Saturday, December 24, 2016

Footprints on the sands of time;

A Psalm of Life

Related Poem Content Details

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers, 
   Life is but an empty dream! 
For the soul is dead that slumbers, 
   And things are not what they seem. 

Life is real! Life is earnest! 
   And the grave is not its goal; 
Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 
   Was not spoken of the soul. 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, 
   Is our destined end or way; 
But to act, that each to-morrow 
   Find us farther than to-day. 

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, 
   And our hearts, though stout and brave, 
Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
   Funeral marches to the grave. 

In the world’s broad field of battle, 
   In the bivouac of Life, 
Be not like dumb, driven cattle! 
   Be a hero in the strife! 

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! 
   Let the dead Past bury its dead! 
Act,— act in the living Present! 
   Heart within, and God o’erhead! 

Lives of great men all remind us 
   We can make our lives sublime, 
And, departing, leave behind us 

Footprints, that perhaps another, 
   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, 
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, 
   Seeing, shall take heart again. 

Let us, then, be up and doing, 
   With a heart for any fate; 
Still achieving, still pursuing, 
   Learn to labor and to wait.

Friday, November 4, 2016

A piece of earth where nothing has ever happened

by Fayyaz Minhas.

I looked on it
A beautiful, flat, green piece of earth
It told me that
No man has ever stood on it
It has stayed a virgin
It belongs to no country
And is sacred to no faith
Only an occasional cow or sheep comes
From elsewhere
kisses it with its lips and trims the grass
It has never been pierced
By flagpoles
Or By spears
Only rain flows on it
The creeking water tells it stories of the world
But No blood has ever fallen on it
Nor any tears!
Snow covers it during the winter
And dandelions bloom in spring
It sees some aspen leaves in autumn time
But that is all that ever happens on it
I wanted to step on it and make it mine
And I would have, had it existed!

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Corruption 101: Curriculum Revision for Pakistani Higher Education Institutions

Corruption 101: Curriculum Revision for Pakistani Higher Education Institutions
By
Dr. Fayyaz Minhas

(Notice to the reader: Parts of this article are satirical in nature)

