An Eye to the World, an Eye to the Net
To celebrate the 20 years of the Pearl Jam career, a documentary is being produced, together with a book.
I’ve got (two copies) of “Immagine in Cornice”, a documentary produced when the band made a tour in Italy (and I went to one of the concert!) It is awesome.
Immortality version from there
Therefore I can’t wait for this one!
This is the trailer!
Pearl Jam rocks!
Atlantis
The shuttle Atlantis has landed safely seven hours ago. The mission sts-135 was the last for the shuttle program. I have already wrote more about the closing down of the shuttle program on the last ride, therefore here I’ll just post this awesome video which Nature has put together, with all the shuttle missions.
after serving the world for 30 years, the space shuttle has found its place in History, and comes to a final stop.
—
sts-135 final mission, last words.
Did you get it? Well if you speak French yes, otherwise it reads like “Do you speak French?”… Ok, big disclaimer, I don’t (yet) speak French! Please don’t reply in French, otherwise I’ll have either to harass my French labmates, or become a very close friend with Google translate.
My Citizenship is Italian, but first of all I feel European. Now, what a European citizen should do to make Europe a better connected place and more integrated?
I think, first is to understand each other. An more strong European idea among her citizen would be a good idea, and although these are tough times, I think its worth to re-raise, and try to re-state that is what we want (or at least, I want) as european citizen.
But “every big journey start with a single step”, and I embrace the “think global, act local” (put any other relevant favourite quote here), therefore I have decided to learn French.
Why? Well as I said it’s all about better understand each other and it’s time to give a little help and do something on this side.
Obviously everybody should start with what is possible for him/her. Consequently, for me, would be to try to learn a new European language, to increase the number of people which I could natively talk to, and understand better one more culture as well.
We really need to approach Europe as whole resource, using the strength of different cultures as resources and minimise the weaknesses.
First step is knowledge.
This blog started as an experiment in 2006. A lot of different contents, spawning from politics to environmental, to campaign, to tips and all the other things I thought/wanted to write are here. Now, I’ve decided it was time to change.
First, and my ‘affecionados’ reader would have notice, the visually appearance has been changed, using a new theme Matala. It was made available today also for the worpress.com hosted blog, I saw it, I liked and I’ve switched to it.
This was the old theme
old theme
Second change, I’ve decided to write from now on only in English on this blog. You can find all the Italian posts still hosted here using the category ‘Italian’ and only the English with ‘English’, however in the future only English will be used. This is to give the possibility to the people that follows to have a consistent feed, in one language only.
However, I like to write also in italian, and sometimes the topics apply only to italian speaking community, therefore I removed the dust from an old blog started even before this one, called Alago-Rets, where I will write exclusively in Italian. That one is a collaborative blog, so you will find my posts, but also posts from other authors.
The return to writing there was explained in this post (in italian).
BTW, thanks for stumbling upon these pages. Comments are open, as usual, if you have any
I’ve just discovered the ICECoaltion,
A Coalition dedicated to creating the International Court for the Environment.
ICE Coalition gathers environmental, legal, business, academic and NGO representatives who believe the need to establish the rule of law and a new, workable global institution in the environmental field is urgent. Support is also sought from the general public, funding institutions and politicians. Public and private meetings throughout the world are to be convened by ICE Coalition, to inform the UN, governments and media worldwide.
and I think it’s a great idea.
We have one planet, and people should feel responsible for it, and it is possible only if a sense of ownership is instilled. On the other hand, accountability is a good start to make people understand that any action has consequences and therefore a clear judgement should be made.
The environment is a global issue, therefore we need a global coalition, and a global law, able to address the problem at super international scale.
Let’s see how it evolves, but at the moment I’m in complete agreement with the proposed solution.
via paul.
The shuttle Atlantis is in the space. Today for the first and last time, I just followed the launch in streaming from the NASA tv. Before I saw only movies with the shuttles, like the sci-fi Armageddon.
But today I was able to follow the whole launch, just streamed directly from the NASAHDTV channel.
I’ve followed the lift-off’s procedures and I saw it live. It was emotional.
Thinking that after 1 min and 40 seconds the Atlantis was already up in space. It was possible to see our planet just down below. These guys were up in space. And yes I know there is the ISS floating up there (BTW it’s exactly where the shuttle is going) with people inside all the time, but seeing the stream and thinking that in so small amount of time the shuttle was flying so high it’s something big.
Now the shuttle program will be shut down and NASA is looking for something new. Let’s see what they come up with, if funding holds. ESA and other players are still up and running, and also the NASA has some plans for the future.
For the time being, Soyuz spacecraft will be used to continue servicing the ISS.
The shuttle will be up there for another 10-12 days, will dock to the ISS and then come back home. Best of luck!
Anyway, I’m kind of sad. The shuttle was cool.
Last lift off, Enjoy the last ride.
A friend of mine, Julia, has written a little guide to classic things required when writing the thesis and the setting up for the viva, which apply for EBI predocs enrolled with the University of Cambridge.
This was a piece on our internal wiki (which nobody ever reads because is a closed one and it’s rather impossible to find, but the problems with closed wikis is a topic for another post). So I asked her if it was ok to grab it and post it here, which, at least, is in the open of the internet sea, and people could maybe actually find it with google or any other way.
