It's that time of the year again...where several experts express their predictions for the new, already strarted, NBA season!
Two of my favourite columns: The Race to the MVP and the Rookie Rankings are two examples of the extensive analysis behind any expert prediction.
Well, as a fan of the game, i would have a go at predicting this year's best of the best. Not that i am an expert like Kenny and Charles at TNT , but i think i can get preety close...well let's see:
1) Eastern Conference Finals:
I have to go with the defending champions, Boston Celtics versus the Cleveland Cavaliers. The champs, although they have lost their best bench player, James Posey, they managed to keep all the other players on the team. On the other side, Lebron James and his Cavs are ready for their big run, which i think will start this year and go on for years to come...
2) Western Conference Finals:
Without a doubt, Kobe and the Lakers are the team to beat this year. They set the standard for the rest of the teams, and i think only the Houston Rockets, with the valuable addition of Ron Artest, will have a chance at competing against the Lakers' super-team.
3) Most Valuable Player (MVP):
I can't really decide between Lebron James and Kobe Bryant for this award...I think it will be close but Kobe will win it because his Lakers will finish with the best record in the NBA for the regular season (which i believe it will be around 65 wins).
4) Rookie of the Year:
For this award i have two players in mind which i think will make the difference for their team, both offensively and defensively: Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls and Greg Oden of the Portland TrailBlazers. If Oden can stay healthy, i believe he can win this award. Otherwise, Rose will not have any problem rising to the top.
5) 2009 NBA Champion:
Finally, the most important award in the NBA, the Larry O'Brian Trophy! I believe we are going to watch a repeat of last year's NBA finals, Celtics against the Lakers, where Los Angeles will get it right this time while its bench will match up and overcome the Celtics' bench force.
Saturday, 8 November 2008
Sunday, 31 August 2008
The Sequels' Curse
Just came back from the movies where i watched the 3rd mummy movie - "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor".
I have to say, altough i enjoyed the first one, the second and especially the third left me wondering why almost every sequel i could remember, while driving back home, failed the fans' expectations which were created after watching the original movies?
I mean, the producers know what it takes to make a successful movie right? The recipe of success is obviously the first movies which introduce the characters and the plot. Then why don't they use the same formula to make another good movie based on the first one?
Well they actually do! They do use the same characters (almost every time) and a different but similar plot (again almost every time). Well where is the problem then?
While reading some dos and don'ts of sequels i started wondering? Is it maybe the loss of the element of suprise that makes the audience to yawn while watching the new mummy? Is is the feeling "I have seen this again, I know what is going to happen" that makes us not laugh while watching a sequel of our favourite comedy?
I even googled it to see if there was a study conducted about this issue but i was disappointed with the returned results. I guess i have to spend some more time searching for finding something that could satisfy my curiosity.
What do you think?What are the reasons that make us hate sequels so much?
p.s The only sequel i liked more than the original movie was Terminator 2: Judgment Day which i believe was a significant improvement from the first one. How about you?
I have to say, altough i enjoyed the first one, the second and especially the third left me wondering why almost every sequel i could remember, while driving back home, failed the fans' expectations which were created after watching the original movies?
I mean, the producers know what it takes to make a successful movie right? The recipe of success is obviously the first movies which introduce the characters and the plot. Then why don't they use the same formula to make another good movie based on the first one?
Well they actually do! They do use the same characters (almost every time) and a different but similar plot (again almost every time). Well where is the problem then?
While reading some dos and don'ts of sequels i started wondering? Is it maybe the loss of the element of suprise that makes the audience to yawn while watching the new mummy? Is is the feeling "I have seen this again, I know what is going to happen" that makes us not laugh while watching a sequel of our favourite comedy?
I even googled it to see if there was a study conducted about this issue but i was disappointed with the returned results. I guess i have to spend some more time searching for finding something that could satisfy my curiosity.
What do you think?What are the reasons that make us hate sequels so much?
p.s The only sequel i liked more than the original movie was Terminator 2: Judgment Day which i believe was a significant improvement from the first one. How about you?
Saturday, 2 August 2008
Five golden rules for a boring presentation
I just returned from this year's Adaptive Hypermedia conference which left me with a bitter-sweet taste after watching all those presentations from a variety of speakers.
On one side, we had some excellent presentations, like two of the keynote speeches: John Riedl's "Altruism, Slefishness and Destructiveness on the Social Web" and Jan Borchers' "Sweet Spots and Baroque Technologies", which were extremely interesting and they kept us wanting more and more.
On the other side, once again we find the majority of presentations, which..yes you guessed it right...they were BORING!
While constantly looking for ways to stay awake, like playing with my iPhone or checking out up-coming cinema movies, i was wondering: "How is it possible, these people to be SO bad in presenting when their work was (most of the time) worth listening and taking into account?"
