Iterations of Oneself

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I’m leaving my job to get a master’s degree soon. This is what my coworkers feel like (like Timon & Pumba)

Clazziquai Project - Speechless

Your skin, your breath, and I touch you with your thousand memories…

This is an extremely powerful video. Against bullying and for individuality and life.

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

- Tyler Durden - Fight Club (1999)

Thought of that person that I know I should not be thinking of. Sigh.

Six degrees of inclusion

Recently, I started studying network science. Network science is the analysis of complex systems that can be represented as networks of nodes linked by edges. I am currently taking the Social Network Analysis class on Coursera; and I’m finding it really interesting, and very well worth my time. (I want to take this space to give a special mention to professor Lada Adamic from the University of Michigan for her enthusiasm and excellent class).

There is an enormous number of phenomenons that can be represented using networks. Social networks are just one of them, but other networks such as flavor networks, product exports by country are just some of the many possibilities.

As part of my project for this class, I decided to analyze the networks formed by file inclusions in software projects coded in the C programming language; and I had some interesting findings.

As part of this project I analyzed the code bases of three different software projects: xv6, git and MySQL.

The following image shows the network representation of Git.

Git

Initially, I coded a simple shell script to extract the graph formed by the file inclusions, and generate a simple file of the Pajek .NET format. Once the graph file was generated, I was ready to import that into either Gephi or R, and start analyzing some data.

One of the most interesting and most expected outcomes of looking at the data is that there seems to be a definite division between files that are included by many other files (and don’t include many other files), and files that include many other files (and are not very much included by others).

This is understandable, and even expected; but it is still useful and interesting to see it being confirmed. This can be explained because there usually are files in software projects that define basic functionality that is utilized by many others. In the research paper, I called these files “service files”, as they define functions and services that can be accessed by other files.

On the other hand, there are few files that tend to include a bunch of other files. These files are generally files that drive the execution of the applications. Particularly for the xv6 project, the file that includes the most other files is that which implements the command console of the xv6 system; and thus it is the one that drives the execution of the application.

On the following image, it is plotted in blue the number of times a file was included, vs the number of times it included any other files. As it can be noted, although not all files adjust perfectly to the idea of service and execution files, there is a general trend to do so.

Indegree and outdegree points by node

Other interesting findings of the analysis were that although the file count of large projects, such as git and MySQL was actually very high, the distance between two files was generally quite short. For MySQL, although it has about 2900 nodes, the distance between files averaged under 5 hops, and over 95% of the paths were of 7 hops or less.

One of the possible explanations of this small world where any file can be quickly reached from any other file is that these projects are coded in the C language, and the simplicity of C allows projects to gravitate towards a monolithic architecture. An interesting trend to look at is whether or not this small world effect manifests in projects written in languages that encourage encapsulation, such as Java or C++.

The graph generated by file inclusions is still rather coarse grained. A more fine-grained analysis of the networks generated in software is the graph of function calls. This promises to be an even better way of identifying the relationships that take place in software.

I uploaded the whole paper I wrote, along with the scripts and network structure for the three projects. All of them can be downloaded as part of the following repository:

https://github.com/pabloem/code_networks

Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre

In 1959, Jean-Paul Sartre started a blog. It didn’t work out too well… Continue reading.

Of old ladies and alien languages

On September 20 of 2012 I had a pretty strange encounter. This encounter gave me a really strong impression, and I intend to write about it and about a little bit of research I did on the topic.

For reasons of little relevance; that evening my roommates and I found ourselves knocking on the door of the janitor of our apartment building. He was not home; and instead it was his mother the one to open the door to attend our call. I told her naturally what the issue was, to which she responded with a single word that I could not understand.

“Pardon me?” - I said.

The same word again; and a load of things that I could not understand.

It took me a few moments before realizing that this lady was speaking to us in an indigenous language; and that she could not speak Spanish. I was speechless. How could I not have the slightest idea of what she was saying? She and I were born in the same country. We lived in the same building; and yet, I could not figure out a way to communicate with her. Holy shit.

In the year of 2005, it was estimated that the number of people who could speak an indigenous language in Mexico was almost 6 million. Of these, about 5.1 million are also able to speak Spanish, and the rest can only speak their mother tongue. Also, almost 10 million people identified themselves as indigenous. These are some interesting numbers to think about. Keep them in mind!

Mexico, in the second article of its constitution, is defined as a ‘pluricultural’ nation; in recognition of the several ethnic and cultural groups that integrate the country. The constitution is careful to give different cultural groups the right of self-determination. This allows all the indigenous groups to freely determine their political, social and religious form of organization, as long as human rights and gender equality are respected. There are 68 indigenous Amerindian languages recognized as national languages.

However, although Mexico does well to recognize its cultural diversity in paper; how well does Mexico do in fostering and empowering all the different peoples that share the country?

There exist several programs offering scholarships and financial support to indigenous students, to be able to attain higher education. Also, there is a strong rhetoric of trying to improve living conditions and services for indigenous communities. Unfortunately, this rhetoric does not materialize in much development for these communities; which usually lack a strong capital flow that could make investment more attractive.

So what would be the right steps to take in order to empower the indigenous people of Mexico to develop their cultures and their potential? Consolidating, and making Spanish education compulsory? Making sure that they get education in their mother language, to make it relevant again? Not acting, and continuing the slow cultural assimilation into the mainstream Spanish-speaking Mexican culture?

I honestly don’t know the answer. I’m just throwing my thoughts out there. It surprises me deeply that not only could we not communicate, but it was also impossible for us to find an interpreter to allow even the smallest amount of communication. How could I expect her to know my language if I didn’t have a single clue about hers?

Sources:

[1] Los Pueblos Indígenas de México - http://www.cdi.gob.mx/index2.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=62&Itemid=24

[2] Indigenous Peoples of Mexico - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_Mexico

The Night We Were Kings

During the night, a boy and a girl, escape from the city, running away towards nature, only to be the kings of the night.

(Source: brain-food)

Where does love go when it dies?

There was a friend you saw every day when you were little. They were the friend with whom you built forts, told scary stories (trying not to fall asleep first), and ran around in the neighborhood until you had to come in for dinner. All of the most thrilling, scary, confusing parts of growing up and navigating a world three sizes too big for you seemed manageable with them. Catching fireflies and wiggling around in sleeping bags, setting up a tent in your backyard, seemed like the stuff of a dangerous safari. You were sure you could catch a lion together, if only provided the proper equipment.

But things happened. You moved away, or they did, or seeing each other just got too hard. Even a simple change of school can do it. Before you know it, you’re an actual adult, and the person who knew you best for such an enormous part of your life—the only person with whom you share such an extraordinary quantity of childhood memories—is gone. 


There was the person who taught you how to love. The person with whom you felt more alive and real and full than you ever imagined possible, who seemed to love even the dark, ugly corners of yourself you were constantly trying to squirrel away. They licked your wounds and told you that you were beautiful. They took you on adventures that didn’t even require you leaving your house. Between the bedroom, the kitchen, and the plush, perfect couch, you existed in a kind of seclusion from everything else in the world. You didn’t need anyone else. You lost entire days kissing, talking, laughing in the car holding hands over the stick shift. You remember the things they showed you, things you were certain that no other human had ever been privy to. [Keep reading.]

Chelsea Fagan, from “Where Does Love Go When It Dies?