The moral code laid down for us states that we are a nation who, when we see an evil,  are required to stop it with our hands or our words or, if these fail to do the trick, make ourselves believe in our hearts of it being an evil so that we do not start liking it. Looking around, or under the carpet if you are curious, reveals that we are not implementing this value system either deliberately or by inaction. I have often wondered where does corruption come from? How does it get to grow and prosper and get transferred from one generation to another? This is particularly surprising to me as I have, in my years working with DNA sequences, never found genes that are scientifically proven to be responsible for the genetic transfer of deceit or corruption from ancestors to offspring. These monstrous bundles of cuteness we call Children are innocent. How and when do they learn to grow up to be corrupt without any formal education on the subject? It is even more surprising because the subject matter taught in our schools contains hardly any notion of how to be corrupt. Teachers, for the most part, teach us to be gentlemen and ladies and expect us to maintain a high standard of discipline, truthfulness, honor, dignity, uprightedness and faith. At least those were some of the qualities my school evaluated on in addition to academic grades. Children are reprimanded for lying, cheating in exams, for stealing, for hiding the truth, for soiling their uniform, writing love letters, stealing library books*, etc. Our schools and universities even issue "Character Certificates" to whom and whosoever it may concern proudly attesting the high moral standards of almost everyone who holds any office in Pakistan. If these certificates were true and the intellectual output of our spiritual parents was what is stated on paper, then we would not have any bribery, thievery, manipulation or other vices in our society. There wouldn't be any need of audits or tax collectors. The cases of land ownership that go pending for generations in our legal system would be decided overnight. Our police would just be there to watch over and provide meals to people who turn themselves in after committing an honor killing. There wouldn't be ghost schools or electrical "kundas". People would be more accepting of other religions and wouldn't use a verse in their scripture to nail their neighbor to the cross to occupy his land. Pakistani researchers would be doing top notch research without any need of Dr. Hoodbhoy writing boring articles titled "Enough PhD's, thank you!" and sounding like a broken record. There wouldn't be any child kidnappings or stolen body organs. Swiss banks would be dry. Our alcoholics, on the way back from the bar, would go and get themselves whipped not to satisfy their kinks but their conscience. Our military wouldn't need to regularly rescue our nation from the edge of a precipice and, of course, our media would have nothing to question! No province or parts of the same province would complain of being treated unjustly and we may still have some road signs in Bengali. But I have not seen these. There must be something wrong. 
If all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail. Being an academic with some experience in curriculum design, I feel that whatever the underlying problem is with us -- it can be solved by education. Our institutions have been inculcating moralities in their students both directly and indirectly. Direct approaches include courses such as Professional, medical or engineering ethics in our higher education institutions. Indirect methods include penalizing students for immoral behavior, negative grading of copied assignments, etc. However, these "soft" techniques have had little success. I am of the opinion, and I believe that others would agree too, that moral training in schools actually has an undesired effect that students who take these lessons too seriously become too "qanooni" or "by the book" or unrealistic and then suffer at the hands of others in our society. It is commonly seen that such righteous or stalwart (read foolish!) people end up bitter and lonely with few "salams" given to them. They may end up retiring to a small house that may or may not own. They are mighty proud but aren't much liked by those around them. Our Pak and pure society spits such people out like one does when he or she accidentally eats a piece of paper sticking to candy. Parveen Shakir says in her poem "Misfit" that most of our offices require as a precondition for appointment that we resign our soul and conscience. People who oppose on principle are cast aside, put behind bars or they may go missing altogether. All this potential is wasted. This calls for a revision of our curriculum to make it more inline with our societal requirements and to improve our human resource potential by improving its effectiveness and performance in life as it is lived here. 
I propose that we replace the outdated ethics and morality course in our curriculum and excise out such components from other courses as well with more hardcore methods given in this article. I do not claim that the proposal made in this article can solve each and every problem we have but I do feel that it would go a long way in addressing some of these. My proposal is to introduce a set of LIFE courses in our higher education institutions. The objective of these courses is to enable our youth to survive, thrive and carry on with our moral legacy that we have inherited from our great forefathers. 
A break down of LIFE courses is given at the end of this paragraph. During bachelors, students will be required to take two courses per semester from this set. I am quite confident that such skills, if taught correctly, will significantly improve the earning potential of our graduates.
Year-1
LIFE101: Fundamentals of Corruption: Aims to introduce how to be corrupt and how to slow poison the conscience. This course should preferably be taught by an experience corrupt person. 
LIFE102: Basics of Hypocrisy:The only clear thing about this course is its title. It's aim is to introduce how to say what we do not mean or plan to do. 
LIFE103: Information Manipulation: Aims to introduce information hiding from others and preventing transparency in organizations. Examples can include hiding labor laws, service rules, or rights from future employers or how to lie to your boss.
LIFE104: Politics: No description needed. A moron can do this.

Year-2
LIFE201: Legal Corruption: I must admit that the title of this course does not say what the course is about. It does not talk about corruption in our legal system as that is against the law. Instead this course aims to introduce how to be corrupt without violating any laws.
LIFE202: Managerial Manipulation: This is a course for future bosses. It aims to introduce how can one manipulate and exploit his or her employees. It will also focus on how to use official positions for personal gains -- from employing office sweepers and drivers at home to submitting project proposals that do not given the country anything but guarantee an extension of service. It can also involve things like how not to delegate and take credit for everything even if it has been done by someone else.
LIFE203: Exploitation Patterns: This is a study of existing patterns of exploitation of vulnerabilities in both systems and people.
LIFE204: Advanced Politics and Lotacracy: Again, no description needed. Just needs an imbecile.

Year-3
LIFE301: Money Laundering: How to ensure that your kids are billionaires before they can count to 10 -- not that they need to count at all!
LIFE302: Bribery and kinship: How to make personal connections and money to work for you! How to benefit your family by getting them jobs without regard to merit or get one for yourself.
LIFE401: Interpersonal skills for future corruptors: Teaches personal communication skills so you know people who matter if you could not become one yourself. Special emphasis on "TC" and bottom-kissing.
LIFE420: Tax and Audit Evasion: How to exploit loopholes in the tax and monetary systems. Example applications include how to get people to pay more than they should. How to double or even triple tax? How to force leasees or consumers to pay your taxes for you.

