Stille Nacht

Xmas is more than just shopping

Suppose they gave a Sale and no one came...

Feliz Navidad

Disfrutando de la lectura

El año que viene haré otra exposición aquí en Berlín. La serie nació por casualidad, de una foto tomada hace seis años y medio de una chica absorta en sus pensamientos en la playa. Tiempo después mi hermana me dijo que, a veces, cuando estaba de guardia y era una de esas noches difíciles, se sentaba al ordenador a ver algunas de mis fotos porque tenían un efecto calmante. Siempre me ha gustado leer y me reconozco en toda esa gente que he fotografiado mientras disfrutaban de un buen libro, la mayoría sin darse cuenta de lo que ocurre a su alrededor y, por ende, no posando para la foto. La foto de arriba me la encontré al salir a la terraza. La vi enseguida en mi cabeza y fui corriendo a por la cámara antes de que el instante mágico desapareciera (algo bastante fácil cuando hay niños de por medio).

Supongo que he tardado bastante en reunir esta serie, pero creo que merece la pena imprimirlas y disfrutarlas en papel, aunque sólo sea por unos días. La exposición será del 7 de julio al 16 de agosto, en el mismo sitio que las anteriores, al fin y al cabo una biblioteca es un lugar muy apropiado para exponer fotos de gente leyendo.

I´m really happy to announce that the Serenity series already has comitted dates for an exhibition!. As mentioned a couple of times, I was by no means in a hurry to have this done. In fact, by next Summer the series will have been over seven years in the making, although most of the time I was not even aware of it myself. But I thought it was about time to print some of these lovely photos. If nothing else, it will be a good excuse to take some more photos between now and next Summer. The dates are from July 7th to August 16th, same place as before here in Berlin.

The year of the MOOCs

Today I took the exam of the fifth #MOOC I have completed in the last year. Even I am surprised of how this last year has evolved. There was no plan behind this, it simply started as a birthday present from my wife in the form of additional "time off" to take one course from MITx and it quickly developed into an addiction, if such a thing makes sense when it come to education.

I was initially attracted to #edx.org through the names of MIT and Harvard. Would I be up to the challenge? Well, it turns out I did well enough on #6.00x for me to be very satisfied. Lucky this did not exist at the time I was at college. I would have struggled with the lectures and the MOOCs :-)

After #MITx's 6.00x (Oct to Jan) I was hooked on MOOCs, so I went on to complete a couple more courses on a different platform, #Coursera. These were Georgia Tech's Computational Photography (April - May) and IIT Delhi's Web Intelligence and Big Data (April - June) before taking the highly acclaimed #Machine Learning from Stanford´s Prof. Andrew Ng , which offered a superb learning experience.

After the Summer break, I have completed Data Mining with Weka, from the Waikato University, which makes the fifth one, plus a couple of others I have audited for some lessons.

All in all I have invested a significant amount of my time on education through MOOCs in the last twelve months. I took much fewer photos this year, I read fewer newspapers and blogs, watched much fewer movies and, in exchange, I focused on something I am convinced it will have a long time benefit, my education. The courses were heavily weighted towards Computer Science, which meant challenging programming assignments beside simply watching the videos and reading additional information.

So what´s next? Well, there is a course about Semantic Web offered by the HPI which caught my eye because of something related to work. Plus there is the XSeries offered by MITx, which I will definitely endeavour to follow. Plus so many others that, again, the problem is making up your mind which one to take. Something I learned this last year is that two MOOCs at a time is one too many for me (tried Harvardx CS50x at the same time as MITx 6.00x and did not work since both demand quite a bit of time, plus I had trouble with Web Intelligence, Computational Photography and Machine Learning partly overlapping for some weeks).

So this was my particular year of the MOOCs. Very enjoyable...

Se acaba el verano...

Este verano empezó algo tarde pero reakmente julio y agosto han sido maravallosos. Con los cientos (miles?) de lagos que hay en Brandeburgo, siempre hay rincones que descubrir.

Scharmützelsee (ii)

I don´t think I have ever seen as many spiders as here. And with very high ceilings, it was impossible to get to them. We did not have any issues with them though, but I´d rather not have them around.

Scharmützelsee

Scharmützelsee is about 40 km from the border with Poland. We have been a couple of times in the thermal pool in Bad Saarow, but always as day trips. A few weeks ago we did a (very) last minute booking and spent a lazy weekend here. We had gorgeous weather and almost everything went well.

