Tales from the Road(house)

22/04/2011 at 00:47 (Places of Interest)
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Man am I glad to back home right now. Was an awesome night at the Roadhouse in Covent Gardens, there’s no doubt about that,  but the issues mentioned in the last post are currently still in full swing and ruining my fun. Aside from that, it was a pretty good night.

The Pros?

  • Great music, both the DJs and the live band
  • The place looks awesome.
  • Friendly staff
  • Generally good atmosphere

The Cons?

  • The system in place for the “restaurant” aspect was rubbish. So much fiddling around with cash/deposits/time slots
  • the food. The appetisers weren’t bad. In fact they were great (specifically the nachos and the calamari rings), but the main was horribly plain and tasteless (steer clear of the salmon).
  • Generally anything to do with the restaurant aspect isn’t great
  • Expensive (but that’s to be expected as it is Central London)

Take home point being that don’t bother going there for the food. Aside for the appetisers, it’s just not worth all the hassle. It’s still worth going in early (before 7:30) as it’s free entry at that point and happy hour is around that time, so if your going to eat somewhere, eat somewhere else well before that.

We had gone there to celebrate a friends birthday and of course that involved cake. One of the reasons I mentioned friendly staff is because, even though they were pretty rushed of their feet (it was packed when we walked in and that was before 7), they managed to bring that out for us and that was well after the restaurant part of the place had closed.It’s generally an awesome place to go. Would probably go again/recommend it.

Also, I think Dita Von Teese works there.

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Like Stinging Nettles Brushing Your Internal Organs

19/04/2011 at 21:45 (Slice of Life)
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Worst. Night. Ever.

I couldn’t sleep at all last night. Food poisoning perhaps? I’m thinking that’s a possibility. The all burger diet I’ve been on the last week or so? That’s a likely candidate too. Whatever the reason, it made me realise, I neglect my body so badly. My diet is horrible. It primarily consists of burgers (as mentioned), chicken wings and fries. I don’t eat breakfast, I rarely eat dinner, I gorge myself during lunch and I constantly snack on garbage (not actual garbage mind you, that would be pretty disgusting and completely unnecessary). The poor shape of last night has led me to realise, I need to fix up. It’s even worse when I loose my self for months at a time doing work, because I don’t even get any exercise on top of the poor diet.

Well no more! I am vowing to give up the burgers, chicken wings and fries for a healthier diet. Not give up completely mind, but moderation is most definitely required. Hopefully by the end of the month I wont feel so…blergh all the time.

Although the Night was horrible, the Day that led to it was pretty awesome. Not that I did much. The day consisted of waking up, going out to JJB to get autographs from famous cricketers (not for my benefit mind, I didn’t even know who I was looking at. I just took the pictures) and then chilling out in TGI Fridays for…hours. I can’t even remember how many hours. The day was full of the good old nonsense chat and lots of reminiscing which is always fun. All of which lulled me into a false sense of relaxation only for me sleep to be completely wrecked >.>

On a positive note, I should be finished with Uni stuff until May very soon. The game is coming along very nicely and once its finished, I’ll spend a day at uni sorting out the report and finish hopefully by the weekend! (at which point I will most likely post some screens of the game. Speaking of the game (you just lost…), I should get back to working on that.

Peace!

Night!

Thats all for now!

Generic Signing Out Phrase!

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Keeping it Short and Sweet

17/04/2011 at 19:13 (Uncategorized)
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I came across this very interesting link today through twitter thanks to @brainpicker. I would most definitely recommend her website. It’s full of curious and interesting  gems of knowledge. It was through that website that I came across my awesome “London Underground Map” Wallet.

Aside from staring at those stars (and wishing I could see it in person), I spent most of this weekend either at work or playing Dragon Age Origins. I’m trying to complete it before moving on to Dragon Age 2 which looks amazing (although apparently not as great as Origins, but I’ll judge that when I play it).

I am so dreading the arrival of May. It’s when everything kicks of again and I feel like I’ve barely had time to stop and relax. The plan for April was to have a decent break before the dissertation begins, but over halfway through and I still have assignments to go which means I still haven’t had the rest I was promised. I am now clutching to the hope that I will get at least one weeks rest at the end of this month. Then I will be rejuvenated and ready to tackle the Dissertation over the Summer.

I finally had my book returned to me. It’s been almost a year since I had this book within my grasps and I was craving to read it for ages. Its an amazing book called Sum. I’m hoping to have a good read of it and plan on it being the “review” piece for next week, but to sum up (harharhar) the book is made up forty short chapters (2-3 pages on average) each detailing a different possibility of what the afterlife is like. It is an amazingly witty and clever book and each interpretation makes you pause to think of its implications and possibilities. But I’ll talk about that more next week. Short and sweet is what I promised and short and sweet (well short at least) is where I’ll leave it.