Year-4
LIFE430: State Corruption: How to maintain our state corruption culture. How to spend state exchequer for personal gains. Examples include how to sell state provided X-ray films to private X-ray machine operators in black or getting funds for a project that the country cannot pay for and may not require just to further your own service.
LIFE440: Publishing and Research in Corruption: Specialized towards research paper publishing. How to write good research articles that are not captured as plagiarized articles or how to form citation rings or force authors of a paper you review to cite your papers and other tricks of the trade.
LIFE450: Teaching methodologies for corruption: Preparing teachers who can teach corruption -- both directly by lessons and by personal example.
LIFE495: Domestic Corruption: How to lie to your spouse and exploit him or her or each other's families. How to ask for dowry and how to keep a smiling face to Khala Sosan whom everyone despises.

LIFE666: Thesis Research in Corruption or Internship

Examination and Grading Criterion for LIFE courses and Certification
The students will be required to pass these courses in a very competitive exam. However, only those students will deserve an A who pass without appearing in the exam by using their knowledge of the skills taught in these courses.
Each course should include assignments and quizzes. Plagiarists who are not caught should be given bonus marks.
A higher education institute should issue a calligraphic diploma of these courses to all those who pass instead of the aforementioned and meaningless "Character Certificate" in addition to a strong letter of reference for all A graders!


The author would welcome your criticism and addition or modifications in the proposed curriculum and wishes all the students good luck!

--

* The write was once "caught" for allegedly writing a love letter to one of his class fellow in 7th grade. The writer denied any such activity and, to this day, stands by this statement though he did have a crush on her. Another time was when he was caught for stealing library books. He proudly admits that he first came across the opening statement of this article in an Urdu book he stole from his school library.

Corruption 101: Curriculum Revision for Pakistani Higher Education Institutions

Corruption 101: Curriculum Revision for Pakistani Higher Education Institutions
By
Dr. Fayyaz Minhas

(Notice to the reader: Parts of this article are satirical in nature)

The moral code laid down for us states that we are a nation who, when we see an evil,  are required to stop it with our hands or our words or, if these fail to do the trick, make ourselves believe in our hearts of it being an evil so that we do not start liking it. Looking around, or under the carpet if you are curious, reveals that we are not implementing this value system either deliberately or by inaction. I have often wondered where does corruption come from? How does it get to grow and prosper and get transferred from one generation to another? This is particularly surprising to me as I have, in my years working with DNA sequences, never found genes that are scientifically proven to be responsible for the genetic transfer of deceit or corruption from ancestors to offspring. These monstrous bundles of cuteness we call Children are innocent. How and when do they learn to grow up to be corrupt without any formal education on the subject? It is even more surprising because the subject matter taught in our schools contains hardly any notion of how to be corrupt. Teachers, for the most part, teach us to be gentlemen and ladies and expect us to maintain a high standard of discipline, truthfulness, honor, dignity, uprightedness and faith. At least those were some of the qualities my school evaluated on in addition to academic grades. Children are reprimanded for lying, cheating in exams, for stealing, for hiding the truth, for soiling their uniform, writing love letters, stealing library books*, etc. Our schools and universities even issue "Character Certificates" to whom and whosoever it may concern proudly attesting the high moral standards of almost everyone who holds any office in Pakistan. If these certificates were true and the intellectual output of our spiritual parents was what is stated on paper, then we would not have any bribery, thievery, manipulation or other vices in our society. There wouldn't be any need of audits or tax collectors. The cases of land ownership that go pending for generations in our legal system would be decided overnight. Our police would just be there to watch over and provide meals to people who turn themselves in after committing an honor killing. There wouldn't be ghost schools or electrical "kundas". People would be more accepting of other religions and wouldn't use a verse in their scripture to nail their neighbor to the cross to occupy his land. Pakistani researchers would be doing top notch research without any need of Dr. Hoodbhoy writing boring articles titled "Enough PhD's, thank you!" and sounding like a broken record. There wouldn't be any child kidnappings or stolen body organs. Swiss banks would be dry. Our alcoholics, on the way back from the bar, would go and get themselves whipped not to satisfy their kinks but their conscience. Our military wouldn't need to regularly rescue our nation from the edge of a precipice and, of course, our media would have nothing to question! No province or parts of the same province would complain of being treated unjustly and we may still have some road signs in Bengali. But I have not seen these. There must be something wrong.

