Marilyn vos Savant

Marilyn vos Savant (pronounced /ˌvɒs səˈvɑːnt/; born August 11, 1946) is an American magazine  columnist, author, lecturer, and playwright who rose to fame through her listing in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Highest IQ". Since 1986 she has written "Ask Marilyn", a Sunday column in Parade magazine in which she solves puzzles and answers questions from readers on a variety of subjects.
Contents [hide]    
* 1 Biography    
* 2 Rise to fame and IQ score   
* 3 "Ask Marilyn"    
* 4 Controversy regarding Fermat's last theorem   
* 5 Famous columns           o 5.1 The Monty Hall problem           o 5.2 "Two boys" problem    
* 6 Publications   
* 7 References  
  * 8 External links  [edit]
       Biography  Vos Savant was born Marilyn Mach in St. Louis, Missouri to Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant, who had immigrated to the United States from Germany and Italy respectively. Vos Savant believes that both men and women should keep their premarital surnames for life, with sons taking their fathers' surnames and daughters their mothers'.[1] The word "savant", meaning a person of learning, appears twice in her family: her maternal grandmother's maiden name was Savant, while her maternal grandfather's surname was vos Savant. Vos Savant is of German and Italian ancestry,[2] and is a descendant of physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.[3]  As a teenager, vos Savant used to spend her time working in her father's general store and enjoyed writing and reading. She sometimes wrote articles and subsequently published them under a pseudonym in the local newspaper, stating that she did not want to misuse her name for work that she perceived to be imperfect. When she was sixteen years old, vos Savant married a university student, but the marriage ended in a divorce when she was in her twenties. Her second marriage ended when she was 35.  Vos Savant studied philosophy at the Washington University in St. Louis despite her parents' desire for a more useful subject. After two years, she dropped out to help with a family investment business, seeking financial freedom to pursue a career in writing.  Vos Savant moved to New York City in the 1980s. Before her weekly column in Parade, vos Savant wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest for Omni, which contains "I.Q. quizzes" and expositions on intelligence and intelligence testing.  Vos Savant lives in New York City with her husband Robert Jarvik, one of the developers of the Jarvik artificial heart. Vos Savant is Chief Financial Officer of Jarvik Heart, Inc., and is involved in cardiovascular disease research and prevention. She has served on the Board of Directors of the National Council on Economic Education and on the advisory boards of the National Association for Gifted Children and the National Women's History Museum, which in 1998 gave her a "Women Making History" Award, citing "her contribution to changing stereotypes about women."[4] She was named by Toastmasters International as one of the "Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999," and in 2003 received an honorary Doctor of Letters from The College of New Jersey.

 savant sindrom

Savant syndrome (pronounced /səˈvɑːnt/^[1]), sometimes referred to as savantism, is a rare condition in which people with developmental disorders have one or more areas of expertise, ability, or brilliance that are in contrast with the individual's overall limitations. Although not a recognized medical diagnosis, researcher Darold Treffert says the condition may be either genetic or acquired.^[2]
According to Treffert, about half of all people with savant syndrome have autistic disorder, while the other half have another developmental disability, mental retardation, brain injury or disease. He says, "... not all autistic people have savant syndrome and not all people with savant syndrome have autistic disorder".^[2] Other researchers state that autistic traits and savant skills may be linked,^[3] or have challenged some earlier conclusions about savant syndrome as "hearsay, uncorroborated by independent scrutiny".^[4]
Though it is even more rare than the savant condition itself, some savants have no apparent abnormalities other than their unique abilities. This does not mean that these abilities weren't triggered by a brain dysfunction of some sort but does temper the theory that all savants are disabled and that some sort of trade-off is required.

        Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (nama penuh Taqī ad-Dīn Abu 'l Abbās Ahmad ibn 'Abd al-Halīm ibn 'Abd as-Salām Ibn Taymiya al-Harrānī; bahasa Arab: تقي الدين أبو العباس أحمد بن عبد السلام بن عبد الله ابن تيمية الحراني) adalah seorang sarjana Sunni yang lahir (22 Januari 1263 – 1328) di Harran, Turki. Beliau hidup semasa zaman kekacauan yang menyaksikan pencerobohan Mongol. Sebagai seorang yang bermazhab Hanbali, beliau mahu melihat masyarakat Islam kembali kepada sumber al-Quran dan as-Sunnah.

       Ibn Taymiyya was born in 1263 at Harran into a well-known family of theologians and died in Damascus, Syria, outside of the Muslim cemetery. His grandfather, Abu al-Barkat Majd ad-deen ibn Taymiyyah al-Hanbali (d. 1255) was a reputable teacher of the Hanbali school of law. Likewise, the scholarly achievements of ibn Taymiyyah's father, Shihab al-deen 'Abd al-Haleem ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1284) were well known. Because of the Mongol invasion, ibn Taymiyyah's family moved to Damascus in 1268 , which was then ruled by the Mamluks of Egypt. It was here that his father delivered sermons from the pulpit of the Umayyad Mosque, and ibn Taymiyyah followed in his footsteps by studying with the great scholars of his time, among them a woman scholar by the name Zaynab bint Makki from whom he learned Hadith.
Ibn Taymiyyah was an industrious student and acquainted himself with the secular and religious sciences of his time. He devoted special attention to Arabic literature and gained mastery over grammar and lexicography as well as studying mathematics and calligraphy. His scholarly zeal combined with his intense partisanship and hypergraphia led many contemporaries and later observers, most notably Ibn Battuta to consider him mentally unbalanced.^[5]
As for the religious sciences, he studied jurisprudence from his father and became a representative of the Hanbali school of thought. Though he remained faithful throughout his life to that school, whose doctrines he had decisively mastered, he also acquired an extensive knowledge of the Islamic disciplines of the Qur'an and the Hadith. He also studied theology (kalam), philosophy, and Sufism,^[6]. He also refuted the Shia as well as the Christians. His student Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya authored the famous poem "O Christ-Worshipper" which unapologetically examined the dogma of the Trinity propounded by many Christian sects.
His troubles with government began when he went with a delegation of ulamaa to talk to Ghazan Khan, the Khan of the Mongol Ilkhans in Iran, to stop his attack on the Muslims. It is reported that not one of the ulamaa dared to say anything to the Khan except Ibn Taymiyyah who said: "You claim that you are Muslim and you have with you Mu'adhdhins, Muftis, Imams and Shaykhs but you invaded us and reached our country for what? While your father and your grandfather, Hulagu were non-believers, they did not attack and they kept their promise. But you promised and broke your promise.

"program anak angkat dan motivasi upsr"

   

3 days 2 nights at Pengkalan Hulu

         On 30 JULY until 1 AUGUST 2010,form 4 of SMK AGAMA SLIM RIVER has programme at Kg Kuak Luar,Pengkalan Hulu,Perak.This programme between students of SMK AGAMA SLIM RIVER and villagers of KG KUAK LUAR.88 Students of SMK AGAMA SLIM RIVER were adopted to the villagers.They will divided into 27 family.

We live school at 11.30 a.m.We go in 2 bus.After that we stop at R&R Sg Perak for pray and eat,at 2.30 p.m.We continue our along journey at 3.30 p.m to Pengkalan Hulu.We took 6 hours to arrived at there.We arrived in rainy.After that we assamble at DEWAN MASYARAKAT to welcome ceremony from villagers.We divided into a group to go to the each adopted family.

On the first night,we known each other and by told our name hometown.while we ate durians.The next day,we have senamrobik with UPSR student of SKKL and we divided into two group.One group for UPSR Motivation and another one have gotong-royong at DEWAN MASYARAKAT.At evening we visited to the Sekolah Pondok and back home at 7.00 p.m.At night,we have a dinner at DEWAN MASYARAKAT.After that,ust Dr fahmi came and give us lecture for Isra' Mi'raj and finish at 11.30 p.m.


