hobiger.org Blog

Presentations and table sizes

Mar 9

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in computer | No Comments

When preparing a presentation for a meeting I am skipping tables wherever possible, and replace them by a suitable graph or plot. This helps the audiences the grasp the content more easily and less explanations are usually necessary (given that the plot are made well). But sometimes, its hard to transfer the information of a table into a figure and there’s no other choice than putting values in rows and columns. My personal policy is not to exceed a size of 3 x 3 to give the audience a chance to read the table in a reasonable amount of time. If I have only two columns, I allow myself to go to 5 rows at max. So as a general rule I would suggest not to present more than 10 values totally, plus the corresponding column and raw labels. I have seen many presentations from colleagues who are using tables a lot and some of them display sizes of 10 x 10 or even larger. When I see something like this in a meeting, I usually don’t try to read the table. Not only because the fonts are too small to be read, but just because there’s not enough time to read 100 values and compare them across each other. I looked on the web and saw that Garr Reynolds has assembled some really good examples, although all of them might not be suitable for scientific presentations as they orient rather on sales presentations.

Popularity: 2%

Microsoft inconsistency

Mar 8

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in computer | No Comments

I try to avoid Microsoft products whenever possible, but for presentations PowerPoint is still the best solution for me. Today I prepared a talk for a meeting this week and I tried to add a graph, which I produced in Excel. Thus after tuning the plot inside the spreadsheet I did a classical “copy-paste” action, hoping that the graph appears on the slide as it was inside Excel. But, no way. Not only that most of the formatting (labels and layout) got lost, also lines changed their colour. Why can this happen? I thought that MS apps are “talking” with each other using these objects, which can be embedded in another application. So I tried to re-format the plot for about five minutes and then gave up and produced the figure with gnuplot and imported a JPG in PowerPoint. Now the slide looks professional (its always hard to produce scientific plots with Excel) and since a graphic files is embedded in the PPT file, I don’t have to worry about if the graph changes when I copy the presentation to another PC. Am I just not talented with Microsoft’s way to share information across their products or are they trying to frustrate costumers by offering useless features for their software?

Popularity: 3%

Fedora 12 and CUDA

Mar 5

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in computer, programming | No Comments

Other than in a prior post I found it rather easy to install the driver under Fedora 12 and I even got CUDA working. NVIDIA’s Linux driver installs without any problem and the CUDA Toolkit also installs smoothly. The only issues you have to face are errors of the type
... inline function ... cannot be declared weak
Just comment out those lines in the corresponding header files. I am not sure if and to which error it leads, but until now I could not find anything abnormal in my results. Getting the SDK to work is a much more difficult job, and according to entries in NVIDIA’s Linux forum requires quite a lot of work-arounds. Fortunately I don’t rely on any of the stuff contained in the SDK, and since the FFT libraries, which are the most crucial part of my code, work as expected I am satisfied with that solution. BTW, the CUDA Profiler for Linux has been improved tremendously and offers now really nice functions which help you to get the critical parts of your code tuned to squeeze out maximum performance of your GPU.

Popularity: 19%

Tokyo sky tree has surpassed 300m height

Mar 3

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in Japanese | No Comments

For those of you who don’t know what it is, please check this site for more information about the Tokyo Sky Tree (an English page is available there as well). Anyway, it seems that at the end of the last month construction has reached 304m of building height which is already pretty impressive. But considering that the tower is expected to grow over 600m (634m exactly), there’s still some work left. The tower will be completely dedicated to digital broadcasting, which will replace analog TV in the Tokyo area in July 2011. So there’s still one year left to to put our old TV to garbage and purchase a new (digital) one

Popularity: 8%

Peer review times

Mar 2

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in math, paper | No Comments

As scientists we are expected to publish paper in so-called peer-reviewed journals which is supposed to ensure the quality of publication. Most of the journals are quite well organized and for nearly all my papers I had results from the review process after at least two months. Sometimes it happens that one reviewer takes longer time, so I inquiry to the editor in charge and things are solved a few weeks later. But now I have a paper under review which takes already more than five months without getting any review results. I am not so much concerned about the delay itself, but the implications which arise from it. If the paper is rejected, I think it would be fair to get the information ASAP in order to re-do the research and sum-up the work in a new and better fashion. If the reviewers wants to have only the paper revised, one or more re-reviews might follow which is a time-consuming process again. Thus, one year from the first review until the paper is accepted is nothing in time-scales of research publications. Since most of the journals have many accepted papers in their production pipeline, another year can be over before the article goes into print. Thus the question remains, how up-to-date publications can be when some of the journal have such long delays between initial submission and the time when the paper appears?
I know that there are a variety of journals which have much shorter turn-around times, which allow to publish really “fresh” results without much delay. Its hard to say, where the bottleneck of the peer-review process is located, but whenever I get a paper for review I try to have it off my table (reviewed) as soon as possible, but at least within one month. Also most of the editors do a great job and remind the reviewers about their due times. But sometimes things don’t go well and papers seem to be delayed for an endless amount of time. From the authors point of view this is the most annoying situation as he does not know how to proceed on. Moreover, if the reviews are finally coming after half a year or later, its hard to do the necessary revisions, as most of us have already started to work on new research topics and projects.