If all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail. Being an academic with some experience in curriculum design, I feel that whatever the underlying problem is with us -- it can be solved by education. Our institutions have been inculcating moralities in their students both directly and indirectly. Direct approaches include courses such as Professional, medical or engineering ethics in our higher education institutions. Indirect methods include penalizing students for immoral behavior, negative grading of copied assignments, etc. However, these "soft" techniques have had little success. I am of the opinion, and I believe that others would agree too, that moral training in schools actually has an undesired effect that students who take these lessons too seriously become too "qanooni" or "by the book" or unrealistic and then suffer at the hands of others in our society. It is commonly seen that such righteous or stalwart (read foolish!) people end up bitter and lonely with few "salams" given to them. They may end up retiring to a small house that may or may not own. They are mighty proud but aren't much liked by those around them. Our Pak and pure society spits such people out like one does when he or she accidentally eats a piece of paper sticking to candy. Parveen Shakir says in her poem "Misfit" that most of our offices require as a precondition for appointment that we resign our soul and conscience. People who oppose on principle are cast aside, put behind bars or they may go missing altogether. All this potential is wasted. This calls for a revision of our curriculum to make it more inline with our societal requirements and to improve our human resource potential by improving its effectiveness and performance in life as it is lived here.

I propose that we replace the outdated ethics and morality course in our curriculum and excise out such components from other courses as well with more hardcore methods given in this article. I do not claim that the proposal made in this article can solve each and every problem we have but I do feel that it would go a long way in addressing some of these. My proposal is to introduce a set of LIFE courses in our higher education institutions. The objective of these courses is to enable our youth to survive, thrive and carry on with our moral legacy that we have inherited from our great forefathers.

A break down of LIFE courses is given at the end of this paragraph. During bachelors, students will be required to take two courses per semester from this set. I am quite confident that such skills, if taught correctly, will significantly improve the earning potential of our graduates.
Year-1
LIFE101: Fundamentals of Corruption: Aims to introduce how to be corrupt and how to slow poison the conscience. This course should preferably be taught by an experience corrupt person. 
LIFE102: Basics of Hypocrisy:The only clear thing about this course is its title. It's aim is to introduce how to say what we do not mean or plan to do. 
LIFE103: Information Manipulation: Aims to introduce information hiding from others and preventing transparency in organizations. Examples can include hiding labor laws, service rules, or rights from future employers or how to lie to your boss.
LIFE104: Politics: No description needed. A moron can do this.

Year-2
LIFE201: Legal Corruption: I must admit that the title of this course does not say what the course is about. It does not talk about corruption in our legal system as that is against the law. Instead this course aims to introduce how to be corrupt without violating any laws.
LIFE202: Managerial Manipulation: This is a course for future bosses. It aims to introduce how can one manipulate and exploit his or her employees. It will also focus on how to use official positions for personal gains -- from employing office sweepers and drivers at home to submitting project proposals that do not given the country anything but guarantee an extension of service. It can also involve things like how not to delegate and take credit for everything even if it has been done by someone else.
LIFE203: Exploitation Patterns: This is a study of existing patterns of exploitation of vulnerabilities in both systems and people.
LIFE204: Advanced Politics and Lotacracy: Again, no description needed. Just needs an imbecile.