At the next day, we have some gotong-royong to cleaned up mosque and the Sekolah Pondok. our gotong-royong finished at 10 a.m.. Then we have self activity with our family before we back home. My friends and I went to Sempadan Thailand with my family. After that, we packed our thing . We were served with delicious meals by our family. We also were supplied with many thing by our family. We were very sad tu leave our 'family'. The bus leave the village at 4p.m.. We reached at our school at 11p.m..

how to create a blog ...2

how to create a blog ...2

Style
To be completely successful, a report which makes recommendations must ensure that the persons for whom the report is intended:

•Read it without unnecessary delay.
•Understand everything in it without undue effort.
•Accept the facts, findings, conclusions and recommendations.
•Decide to take the action recommended.
Achieving this demands more of you than merely presenting relevant facts accurately. It also demands that you communicate in a way that is both acceptable and intelligible to the readers.

Selectivity

Careful choice of words can enable you to convey many subtleties of meaning.

Accuracy
Check that everything you write is factually accurate. The facts should be capable of being verified. Moreover, arguments should be soundly based and your reasoning should be logical. You should not write anything that will misinform, mislead or unfairly persuade your readers. If you do, you will be doing a disservice not only to yourself but also to your department and organisation. Accurate information is essential for effective communication and decision making.

Objectivity
A report should not be an essay reflecting personal emotions and opinions. You must look at all sides of a problem with an open mind before stating your conclusions.

Making it clear that you have an open mind when writing your report will, in most cases, make your conclusions and recommendations more acceptable to your readers. The emphasis, therefore, should be on the factual material presented and the conclusions drawn, rather than on any personal beliefs, biases or prejudices.

Conciseness
Veni, Vidi, Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered). That is how Julius Caesar reported his visit to our shores. While none of your reports will be as short as this, you should aim to keep them concise. In doing this, do not mistake brevity for conciseness. A report may be brief because it omits important information. A concise report, on the other hand, is short but still contains all the essential details.

To ensure you do not include material which can safely be left out, you should not ask: 'Can this information be included?' Rather, you should ask: 'Is it necessary for this information to be included?'

Clarity and Consistency
The best way to achieve clarity in your writing is to allow some time to elapse between the first draft and its revision. Try to leave it over the weekend, or at least overnight. If you are really under pressure and this is simply not possible, at least leave it over a lunch or coffee break. It is essential to have a period of time, no matter how short, when you can think of other things. In this way, when you come back to the report, you can look at it with a degree of objectivity.

Simplicity
Usually, if your writing is selective, accurate, objective, concise, clear and consistent, it will also be as simple as it can be. You should guard against over-simplifying, for example to the point of missing out information which the reader needs to fully understand what you are trying to say. You should again keep your readers firmly in mind and keep asking yourself whether or not they will be able to follow the logic of your presentation.

Avoid Pointless Words
Some words and phrases - like basically, actually, undoubtedly, each and every one and during the course of our investigation - keep cropping up in reports. Yet they add nothing to the message and often can be removed without changing the meaning or the tone. Try leaving them out of your writing. You will find your sentences survive, succeed and may even flourish without them.

how to write a good report..

How to Write a Good Report


   This short document describes how to write a good report. This is based on common mistakes I have observed over a period of time. While most of the following apply in general, they have been written with BTech/MTech/PhD students in mind.
The comments below apply for course projects, other semester projects, technical reports, theses (BTech/MTech/PhD). That is, technical writing in general. While a google search on the topic may churn out many hits, the following is tailored for IIT (Kanpur) students in particular.
I will first mention some general guidelines, then the structure of the report. Towards the end, I will also describe how to refine your writing, and how to give feedback on others' writing. Based on these, I will recommend a possible strategy for producing high-quality reports which have high potential for being published.

