Naresh Cuntoor
PhD Candidate and Graduate Research
Assistant
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Monday, January 16, 2005
It has been a while since I cyber-scribbled; chalk it up to inertia. You know how it goes. First you are busy. Then you tell yourself you are busy. And soon enough you start believing yourself – perhaps you really were so pre-occupied that you forgot to take that breath of air 1.3 seconds ago. In any case, today's newspaper provided the necessary jump potential to open the html editor, in OOo -2.0, of course. For the unitiated, that's OpenOffice.org 2.0. An alternative to MS Office. Works reasonably well but it is not immune to crashes. On the plus side, it takes far less disk space. I seem to have an obsessive need to keep as much disk space free as possible. Food for psychoanalyzing, maybe? But I digress.
Back to today's newspaper. I stumble into my office this morning after 4 hours sleep last night (for those who know me, I know it comes as a shock!). Get my “first” cup of coffee – I say “first”, because the count automagically resets itself whenever the number seems excessive! Open the front page of a couple of newspapers to get my dose of the day's news. And I find a familiar face on the front page of the Indian express! Dharmendra, a classmate from primary/high school, is celebrating a successfully completed run at the Bombay marathon. I don't mean celebrate, as in a frivolous showoff of resources or abilities. But is a poignant memorial to Manju, a friend he lost last year.
Manju was gunned down in a disgusting act of violence that cut short a promising beginning. He was an IIM, Lucknow graduate. Dharmendra, wearing a “Remembering Manju” bandana gloriously crossed the finish line. Good show, D. I never knew Manju. But how can you not admire the depth of their friendship and loyalty?
Here's the article as jpegs in two parts: part 1, part 2.
Thursday, December 23, 2004 - Wednesday, January 5, 2005
Two weeks on the road - a coast to coast road trip. Actually a coast to coast to coast road trip! Check out the road trip page for pictures and more!
Thursday, December, 2, 2004
People are making a big deal of Tom Brokaw's departure from NBC nightly news. For example, see here and here. But Maureen Dowd's column in NYT was excellent. A bit of background - each of the 3 major broadcast networks, NBC, CBS and ABC have a half hour news every night. The news itself was a big deal in the pre-internet, pre-cable TV era. Nevertheless, the veteran news anchor trio of Tom Brokaw (NBC), Dan Rather (CBS) and Peter Jennings (ABC) command people's respect and trust (well, to some extent anyway). Brokaw stepped down after 21 years, Rather has announced he'll be signing off early next year. Some people were hoping there would be some diversity after these guys bid their adieus. Seems rather unlikely. It looks like these three white men will be followed by another three white men - Brian Williams is stepping in Brokaw's shoe, all the guys in the running for the CBS seat are white men, and by extrapolation, it is a safe bet that Jennings will be followed by a white man when he steps down (there's no talk of that yet).
An update note - pictures from the Tampa trip are online. Check out the "Pictures" link on the left.
Friday, November 27, 2004
Barbara Walters, the diva of broadcast TV stepped off the spotlight at ABC's news magazine 20/20. And Elizabeth Vargas waltzed onto the stage taking Ms. Walters' place. I can understand that anyone who steps into the shoes of Ms. Walters may want to prove something. Ms. Vargas, however, has sunk to outrageously low journalistic levels in putting together today's "The Matthew Shepard Story." In the days to come, the media will no doubt debunk many of Ms. Vargas' claims, some of them simply irrelevant to the heinous killing of Matthew. To those of you not familiar with the case, back in 1998 in a small town called Laramie in the state of Wyoming, two guys Henderson and McKinney savagely beat Matthew, a young gay man, and tied him to a pole in the outskirts of the town and left him to die. Matthew was found there fully covered in blood, except for the place where tears ran down his cheeks. Five days later, he died. For sure, Matthew wasn't a saint, but he did not deserve to die like that. Nobody does.
The suspects were almost immediately apprehended. When the case came to trial, they used "gay panic" as their defense. Basically, what they were saying through their attorneys was that they killed Matthew because he was gay and he made a pass at them. Friends of the duo testified in court and in the media to their homophobic instincts. To cut a long story short, they were sentenced to life in prison.
And now, six years later, they have changed their story. They claim they were strung out on drugs and lost control. At least, that is what Ms. Vargas cajoled and lead them to say on today's 20/20. The police chief of Laramie got a chance to show his homophobic side while managing to hide it in the drug use theory. Andrew Sullivan, the conservative columnist who has dances merrily to the Republican song got a chance to chime in with a "we should know the truth." ABC got a sensational story out of a shameful, terrible tragedy. Henderson got a chance to make a plea on national TV before appealing his sentence in the federal courts.
