Arbit Scratchpad

I got the following response from IKEA after the incident:  IKEA Glass Tumbler Explodes. However my response would be  I underwent this agony after IKEA selling me this untested/defective good (explosive?) and this untoward accident which happened at our premises and might have caused so much more damage. There was hardly any thermal shock - after almost 5-10 mins after pouring water from the tap (cold) the glass exploded with a loud sound and scattered around. I bought the product thinking it is robust and not so fragile that merely trying to drink water it will explode into pieces. Also IKEA needs to ensure this product is checked/evaluated for safety standards or else any customer could get hurt - knowingly selling this product would amount to willful negligence .  As a friend of mine states consider an accident happens with my car due to a fault in the system and I am exposed to danger. Can the car company just educate me and their job is done?   C...

An IKEA glass tumbler (we bought in  Gothenburg,  Sweden) exploded on our dining table tonight. We had a few guests at the table and they were having dinner when the glass exploded and shattered into small pieces and minute fragments. It is sheer luck that nobody was hurt. Cold tap water was poured into the IKEA glass tumbler (which was lying unused inside the cupboard) and was offered to the guests. This happened within 5 minutes after pouring the cold tap water. With a loud thud sound (as if it had been shot), the glass exploded and shattered. People could have been badly hurt because of what happened and such products must not be produced (or procured from sub-standard sources) and sold without proper quality testing. This was so totally ridiculous, that buying glass products from IKEA will be a risky proposition hereon. I am apprehensive that guests could have been severely hurt and it makes me shudder (what if shards or  particles  of...

First short story in the 'CSlueth files' series.  Note: This is purely a work of fiction! 1. The dead body  Wednesday, Chalmers tekniska hogskola, 6:30 PM  He had just walked out of the classroom in the V building. For the past forty five minutes he had been coding an exciting dynamic systems simulation after having completed a late and rather boring simulation exercises session class. He had to take the road in front of the Chalmers Bibliotek library as he wanted to meet a friend staying nearby. As he walked past the Information Sciences department building there was a gust of cold winter wind that struck his face and he raised the collars of this jacket, sinking in his chin into its warm, furry interiors. It was December and it would get dark really early. It was dark now and hardly anyone else around.   He hummed a tune as he ran up the flight of stairs, the library was at an elevated level from the V building. He found himself humming some r...

An Ode to Google ‪#‎DeepDream‬ - Perhaps generated by the same process - I see a scene in a park and start imagining other patterns ...

Accepting Contradictions You want me  To be like you. And I want you  To be like me. Acceptance is hard, you see! You won't change your mind, And I agree with you too! A space where it is impossible  To change your mind - is a dead space.  Bury it. And yes  It's OK to contradict yourself  On a regular basis Else you’re not even thinking ...

Was thinking about an analogy recently while getting back home from the tram station.  Let us assume you are waiting at a bus stand for a particular bus. Quantum physics is akin to saying: Any given bus can be bus route number 5, 10 or 15 (or any other number) with any of the probabilities ranging from 0 to 1 at any time. It transforms into an exact bus number that arrives next when its probability of being that route number becomes 1. Or vice versa.  But if you are on a particular bus the probability being the same route number is always 1. Or unless you have seen the bus yourself its route number is less than one but we cant be certain it might also be zero.  Seems like a joke right? I know at the quantum (or very small scale) it maybe true, but can the analogy be used elsewhere in designing systems?