---

General Guidelines
These are some general things you should know before you start writing. I will try to answer the questions of the purpose of report writing, and the overall approach as well.
Purpose of a report: writing to be read
A key thing to keep in mind right through your report writing process is that a report is written to be read, by someone else. This is the central goal of report-writing. A report which is written for the sake of being written has very little value.
Before you start writing your report, you need to have in mind the intended audience. In the narrowest of possibilities, your report is meant for reading by yourselves, and by your advisor/instructor, and perhaps by your evaluation committee. This has value, but only short-term. The next broader possibility is that your report is readable by your peers or your juniors down the line. This has greater value since someone else can continue on your work and improve it, or learn from your work. In the best case possibility, your report is of publishable quality. That is, readable and useful for the technical community in general.
Overall approach: top-down
Take a top-down approach to writing the report (also applies to problem solving in general). This can proceed in roughly three stages of continual refinement of details.

1. First write the section-level outline,
2. Then the subsection-level outline, and
3. Then a paragraph-level outline. The paragraph-level outline would more-or-less be like a presentation with bulleted points. It incorporates the flow of ideas.

Once you have the paragraph-level flow of ideas, you can easily convert that into a full report, by writing out the flow of ideas in full sentences.
While doing the paragraph-level outline, think also about (a) figures, (b) tables, and (c) graphs you will include as part of the report at various stages. You will find that many things can be better explained by using simple figures at appropriate places.
Another thing to nail-down while doing the paragraph-level outline is the terminology you will be using. For instance, names of various protocols/algorithms/steps in your solution. Or names/symbols for mathematical notation.
The overall approach also includes multiple stages of refinement, and taking feedback from others (peers/advisor/instructor). I will talk about these in more detail after talking about the overall report structure.

---

Structure of a report
The following should roughly be the structure of a report. Note that these are just guidelines, not rules. You have to use your intelligence in working out the details of your specific writing.

• Title and abstract: These are the most-read parts of a report. This is how you attract attention to your writing. The title should reflect what you have done and should bring out any eye-catching factor of your work, for good impact.
  The abstract should be short, generally within about 2 paragraphs (250 words or so total). The abstract should contain the essence of the report, based on which the reader decides whether to go ahead with reading the report or not. It can contain the following in varying amounts of detail as is appropriate: main motivation, main design point, essential difference from previous work, methodology, and some eye-catching results if any.
• Introduction: Most reports start with an introduction section. This section should answer the following questions (not necessarily in that order, but what is given below is a logical order). After title/abstract introduction and conclusions are the two mainly read parts of a report.
  