Popularity: 8%

Dry air and bad curry

Mar 1

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in Food, travel | No Comments

Last weekend I went to Toyama by ANA since it is the only airline which serves that local airport from Tokyo (Haneda). The first flight HND->TOY took roughly 50 minutes and reading the airline journal in the seat pocket gave me the information that this flight should qualify for free (soft) drink service. Flights shorter than 45 minutes are excepted from such service, but this route should cover it. Anyway, after 15 minutes the seatbelt sign turned off, the stewardess went through the plane with candies and I thought “Hm .. nice start, lets get the drinks ..” but nothing more than the simple lemon candy which I grabbed from the plate was coming. On my return flight, I saw already that trolleys with drinks were put on-board, so I thought that there would be a chance to get something served. This time, the cabin crew started to serve drinks, but started from the back rows. Before they reached my seat, some “turbulence” was announced and the drink service was stopped – better to say – ended. Another ANA flight without anything to drink. When leaving the aircraft we were offered again some candies (together with some apologies), this time I got a strawberry flavoured one – yeah.
BTW, after landing at Haneda I went to a restaurant inside the airport building which was really bad, why I take to opportunity to warn everybody not to go there. I ordered some curry rice, but what I got severed was neither related to curry nor was it tasty. It was totally sour and when I arrived at home, I had to take some stomach medicine to overcome the feeling to vomit at any time…

Popularity: 11%

Where to sit on a plane

Feb 24

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in Uncategorized | No Comments

When I go on a business trip, I have to ride in Economy class and thus for long-haul flights good seating is preferable. I usually arrive at the airport earlier, to be the first in the line at the check-in counter and I always talk to the staff if I can get a good seat. I always check the airline’s homepage for a seat map of my flight or I visit seatguru.com to find a good location to spend 10 hours or more in a narrow seat. In most of the cases I can get an acceptable seat (or I am freely upgraded to business class ) but as a rule of thumb I found out that seats next to the emergency exits are usually not available at the time when you check in. They are opened rather late and are offered to travellers with babies or special needs. But on most of the flights there are vacant seats next to the emergency exit and you can talk to the staff at the gate (not at the check-in counter !) if such chairs are available. It does not hurt and in the worst case you should get a friendly “no”. BTW, showing your frequent flyer card (given that you have one for the airline you are booked on) increases the chances to get a seat next to the emergency exit tremendously.

Popularity: 15%

Presidental aircrafts and Sarkozy’s new toy

Feb 22

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in Uncategorized, travel | 1 Comment

Nearly all of the larger or rich countries operate dedicated planes for giving prime ministers and presidents comfy rides, without the need to be packed into “ordinary” first-class on long-haul flights. The most famous one (i.e. the Air Force One) seemed to have inspired the French president to upgrade an A330 to make it his mobile office during business trips. Compared to other countries that is not overdone, I think. Anyway, even the Austrian press found it worth to mention Sarkozy’s new toy and added spicy comments about the cost of the new interior. First of all I think its each countries decision and should not be criticized at all. And to be honest, if I would be in Sarkozy’s position, I am not sure if I wouldn’t like to have my own flying apartment when attending conferences.

Popularity: 24%

The golden arches on the retreat

Feb 19

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in Drink, Food | 2 Comments

According to a recent article, Mc Donald’s will close hundreds of its restaurants across Japan. I seems that other than the airport outlets, which are at least frequented by American costumers, the shops within Japan suffer from significant sales decrease. Also the recent advertisement campaign featuring “Mr. James” turned out to be a flop. Other American fast food chains, which suffered immense losses in the past years, are already planning to leave the Japanese market entirely. McD mentions the economic recession for their decrease in sales, but I am not sure if this reason accounts for all unsold burgers. I can imagine that Japanese society can’t be as easily trained as the American to eat junk food on a regular base. And even the golden arches with their powerful and aggressive advertising campaigns might crush on the walls of the Japanese food tradition (this is at least my hope )

Popularity: 28%

HD crash and LVM

Feb 18

Posted by Thomas Hobiger in computer | 5 Comments

One of my three hard-disks died overnight in my Fedora machine. When I started the PC today it did not boot and since it seems that large parts of the kernel were located on the disk there appears to be no way to get it work. Moreover, as data is distributed via LVM across all three disks, I can’t use the other two as well. I have tried several options, but I think the most straightforward way will be to do a fresh installation with a new disk and try to mount the other two ones somehow. At least this gives me the chance to switch over to Fedora 12. Although GPU programming might not work, I think its better to switch to F12 and if possible to the GPU stuff on another (dedicated) machine.

Popularity: 41%