Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Monday, October 21, 2013

The Muslim Blogger

After having read a lot, and after having written to some extent, I presume that I should also write a few words about The Muslim Blogger. The website is owned by (a) Muslim person(s), of course. The aim of this is to help people to develop websites using WordPress. The administrators help people in doing that for free. Moreover, they offer free plugins that render a more Islamic look and feel to the website. This sounds cool. They also claim to offer some more stuff but I am not sure if I understand everything. Apart from that they have various sections on their website which are full of useful resources. These include tips and tactics to becoming better writers, ways to enhance website traffic, search engine optimization strategies, guideline for writing e-books and becoming authors, nice alternatives to google's AdSense, and a lot of motivational advice. 

I have been browsing the website time and again and I have found it to be quite informative. They also help in one-click sort of hosting and installation of the website on a number of web hosting platforms. HostGator is one of them. One of the problem with these guys is that they are not as efficient as the guys at Wealthy Affiliate are. I mailed them a number of times with my queries and questions, but I am still waiting for a response. Although I hope that I would get a reply any time soon.

Search Engine Optimization

I have been in to too many fascinating things over the last couple of days. This has kept me unusually busy over the weekend. The temptation to keep on so great that I had to abandon so may things. And the time elapsed very quickly. Actually from the moment I signed up with wealthy affiliate, I have had to read non-stop. Added to that was the temptation coupled with compulsion to act on what they had advised. That was mainly to create a website as a part of the learning process. Anyhow, I learnt many things that I never knew before. One of them is search engine optimization.

There is an e-book that you get for free as soon as you sign-up with the wealthy affiliate. I am not sure that at which stage you get it. But you surely get a prompt to download a free e-book for search engine optimization. The name of the book is SEO Tips: 5 Things Every WordPress Owner MUST Know. I am not quite sure how to get this book just like that, but I guess it should be downloadable from somewhere here. You may have to perform a search on it though. It is written by a person named Michael Torbet, who is the author of the "All in one SEO pack" plugin for WordPress. He is also the founder of Semper Plugins. Quite naturally I presume that he makes more plugins for WordPress in this company. In the book he gives valuable advice on as to how to write content for your website in a search engine friendly way. The book has topics ranging from tips for using meta tags to arrangement of keywords in the content. Overall it is a great thing to know the strategies search engines use to index and rank pages. The main emphasis is, however, on the content itself. This means that the content you write on your website, or wherever, should be good quality content. As the punchline goes, content is the meat!

Friday, October 11, 2013

Digital Image Processing

Learning an intricate subject such as digital image processing can be a quite of a difficult expedition to undertake. The student should have a firm background in mathematics. He/she should have taken a number of different pre-requisite courses in mathematics and signal processing before even being considered eligible to study image processing. Raafael C. Gonzalez, however, makes that task easy for the student. Digital Image Processing by Gonzales is a book written for the maths shy student. It assumes that the student would have little mathematical background. In so many ways this book can be compared favorably with the one written by Richard G. Lyons on digital Signal Processing i.e. Understanding Digital Signal Processing. In a metaphorical sense these books can be considered cousins of each other for two closely related subjects. 

After preparing the student with initial background material in the first two chapters, the authors illustrates a few spatial domain image treatments. In the first two chapter concepts such as linearity, pixel distance measures, spatial versus greyscale resolution, and shrinking and zooming are described. Chapter 3 discusses image enhancement in the spatial domain. Topics such as contrast enhancement, histogram matching, histogram processing, equalization etc. are explained.  

Chapter 4 is about frequency domain transformation and processing. The author explains the 2-D Fourier transform. In my opinion, this is the best part of the book. The explanation of Fourier transform is not only lucid, it gives key insights into how the whole transformation of image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain is realized. This is done in a step by step manner so the reader may fully grasp the inner workings of the otherwise quite enigmatic Fourier transform. Moreover, it is explained how filtering can take place with the Fourier transform. 

The subsequent chapters discuss more advanced topics such as image restoration and color image processing techniques, image compression. Lossy and lossless methods of compression are discussed. 

Overall the book is quite fun to read and it makes the reader enthusiastic about the subject of image processing. Although it is assumed that the reader has some familiarity with calculus and linear algebra, it is still a very good resource for almost any student from any background interested in studying digital image processing.

