A Dirty way to the Social Media Stardom

Twitter has somehow created a class hierarchy with its verified accounts. Anyone can receive a "blue tick" as long as they have met a certain criteria. Doesn't it sound fancy to have 10K followers when you just follow no one except the God? That is what these unethical/fake Twitter stars are doing by exploiting a flow in Twitter's workflow.

First, you will receive a follow from a star/verified account from some motivational speaker, influencer, marketer, leader, or a king of jungle jiggy bamboo. You follow them back because you are a nice person who follow everyone else back (probably with an exception of obvious bots), or because you feel happy to be followed by a "star-Tweep".

One week passes by. By this time, the star-Tweep would have unfollowed you already. You would not notice, as Twitter does not inform or alert you on unfollowers. On the other hand, the star-Tweep, this is how he/she became the star in the first place. You will still receive their noise in your time line. This is scam also common in YouTube. Not possible in Facebook or LinkedIn, as there the connection option is two-way, unlike the Twitter and YouTube follow. It might be the case with Google+ too. But I never used it long enough to know its tricks. I am not sure about other social media (such as Instagram), as I am not a user.

I use TweepsMap these days to find these culprits. Trust me, every week I have around 5 of these guys. Those with "10 K followers and 5 K following", following me first only to unfollow me within a week after I followed them back.

The last offender was someone (a company, judging from their handle) with "Following: 4,975, Followers: 7.8K", who followed me first to unfollow me within a week after I followed back.

Bye for now, Twitter. You used to be a way to announce "eating salad now", and you have grown up to be a mass weapon for marketing, politics, and all the similar things.

Travels in Portugal

Viseu is ready for Christmas!

I am in my 5th year in Portugal. Finished 2 years of MSc/EMDC, and 2 complete years of PhD/EMJD-DC - and currently in the 3rd year of my PhD with one semester almost complete. I can divide my stay in Portugal into multiple eras:

1) Arrival: The first semester of EMDC (arrival till end of 2012). I was waiting for my grant. Combined with new friends and new country, this was an exciting period.

2) Travels and Fun: The second semester of EMDC (first half of 2013). This was the period I was travelling around and enjoying Portugal. By end of this era, I returned to Sri Lanka, before going to Sweden to continue the 3rd semester of my MSc. I also visited Porto during this time.

(Porto: 25th - 27th of June, 2013) 

3) The return: This is by far the longest period, starting from 2014 new year, my master thesis semester / the final semester of EMDC, and the first 2 years of EMJD-DC, my PhD. This period ended with my departure to the USA for my internship in Emory University, Atlanta.

Portugal was almost like my second home during this era, and I made numerous local and international travels during this time.

  

Among the local travels, remarkably, 

EMDC Summer Evant: (Evora: 12th - 14th, February 2014) 

A random trip to south: (Porto Covo and Santo André: 26th - 27th, September 2014) 

Another random trip to south: (Portimão: 12th - 13th, September 2015)

4) An intermediate era: This marked the end of 2016 and early 2017. A short stay in Portugal following my return from Atlanta and waiting for my departure to Belgium to continue the latter part of my PhD in my second university.

Among the local travels,

A short break: (Viseu: 26th - 27th of November 2016)

It is winter here and enjoying my 5th winter in Portugal.

Naming the papers/projects

The most interesting part of a paper/project is giving it a short name. So far, I had the privilege to name a few papers with interesting names, during my masters and PhD. Given below is a list of my works. This blogs an on-going work, and is not a complete list.

Adjectives
1. SMART
2. FIRM 
3. CHIEF

A view of Óbidos

 
Portuguese Cities/towns
1. SENDIM
2. Óbidos (on-going work)

Abbreviations 
1. SD-CPS (submitted)

Extensions to known frameworks
1. Cloud2Sim / Cloud²Sim

Names surrounding the core technology
1. SDNSim 
2. xSDN 

Names sounding technical
1. MEDIator
2. MediCurator

Animals or birds
1. Cassowary  

Cute names 
1. ∂u∂u 

Made-up names (almost an abbreviation)
1. ViTeNA

Historical names
1. Mayan
 

Worst of LinkedIn: Those who warn of scammers in a scamming way!

So we all know that there are so many scammers in LinkedIn by now. Many of them try to get views or attention to their profile by posing as a recruiter in a city like Dubai or Doha, or by posting silly mathematical questions. The worse is those who fall for this scam, and write down their email address to the public display and to be scrawled by the spam bots. Some just "like" the status, or type "interested" or "pls review my profile", as that is the best way to prove their competent in the posted job.

Worst scammers of LinkedIn

Now the worst kind of scammers: see the above screenshot.

The status, by default, shows only the first 5 lines. For the entire message, you need to press "Show more". Hence, the unsuspecting LinkedIn users give their contact details as they would do for a LinkedIn job posting I discussed before. They would not read and realize that this status was posted as a warning.

I will explain why these guys who attempt to give light to the con recruiters in LinkedIn are the worst. First, if he was genuine, he would have started the message with the warning, such as "Pls do not fall for this type of scams in LinkedIn:", instead of making the warning hide deep below the advertisement. If you go through the comments, almost everyone has given their contact details, with only a very few commenting how others have misinterpreted this gentleman's kind gesture. 

Little did they know that this type of statuses are very common and popular. In fact, they serve the same purpose. Getting more views to your profile. These are worse, as they are made to obviously make fool of those who commented. Besides, this trick can be used by anyone, not just recruiters, hence increasing the potential reach of the scam.

Don't be this guy, who ruins LinkedIn for everyone! I have been unsubscribing from everyone who falls for these shit to keep my LinkedIn sane.

Viseu - a young and thriving Portuguese city

Palacio do gelo

[26th - 27th, Nov] We had a lazy weekend in Montebelo Viseu & Spa a break - mid of busy schedules of PhD, full of deadlines. Winter seems to be already here. Viseu is ready for the Christmas.