Alemaña

Este verano me tiré una semana entera pasando por Spanische Allee y un día descubrí está simpática esquina, muy apropiada para los alemañoles.

Sin embargo, otro día descubrí Guernicaplatz y la placa que explica por qué le cambiaron el nombre a la calle (pista, antes de 1939 se llamaba Wannseestrasse). Por lo que ponía el cartel, al volver las tropas alemanas de la Legión Condor de España, hicieron un desfile en esta calle, que pasó a llamarse Spanische Allee. Si algo hacen bien los alemanes es recordarse ellos mismos las barbaridades cometidas en el siglo XX. Y además sin piruetas lingüísticas, llamando golpistas a los golpistas y reconociendo que Guernica fue el precedente de lo que luego pasaría en Varsovia, Rotterdam, Conventry, Belgrado, Hamburgo, Dresden y Berlin. Doch am Anfang war Guernica...

Ni que decir tiene que después de este descubrimiento la calle dejó de parecerme simpática. La foto la hice un día bajando la ventanilla del coche mientras esperaba en un semáforo. No me apetece ni enderezarla.

Desarrollo en un plano

Cuando estaba acabando la carrera, daba clases particulares por la noche a un chico que era calderero. Recuerdo que una vez mientras le explicaba como hacer desarrollos, me dijo, sí, pero cómo hago esto en el taller? En el papel es fácil, pero estas cosas miden mucho más en la realidad. Y que razón tenía...

Street photography: asking can take you a long way...

I saw this as I was going for a walk with my family. I told my wife I needed a minute to ask for permission and maybe take a photo. The guy was really friendly and relaxed about it so I took the photo and offered to send him a copy by email, which I did a few days later upon my return to Berlin.

Stretching the dynamic range

These days modern cameras have an impressive dynamic range, but IMHO taking this photo directly against the Sun is stretching your expectations more than a bit (just have a look at the shadows of the other people). The background was the Brandenburg Gate.

Film making in Berlin

It cannot be seen on this photo, but this couple was making a video with a teddy bear as main character. I wonder what the video will look like when finished. The background is certainly impressive.

Kanzleramt

Leyendo bajo el sol

Hace poco le mandé esta serie de fotos a la mujer que se encarga de las exposiciones en la biblioteca local. Le gustaron mucho (el tema es muy apropiado para una biblioteca) y quizás me anime a hacer otra exposición con ellas el año que viene si consigo suficientes fotos. Pero no tengo prisa, si no es el año que viene, ya será otro año.

La foto de arriba está tomada en el parque Gleisdreieck en Kreuzberg. Era imposible hacerla sin que me viera así que simplemente pedí permiso. Me sigue sorprendiendo lo fácil que es. Este fin de semana me pasó algo parecido en Leipzig y de dos personas a las que pregunté una dijo que sí.

Sala de espera en Heathrow

A la vuelta de la última vez que fui a EEUU hice escala en Heathrow. Era muy pronto y la sala de espera estaba vacía. Creo que me tomé un cuenco de fruta y me bebí un zumo de naranja mientras que hacía tiempo para el vuelo a Berlín. Sin duda alguna, una forma mucho más cómoda de esperar. Me pregunto como será el de primera clase.

Gleis 17

Cada placa representa un convoy y dice el destino y el número de personas que iban. Demasiadas placas y demasiadas personas...

Mahnmal Gleis 17

En Berlín hay varios monumentos en recuerdo de los judíos. Éste está en la estación de Grunewald, desde la que se deportaron a decenas de miles de personas a campos de concentración y exterminio.

Good bye Google Reader, hello Feedly

Si sigues este blog a través de RSS con Google Reader seguramente sepas que Reader está a punto de desaparecer. Yo acabo de pasarme a Feedly, que ofrece hacer el cambio con un click (y funciona!).

Últimamente he estado más activo en G+ que en el blog (tampoco mucho), así que quizás también quieras echarle un vistazo a mi perfil. En cualquier caso, sigo haciendo fotos, pero últimamente son más de la familia y los amigos, así que no tienen cabida. De hecho, hay una posibilidad de que mi tercera exhibición tenga lugar el año que viene con las fotos de Serenity Project, que le gustaron mucho a la persona que organiza las exhibiciones en mi biblioteca local.


If you follow this blog through Google Reader, note that Reader will cease to exist in a few days. I can recommend Feedly, which offers a (great) one-click migration service. Just tried it myself and I am really happy.