Articles Writer

Sunday, October 06, 2013

Understanding Consciousness

One of the topics that is quite hyped these days is the study of human consciousness and its possible survival after death. The argument that human beings have souls that depart to a certain afterlife once we are dead is one of the major tenets of almost every religion. The materialist view, that we human beings, along with all the other life forms. are merely flesh and bones defies any such notion that human beings have souls or that they depart to some other world once we die. To this end, they also argue that there is no such divine entity, such as a godhead, that may have created life. The religious doctrines of creation of universe can be explained away with the help of theories of astronomy, cosmology and astronomy. Similarly, the religious doctrines about the creation of life and humanity can be explained away with the help of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. 

Rationalists try to understand and study the nature of survival of human consciousness with the help of various ways in which they can try to tap into the afterlife and communicate with the dead. There might be a possibility that some religious people may have the ability to do it already. I heard (or possibly read somewhere) that Jews have been prohibited to do it according to Torah. Given that it is considered the old testament for Christians and a holy book to be revered by the Muslims, it may be supposed that the followers of these two religions are also prohibited from tapping into the so-called unseen world. Particularly, Muslims are advised to follow a set path and believe in the unseen and are advised not to long for miracles. 

Whether or not there is an afterlife, or whether or not people survive bodily death cannot be proven by believing merely in someone's word of mouth. A religious scripture no matter how convincing it may be is not a proof of any of the extraordinary claims it makes. The claims must be proven from sources other than where they have been claimed. Thus, objectivity demands an honest scrutiny.

People who are interested in knowing about human consciousness and its survival of bodily death leverage mostly from the research of near death experiences (NDEs). As the name suggests, in an NDE a person is subjected to a clinical death of sorts in which electrical activity in the brain of the subject stops. Once rehabilitated back to normal life, the subject is asked to describe his/her experience. A keen survey reveals that there are hundreds of thousands of NDE stories. A review of the NDE research also indicates that NDE research has become a mature field of study with considerable adoption of scientific method.

Another discipline that tries to tap into afterlife is spiritualism. Spiritualism is rather old and established itself in the late nineteenth century. In simply world spiritualism entails methods to communicate with demised soul and to tap into the spirit world. A wide variety of literature is available by various contemporary and prolific scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Older people include Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Russell Wallace and William Crookes, to name but a few. History of spiritualism by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is probably the best resource on the subject.

If the findings of NDEs and spiritualists are correct that human beings survive bodily death, and that human beings do indeed have souls that depart to another world as we die, it means that materialism and its related theories of evolution etc. have already been explained away. For skeptics it means that they would have one less dimension to think about as regards existence.
    

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Machine Learning

Machine Learning by Tom M. Mitchell is the first text book for students who aspire to learn the subject of machine learning. It presents detailed and easy to understand illustrations of various concepts that are used in the field of machine learning. These include, necessary topics concerning probability and statistics, artificial intelligence, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. 

The best thing about the book is its illustration of feed-forward, back-propagation, multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The good thing about it is that the underlying mathematical concepts are explained in a layman friendly manner. One learns techniques for computing partial derivatives and the chain rule for differentiation for the first time in high-school calculus without having any apparent and significant practical benefit. Their utility becomes clear when one reads and understands how the MLP works. More precisely, Mitchell explains how partial derivatives are computed with respect to the weight coefficients at every step of the MLP so as to guide the gradient descent algorithm to plunge into some locally or globally optimal solution. Similarly, Mitchell shows the significance of applying the chain rule to derive weight coefficients at every layer and node of the MLP with respect to the input values at its first layer. The whole explanation is quite fascinating and exciting.

Mitchell also introduces and covers the complicated topic of evolutionary algorithms in a very nice way. Initially various concepts surrounding genetic algorithms are introduced in a lucid manner to make the student comfortable with the subject. Mitchell then illustrates genetic programming. Other important and interesting algorithms are also discussed. For instance, coverage of the famous simulated annealing algorithm is quite interesting. The book is an excellent guide for any student who has began to learn machine learning. 

Friday, July 26, 2013

Understanding Digital Signal Processing

Understanding digital signal processing (DSP) can both be intriguing and frightening in the beginning. The mathematics involved in various integral transforms can turn off many teachers. The mysterious domain transformations can fascinate many a novice. For a long time as a graduate student I was amazed by the underlying idea behind transformation of a digital signal from time domain to frequency domain. I simply could not understand how it happened. After going through many lectures and books, I eventually came across Understanding Digital Signal Processing by Richard G Lyons. 