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Pear Drops and Bad Mouthwash

15/04/2011 at 12:24 (Article Review)
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Yesterday morning started way better than I expected it to considering the events of the night before. I even managed to wake up earlier then I usually do and finish of the two assignments for the most stubborn lecturer I have ever met! He even had problems with the way I printed my programs. On the plus side he did let me correct it. Anyway, before I rant on about him again lets move onto better things.

As planned, I wanted to go through at least one interesting journal article/magazine article/piece of research a week. In a bid to focus my attention onto my dissertation, I thought I’ll start of with the paper that got me interested in the topic. It’s a relatively short paper, so a good way to ease into things, but it is still packed with information. The paper I am looking at is by Steven Strogatz and Duncan Watts and was published in Nature in 1998. It is titled”Coupled Dynamics of a ‘Small World’ Networks” (link).

Small World Networks finds it’s origin in the similarly named Small World Phenomenon, or as most people probably know it, “Six Degrees Of Separation”. It’s essentially the same thing and having equated it to Six Degrees of Separation made it much easier to understand. The basic small world network can be described as both highly clustered as well as having a small path distance. What this means is, the same as what it means in 6 Degrees of Separation, there is high clustering/grouping (like in a normal network) as well as there not being too many steps between any two nodes.

Going along with the social network aspect of things, the paper discusses the collaboration of film actors using data from IMDB as well as looking at (more interestingly to me) the neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the power grid of the western united states.

The paper can seem very dense on the mathematics (considering it’s been written by a Mathematician that’s not exactly surprising), especially in discussing the formation of the small world networks. However, as I understand it, it is not too difficult to grasp what is being discussed. The paper begins by attempting to prove what a small world network is. To do this, they randomly create a load of networks. These range from fully connected “Large world” networks, to completely random networks. The expectation is that normal networks are highly clustered but have high path lengths and random networks have low clustering but have low path lengths. The expectation is that the spectrum between the two will go from low to high path length and low to high cluster size, however there is a point at which this is not true. In comes the small world network. The small world network has a high cluster and a low path length. The important aspect of the small world networks are just a few long-range connections. Those few connections change the whole dynamic of the network.

As mentioned, there are a few real world examples of these small world networks that the paper goes through (worms, power grids and actors…a potent combination). All three of these things present small world properties, the implications of which extend the small world phenomenon past just social network and into nature in general (including, and most fascinatingly, the brain).

Finally to see the functional relationship this has with dynamical systems, the author carries out an experiment where an “infectious disease” is propagated through the networks. They propagate this across a range of networks including small world networks, and the final results indicate that the infectious disease spreads most quickly in a small world network. This fits with the hypothesis however the low number of long-range connections required to make this true was surprising. The paper finishes by saying that this is essentially the beginning and that more research is required. Since the paper was published in 1998, there has been a lot of research into the area of small world networks, most interesting of which is looking at small world brain networks.

There has been a lot of research into this area, and as the worm example in this paper suggests, the findings do show that the brain has small world properties in its neural connections. Most interestingly is the incorporation of small world theory into various potential brain architectures, for example Murray Shannahans’ work on global workspace theory. The small world networks incorporated here are of a different variety to the ones shown in the Watts and Strogatz paper. For example the ones incorporated in Shannahans’ architecture are much more modular and have “hub nodes” (which are when all information to a cluster comes through one specific node in that cluster). Overall, understanding the role of small world networks in the brain could help give us a much better understanding of the dynamics of the brain.

And that’s that! Hopefully that is an informative review. Normally I would do papers that are more recent, however as I said, in a bid to better understand what my dissertation is going to focus on, for the moment at least, I’ll most likely be focused on this topic in these weekly “reviews”.

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Time To Vent

13/04/2011 at 11:57 (University Life)
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While “working” in the library yesterday, I came across an interesting bit of news. 890 jobs in the London Ambulance Service to be axed. 560 of them will be front line jobs. Wow. All I can say is, if your planning on getting into any accidents, don’t. That’s exactly the sort of service that requires job cuts. Sigh.

Anyway, yesterday I attempted to complete the work for two of my modules. The work is due in on the 15th and shockingly, I am done days in advanced. That never happens. I’m lucky if I get done minutes in advanced! It feels oddly satisfying finishing work so early. On the downside however, I have to present my work to my lecturer.

To clarify, the work I am presenting to him are programs. On is for the AI module. That one is an inference engine designed around a pretty basic set of rules. The other is for my Neural Networks module. That is to run a learning algorithm on an MLP network provided.

Now, back to the problem at hand. presenting these to my lecturer. He won’t let us present them on his computer, they have to be on our own laptops. I don’t have a laptop. I have a desktop and there is no way in hell I am lugging that anyway! I know what he would say to. “What kind computer science student doesn’t have a laptop?” Generally the answer to that would be “A poor one”. However, the main problem here is that he doesn’t seem to understand I am not a computer science student! I do cognitive computing! Heavily emphasised on the cognitive aspect!