Year-3
LIFE301: Money Laundering: How to ensure that your kids are billionaires before they can count to 10 -- not that they need to count at all!
LIFE302: Bribery and kinship: How to make personal connections and money to work for you! How to benefit your family by getting them jobs without regard to merit or get one for yourself.
LIFE401: Interpersonal skills for future corruptors: Teaches personal communication skills so you know people who matter if you could not become one yourself. Special emphasis on "TC" and bottom-kissing.
LIFE420: Tax and Audit Evasion: How to exploit loopholes in the tax and monetary systems. Example applications include how to get people to pay more than they should. How to double or even triple tax? How to force leasees or consumers to pay your taxes for you.

Year-4
LIFE430: State Corruption: How to maintain our state corruption culture. How to spend state exchequer for personal gains. Examples include how to sell state provided X-ray films to private X-ray machine operators in black or getting funds for a project that the country cannot pay for and may not require just to further your own service.
LIFE440: Publishing and Research in Corruption: Specialized towards research paper publishing. How to write good research articles that are not captured as plagiarized articles or how to form citation rings or force authors of a paper you review to cite your papers and other tricks of the trade.
LIFE450: Teaching methodologies for corruption: Preparing teachers who can teach corruption -- both directly by lessons and by personal example.
LIFE495: Domestic Corruption: How to lie to your spouse and exploit him or her or each other's families. How to ask for dowry and how to keep a smiling face to Khala Sosan whom everyone despises.

LIFE666: Thesis Research in Corruption or Internship

Examination and Grading Criterion for LIFE courses and Certification
The students will be required to pass these courses in a very competitive exam. However, only those students will deserve an A who pass without appearing in the exam by using their knowledge of the skills taught in these courses.
Each course should include assignments and quizzes. Plagiarists who are not caught should be given bonus marks.
A higher education institute should issue a calligraphic diploma of these courses to all those who pass instead of the aforementioned and meaningless "Character Certificate" in addition to a strong letter of reference for all A graders!


The author would welcome your criticism and addition or modifications in the proposed curriculum and wishes all the students good luck!

--

* The write was once "caught" for allegedly writing a love letter to one of his class fellow in 7th grade. The writer denied any such activity and, to this day, stands by this statement though he did have a crush on her. Another time was when he was caught for stealing library books. He proudly admits that he first came across the opening statement of this article in an Urdu book he stole from his school library.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Fix Integrated Webcam stopped working in Windows 10

So I have been using windows 10 and have troubles with using the integrated webcam for my Dell Studio 1558 Laptop. The camera would just stop working and I learned how to fix it.

For the fix, go to the device manager and see if the integrated webcam is listed under imaging devices. For my case it was not listed there, however I could see a couple of "Other Devices" and an ambiguous looking device under "Universal Serial Bus Controllers". What I did is to uninstall ALL devices listed under these categories one by one and restarted the computer. The camera worked fine after that!

Good luck!

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Munir Niazi

اس شہرِ سنگ دل کو جلا دینا چاہیے​
پھر اس کی خاک کو بھی اُڑا دینا چاہیے​
ملتی نہیں پناہ ہمیں جس زمین پر​
اک حشر اس زمیں پہ اٹھا دینا چاہیے​
حد سے گزر گئی ہے یہاں رسمِ قاہری​
اس دہر کو اب اس کی سزا دینا چاہیے​
اک تیز رعد جیسی صدا ہر مکان میں​
لوگوں کو ان کے گھر میں ڈرا دینا چاہیے​
گُم ہو چلے ہو تم تو بہت خود میں اے منیر​
دنیا کو کچھ تو اپنا پتا دینا چاہیے​

Inspiration: Naeem Bukhari


Inspiration: Dr. Adib Rizvi














Saturday, May 21, 2016

مقدمہ الفاظ

Words on trial
(منظرِ عدالتِ الفاظ)
عدالت بھری تھی لفظوں سے 
جرم بھی
مجرم بھی
مدعا بھی
واقعہ بھی
معصوم اور
ملزوم بھی
قاتل اور
مقتول بھی
سچی باتیں
جھوٹے بول
سب پیش ہوئے
وکیل بڑھے
گواہوں سے
سوال ہوئے
کٹہرے میں
قانون کے
معانی کھلے
سزا تو جزا میں نہ بدل سکی لیکن
منصف نے یہ فیصلہ دیا
"!حرفِ گناہ بے گناہ ہے"