Lately I have been a bit more active on my G+ account than here in this blog. But still taking photos so this blog is not dead, just having other stuff on my mind at the moment.

MIT - Stata Center

Visiting MIT...

On the way back to the airport a few days later, and as you can see from the photo above, I had a bit more luck with the weather. I stopped by in Cambridge once more, as Prof. John Guttag at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory had kindly made time on his schedule to meet me. We talked briefly about my experience taking the 6.00x course and he gave me a signed copy of the Spring version of his book, the one which includes me in the acknowledgements.

Just by chance, I had bought the big book "The Human Face of Big Data" a few days earlier in Hartford (seriously, it´s really big and won´t fit on my shelves!). John Guttag and fellow researcher Collin Stultz appear in this book and their photo was actually taken in the Stata Center. As I needed a photo for an internal newsletter from my company, John agreed to have one taken and he suggested that we do it in the same spot as the one in the book. Quite memorable!

Finally, I also found time to visit the edX offices, just a few hundred meters away. I just showed up to the entrance and asked to see one of the staff, whose name I could remember from the forum discussions. Luckily she was there and, surprised as she was, she took some time to show me the offices and talk about MOOCs and the challenges they are facing. All in all, a great experience before rushing to the airport for my flight back home.

I am very grateful for the effort that goes into making these courses freely available, so when edX asked for stories from students, I sent mine hoping it would be useful. I don´t usually post photos of myself, but I felt this was worth it and I am very happy that my story has been featured on their facebook page.

If you have not done it yet, have a look at edx.org or any other of the platforms offering MOOCs. You will be stunned by the quality of the courses.

Harvard

I walked around Harvard court for a while, but could not enter any of the buildings there (I guess for good reasons). The one I entered outside of the court was the Science Center also walked around the nearby Sanders Theater, where the lessons of CS50x are recorded.

Massachusetts Avenue

I had a quick lunch at the Stratton Student center (not pictured above!) and when I came out, the weather had not really improved much. Initially I had planned to go to the MIT Museum, but seeing that the weather was not that great and that I did not want to drive to Hartford in the night, I decided to skip that and go straight to Harvard for a quick walk.

MIT - Lobby 7

MIT - Under the Great Dome

MIT - Infinite Corridor

I often post panoramas like the one above, stitched together using a demo version I once found of a program called Autostitch, by Matthew Brown and David Lowe from the University of Columbia. I recently was reading how the panoramas are created and found it very interesting. Many thanks to Jan Erik Solem for making the book "Programming Computer Vision with Python" available with a CC license.

MIT - Great Dome

I spent most of my Sunday morning inside this Building, walking up and down the Infinite Corridor and waiting for the snow storm and the wind to finish. I was lucky to find an open door on one of the wings, so I could take this photo of the Great Dome. One of the few places where I have seriously considered having somebody take a photo of me with this as background. For comparison, this idea of having a photo of myself taken did not occur to me in places like Tokyo, Hanoi, Xi'an, NYC, Christchurch or Beirut, to name a few I have visited in the last few years. So finally I kept to the side of the camera that I know best. At least this time as the return trip had a nice surprise waiting for me a few days later...

MIT - Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel

First stop at MIT, battling the wind and the snow (not a good day for outdoor photography). This reminded me of my time as an intern in the aerodynamics lab in my college a long time ago, working with other fellow students to determine the drag polar of a model aircraft. I have very fond memories of that time.

Join edX today and invest in knowledge...

I am a great fan of edX so when they asked students for stories, I sent mine. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who have enrolled on these courses from all around the world, so there was little chance that I would make it through. But here you are, looks like my (very short) story will make it into the edX page in Facebook. Today, the first nice surprise, my face being part of the cover photo. You can check it out here edX in Facebook.

If you haven´t done it before, this is a good time to check the courses available in www.edx.org 

Snowstorm

This is what the next day looked like in the morning. Good thing about Boston, there are plenty of things to see close by. The two at the top of my list were MIT and Harvard. So off I went (driving very slowly) to nearby Cambridge before driving to Hartford in the afternoon.

Freedom Trail (vii)

By the time I took this photo, the blue hour was finished and I was tired enough to call it a day (actually a very long day due to the time difference). Just walked back to South Station and got onto the bus back to the hotel at the airport. Nice that the center of Boston is so small. Easy to understand why it´s called the Walking City.

Freedom Trail (vi) - Quincy Market

I am usually too lazy to retouch my photos. In this case the perspective effect on the tall tower behind Quincy Market is simply a bit too much. So I gave the perspective tool in Gimp a try.