Understanding Digital Signal Processing (DSP) treats the subject in a way no other author or teacher has ever done. The best thing about the book is that elucidates the various and many key concepts of DSP in an extremely layperson friendly manner.  It is quite inspiring to learn with the help of examples on as to what the various transforms and transfer functions do with a digital signal. One has a great eureka moment when one learns that the Fourier transform is basically a cross-correlation function. In order to know the strength of a particular frequency component in a multi-spectral signal, the signal is simply corss-correlated with another signal of that particular frequency. This is a very enlightening way to learn about the Fourier transform.

There are many other cherish-able ideas in the book. For instance, to know that a FIR filter is basically a smoothing function. Similarly, the rationale behind choosing a particular Nyquist's sampling rate is also quite informative. The reasons for having bell-shaped windowing functions and their linkage with spectral leakage is also explained in a very nice manner. Other topics like the Z-transform, or IIR filtering are also covered in a very nice way.

 Understanding digital signal processing can is the best book for anyone who wants to learn DSP from the ground up. It is also quite suitable for anyone who is an expert but wants a revision of concepts. It is specially useful for learning the key concepts of DSP and for developing a transparency in the mind about what actually happens to the signal when it is transformed from one domain to another. Any person who wants to learn DSP should definitely read Understanding Digial Signal Processing by Richard G Lyons. Understanding digital signal processing (DSP) can both be intriguing and frightening in the beginning. The mathematics involved in various integral transforms can turn off many teachers. The mysterious domain transformations can fascinate many a novice. For a long time as a graduate student I was amazed by the underlying idea behind transformation of a digital signal from time domain to frequency domain. I simply could not understand how it happened. After going through many lectures and books, I eventually came across Understanding Digital Signal Processing by Richard G Lyons. 

Understanding Digital Signal Processing (DSP) treats the subject in a way no other author or teacher has ever done. The best thing about the book is that elucidates the various and many key concepts of DSP in an extremely layperson friendly manner.  It is quite inspiring to learn with the help of examples on as to what the various transforms and transfer functions do with a digital signal. One has a great eureka moment when one learns that the Fourier transform is basically a cross-correlation function. In order to know the strength of a particular frequency component in a multi-spectral signal, the signal is simply corss-correlated with another signal of that particular frequency. This is a very enlightening way to learn about the Fourier transform.

There are many other cherish-able ideas in the book. For instance, to know that a FIR filter is basically a smoothing function. Similarly, the rationale behind choosing a particular Nyquist's sampling rate is also quite informative. The reasons for having bell-shaped windowing functions and their linkage with spectral leakage is also explained in a very nice manner. Other topics like the Z-transform, or IIR filtering are also covered in a very nice way.

 Understanding digital signal processing can is the best book for anyone who wants to learn DSP from the ground up. It is also quite suitable for anyone who is an expert but wants a revision of concepts. It is specially useful for learning the key concepts of DSP and for developing a transparency in the mind about what actually happens to the signal when it is transformed from one domain to another. Any person who wants to learn DSP should definitely read Understanding Digial Signal Processing by Richard G Lyons. The book is particularly suitable for the mathematics shy.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Gora

The Urdu word "Gora" literally means "white man" in English. Its feminine counterpart "gori" means a white woman. The word is commonly and quite frequently used to refer to an average white person of a Western origin. Particularly, it is used to refer to European and American white men. But it would not be an exaggeration to include people from other racial backgrounds, like the Chinese and the Japanese, to form a generalization. In short, the word gora can be used to refer to a person belonging to any of the advanced countries. In a literal sense it is used to refer to a white man of Caucasian background.  

It is not uncommon to hear mentions of gora in normal everyday discussions in Pakistan. Gora did this, gora did that. Gora is a genius. Gora is creative. Gora has better laws in his country. Gora has better values. Gora is humane. Gora is humble. Gora is funny. Gora is fun. Gora is simple. Gora is honest. Gora is innocent. Gora's science. Gora's research. Gora's technology. Gora's ideas. Gora is not jealous. Gora is not wicked. Gora's this and gora's that. Indeed, gora can sometimes be discussed in Pakistan like  the way shrimps were cherished by Bubba in Forrest Gump.  

