Let’s get rid of HIV: The presidential way!

Greetingz. The World AIDS day was on 1st of December, and I had twittered this: “I request on this #WorldAIDSday that all those infected with HIV voluntarily ask to be castrated and exiled to an isolated land forever.” as my status.

That statement yielded very negative reactions from some people but when these very people were asked to provide a better alternative…they shared none.

Basically my idea is this:

We impose mandatory medical test to identify all those infected with HIV.

We make sure they can no longer have children

Send them to an isolated place with food being air-dropped

Within at most 100 years, all the HIV+ people would have died, effectively taking away the virus with them.

The challenges:
Some people are very sensitive and prefer that we all live with the risk of catching the virus rather than taking drastic measures as listed above. They will prefer that we keep spending loads of money in HIV-related medical research (yielding nothing much so far) when this money could have saved lives in many other ways and improve our quality of life.

The origin of the HIV virus is still a mystery…Does it really come from those chimps? If yes, we need to eradicate all those infected as well. If it did come from some labs as some rumors claim, those resposible should be taken care of.

Of course, this is in no way close to a research paper…so no referencing and statistical data yet. But a good review and analysis about why my proposed idea will or will not work will be a really nice piece of litterature. Any volunteer?

As promised, the Great news!

Firstly , my parents have successfully flown to Saudi Arabia for Hajj (muslims’ pilgrimmage) on Sunday 15th of November and they are doing well.
As a consequence, I am now the temporary chief of the house This directly translates into: I can cook whatever I want!

The other great thing: I got my MSc dissertation result. 84%! Thus another milestone has been reached and successfully jumped over I wish to seize this opportunity to thank God and EVERYBODY (even those who are sure they have not helped me…but trust me, you all have, unknowingly :p). I am now looking forward for my PhD which I am planning to start next year. (If you are an academic and you have funds for a project related to Computer science – Web Science -Social Computing, do get in touch ).

And another good news: a new experimental blog from the presidential media department: webnewsmoris (web news for mauritius) http://webnewsmoris.wordpress.com aimed at delivering news about blogs, twitter and other places on the web by fellow mauritians in the mauritian local dialect (creole) was launched. Despite a small controversy over the content of one of its post, the new blog has been largely accepted as a first of its kind among mauritian blogs and the experiment was a success. From the response of readers, we have positively identified a demand for such type of news collected from grass-root Mauritian Web users. Unfortunately this positive experience could not be sustained for a longer time period due to a lack of personnel and the time-commitment required. However we are open to suggestions and are willing to recruit volunteers to work on webnewsmoris.

Hope you are all preparing yourself for the year 2010 which will be indeed a challenging one for many among us. Enjoy yourself guyz!

Great news coming soon :)

Greetingz my people! Summer is here, the sun shines making it great during the day and a nightmare at night when the bats take over the night’sky and my litchi tree But hey, there are some some great news as well! On my counter I have at least 3 of them right now :p
But as some say, the fruit of being patient is sweeter, so you will have to wait and I will wait too for the appropriate moment. Until then I hope you are all having a nice time. Stay connected

Holidays over!

Greetingz all. Change of plan… I’ve put a premature end to my holidays this month by joining the University of Mauritius as research assistant on a contract ending March 2009 2010. It was a good opportunity to get some research experience, so i seized it! The project I am working on is about asset tracking for the university using RFID.

Collecting my degree certificate from UoM

On Friday we went out for some shopping. But first on the list of task for the day was to collect my degree certificate from UoM. Since they do not indicate where the different offices are, except for the cash office (they make sure you know where to pay!) I had to ask the staff there where I should go to take my certificate. I was redirected to the examinations office, 1st floor above MCB. Presented my national ID and I was asked for my student ID as well…luckily after one year I still remembered it :0510007. To my amazement, I was told that they cannot deliver my certificate until I repay my debt of R12 that I owe to the library :S And I never borrow books from the library…I don’t even know the procedure to borrow books! But this did not convince the staff…so I went to the library and asked them to check what I really owed them and obviously they did not find anything about this debt of mine. In fact I was told that they delete all past-student accounts in case the students do not owe them. They gave me a clearance form to submit to the exams office which I did and I obtain my certificate…I was not so interested to see it so it’s only when i was back in the car that my mum opened the envelop only to find that my name is now ’sahir’ and I got a third class…I rushed back to the exams office and told them about their mistake which they took very lightly and pulled out my certificate (I checked it on the spot this time: Sheik Mohammad Roushdat Ally Elaheebocus, first class with honours…). They even had a sense of humour to tell me ‘ou pena nanrien pou payer! oune fini al paye librarie talere la?’ (you don’t have anything to pay! have u paid the library earlier?)

