A.K.B.