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the gora has earned this good reputation and respect among the Muslim societies due to his/her superior character of the personality. Gora can be discussed in many diverse circles and places, ranging from markets to mosques. Indeed, many Muslims believe that should the gora recite the testimony of purity and convert to Islam, he/she would be a better Muslim than them already. Muslims claim to have with them a code of the most supreme morality in the form of Quran and Sunnah. It is a pity that the values of Quran and Sunnah are not practiced by the Muslims as the way they should be. They, nonetheless, find a practical implementation of these values in the life of a gora. Muslims, however, appreciate this strength of character. 

Monday, July 22, 2013

Air Conditioning

I thought about this idea a long time ago when I was a university student. The idea was to air-condition beds, sleeping bags, small tents, or any other similar thing which has a small volume good enough for one person to sleep in. The next thing is to attach a duct and a pipe with the facility and to eventually connect it to a small air conditioner. The air conditioner will keep the facility cold for as long as it will run. The person who would sleep in it would have sweet dreams. 

Such an apparatus would have an additional advantage. Cooling a small volume of space is easier and cheaper to do than to cool a larger volume, such as that of a whole room. Thus, it can be highly cost effective. Similarly, the same air conditioner that may have cooled a single room that may have been hosting a couple of people can be used to supply cold air to a larger number of people sleeping in things like sleeping bags. This can be done by spreading a small pipeline. And such an air conditioning solution can be useful in countries with hot climate. Countries like Pakistan that are suffering from an acute electricity crisis can benefit a lot from such schemes.


Sunday, July 21, 2013

Language and Speech Production

The other day I was thinking about writing a small research proposal around the idea of studying neurological basis for accent and language production. There were a few interrelated reasons for which this came to my mind. First is based on the observation that some people have a natural talent for adapting themselves to various accents. I have personally met some people who can change from a very crude Punjabi accent to a very polite Urdu accent in a fraction of a second. It was also very cool to observe a few people whose native language was Mewaati and they used to change between swinging Mewaati and plain Urdu in a fraction of a second. Same can be said about multilingual people who can speak languages other than Urdu, such as Siraaiki, Potowaari, Punjabi and possibly also English.  Indeed, I have seen people who can copy accents very fast and can have a wide variety. There are people who can mimic a plethora of lingual accents and dialects. Many comedians and actors fall under this category.

The other reason was based on the observation that some people are more prone to speaking in a harsh and impolite manner. Indeed, swearing is very common in Pakistan. I am not sure but I think that the tendency to swear is related to the idea that a person appears to be more masculine and virile if he does so. I am not sure if swearing is considered a crucial positive aspect in grooming and upbringing of an adolescent boy. Moreover, most of this profanity loving psychology is inherited from Bollywood movies too.  Swearing and the use of obscene expression can be very common in Pakistan. When you have a problem, you swear. When you are happy, swearing can sometimes be the best way to express that joy.

On the other hand, I have also had a chance to come across many very soft-spoken people both in Pakistan and abroad. There are languages and dialects that may be considered very euphonious and sweet sounding. Indeed, the way you speak or the way you are addressed can have a great impact on your personality. However, this may not be claimed that people who are more likely to use rough and obscene language are indecent, less effective or less loved in any way. On the contrary, a sweet sounding person can sometimes be considered weak and worthless as opposed to a person who uses whatever words that come to his mouth and somehow manages to achieves his objectives, such as developing a domineering aura around himself.

But I think that it is worthwhile to study the neurological basis for accent and language production. To this end, it can be a good idea to study how people learn to speak from an early age and how they develop one way of speaking or the other. It would also be a nice idea to see the social and psychological factors that affect the speech related affairs of human personality. Along with that it would also be interesting to study the neurological basis for language. It would be interesting to see what parts of the brain play an important role in language production. Similarly, to see how the human ability to speak evolve over the course of his/her life, and whether it is a adaptable trait. It would also be very interesting to study the benefits multilingual people can have over people who speak only one or two languages. And most importantly, I wonder that what are the benefits and pitfalls of speaking in one way or the other.

