AI Shack

AI Shack

Over this summer, I’ve been working on a side project: AI Shack.

What is AI Shack? It’s a place where I put simple-to-understand articles/tutorials on computer vision, image processing and robotics.

Why? I never really found any good online resource for this. All I ever found was abstract lecture slides of various universities and academic papers. Not good.

If you’re interested in how computer vision works or robotics, go have a look: http://aishack.in/

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Getting people to work for you

Like I mentioned in the previous post, The Creative Economy, creativity is priceless! At least in terms of money. You can’t pay a person a billion dollars and force him to come up with an alternative to fossil fuel in just one day. It just won’t happen.

Economists and managers worldwide have started tinkering around with ideas. They’re looking for a way to promote creativity in jobs and motivate employees to work better. Motivation theories of the past don’t work for the kind of work needed today. They worked best when people were employed only to do mechanical tasks.

So new theories are being formed. Here are two videos that go into the topic of motivating employees to do their jobs better. Both videos are by Dan Pink. The first one is a TED. The second one goes into more details and the studies being done around the world.

The TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

The illustrated speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

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The creative economy

The Creative Economy

Computers have not been able to generate “creativity”. At least till now. Neither do humans know for sure what “causes” creativity. So you can expect computers to stay that way. So you have an opportunity right there! Something that just cannot be outsourced or delegated to computers.

There’s just a LOT of people getting degrees every year. Some institutes have even been labeled as engineer churning factories. Having knowledge simply doesn’t have the same value it used to have a few decades back. You’ll have to have the knowledge, and actually do something that makes an impact on the lives of others.

Here are a few examples: Facebook has had a pretty BIG impact on the way we use the internet. So has Google’s android phone.

With today’s technology, you have enough resources to create whatever you’d like. You can do things on computers: create movies, design graphics, simulate the human race, whatever you want. And the internet lets you connect with thousands of like minded people almost instantly.

So we have something that is rare, and everyone wants it. Creative output. That’s the currency of the Creative Economy. Oh, by creative I don’t mean just design oriented, or movie making related stuff. Here’s the idea – create something no one has imagined or done yet. We have enough steel plants, clothing companies, and sweetened coloured soda water sellers.

What are your views about this? Was this a pointless argument and knowledge is power supreme? Or is this a part of a paradigm shift?

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Related posts bug in Mystique

Mystique is an awesome theme designed by the people at http://digitalnature.ro/ Over the past few days I’ve been working with this theme, tweaking it and trying to set it up.

And I found a little bug in the theme. On single pages, $post has an unexpected behavior. Its there, but points to the wrong post.

After a few hours of bug hunting, I was able to figure out what was causing this. The flaw was in the “comments” part of the code. The commenting area has a list of “Related posts”. To generate this list, Mystique has to use the $post. Thus, all code after the comments box (like the sidebar, footer, etc) cannot access any post data.

To fix this, go to Theme > Editor in your WordPress installation. And select the theme to edit as Mystique. We’ll edit the “Comments” file… comments.php.

Scroll down to the very bottom of the file. You’ll see some code for related posts. It starts with

if($rp_query && $rp_query->have_posts() && $jquery): ?>

To fix the bug, you need to restore $post to its original value. We’ll do just that. The line of code above checks if there exist any related posts. If it does, it echoes them out with proper formatting.

So add this line just after the if($rp_query… line:

<?php /*MODIFICATION */ $currentID =$post->ID; ?>

Now, we need to restore the $post using this $currentID. And the place to do that is right after the Related Posts work is done. And that happens here:

<!– /related posts –>
<?php endif; ?>

We’ll restore the $post right before the block of text ends. And that is done using:

<?php /* MODIFICATION */ query_posts(‘p=’.$currentID); the_post(); ?>

Here’s what the entire block of code looks like on my screen:

I found this in the latest version of Mystique (v2.3.1) so I’m guessing this has been an issue with past versions as well.

Anyway, I hope you found this useful.

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