cat /proc/claus | java

I’m writing the support material for my thesis defense. They request my name and the page numbers in the top of all pages. In latex, you can do this easily with “fancyhdr”

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancyplain}
\lhead{Claus Aranha - The University of Tokyo}
\chead{}
\rhead{\thepage}
\rfoot{}
\cfoot{}
\lfoot{}

In the preamble. The fancyplain style is supposed to apply the header and footer to the first page as well. But it seems that from the second page onwards, there is a line separating the header from the contents, but the first page does not have this line (but it DOES have the special heading that I set up).

I think it would be nice to have the line in the first page as well. Anyone knows how?

So, one of my summer projects was to build a manager for my bibtex files. They have been growing bigger and bigger as time went by, and now I have many somewhat different, somewhat similar, bibtex files for each of my writs.

Of course, before I set out to build anything, I decided to look around to see what is done. And I find kbibtex, a very nice looking, and actively developed project. It has most of the filtering and search abilities that I wanted, and while it does not have some (like a good support of comments, and merging/splitting of bibfiles) it seems to fit my needs pretty well.

So if you needed a bibtex managing tool, check out this one. And I need to find out a new summer project. Maybe my own research? Naaah…

Yesterday while I was procrastinating at home, I read this article in Wikipedia about the Milgran Experiment.

The Milgran Experiment was an experiment performed in the 60ies. If I understood correctly, the experiment had as a goal to understand the influence of authority over people. The subject was called to take part on a fake experiment, where he would be asked to perform progressively higher amounts of pain on an actor, directed by a figure of authority. It was observed that a rate much higher than what common sense would say (about 60% of the subjects) obeyed the authority figure, and inflicted extreme pain to the actor.

I found this article to be extremely interesting. First, obviously, because of the results. I was surprised at the high and consistent rate of obedience. It makes me wonder if this is an intuitive trait of humans (a la evolutive psychology of Steven Pinker), or if it is born purely out of society influence.

The second thing that caught my attention was the experimental nature itself. I think I have never seen before a scientific conclusion about humans from the field of psychology. Of course, my knowledge of psychology is limited, and I always had this notion, from the little I had read, that most psychological theories could not, or would not, be verified by experimentation.

Well, I have to go back to study, 9 days until thesis deadline.

Why don’t I consider the above “study”, though? Another interesting observation.

So today Marilia was telling me about her Digital Circuit class, that her teacher asked them to design the circuit to display a 7-led digit:

“So, for instance, for this one I use an AND gate for the first and third bit, and a EOR gate for…”

“EOR gate?”

“Exclusive OR”

…

This was actually the first time I had ever heard that XOR could also be called EOR. I was sceptical for a while; in her book it was indeed written EOR. Wikipedia also confirmed it, in the opening paragraph of the XOR page, that it can also be called EOR. Googlefight gives 5.000.000 hits for XOR, and 1.000.000 hits for EOR.

Living and learning, I guess.

I have moved all the pics in my album, plus a few previously unpublished pics, into Picasa:

http://picasaweb.google.com/caranha

Browsing, searching and viewing there should be better than with my current php album, even though they don’t have a neat “random picture” feature.

This should make the move to a newer version of wordpress easier for this blog.