Probabilistic  Topic modeling provides methods for organizing, understanding, searching, and summarizing large electronic archives. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) : The simple intuition behind LDA is that documents exhibit multiple topics. In reality, we only observe the documents, the other structure are hidden variables Our goal is to infer the hidden variables i.e. compute their distribution conditioned on the documents:  p(topics, proportions, assignments|documents) . Gibbs sampling for LDA  - Here we sample the topic of a word in one of the documents, given the topics of all other words, the topic distributions and the data. A sample from a recent coursework at Chalmers below: Another instance shown below - for 10 topics:

Population genetics is concerned with the study of the genetic composition of populations. This composition may be changed by segregation, selection, mutation, recombination, mating structure, migration, and other genetic, ecological, and evolutionary factors. Therefore, in population genetics these mechanisms and their interactions and evolutionary consequences are investigated. A gene may have different forms, called alleles. The allelic composition is called the genotype, and the set of observable properties derived from the genotype is called the phenotype. Thus, supposing that there are two alleles A1 and A2, there are three possible genotypes, A1A1, A1A2, and A2A2. In the first and third case, the organism's genotype is homozygous (for A1 or A2, respectively), in the second case it is heterozygous. Genetic material is deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). It consists of four bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C). Each base is linked to a sugar and a ...

Dear Mr Bagchi, We have received your entry for the World Hindi Day, which has been selected for an appropriate award. Please confirm your attendance on the flag hoisting ceremony on 26 th  January, 2015 at 0915 hrs at India House 13-A, Villagatan, Stockholm to receive the prize. Regards, J. P. Meena /  जे . पी .   मीणा Minister & DCM /  मंत्री   व   मिशऩ   के   उप   प्रमुख Embassy of India /  भारत   का   राजदूतावास Stockholm /  स्टॉकहोम ,  ईमेल   :  dcm@indianembassy.se दूरभाष : +46-8-107008 /4117090, फै क्स : 248505 Website:  www.indianembassy.se Facebook:  www.facebook.com/ IndianEmbassyStockholm

Ewww!! Yes that's true of some Darter , pupfish varieties and other fish species too ( Filial Cannibalism )! The dynamics of the population with adults cannibalizing on their offspring can be described by the Ricker map, given by the equation: Figure 1: Bifurcation Diagram (Click to enlarge) -Plot between R and eta . Chaos and bifurcations and period doubling observed.  We observe the 2 point limit cycle is observed at R value > 7.4 Figure 2: We observe a 4-point limit cycle for values of R > 12.5, see above figure The second iterate results in a 2-cycle periodic solution and then later this branches out and a 4-cycle periodic solution appears. Thus as R passes through a series of bifurcation values the character of the solution passes through a series of bifurcations, as period doubling of the periodic solutions. As R increases through successive bifurcations, every even periodic solution branches into a double-periodic solution and this happens wh...

What started as a measles outbreak among seven people who visited Disneyland in December has spread to more than 26, as an unvaccinated California woman apparently transmitted the virus through airports and the theme park, health officials said. (Source: Guardian ). The Ebola is another outbreak we saw a few months back... Taken together, the 26 cases would account for almost 12% of the expected measles cases for the entire year in the US. Photograph: John Heseltine/Corbis S - Susceptible , I - Infected , R - Recovered The SIR Model a three- compartment model , for disease spread can be used to explain such outbreaks. In this model each individual is either Susceptible to the disease, Infected, or has Recovered and is immune. Infected individuals infect susceptibles they meet with some rate and recover with some rate. The ratio of these rates determine if the disease will become an epidemic or not. The simulation for the SIR Model I had done recently as...

Global synchronization of oscillators is found abundantly in nature, emerging in fields from physics to biology. The Kuramoto model describes the synchronization behavior of a generalized system of interacting oscillators. A particularly beautiful example comes from certain species of fireflies , with stories of huge populations of fireflies all flashing in perfect unison, making long swaths of light flashing on and off in the darkness. It was not until the late 1960s that anyone understood what was really going on—that the rhythm was not being set by any single “conductor” firefly, but rather by the interactions among all of them. Somehow the oscillator in each firefly (presumably some patch of neurons in each firefly’s brain) corrects itself to flash in unison with all the others. With a large number of oscillators with different natural frequencies, the Kuramoto model predicts that, if they are allowed to interact strongly enough, they will all start oscillating at the same ...