I am quite convinced that this sudden interest in correcting perspective has to do with me recently reading about image warping here. But I wonder if I have not stretched the Market and the tower a bit too much...

Freedom Trail (v) - Old State House

Some times I take my tripod for no good reason, just in case, end up carrying it around for hours and never get to use it. Well, not this time. It was already too late for my old camera´s sensor to take these photos just by cranking up the ISO (too much noise) or holding the camera by hand (exposure too long, i.e. blurred image for sure). And there came the tripod to the rescue...

Freedom Trail (iv)

Something that always gets my attention are these churches buried in between high rise buildings. The churches are not small, it´s just that the buildings around are huge.

Freedom Trail (iii)

Freedom Trail (ii)

Freedom Trail (i)

If you don´t have much time in Boston, one easy option is just to go for a walk along the Freedom Trail. So that´s what I did. It was not that cold and, thankfully, it was not windy (unlike the following day...)

This was my first stop, the House of Representatives, as seen from the Boston Common.

Best investment

I've been in the USA this past week. I had the chance to visit downtown Boston quickly on Saturday right after my arrival. Although I was tired from the trip and the time difference, I forced myself to get out of the hotel and go for a quick tour. Good that I did, because I found this plaque and, maybe not my best photo ever, but I could not agree more to it.

More tk...

Winter holidays

This year the winter holidays started a bit later than originally planned because of an unexpected trip to Scotland (outbound flight on Friday at midday and back in Berlin on Saturday night a week ago). There are no photos of that trip, as it was a typical business trip i.e. from the airport straight to the office, work till late, out for quick dinner, early morning start and then back to the airport and home after a stopover somewhere. I was told the day before that I would be travelling, but at least this time it was not to the other end of the world.

And now, the week of vacation is finished and it is time to get back into the routine...

Python & applying knowledge gained in an MOOC

I recently saw this at a school biology lab here in Berlin. When I read the (very) old label and noticed that these were two pythons, I took my blackberry and snapped the photo above. There was a teacher next to me so, rather apologetically, I explained that I had recently finished a programming course and that the name of the language was Python! She smiled at me and probably thought I am nuts. Maybe. Maybe not.

But I actually wanted to write about something else today. There is a lot of hype about MOOC´s and all the stuff that can be learnt these days for free. But learning without applying your knowledge later is sort of useless. OK, you get a certificate (and apparently mine from +edX will be ready tomorrow!), but that is not the whole point of doing a course, is it? In contrast, most of what I read about Raspberry Pi´s are actual applications of what people are doing with it. You don´t buy a Pi just to tick a box of cool things to own, but because you have a project in your mind and you are itching to get started with it. It should be the same with programming. 

I am happy to say that I have already applied some of what I learnt on 6.00x at work. I have developed a simple search tool which actually makes life in my department a bit easier. It allows to search a huge repository of documents from an old system in a way which was not possible before. It is not rocket science, and surely many a professional programmer would find ways to do this in quicker and more effective ways. But it works and it reduces search times from hours and hours to a few minutes. And I have the feeling this is just the start. I recently came across this book and, time permitting, I already have something else in my mind. Again, it is not about learning Python for the sake of learning. It is what we can now do. And I have a feeling it is a lot that we can do!

So how are you applying the knowledge gained from whatever latest MOOC you took?


PS: I know, Python did not get its name because of the animals...

MIT - 6.00x

Quite predictably, I passed the exam and the course. Actually, I got an A, which is sort of nice thinking which institution is behind the course. From the stats I´ve seen, literally thousands of people did drop half way through the course. So finishing it and passing is, by no means, a given. Even less getting the top grade. 

So thank you to my wife for this wonderful birthday present. And now it´s time to apply the newly gained knowledge...

MIT - 6.00x Final Exam

Just got the e-mail that the exam window is now open. In my case, I have been in bed for the last few days with a persistent cough and I am late with reviewing, which now looks like it will mostly happen on Saturday. I have already passed the 55% line anyway, thanks to my scores on the mid term exams and the problem sets, so it is really a matter of honour to try and get a nice grade (the final is worth another 40%), but knowing I am already through definitely takes some pressure off (which maybe also explains why I am so late with reviewing). I am currently planning to take the 6.00x final exam on Sunday morning, for which the instructions say I should plan four hours. That´s a full morning and leaves me Sunday afternoon to relax. And probably to start thinking which course to do next...