Back to base, I am in Mauritius

Hello everybody!
I returned to Mauritius this weekend after a one year tour in UK for my MSc. It was an enriching experience. So for the time being as stated in my previous entry, I will be granting myself some holidays. And will make an effort to blog and share some interesting aspects of my UK trip.
To people who compare students who have attended a local university in Mauritius with those who have studied abroad, I say: While studying abroad does provide you with more opportunities to develop your different skills and in some way force you to be more independent, the most important player is the individual himself/herself. All these can be achieved in Mauritius as well, it is all in our minds and hands. Thus people should not use this ’study abroad/study locally’ to taunt those who do not have the means to pay for big universities and it should not be used as an excuse to justify the immaturity of some young people either…It is all about us and how we choose to be.

Some holidays finally ;)

Greetingz my dear people With my final MSc dissertation submitted I am now trying to enjoy some well-deserved holidays. In fact right before the end of my BSc I joined a company and stopped working only one week prior to my postgraduate studies in the UK. The original plan was to get into PhD right after the MSc (October 2009) but it looks like the higher power wanted me to have a break so I’ll be hunting for PhD opportunities in 2010 instead. Until then I plan to enjoy myself a bit doing little…a facebook application, preparing my PhD proposal, trying to start a ’small’ company and of course spending loads of time planning my rule over planet Earth :p

This blog is still alive, so is your future president ;)

Greetingz…I should be in bed right now, but I thought I better give you the good (bad for some) news; this blog is still active and so am I
In fact it has been updated through tweets on the left column of this blog from time to time and will continue to be. As for the lengthy posts that I used to write, well, I am currently writing up my dissertation so less time for writing here (more time for watching movies though). But don’t worry, I have great ideas coming up
I hope you guyz are all ok and having fun

Current location: Southampton, UK.
Blogging device: Laptop

A mauritian blogger in the news!

The president has been informed through confidential sources that a local newspaper (lexpress) intends to publish an article in their magazine by the end of this month about “blogs de femmes”.

While guys tend to enjoy more technical stuff (from my personal observation), girls enjoy keeping diaries. As a result, before the advent of Web logging (shortened to blogging some time afterwards), guys were designing their own personal web pages that required atleast some html knowledge while the girls found it easier to write in paper-based diaries and were thus able to concentrate more on the contents.
As a result, the technies were able to reach a wider audience with poor quality content while the better quality ones were restricted to personal girls’ diaries locked in a drawer…

Blogs changed that! Web-based applications such as WordPress’s and Blogger’s platforms empowered people with even zero html knowledge to publish content online with pictures as easily as preparing an article in a word editor on your computer. And thus, we find both guyz and gurlz on equal footage, able to concentrate on high quality content while reaching a worldwide audience.

In Mauritius, even with about 100 blogs, a sizeable number of local bloggers are girls, and their writings are very much appreciated; I will go on to say that they simply write better than their male counter-parts. But no worries guyz, you are still ahead on topics related to technology, and news related post since girls tend to write about girlish topics, poems and romantic stuffs :p

Well, let’s move to the motivation of this post itself: The female blogger to be featured in lexpress’ magazine this month:
I have the pleasure to present to you : Miss Aniisah whose blog url is: http://aniisah.wordpress.com and guess what, her blog turned 2 years old yesterday 8th of June.
An extract of her first post :

Well here I am!!! Finally I should say. It has taken me long enough. The main reason I wanted to have a blog is not to lose the habit of writing. Back to college years, I used to write an average of four essays per week! Now that I am at the University…read more

In the article she will be speaking about her motivations behind blogging, what she usually talks about in her blog post and the main purpose of her blog itself. So if you want to read her answer, let’s wait for the magazine to come out now

A small note to conclude: I have not been asked to advertise this event by anyone. I have done so simply because Aniisah is a good friend of mine and as fellow bloggers we should be proud that the mauritian blogosphere is becoming known! Congratulations anii and happy birthday to your blog!

Autoblogging: Where pervasive computing, semantic web and web 2.0 meet!

Greetingz!

Exams and coursework are now over. Discussed with my supervisor for the first time about the dissertation and he was happy with the topic I proposed: Autoblogging.

Autoblogging is all about aggregating data from sensors and other devices such as smartphones, car navigation systems…etc, analyse these data and present them in the form of blog posts.

The main reason behind this topic is: I like to blog but I feel lazy am too busy to blog. Thus my idea is to have blog posts produced automatically on my behalf, and probably I will add only a few personalised words in them   Although it will not be possible to come up with a system that can blog about everything yet (mainly because we dont have many intelligent home appliances and devices) but atleast it will be a first brick t0wards that vision of mine

Feedback and advice are as usual, very much appreciated

Presidentially yours,
Roushdat.