Jaska for Mayor

One of the projects that I work on is the compressive imaging camera. This camera uses the recently developed theory of compressive sensing to acquire images in a compressed form, and as a bonus uses only a single photodetector.

The picture above shows me and Dharmpal in the lab after fidgeting with different imaging methods. It is a neat project - and I got to spend some time programming a digital micromirror device (DMD) which is what you find inside you DLP projectors and TVs.

Recently, a media buzz has been generated about the project. You can see various interpretations of our work here:

• USA Today
• Rice Media Site
• Rice PR
• Digg Digg 2
• Phys.Org
• Stumble Upon
• Science Daily
• MSNBC
• Engadget
• Fox News
• Scientific American

Other Languages

• IT News
• DSL
• Popular Mechanics Russia

I will try to keep this list updated as I find more around the web. To see this post en español click here.

After being in Houston for just over a year it has occured to me that we have three summers here. The first summer starts during spring - the weather gets very hot very quickly. The second summer is during the summer. It is hot and humid, even at night it feels like midday. But the best summer of all, is third summer. It feels like what the end of spring feels like in normal climates. We have just embarked upon third summer and the weather today smells like every color in the spectrum.

So I am laying claim on this summer. This will be my summer, and the vacillation that defined the prior summer will be resolved. It is almost as if a new year is beginning. May it be delicious like apples and honey!

Shanah Tovah

So I was recently browsing through Google Scholar to see if it has picked up any paper's with my name on. The way this works, is that Google crawls the web, and when it finds a PDF or other document that it deems to be academic, it adds it to the scholar database.

This is great, but to my surprise, the first entry under my name is a report that Farsheed and I wrote junior year for a class project. We are forward thinkers and at the time, we were trying to solve pitch detection for the next millenium.

It is not too surprising then, that this project report has more citations (one - from Brazil) than any of the papers that have actually been published.

The search also returns another author with my name (he is not a Mayor of course) that publishes in similar journals. Without a doubt we must already be friends on Facebook since that is the best place to find Jason Laska. A nice feature would be a disambiguation tool similar to Wikipedia's for dealing with this.

This report was from my time as an undergrad, but I imagine that even high school students today who have their class projects posted on the web will find that they too are google scholars.

Rich, my advisor, gave a great talk at the TED conference back in February. He shared the stage with everyone from Peter Gabriel and Al Gore to a parrot which spouts funny phrases.

Watch the video!

Other interesting talks for the conference can be seen on the TED Blog.

Occasionally I will post new and exciting ways in which you can help support my mayoral campaign. Today I am proud to announce a web bumper sticker which links to Jaska for Mayor. Show your support by displaying this bumper sticker prominently on your webpage.

use this code in your html files:

The artistic design of this icon has been carefully customized by Farsheed and provides the grassroots look and feel our platform stems from. An abstract, yet striking resemblance to Wentworth sits on the left of the sticker.

Many of you may rememeber the successful yet short-lived business proposal my brother and I dreamed up in the early 90's. It was called Rubberbands and More and the idea was to open a store under that name which only sold rubberbands. While the idea was wildly popular and was voted best small business concept of the 90's, we were never able to collect enough capital to fund the project.

Fast forward to last week. I was driving my Accord, which I call the Idea Accord (in constrast to my dad's Car of Learning), and had a flash of brilliance. I should open a store under the name Parrotphernalia and sell parrot-themed paraphernalia! This is undeniably the best idea I have had in weeks.

To my dismay, a quick googling shows that I am not the only one to have this amazing idea. Here are some already operating parrot-themed paraphernalia stores:

• Parrotphernalia Plus
• Just Parrotphernalia
• Parrotphernalia

and there are countless others. I must admit that I am not shocked by this, it is a brilliant business concept.

Even a search for carrotphernalia on google produces a suggestion for my idea [search carrotphernalia].

All this discussion leads to the obvious marketing question. What is your favorite phernalia?

This is really a welcome to myself for finally entering the blogosphere. I find the term blogosphere a bit misleading - it is well known that the collection of all blogs are composed of opposite hemispheres which rotate in opposite directions and to add further confusion, the internet consists of a series of tubes. As I learn more about the World Wide Web this will all become more clear.

I will use this space to promote my ideas and platform as we move forward toward a better future. So much needs to get done, but so little is actually getting done because I have only been able to modulate my opinions during coffee break. Occasionally I have thoughts on technical things like code - these will be posted in the obvious location. Thank you for your support.