Monday, July 15, 2013

The Code Book

After having read Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem and Big Bang it is inevitable that one would go on to read The Code Book too. As the name suggests the book is about the history and evolution of the science of encryption. Apart from being a difficult subject, cryptography can come across as boring and lackluster. But Simon Singh knows how to treat his audience well. The Code Book takes its reader on to a roller coaster ride in to the wonderland of cryptography. In the book Mr. Singh chronicles the development of the science of cryptography and crypt-analysis from the times of ancient Romans and Egyptians all the way to our current times and quantum cryptography. During the course he records all the important events and hallmarks in the history of cryptography. The effect cryptography has had on the lives, wars, liberty and the geopolitical landscape of our times is described in a revealing way.

The Code Book begins with the Romans involvement with early forms of cryptography. Julius Caesar's secret military writings are discussed. It distinguishes between cryptography and crypt-analysis. It also elucidates the role of Arabs in the development of crypt-analysis and a few old methods of cipher analysis. It then goes on to discuss the clandestine plot of Mary queen of Scots to assassinate the British Queen Elizabeth. The assassination plot was deciphered by Queen Elizabeth and she had the former beheaded. At its climax, it moves on to the stage of world war 2 and a significant portion of the book is devoted to the developments concerning the deciphering of Germans' enigma codes. The efforts of Allen Turing and his contemporaries, on both sides, are worth reading.

The author then brings right in to our very own era of so-called modern cryptography. Here the author discusses the evolution of various techniques such as RSA, PGP and public-key cryptography. The author also discusses various philosophical, ethical and moral issues concerning personal privacy in our times. In particular, the discussion on the trade-of between the level of personal privacy and the level of information gathering by the law enforcement agencies is discussed from the point of view of security.

The final chapter concludes by speculating about the future of cryptography and discusses and analyses the potential of quantum cryptography. Here again the author has done a commendable effort to elucidate some of the intricate concepts in quantum physics, specially superposition, and to analyse their relevance with quantum computing and cryptography. Simon Singh has a very inspiring style of writing about popular science. All of his books are written with much lucidity and eloquence. The pace of the plot is fast while not compromising the fine details. A person who opens the book once and set's off to reading looses track of his/her diurnal chores, looses track of time and would find it hard to close the book before the last page is reached. Anyone who would read The Code Book would fall in love with cryptography.






Saturday, July 13, 2013

Big Bang

I developed an addiction for popular science after reading Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem. Afterwards I got hold of his Big Bang. This time I didn't borrow it from the library, rather I bought it for my personal collection of nice books.

The book takes a modest start by describing the earlier notions held by the ancient people of Greece, Perisa and Egypt about the nature and origin of the universe. After setting the stage for a keen discussion on the subjects of cosmology and astronomy, the author lands his readers right in to the lives and works of middle and post-middle age scientists. 

Simon Singh has a remarkable storytelling talent. The manner in which he narrates the history and development of any scientific enterprise keeps the reader spellbound till the last page, and for several subsequent days. The story is never less attractive than any bestselling thriller. Actually, the plot moves so swiftly while hopping over people and evolution of ideas that before the reader gets a chance to contemplate over any particular idea, he/she is ridden to a next more exciting one. Yet at the same time the fine details about the crucial concepts are not compromised. Everything is explained in an extremely lucid manner. And the biographies of the people involved make the whole narrative all the more interesting.

Big bang describes the works of notable scientists like Albert Einstein, Johannes Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Ptolemy etc. The list goes on. It discusses the times and circumstances in which these people lived. The hardships they had to suffer. The theories which they challenged or developed. Their confrontation with the bureaucracy and the popularly held beliefs. And consequently how the various theories about the existence of universe evolved. The book is also interesting as it educates its reader not only about the nature of cosmology, but also about the intricate interplay between science with other realms of human existence, such as religion. 
Johannes Kepler

I can never forget having read this book for another reason too. I read this book while in various European cities. These include, Limerick, Vienna, Salzburg and Graz. I particularly remember that while I was reading about Johannes Kepler and his work, I was sitting in a garden in Graz. And when I finished reading the chapter concerning him, I noticed that there stood a statue of him in front of me. Similarly, I remember that read about the steady state model and its comparison with the big bang model on a hilltop in Graz on which I had gotten to through a lift. There were many people around me but I was practically oblivious about their existence. I read about the CMB (cosmic microwave background) on my way back to Limerick in a bus. These vivid memories are unforgettable and romantic.