That’s been the problem all year long. He assumes too much. Most of the people on the MSc don’t have computing backgrounds. One person did law, another is a doctor and two, me included, have psychology degrees. Yet he assumes we know as much as his third year computer science students from the get go. On the plus side, this will be the last hoop I’ll have to jump through for the stubborn idiot. On the down side, I’m not sure it’s a hoop I can fit through. Plus the hoops on fire. Over a tank of acid. With hungry acid breathing sharks in it.

I’m doomed.

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And So, The Journey Begins…

11/04/2011 at 00:59 (Uncategorized)
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… Lets hope it’s not a short journey.

I’ve been planning on starting a blog for quite some time but never really thought I would have much of a focus for it until recently. Even then it’s taken me a while to actually start it. I’m a procrastinator. A terrible, terrible procrastinator. This fact will be quite obviously reflected within my blog. Here’s to hoping that this is the procrastination. Of course “ThePicklesAreFickle” isn’t solely a means of procrastination.  It is primarily going to be about Psychology and Cognitive Science, because in general that is the biggest focus of my life at the moment (as I have mentioned in the about section). The aim here is to review at least one article/study/journal entry a week (to start of with). Of course I am not limiting this blog to only be about Psychology/ Cognitive Science. I would also like it to be about other aspects of my life too. University, my home (London), music, books, games, life, the universe, everything!

… But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

For my first entry I thought I might introduce myself, like that excruciating exercise Group Leaders do to get everyone familiar with each other. God I hate those…

Hi, My name is (<insert Eminem reference here>) Zeeshan. Most people call me Zeeshan or Zee(sh), however I also go by Zeek, Liebie (by one very select person), Pickle (or Pickel thanks to the inactive twitter user who stole the correct spelling) or Shaan (by family members). I am happy to be referred to by any of these (besides Shaan, because lets face it, no one reading this is family), although I prefer Zeek/Zee(sh).

My undergraduate degree was in Psychology with Human Biology. Both of those topics lend themselves very neatly to the topics discussed in the Msc I am doing, and in general, Psychology is the route I would like to take for my PhD (here’s to hoping).

I am currently at university doing a Masters Degree in Cognitive Computing. It is a course that deals heavily in Cognitive Science, and as the name suggests, leans heavily towards the computing aspect of the domain. Cognitive Science in general is very multidisciplinary, borrowing from Psychology, Philosophy, Biology, Neuroscience, Computer Science and Linguistics to name but a few. I absolutely love doing this course because of that very fact. There is always so much to learn and discover from so many different sources. To think, I initially decided to do the course to qualify my computing knowledge which has always been a neglected interest of mine, but a week in and I had fallen in love with Cognitive Science.

Although Academics is something I use heavily to define who I am, for other people I’ve always believed that a great way to tell what they are like is through the music they listen to. This may be pretty superficial (or is it?), but music has always been a core aspect of my identity and I tend to project that onto others. Because of this, I’ve always thought a good way to introduce myself is through outlining my musical tastes.

My favourite band is Alexisonfire (said as “Alexis on fire” not “Alex is on fire”). They are a band that for me have been consistently great from one album to the next, and I can’t think of a single bad song by them. I can think of a few weird ones, but not a single bad one.  Another band who is similarly consistent for me is 30 Seconds to Mars, who I would place in my top 5 bands (if not in second place).

My favourite singer is (forever changing, but currently) Ellie Goulding. As “tame” as that may sound compared to my favourite bands, I could listen to her voice forever and not get sick of it.

My favourite song of all time is “Digital Sea” by Thrice. I could get lost in that song. I have always found that this particular song is very good at putting me in its setting. It’s one of the few songs that I can honestly say makes me feel like I am inside of it (there is innuendo there, I am sure of it).

Another facet of my being can be found in what I read. Talking about what I read has always followed on naturally from talking about the music I listen to. This is purely because a lot of my favourite music attaches itself to my favourite books (and vice versa). I sometimes think that the main reason I hold these songs/musicians/books/authors in high regard is because they’ve attached themselves to things I already enjoy. Favourites by association, if you will. For example, The Alchemy Index by Thrice has attached itself to my favourite book series of all time, The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula Le Guin. Another example is how Lights by Ellie Goulding, and Ellie Gouldings’ voice in general, has attached itself to Egwene Al’Vere, one of the protagonists of Robert Jordans’ The Wheel Of Time series.

Other favourite reads of mine include Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Artemis Fowl, The Wind on Fire series and practically anything by Terry Pratchett. There’s a pattern there. I love to read fantasy, usually ones set in “the past” a la Lord of the Rings, but “the future” is fair game too, for example Neal Ashers Spatterjay series. In general “the present” tends to be neglected in my fictional readings. Maybe that says something about me, maybe it doesn’t (it does).

You know, I think that is enough about me for now (and possibly for ever). To think, at the start I didn’t believe I would have anything to say…boy was I wrong.

But as that famous quote goes, “The first blog is always the hardest”, and with the completion of my first blog (My First Blog sounds like it should be a baby book), hopefully it’s on to easier and better things!

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