  • What is the setting of the problem? This is, in other words, the background. In some cases, this may be implicit, and in some cases, merged with the motivation below.
  • What exactly is the problem you are trying to solve? This is the problem statement.
  • Why is the problem important to solve? This is the motivation. In some cases, it may be implicit in the background, or the problem statement itself.
  • Is the problem still unsolved? The constitutes the statement of past/related work crisply.
  • Why is the problem difficult to solve? This is the statement of challenges. In some cases, it may be implicit in the problem statement. In others, you may have to say explicitly as to why the problem is worthy of a BTech/MTech/PhD, or a semester project, as the case may be.
  • How have you solved the problem? Here you state the essence of your approach. This is of course expanded upon later, but it must be stated explicitly here.
  • What are the conditions under which your solution is applicable? This is a statement of assumptions.
  • What are the main results? You have to present the main summary of the results here.
  • What is the summary of your contributions? This in some cases may be implicit in the rest of the introduction. Sometimes it helps to state contributions explicitly.
  • How is the rest of the report organized? Here you include a paragraph on the flow of ideas in the rest of the report. For any report beyond 4-5 pages, this is a must.
  The introduction is nothing but a shorter version of the rest of the report, and in many cases the rest of the report can also have the same flow. Think of the rest of the report as an expansion of some of the points in the introduction. Which of the above bullets are expanded into separate sections (perhaps even multiple sections) depends very much on the problem.
• Background: This is expanded upon into a separate section if there is sufficient background which the general reader must understand before knowing the details of your work. It is usual to state that "the reader who knows this background can skip this section" while writing this section.
• Past/related work: It is common to have this as a separate section, explaining why what you have done is something novel. Here, you must try to think of dimensions of comparison of your work with other work. For instance, you may compare in terms of functionality, in terms of performance, and/or in terms of approach. Even within these, you may have multiple lines of comparison -- functionality-1, functionality-2, metric-1, metric-2, etc.
  Although not mandatory, it is good presentation style to give the above comparison in terms of a table; where the rows are the various dimensions of comparison and the columns are various pieces of related work, with your own work being the first/last column. See the related work section of my PhD thesis for an example of such a table :-).
  While in general you try to play up your work with respect to others, it is also good to identify points where your solution is not so good compared to others. If you state these explicitly, the reader will feel better about them, than if you do not state and the reader figures out the flaws in your work anyway :-).
  Another point is with respect to the placement of related work. One possibility is to place it in the beginning of the report (after intro/background). Another is to place it in the end of the report (just before conclusions). This is a matter of judgment, and depends on the following aspect of your work. If there are lots of past work related very closely to your work, then it makes sense to state upfront as to what the difference in your approach is. On the other hand, if your work is substantially different from past work, then it is better to put the related work at the end. While this conveys a stronger message, it has the risk of the reader wondering all through the report as to how your work is different from some other specific related work.
• Technical sections: The main body of the report may be divided into multiple sections as the case may be. You may have different sections which delve into different aspects of the problem. The organization of the report here is problem specific. You may also have a separate section for statement of design methodology, or experimental methodology, or proving some lemmas in a theoretical paper.
  The technical section is the most work-specific, and hence is the least described here. However, it makes sense to mention the following main points:
  
  • Outlines/flow: For sections which may be huge, with many subsections, it is appropriate to have a rough outline of the section at the beginning of that section. Make sure that the flow is maintained as the reader goes from one section to another. There should be no abrupt jumps in ideas.
  • Use of figures: The cliche "a picture is worth a thousand words" is appropriate here. Spend time thinking about pictures. Wherever necessary, explain all aspects of a figure (ideally, this should be easy), and do not leave the reader wondering as to what the connection between the figure and the text is.
  • Terminology: Define each term/symbol before you use it, or right after its first use. Stick to a common terminology throughout the report.
• Results: This is part of the set of technical sections, and is usually a separate section for experimental/design papers. You have to answer the following questions in this section:
  
  • What aspects of your system or algorithm are you trying to evaluate? That is, what are the questions you will seek to answer through the evaluations?
  • Why are you trying to evaluate the above aspects?
  • What are the cases of comparison? If you have proposed an algorithm or a design, what do you compare it with?
  • What are the performance metrics? Why?
  • What are the parameters under study?
  • What is the experimental setup? Explain the choice of every parameter value (range) carefully.
  • What are the results?
  • Finally, why do the results look the way they do?
  The results are usually presented as tables and graphs. In explaining tables and graphs, you have to explain them as completely as possible. Identify trends in the data. Does the data prove what you want to establish? In what cases are the results explainable, and in what cases unexplainable if any?
  While describing a table, you have to describe every row/column. And similarly while describing a graph, you have to describe the x/y axes. If necessary, you have to consider the use of log-axes.
  If you are presenting a lot of results, it may be useful to summarize the main take-away points from all the data in a separate sub-section at the end (or sometimes even at the beginning) of the results section.
• Future work: This section in some cases is combined along with the "conclusions" section. Here you state aspects of the problem you have not considered and possibilities for further extensions.
• Conclusions: Readers usually read the title, abstract, introduction, and conclusions. In that sense, this section is quite important. You have to crisply state the main take-away points from your work. How has the reader become smarter, or how has the world become a better place because of your work?