Well i watched so many of them, and got sooo bored, which resulted in writing this post to express.... my 5 golden rules for a boring presentation:
1) Overload your slides with more information than the audience can digest: It may be hard, but keep adding stuff to your slides until you have covered the whole area of the slide. If you are using pictures, make sure to be small enough so people sitting at the back of the room will not be able to see them. That will also allow you to add more text on the slides!
2) Read word-by-word the content of your slides: Yes that's right. All you have to do is read everything that is on your slides. Don't care if the audience can read it by themselves. I am sure they will fully understand it if you spoon-feed the content to them.
3) Don’t be exciting about what you are presenting: Your mission is to trick your audience into falling asleep while listening to you. Be prepared, that some of them would have slept well on the night before so you may need to give your best if you want to achieve this. But don't worry, the majority of the audience would propably had some drinks during the previous day's excursion and they will not put a fight for staying awake.
4) Talking about your work is better than demonstrating it: Who cares about demos or examples of your work? Talking about it is much better. Demos will drive the audience crazy where listening to you is much more fascinating. If you up for it, try avoiding commas or even full stops. Keep it flowing non-stop, and try to combine it with the 3rd goal for even better results.
5) Assume your audience knows what you are talking about: Assume your work is self-explanatory and simple for everyone to understand! If they don't know your work or if they don't get it, it's their fault! Do not assume, the audience needs guidance and do not put yourself in their shoes. If you understand what you are talking about, that means they get it too.
To conclude on a more serious note, i would like to refer to Dr Dave Millard's seminar "The New Web Literacy" as an example of someone who did NOT follow any of my golden rules, resulting in a failed attempt to deliver a boring presentation...I encourage you to go and have a look. Trust me you will not regret it!
On one side, we had some excellent presentations, like two of the keynote speeches: John Riedl's "Altruism, Slefishness and Destructiveness on the Social Web" and Jan Borchers' "Sweet Spots and Baroque Technologies", which were extremely interesting and they kept us wanting more and more.
On the other side, once again we find the majority of presentations, which..yes you guessed it right...they were BORING!
While constantly looking for ways to stay awake, like playing with my iPhone or checking out up-coming cinema movies, i was wondering: "How is it possible, these people to be SO bad in presenting when their work was (most of the time) worth listening and taking into account?"
Well i watched so many of them, and got sooo bored, which resulted in writing this post to express.... my 5 golden rules for a boring presentation:
1) Overload your slides with more information than the audience can digest: It may be hard, but keep adding stuff to your slides until you have covered the whole area of the slide. If you are using pictures, make sure to be small enough so people sitting at the back of the room will not be able to see them. That will also allow you to add more text on the slides!
2) Read word-by-word the content of your slides: Yes that's right. All you have to do is read everything that is on your slides. Don't care if the audience can read it by themselves. I am sure they will fully understand it if you spoon-feed the content to them.
3) Don’t be exciting about what you are presenting: Your mission is to trick your audience into falling asleep while listening to you. Be prepared, that some of them would have slept well on the night before so you may need to give your best if you want to achieve this. But don't worry, the majority of the audience would propably had some drinks during the previous day's excursion and they will not put a fight for staying awake.
4) Talking about your work is better than demonstrating it: Who cares about demos or examples of your work? Talking about it is much better. Demos will drive the audience crazy where listening to you is much more fascinating. If you up for it, try avoiding commas or even full stops. Keep it flowing non-stop, and try to combine it with the 3rd goal for even better results.
5) Assume your audience knows what you are talking about: Assume your work is self-explanatory and simple for everyone to understand! If they don't know your work or if they don't get it, it's their fault! Do not assume, the audience needs guidance and do not put yourself in their shoes. If you understand what you are talking about, that means they get it too.
To conclude on a more serious note, i would like to refer to Dr Dave Millard's seminar "The New Web Literacy" as an example of someone who did NOT follow any of my golden rules, resulting in a failed attempt to deliver a boring presentation...I encourage you to go and have a look. Trust me you will not regret it!
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Standardize the problems before standardizing the solutions
I am currently attending the Adaptive Hypermedia 2008 conference which is being held in Hannover, Germany.
Today i participated in the User Model Integration Workshop where some interesting presentations and discussion took place.
The main theme around all presentations was the argument of centralised vs distributed user models. Which one should we adopt and why? pros and cons of each one were presented as speakers took turns in supporting one or the other.
What i found interesting was the presentation of Peter Brusilovsky who emphasized, as it stands now, how long is the road on achieving interoperability across the entire web. He made it clear that among peer systems, the centralised approach works perfectly, by having a common ontology and keeping universal common models. But he concluded that the big picture requires a decentralised approach, since various models for every user are located in systems with different data models among them.
The workshop concluded with a discussion where some interesting opinions were heard.