Big bang is a must read for every student of science. Once you will read it, you will fall in love with cosmology. And you would also want to live the rest of your life as a cosmologist or an astronomer.

Fermat's Last Theorem

I read Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem in 2007. It was recommended to me by a dear friend as a cure to boredom. I was reluctant about reading it in the beginning. My shyness with mathematics was the main reason. I nonetheless got it from the library and once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down till the time I reached the last page. And when I finished it, I was expecting more. I was sad to see it end.

Fermat's Last Theorem is a story about many stories. First and foremost, it is a story about a mathematical problem that ensued from the ancient Pythagorean theorem. Fermat's Last theorem is basically a generalized version of the Pythagoras theorem. It suggests that whole numbered solutions for the higher order Pythagorean equation do not exist. The theorem was proposed by a French mathematician Pierre De Fermat who lived between 1601 and 1665.

It has stories about many mathematicians starting from Pythagoras himself and finishing at Andrew Wiles. The latter spent a significant portion of his life is trying to come up with a proof for the enigmatic theorem. He eventually succeeded. The way in which Andrew and a myriad of his predecessors approached to solve the mystery is absolutely epic and is the subject of this book.

Stories of many mathematicians are told not only from the point of view of their works' relevance to the Fermat's theorem, but also about their personal lives. It is very interesting and motivating to read the stories of some of the mathematicians who grew out of humble circumstances and became some of the most renowned people of all times. Some of the notable people among these are Laplace, Fourier, Galois, Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimua, to name but a few. 

The book also has lucid and eloquent explanations of various mathematical concepts and how they evolved over time. For instance, the book explains the generalization ability and importance of a mathematical theorem and its proof. Other topics such as group theory and elliptic curves are also introduced in a layperson friendly way.

Reading this book was one of the best experiences of my life. It kindled an interest about reading and knowing more about various disciplines of science and mathematics. After reading this I went on to read other works of Simon Singh, whose thrilling storytelling style vitalizes any narrative he wishes to tell. Any person who would read Fermat's Last Theorem would fall in love with number theory, at least for a while.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Rooftop Gardens

The idea of having a garden on the roof of one's house is a cool one. It struck me for the first time when I read an account of India's Narendra Modi's endeavors to install solar grids over the canals of Gujarat, the province of which he is the CM. Installing solar grids over the canals has two additional benefits along with electricity generation. It saves land space, which can be used for other purposes such as agriculture. Secondly, it saves substantial amount of canal water from being evaporated. Projects involving solar energy have great potential in Asian countries like India, Pakistan and other middle eastern countries, which can have very hot climate specially in the summer months. Indeed, when installed on rooftops they could also be beneficial in reducing the indoor ambient temperature of a house or a similar facility. But solar panels are not viably cheap so that everyone can afford them. However, the idea of installing them over canals or on rooftops has additional benefits as discussed above. 

A cheap alternative to having solar panels over one's house is to plant a rooftop garden. Obviously they would not generate electricity. However, they will offer at least three other benefits. First of them is, of course, that the gardener would reap his/her own homegrown vegetables. The second is that it will lower the indoor temperature of the house as rooftop plantation would absorb much of the solar heat from allowing it to penetrate in the house. There is a third very crucial benefit too specially for a country like Pakistan. Pakistan is basically an agricultural country. However, much of its agricultural traditions are being ruined for one reason or the other. One of the reasons is population growth itself. A consequence of that is that a substantial amount of arable land that was once used for agriculture is gradually being converted to habitations. Thus, reducing the land that was available for agriculture. Adopting rooftop gardens would revive significant portion of that land for household horticulture. Growing organic vegetables on one's own roof would also be cheap and healthy. There is a fourth benefit too of having an orchard on one's own roof. Developing a rooftop garden can also be a way of testing and honing one's aesthetic sense about gardening.

Rooftop gardening is quite common in western and other Asian countries. It has, however, not been adopted in Pakistan so far. Of the many reasons a common one is that we as Pakistanis are shy of adopting new ideas quickly. Fear of taking initiative is another common cause. Developing rooftop gardens can have many benefits both personally for the owner and the community as a whole. It can also be anticipated that developing rooftop gardens can be much cheaper and would not require much paraphernalia. Here is a good link to useful advice on developing rooftop gardens.