These information were correct up-to June 28, 2011. As the matter of fact, she is now a Doctor :). Bare in mind this applied for a PhD thesis in the Biological Science umbrella, and the last part is EBI specific. Therefore is not at all official, they are just tips and hooks to speed up the process. Check always the latest rules from the University.
With that said, here you have it.
P.S.: Template-wise check out the amazing classic thesis. You’ve got to tune it, just a bit.
Thesis submission and viva
Written by Julia Fischer on June 28, 2011
When the time has come and you would like to submit your thesis to the Board of Graduate Studies, there are one or two things you might want to know.
1. Find a template
Most people (at least in the natural sciences) will write their thesis in LaTeX. There are a various templates out there. Please add your template here if you have found a nice one.
- Template from engineering department
2. Restrictions and rules for the thesis
If you are submitting to the department of Biology, you will have a word limit of 60,000 words, but you can always check the newest information here.
3. Abstract and examiners
It is a good idea to start thinking about your examiners a couple of months before you submit. You will have to email the degree committee (degbiol@mole.bio.cam.ac.uk), saying that you will submit soon. They will then send you a form to fill. You have to submit this form with your thesis title and planned submission date back to them together with your thesis abstract (which shouldn’t change significantly from there on).
They will then contact your supervisor who has to suggest two examiners for your viva. You might want to mention this to your supervisor in a meeting before you have to submit the forms, so you can discuss possible choices. One examiner needs to be internal (i.e. University of Cambridge) and one external.
4. Initial submission
When you are ready to submit, you need two soft-bound copies of your thesis. If you are sure that there will be no corrections, you can submit a hard-bound copy directly, but if you need corrections, you will have to pay for the expensive hard-binding again. Here is a lot of information about all the forms and declarations you need on submission day.
5. Your viva
It is advisable to try and set your viva date for the end of the month if you are going for the bridging postdoc contract, because you will receive the postdoc stipend from the 1st of the month *after* your viva. That is, if your viva is on the 1st of the month you will lose the pay raise for a full month.
Poke your supervisor to email the graduate office in Heidelberg and HR at EBI directly after your viva to confirm that you have passed and theat he/she would like to employ you as a (bridging) postdoc, so they can prepare your postdoc contract.
Good luck!
6. Submission of corrections and hard-bound copies
You do need to submit a hard-bound copy to the Cambridge University Library, although you may have to hand the copy to the degree committee, if you are faster that Cambridge burocracy. EBI will usually pay for the hard-bound copy that they would like for their own library, but you will probably have to pay for the other copies yourself. All about submitting hard-bound copies can be found here.
7. Congratulations!
You’re done!
credits Macca su Flickr.
Credo che scegliere i candidati con le primarie, per rendere il porcellum completamente inefficace e ridare la possibilità ai cittadini di scegliere i candidati sia un’idea necessaria ed estremamente intelligente.
Questo avrebbe almeno quattro conseguenze:
E’ un pò allucinante che solo Civati sia quello che sostenga questa idea. Io, nel mio super piccolo, una +1 lo metto.
I’ve just added a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license to my (one year old) presentation about scipy and numpy and imported the code and the stuff on github, so it’s easier for people to download it (and hopefully the link will not go down, after I’ll leave the EBI)
I’ll put it also here, so you can have a look.
[slideshare id=2512270&doc=pylab-091116123248-phpapp02]
credits: http://askbobrankin.com/automatic_backups.html
Having a Dell XPS M1330 is kind of a problem. This computer failed me 3 times in the last 3 years. The mother board managed to cook itself every time, and also the graphic card died. It seems the problem was due to a lazy fan, which was not spinning as it should have done.
In this situation, coming up with a backup schema is necessary. More over a hot-backup schema, which permits to swap computers, going from the dead laptop to another working machine on the fly would be very convenient. The other machine would be either my desktop computer at work, or my old (2003) acer laptop.
Usually I work with three different type of formats: code, simulations result and written report (in the form of text documents or presentations).
My simulations’ results live on the server @EBI, so I don’t have to care about the backup and I can mount/access them using ssh.
This leaves out the code and the documents.
Code
For the code my choice has been to use git and host the code somewhere. For example Neuronvisio lives on the github repo. For stuff that can’t go live (yet) I’ve set up my own private git repo on another server, and I wrote a quick how-to here.
Given the distributed nature of git, to keep all my machine in synch, I just need to clone the repo. Then I can develop on my working machine (no pun intended) and I can push the latest development back to the online repo. When I switch machine, I just need to pull the repo to go up to speed. Easy and slick.
Docs
I think one of the best way I found to keep my docs synced is with DropBox.
Dropbox syncs automatically your docs (or any stuff you’ve got in the folder) with an online server. So you have an easy way to do the backup. What is more interesting is Dropbox allow you to add another computer to the same account, and automatically syncs the documents between the online computers.
Basically it acts as a bridge between your two computers, without having the problem to think about the backup, but automatically doing that. It integrates in a really nice way with Linux as well.
So join it and give it a go!
P.S.: If you use this link to join DropBox, I’ll get some free space 🙂
Conclusions
Using git and dropbox I have a complete automated backup system, which lets me to:
Comments are open if you want to share some other solutions 🙂
