So the State Bank of Pakistan has reduced the discount rate to 10.5%. My better half was commenting on how the media likes to air their opinions and interpretations about news related to economics, science or any such technical field while being rather clueless about it. Close to public holidays such as Eid and New year, unrelated events are declared to be gifts to the nation. One such example in Urdu is the phrase قوم کو عید کا تحفہ....
I was walking through my department library today and some old thickly bound volumes caught my eyes. They turned out to be archives of the official journal of the University of Cambridge dating back to the late 19th century. I picked up the 1905-06 journal and look who I found there! (you can take a look at where he lived in Cambridge here)
Taking a break from writing up my dissertation, I noticed the hash tag #ReplaceMovieTitlesWithSamosa trending on twitter. It’s getting quite common and you can see such topics trending once a month or so. While people are quite apt at coming up with funny topics, computers just might be good enough for the job. So I made this small JavaScript program which replaces words in movie names automatically and gives you an option to tweet them....
For under $1 million, every high school student in Punjab can have access to a computer. Number of high schools = 5600 (source) Price per computer = 16500 PKR (source) Total = 92,400,000 PKR = 976,206 USD Imagine a whole generation growing up on Khan academy lectures and the Gutenberg library. Imagine these kids using Wikipedia to get both sides of an argument and playing around with Wolfram|Alpha. Imagine them falling in love with physics by appreciating the mysteries of light and getting high on chemistry by designing molecules....
Last night, I took a look at the federal budget for 2012-2013. Apparently we will be spending about 25% in “Servicing of Domestic Debt”. Take a more detailed look here
With the increasing number of “opinion-dispensing apps” which enable Urdu users to write in Unicode out there on the web, there is (or will soon be) a need for getting some meaningful statistics out of the ever-present sentiment of the masses (or at least the web-savvy subset). This calls for resources which enable automatic processing of sentiment, one of which is a sentiment lexicon for Urdu. (For people uninitiated in computational linguistics, a lexicon is just a list of words)....
(random 3 min mspaint sketch)
Twitter API has changed a bit so this post had to be updated. Check the updated post here Topic modelling means detecting “abstract” topics from a collection of text documents. The most common text book technique to do that is using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Simply put, LDA is a statistical algorithm which takes documents as input and produces a list of topics. One catch is that you have to tell it how many topics you want....
2006 وزیر اعظم کےمشیر برائےخزانہ ڈاکٹر سلمان شاہ نےکہا ہےکہ بجٹ 2006-07ء عوام دوست ہو گا2007 آئندہ وفاقی اور صوبائی بجٹ عوام دوست بنائے جائیں۔وزیراعظم شوکت عزیز کی ہدایت 2008 امید ہے حکومت عوام دوست بجٹ پیش کرے گی، صدر پرویز مشرف 2009 متوازن اور عوام دوست بجٹ پیش کیا گیا‘تنویر کائرہ 2010 نئے مالی سال کا بجٹ تاریخی اور عوام دوست ہے، پی پی پی 2011 آئندہ بجٹ عوام دوست ہونا چاہئے، صدر ذرداری 2012 بجٹ عوام دوست ہو گا، صدر زرداری 2013 بجٹ عوام دوست، ٹیکسوں میں اضافے کا عام آدمی پر اثر نہیں پڑے گا: وزیر خزانہ 2014 آنے والا بجٹ عوام دوست ہو گا۔ جس میں غریبوں اور چھوٹے زمینداروں کے لیے بہت بڑی خوشخبری لارہے ہیں۔ پرویز خان خٹک 2015 وزیراعلیٰ شہبازشریف نے کہا کہ وفاقی حکومت نے عوام دوست اورمتوازن بجٹ پیش کیاہے 2016 مالی سال دوہزار سولہ سترہ کا بجٹ عوام دوست ہوگا:وزیر خزانہ 2017 موجودہ بجٹ متوازن اور عوام دوست ہے: وزیراعظم 2018 بجٹ عوام دوست ہے، چیلنج کرتا ہوں اس میں ایک لفظ بھی تبدیل نہیں ہوسکتا: وزیراعظم 2019 وزیراعظم نے عوام دوست بجٹ بنانے کی ہدایت کردی 2020 وفاق کی طرح پنجاب کا بجٹ بھی ٹیکس فری اور عوام دوست ہو گا: ترجما ن پنجاب حکومت 2021 وفاقی بجٹ مثبت اور عوام دوست ہو گا...