SimplyMajestic

Tips for interview with professors over Skype

Here's how you can prepare for a telephone/Skype interview.

1) Prepare to speak "about yourself" for a minute or so. Talk about your academic activities after college (i.e., from the university and above).

2) Mention any significant or notable achievement. For example, top student in class, any medals, any publication, conference attendance, etc.

3) Mention something about your past and current research activities. Leave an impression that you are research-minded and you would like to continue research in area "A" or whatever is appropriate.

4) Do mention that you have interest in a particular area or areas and give a specific example of a research topic that falls under the professor's research field. Avoid being too pushy. Do not only say "I am very interested to work with you"-type statement. If you say so, say why you are interested immediately.

How to write email to a professor

This post is a collection of tips and articles (mostly written by professors). In search of my quest to find a graduate supervisor, I adopted different policy and tried several method of knocking professors. Sometimes they responded, but most of them ignored me. It made me search on the web what I am doing wrong in writing the mails. The goal for this is to find a proper way of writing formal email to which professors will reply positively. I tried to collect different tips and accumulate them here so that I never lost them again. I believe it will benefit me, as well as readers of this post, to get opportunity to work under dream professor.

Before I write anymore, let me again mention this post does not contain my personal suggestions. These are collected from web (mostly from dependable sources) .

As a summary, here is the most effective form of writing email as per my findings.

BusinessWeek tells Why The World Shouldn't Stop Buying From Bangladesh

Charles kenny, an author of businessweek.com, recently writes an article giving his reason for buying clothes and other low cost manufacturing goods from Bangladesh. The question arises recently due to building collapse in Savar, Dhaka which takes away nearly 500 lives. A big buidling called Rana Plaza, which homes 5 garments and a lot of shops, collapsed recently with nearly 4000 man inside it. Afterwards crticism towards the original buyers see a steep increase. In response to these incident and criticism, some western buyers declare not to buy gods from Bangladesh. 
Kenny gives some reason to buy from Bangladesh, here is the article quoted as is.

Jol o jongoler kabbo, gazipur

Some pictures from our visit in the quite resort of jol o jongoler kabbo. They have quite good fooding arrangement.

Shohag premium - not actually scania vehicle

Shohag bus service in Bangladesh has recently launched its premium service, in place of former volvo service, shohag premium. They claim to use scania vehicles in this service. However, its a blatant lie.
Scania bus has been first introduced in Bangladesh by green line bus service. Their scania service is truly remarkable. With three sits in a row, they provide only 27 sits. Their sits are vrry comforr and body of bus is truly elegant. They actually defined the scania standard and craze in Bangladesh.
Impressed by the polish outlook, I fancied to avail shohag premium service recently. However, I was extremely disappointed. At first look I realized this is not the same scania bus as provided by green line. After examining the bus for less than five minutes, I realized the body of bus is not as good as it first seems. my assumption, from the paint, look of surface and sound of sits while the bus moves, is the body is made in Bangladesh. The sits in the first three row is probably taken from old volvo vehicles. Rest of the sits feels same as normal non - ac bus and does not meet the expected quality of scania service.
I do not complain about the body being made in our country, I rather inspire it. My complain is about their excessive charge in the name of scania. I do not like it.
So before you ride shohag premium, please remember you will not get same service as green line scania even though you are probably paying almost same.
(disclaimer: this is my personal observation, your experience may differ from it. My experience may not reflect the real scenario, but this is my experience in shohag premium.)

Bangladesh tops the natural climate danger ranking list

In a recent news published in nature disaster blog, scientists publishes a danger map. In this danger map they showed the natural climate related danger exposed to different countries. Red depicts extreme risk and green depicts low risk associated with a country. Here is the map taken from the article

Bangladesh tops the climate danger list

You can see Dhaka, Bangladesh tops the list, which means Bangladesh is the most vulnerable place to live due to threat of sudden natural calamities. Beside, Bangladesh has a bad law and order situation with very corrupted police force and health professional.

However, I noticed something on the map. The low end of the map is particularly risky in comparison to the upper part of the world. Most of the time this low part of the map is also the lowest income area of the world. Do you think the high income end of the world is saving their back in this case by doing something fishy, both in long term or short term? 

Microsoft is trying to convince me IE 8 provides better malware protection than Google Chrome !!!

You know what, Microsoft is trying to convince me IE 8 provides better malware protection than Google Chrome. LOL too much. I found this today, on msn. 

Don't look at the nice duck, look at the red box at the top. Can you believe IE is better at  protecting you than chrome? I can't.