The participants agreed that re-usability of ontologies must be preferred instead of every one creating his/her own every time. Altough, we understand, agreeing on ONE universal ontology is far from realistic, up to 3-4 ontologies should be something we could achieve in order to accomplish a desired Lingua Franca state among the user modelling community.
Furthermore, user modelling standards, like LOM, LIP and PAPI, appear to fade away, since developers just don't care any more how they gather user information as long they manage it and keep their users happy while doing it.
Something that i really found interesting is the lack of consideration for scrutability and privacy issues from most of the workshop presenters. Only one student, whose supervisor is Judy Kay, the driving force for scrutability in user modelling, presented a scrutable solution which allows users to inspect and alter the way they are being modelled. I am glad that my PhD is not only focusing on interoperability, but also shows how we can add a 'scrutable touch' on our implementations while keeping in mind privacy of user information as well.
Another point that worths mentioning, is the fact that no-one is thinking outside the educational domain. All presented solutions were for achieving interoperability inside the educational domain only...But how about the social networking domain, e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.? How about the e-business domain, e.g. Amazon, eBay, etc.? That is another contribution that i think my PhD is bringing to the community.
Finally, every single one implementation presented was following a common (popular) approach: RDF or OWL to describe ontologies, which i agree, and Web Services for systems to communicate and exchange user information between them, which i don't fully agree. Why use such an 'advance solution' when a simpler one that fits the same purpose is available. The RESTful approach is covering its ground against SOAP-based implementations. Facebook, Google's OpenSocial, Amazon and eBay are all providing RESTful APIs. So why don't we as well?
I think the right questions were being asked today and a common understanding of various existing problems which we are facing has been developed. So why don't we build an ontology to map all these identified problems before every one of us goes away and attempts to solve them in their own diverse way? I mean...where we all agree is when identifying these problems; where we disagree is how we should go about solving these problems. Maybe what we should do, is standardize the problems before wondering why we don't have standardized solutions...
Today i participated in the User Model Integration Workshop where some interesting presentations and discussion took place.
The main theme around all presentations was the argument of centralised vs distributed user models. Which one should we adopt and why? pros and cons of each one were presented as speakers took turns in supporting one or the other.
What i found interesting was the presentation of Peter Brusilovsky who emphasized, as it stands now, how long is the road on achieving interoperability across the entire web. He made it clear that among peer systems, the centralised approach works perfectly, by having a common ontology and keeping universal common models. But he concluded that the big picture requires a decentralised approach, since various models for every user are located in systems with different data models among them.
The workshop concluded with a discussion where some interesting opinions were heard.
The participants agreed that re-usability of ontologies must be preferred instead of every one creating his/her own every time. Altough, we understand, agreeing on ONE universal ontology is far from realistic, up to 3-4 ontologies should be something we could achieve in order to accomplish a desired Lingua Franca state among the user modelling community.
Furthermore, user modelling standards, like LOM, LIP and PAPI, appear to fade away, since developers just don't care any more how they gather user information as long they manage it and keep their users happy while doing it.
Something that i really found interesting is the lack of consideration for scrutability and privacy issues from most of the workshop presenters. Only one student, whose supervisor is Judy Kay, the driving force for scrutability in user modelling, presented a scrutable solution which allows users to inspect and alter the way they are being modelled. I am glad that my PhD is not only focusing on interoperability, but also shows how we can add a 'scrutable touch' on our implementations while keeping in mind privacy of user information as well.
Another point that worths mentioning, is the fact that no-one is thinking outside the educational domain. All presented solutions were for achieving interoperability inside the educational domain only...But how about the social networking domain, e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.? How about the e-business domain, e.g. Amazon, eBay, etc.? That is another contribution that i think my PhD is bringing to the community.
Finally, every single one implementation presented was following a common (popular) approach: RDF or OWL to describe ontologies, which i agree, and Web Services for systems to communicate and exchange user information between them, which i don't fully agree. Why use such an 'advance solution' when a simpler one that fits the same purpose is available. The RESTful approach is covering its ground against SOAP-based implementations. Facebook, Google's OpenSocial, Amazon and eBay are all providing RESTful APIs. So why don't we as well?
I think the right questions were being asked today and a common understanding of various existing problems which we are facing has been developed. So why don't we build an ontology to map all these identified problems before every one of us goes away and attempts to solve them in their own diverse way? I mean...where we all agree is when identifying these problems; where we disagree is how we should go about solving these problems. Maybe what we should do, is standardize the problems before wondering why we don't have standardized solutions...
Sunday, 27 July 2008
NBA Player Movement 2008-2009
As with every year, NBA teams are looking to become stronger, faster and smarter before the start of the next season with additions of free-agent players or by trading key players with other teams.
Although the summer and the pre-season is still long, some significant trades and free agents' signing has tricked me into thinking, as it stands now, who can win it next season.