Rest in peace, Matthew.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
America's love with reality shows is hot as ever as the new season of the Amazing Race began on CBS last week. Although not as popular as the channel's other reality show, "Survivor," the Race has found some die-hard followers. The reason I like the Amazing Race is its timeless appeal - going to new places, exploring new lands - something that man has done for ages. The Survivor plays up another old theme - the art and science of survival in all its primal sense. People are cast off on a deserted island and they are forced to do whatever it takes to survive. All too stone-age for me. I prefer the plane-hopping, the bickering and scheming of the Amazing Race!
In another kind of reality, the CIA came out with a report today saying some rather unsurprising things. According to the report, the arms trafficking network led by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan provided Iran's nuclear program with "significant assistance," including the designs for "advanced and efficient" weapons components. Incidentally, this is the same Khan that General Pervez Musharaff, the self-appointed Chief of Pakistan, granted official pardon to. For a long time, Pakistan's sale of nuclear technology was an open secret. And then came the scathing report that forced Musharaff's administration to admit that top officials in his country had been peddling nuclear secrets to countries and entities around the world. Strangely enough, no heads rolled after that. Musharaff wagging his finger side to side said, "bad, bad, Khan!" And that was that.
So when this new CIA report says Pakistan provided nuclear assistance to Iran, all I can say is 'Duh!' As before, you can bet your bottom dollar that President Bush will wag his finger from side to side and say, "Bad, Bad, Mush!" (expecting him to say Musharaff is a bit of a stretch). And that will be that.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
A part of the CMU gait data can be found here. The zip file contains background subtracted binary images of 24 people walking on a treadmill. The profile view of the people, walking under two speed conditions labeled slowWalk and fastWalk, is available. The files are in pbm format. It can be read in MATLAB with imread. The original dataset can be found at the CMU HID page.
Please address questions to cuntoor@umd.edu
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Google's foray into the desktop search arena has raised more than a few eyebrows. As before, people are not comfortable with the possibility of someone snooping around and gathering their deepest, darkest secrets or their credit card numbers! Google, meanwhile is assuring everyone that their search tool is not a spyware (you'd be amazed how many of those are on your machine right now! If you're curious, try spybot to find out!). My gripe with this new search tool? It doesn't search pdf or ps files. It can search word documents, outlook email, etc. Given that I have a handful of doc files on my machine, I could easily search the files manually. I don't use outlook or AOL. Is google (or anyone) listening?!
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Veerappan, the notorious bandit, was shot dead in an encounter yesterday. This guy has murdered more than 100 people, killed countless elephants for their ivory, and disrupted the lives of many. The police had set up a special task force to capture him, but he was always one step ahead. After all, he knew the forest like the back of his palm.
A little over four years ago, early in August I was making final preparations for my journey here. July 2000 was pretty hectic as I tried to scramble together things that I might need for my graduate study, including a visa to get here. I was scheduled to fly out of Madras (or Chennai) on the 2nd of August. The plan was to take the train from Bangalore that morning, visit my uncle and his family in Madras, and board the plane that night. Amidst the chaos of shopping and packing and bidding adieus came the news that Veerappan had abducted Dr. Rajkumar, a well-known actor in the state. Fans took to the streets, and Bangalore came to halt that day. This was on the 31st of July. Bangalore police imposed curfew in a bid to contain the violence. The next day, things got worse. Reports and rumours of violence grew thicker by the minute.
Veerappan hails from Tamil Nadu state. He kidnapped Rajkumar who is idolized in the neighboring state of Karnataka. Madras is in TN, about 7 hours by road from Bangalore, Karnataka. So, here I was, in Bangalore, about to travel to TN. And the people of Karnataka had directed their anger at the whole of TN! Oh, joy! We heard that the highways leading out of the city were being blocked. We were convinced that the trains would too. It was only a matter of time. We could hire a taxi, we thought, and make our way in the dead of the night of 08/01. No wait, that's too risky. How about getting a police escort across the state line? someone said. In the end, we decided to simply take the train as planned hoping for safety in numbers. Plus, we reasoned, it was an early morning train; most of the train/road blockers get serious after 8am. We should be out of the state by then.
Thankfully, the train chugged out of the station as scheduled early in the morning. The scene outside the window melted gradually from an urban landscape to rocky hills, and we knew we had crossed into TN. After an unevenful train journey, we reached Chennai Central on time to be greeted with smiles of relief!