Greenline (green line) bus service :: not a green experience before hartal

Greenline (or green line) bus service is quite a respectable inter-city bus service in Bangladesh. Many prefers this service for Dhaka to Chittagong / Dhaka to Cox's Bazar (coxsbazar) / Dhaka to Sylhet transportation. Usually they are good but they change their face before hartal (nationwide shutdown imposed by political parties). I was returning Dhaka from Cox's Bazar at the end of February, 2013. The bus was almost full and some foreigners were also travelling with us. We started on Wednesday night and was supposed to reach Dhaka on Thursday early morning. However, due to huge traffic on the highway we were a little late to reach Dhaka suburb. At this time greenline authority shows their angry red face to the passengers.

So, this is how it actually works huh!

The world is not quite what you can think about it. Not positively, not negatively. Whatever you are expecting will not turn out to be the exact case. Mostly things wil surprise you. Each of your action and speech will convey double meaning, though you may not mean them to have more than one meaning. World will not judge you the way it should, no one will be there to pat your back at your mistakes, your wife will start snapping at you, you will start imagine what hell can be, how bitter your friendship were. You will see the end of everything. At times you will have the wish to hang yourself from your seiling
At the same time you will realize someone is passing his /her happiest moment of life, meaning world is rewarding them like once it did to you. Then you will realize this is exactly how the world actually works, like I am realizing at the moment :-(

Google Reader retires

Its my daily practice to log-in to google reader and read selected news from my subscriptions. Today I got the following notification after logging in, which makes me instantly asking myself- why? Why they need to take it out? Google declares it will shutdown its reader service after first July, 2013. I did not expect google to shutdown this extremely useful service, not at all. I would be very happy of google rethinks its decision about shutting down google reader service.

The next question peeking my mind was how am I going to manage these subscription to another news reader. However, unlike this decision, google extends helps in this case. They offered help in the "learn more" link for managing my subscriptions using google takeout (the service google offers its users to download their data, I did not heard about it until today). Though I was expecting a bit clarification service under this learn more link, I did not mind not getting any since I knew for long google does not clarify, they just declares.

Here is what I get from their "learn more" link, copied here because sometime I did not find correct link quickly from their help service.

How can I download my Reader data?

Google Reader will be retired on July 1, 2013. If you'd like to download a copy of all your Reader data before then, you can do so through Google Takeout. You'll receive your subscription data in an XML file, and the following information will be downloaded as JSON files:

• List of people that you follow
• List of people that follow you
• Items you have starred
• Items you have liked
• Items you have shared
• Items shared by people you follow
• Notes you have created
• Items with comments

Click here to start downloading your Reader data from Takeout. Once downloaded, your subscription data should be easily transferrable to another product, where you can continue to keep up with your online reading.

• Mar 13, 2013

My next question is where can I find another news reader service like google reader which would offer same reliability and user friendliness? I will explore other service and will be posting my observations later, hopefully. In the meantime, if you are reading this post and already have an answer, please inform me using the comment box. It will be higly appreciated.

Wordpress theme - Simplistic

How to lie at office. Yes,how to lie.

Original URL: http://images.businessweek.com/cms/2013-01-30/etc_opener06__01__inline605.jpg 'via Blog this'

"Rupkotha" responsive Wordpress theme has been published

A new responsive theme has been published for wordpress platform.
Theme Name: Rupkotha responsive
Features: responsive layout, front page template, admin panel for controlling tabbed slideshow and box content, six post template etc.

This theme is actually built on 'twentytweleve' theme, which is originally built by wordgress team at www.wordpress.org. My contribution is actually a slideshow, box content on any page made with 'Front Page template' and an admin option for that.

See two screenshots for admin panel.
For tabbed slideshow:

For box content:

This theme is free, but you should give credits where and when required.
Please mail me at bojroninad [at] live [dot] com.

however, I will be hosting the theme for direct download very soon.
Till then, adios :-)

Analytics tracking problem in new Blogger template

Recently I have created a new blogger/blogspot blog and inserted a google analytics code I have done it many times before in blogger and never faced any problem (apart from this 'www' problem). However, today I faced a news problem in new blogger templates.

I inserted the tracking code in 'edit html' mode just before the closing head tag

. However, anaytics did not find the code and showed me that tracking is not installed. After some trial and error, I found the following work around.
1. Go to settings » other, find the 'Analytics Web property ID' in Blogger admin dashboard
2. Go to analytics admin dashboard, find your desired web property ID
3. Insert it in the place found in step-01
4. Go to 'Template' in blogger admin dashboard
5. Scroll to the end of page, you will find 'Revert to classic template'
6. Click on it, and revert to classic template
7. Go to analytics admin dashboard, you should see tracking is now in installed state message
8. Come back to Blogger admin dashboard, change your template to any modern template, whatever you wish. You should see the analytics tracking is still working as it did on my case. Check it with some real time data.

And its done. :-)
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