(Fayyaz Minhas)

Monday, February 8, 2016

Bibliography or Reference Management in LaTeX using Zotero Standalone

I use LaTeX for writing paper but it can be rather difficult, especially for beginners, to add citations and Bibliography. For this purpose I use Zotero Standalone which is an awesome software for reference management. It has a plugin for MS Word. However, for LaTeX, the citations need to be added manually. There are some automated tools available but I could not find an easy to use or dependable one. So I describe a process that you can use to add citations and bibliography directly in your LaTeX document from Zotero.

Adding Citations

Adding citations manually in LaTeX from Zotero is a pain. However, the process described below will make it a breeze for you. It contains the following steps:


  • Installing bibtex-citep.js

Download the bibtex-citep.js translator from here (http://pastebin.com/UNVexqKc). Great work by these guys! This translator will allow you to easily cite the paper using a simple drag-drop procedure in your LaTeX file. However, first we need to install it. Place the downloaded file in the "translators" folder in Zotero standalone.  You can access this folder by opening Zotero Standalone and navigating as (see image below): Tools > Preferences > Advanced (tab) > File and Folders (sub tab) > Show Data Directory. This data directory contains the "translators" folder.




  • Restart Zotero
  • For exporting citations as \cite{...} from Zotero, you would need to set the export mode of Zotero to bibtex-citep. You can do this as follows: In Zotero, Go to Tools > Preferences > Export (tab) > Select Export Format (drop down menu), select "bibtext-citep" and click OK.
  • Now you can add citations from Zotero directly. To do this you can select a paper in Zotero and drag-drop it in your opened LaTeX file in a text editor and it will create a \citep{...} citation automatically. If you want \cite{...} or \citet{...} you can manually edit the name of the field in your text editor. An alternative way is to click on the paper in Zotero to select it and then press Ctrl+shift+C to export the citation to the clipboard which can then be pasted anywhere you like.

Adding Bibliography

Adding bibliography requires a simple export of the Zotero Library as BibLaTeX. This can be easily accomplished by Clicking on File > Export Library. An "export" dialog will appear and you can simply select "BibLateX" as the format and click OK.It will ask you where to save the bib file and what name to give it. You can choose any name (say, "mybib.bib") for it and save it in the directory containing your LaTeX sources. You can then simply add "\bibliography{mybib}" to your LaTeX file and compile your LaTeX source.

If you do not want to export your whole Zotero library, you can choose to create a collection or add specific tags in Zotero to the papers that you cite or use in your LaTeX document and then export only that collection by right clicking on the collection in the left pane of Zotero Standalone. You can read more about Collections and tags hereAlternatively you can use the following python script to get a cleaned up bib file containing the bib entries for the citations you have in your paper. It takes the zotero exported bib file and a bbl file generated by LaTeX from the zotero bib file to create another bib file containing only the cited entries. This output file can then be used in your LaTeX document.

Enjoy!


# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Created on Sun Jan 18 12:23:36 2015

@author: Afsar
"""
from pyparsing import nestedExpr
import re

bbl = '.\paper.bbl' #input bbl file
bibin = '.\mybib.bib' #zotero bib file 
bibout = 'outbib.bib' #output file containing only the citations used

B = []
with open(bbl,'r') as fbbl:
    for ln in fbbl:
        if 'bibitem' in ln:
            B.append(ln[ln.find('{')+1:-2])

fields = []
i=-1
with open(bibin,'r') as fbibin:
    for ln in fbibin:
        if ln and ln[0] == '@':
            i+=1
            fields.append('')
        if i<0:
            continue
        fields[i]+=ln

entries = {}       
for f in fields:
    hdr = f.split(',')[0].split('{')[1]
    entries[hdr]= f

with open(bibout,'w') as fout:
    for b in B:
        try:
            fout.write(entries[b])
        except KeyError as e:

            print e,':',b