3: Toronto Raptors obtaining Jermaine O'Neal has to be in number 3 spot in this year's player movements. O'Neal will add value and strength to Toronto's front line and along with Chris Bosh will hope to take the Raptors a step further in this year's playoffs.
2: Although, it can not be considered as a trade or a new signing, the debut of Greg Oden with the Portland TrailBlazers can be seen as an introduction of a new player in the team, therefore i think it fits in this discussion. Furthermore, the rookie Jerryd Bayless who won this year's best summer league player award makes the Blazers a significant force to be reckoned with.
1: Without a doubt, the signing of free-agent James Posey by the New Orleans Hornets has been the highlight of this year's movements! The two-time champion with Miami and Boston can bring an eclectic range of options to the Hornets. If Byron Scott lets him do what he does best, coming off the bench and shutting down the opposite team's star-player, while continuing to shoot high percentage 3s, the Hornets will be West conference champions this year.
Although the summer and the pre-season is still long, some significant trades and free agents' signing has tricked me into thinking, as it stands now, who can win it next season.
3: Toronto Raptors obtaining Jermaine O'Neal has to be in number 3 spot in this year's player movements. O'Neal will add value and strength to Toronto's front line and along with Chris Bosh will hope to take the Raptors a step further in this year's playoffs.
2: Although, it can not be considered as a trade or a new signing, the debut of Greg Oden with the Portland TrailBlazers can be seen as an introduction of a new player in the team, therefore i think it fits in this discussion. Furthermore, the rookie Jerr
1: Without a doubt, the signing of free-agent James Posey by the New Orleans Hornets has been the highlight of this year's movements! The two-time champion with Miami and Boston can bring an eclectic range of options to the Hornets. If Byron Scott lets him do what he does best, coming off the bench and shutting down the opposite team's star-player, while continuing to shoot high percentage 3s, the Hornets will be West conference champions this year.
Saturday, 26 July 2008
The Dark Night
Yesterday i watched the latest Batman movie called The Dark Night.
I was waiting for this movie since i first saw the trailer some months ago..
Some exciting news also made it more attractive compared to all previous Batman movies...
First it was the reaction of Jack Nicholson when found out that another actor was selected to play the role of Joker. As revealed, Jack was furious when Heath Ledger was given the role of the famous villain, the Joker, in the new Batman movie.
Secondly, it was the tragic news of Ledger found dead in his appartment before the movie was released, caused from a possible drug overdose...
Surely, that initiated some reactions from the public. How is it possible, with such a huge success waiting around the corner, the actor to commit suicide in such a 'stupid' way?
Well i got my answer yesterday!
A brilliant performance from Ledger, overshadowing Christian Bale who played the Batman role. Ledger brought a new level in the villains category offering a range of emotions to the audience. An outsdanding, hate-to-love or love-to-hate (which one are you?), performance that, i am sure, has marked the Batman era!
I wouldn't be suprised if Ledger gets an Oscar nomination, or even win an award, especially when, rumour has it, his death was caused due to his 'deep-acting' commitment to the role of Joker.
You can see it in the big screen, Ledger was turned to something else...He wasn't Casanova anyomore nor that confused guy in Brokeback Mountain. He was something else...Fear, pitty, admiration, anger, you name the emotion, Ledger delivers it in the movie!
A 9/10 from me and definetely added on my list of best movies ever, along with Seven, The Devil's Advocate, Forrest Gump and Two for the Money
I was waiting for this movie since i first saw the trailer some months ago..
Some exciting news also made it more attractive compared to all previous Batman movies...
First it was the reaction of Jack Nicholson when found out that another actor was selected to play the role of Joker. As revealed, Jack was furious when Heath Ledger was given the role of the famous villain, the Joker, in the new Batman movie.
Secondly, it was the tragic news of Ledger found dead in his appartment before the movie was released, caused from a possible drug overdose...
Surely, that initiated some reactions from the public. How is it possible, with such a huge success waiting around the corner, the actor to commit suicide in such a 'stupid' way?
Well i got my answer yesterday!
A brilliant performance from Ledger, overshadowing Christian Bale who played the Batman role. Ledger brought a new level in the villains category offering a range of emotions to the audience. An outsdanding, hate-to-love or love-to-hate (which one are you?), performance that, i am sure, has marked the Batman era!
I wouldn't be suprised if Ledger gets an Oscar nomination, or even win an award, especially when, rumour has it, his death was caused due to his 'deep-acting' commitment to the role of Joker.
You can see it in the big screen, Ledger was turned to something else...He wasn't Casanova anyomore nor that confused guy in Brokeback Mountain. He was something else...Fear, pitty, admiration, anger, you name the emotion, Ledger delivers it in the movie!
A 9/10 from me and definetely added on my list of best movies ever, along with Seven, The Devil's Advocate, Forrest Gump and Two for the Money
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