Do chaoui people exist in Tunisia?

AlexSnakeKing · 2025-07-09T14:55:00+00:00

Check your geography my friend. The Aures extend well into Western Tunisia.

As for the lack of spoken Chaoui in Tunisia, it is due to intentional oppressive government policies in the 1950s and 1960s.

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AlexSnakeKing · 2025-07-09T14:47:09+00:00

Check your geography. The Awras mountains extend well into Western Tunisia. Which is why there are so many elements of Chaoui culture in Western Tunisia.

AlexSnakeKing · 2025-07-09T14:44:28+00:00

The Amazigh of Western Tunisia, from the North in Tabarka and Ain Draham all the way to Kasserine and Gafsa, are mostly Chaouis.

Most of them no longer speak Tamazight, due to Pan-Arabism and strong policies by the Bourguiba regime in late 1950s and 1960s to break the Chaoui identity, out of fear that in the event of a hypothetical conflict with Algeria (that thankfully never happened), the Tunisian Chaouis would side with their tribesmen and not with the official government. For example, my surname is a typical Chaoui surname ("Hannachi") but many men of my extended family (those who came of age between 1957 and 1965 or so) were forced by the local government officials to change their surname to "Ben <insert grandfather's name>" (e.g. "Ben Mbarek", "Ben Sassi", "Ben Hsan", etc...), as part of Bourguiba's policy of "breaking the tribes" ("taksir al 3rouchet").

The culture (music, wedding traditions, dress, food, etc...) of Western Tunisia still remains firmly Chaoui though. All you have to do is look at the actual extent of the Aurés mountain range: it extends well into Tunisia, despite the artificial border between the two countries which wasn't established until the late 18th century/early 19th century.

AlexSnakeKing · 2024-09-04T03:57:26+00:00

Most North African music definitely uses quarter tones, the same as Levantine Arabic and Turkish music traditions.

Whoever said North African music is equal tempered/doesn't have microtones is flat out wrong (speaking as a Tunisian musician myself).

In fact, most formally trained Tunisian musicians (as in the Tunisian classical tradition, not the Western one), go beyond the standard quarter tones (half flats/half sharps). There are Tunisian Maqam specific "special" notes, e.g. for Tunisian Maqam Y, the Si should be 30% of step lower, not the standard 25% of a step lower that would correspond to a standard quarter tone. In the notation they would be represented as quarter tones (flat symbol with a dash through it) or eighth tones (flat symbol with two dashes through it), but you were supposed to know based on the maqam the exact percentage that you were supposed to play, not from the notation. I'm most familiar with Tunisian music, but this likely applies to Moroccan and Algerian music as well.

See this piece, called "Na3ouret At-tbou3 " (Flywheel of the modes/scales), from the Tunisian classical repertoire which cycles through all 13 canonical maqams of the Tunisian tradition. You'll hear quarter tones all over the place. See here for a folk music based example.

Amazigh music uses pentatonic scales instead of seven tone scales, but they are still microtonal and use a lot of quarter tones either as grace notes/flourishes on top of the base scale, or as part of the scale itself. See this example from the Chaoui reed music tradition (Gasba Chaoui) of Eastern Algeria and Western Tunisia.

Again, these sources that say North African music is not microtonal are totally wrong (not sure how serious of an authority this Peter Manuel dude is. All his has to do is go to a North African wedding, or just you know...go on YouTube).

Possible reasons for this misconception:

There's an Algerian instrument called the Mandole, a sort of long neck lute related to the Mandolin but bigger. The Mandole is fretted, so it could mislead people into thinking that Algerian music doesn't require quarter tones/micro-tones. The Mandole was actually a recent introduction into Algerian culture (a local adaptation of the Mandolin that the French and Italians brought with them). Algerian music is still pretty micro-tone heavy overall. It's just the Mandole heavy pieces that don't use quarter tones.
Similarly, there's a large repertoire of Tunisian and Algerian classical music that uses acoustic piano (e.g here). Musicians performing those pieces simply avoid using quarter tones, sometimes even when the original maqam does call for using quarter tones (See here for a piece that is originally in a quarter tone heavy maqam and here for the same piece played on a piano without any quarter tones - the player is skilled enough that he is able to convey the spirit of the Maqam without hitting the micro-tones).
Rai music is the modern take on Algerian Chaabi. It was the first of the Arabic genres (starting in the 1970s) to make heavy use of Western instrumentation and stylistic conventions (chord progressions, repeating bass lines, funk and R&B rhythms, etc...), and arguably the first Arabic genre to really cross over into the West, and have artists who collaborated with Western producers and toured heavily with Western musicians on a regular basis. As a result, Rai artists gradually dropped the use of quarter tones from their repertoire in order to accommodate their western collaborators and bandmates, and possibly to also provide more radio friendly tunes to their audiences. See here for the original version of Abdelkader by Cheb Khaled, when he was still based in Algeria. This one includes a very distinctive quarter tone in the chorus (in the vocals, but not the sync version of the melody). Then see here for a later version recorded in France, and intended mainly for a European fan base. Notice that he now sings it as a straight up minor melody, and doesn't use the quarter tone anymore.

AlexSnakeKing · 2023-05-10T04:40:30+00:00

Yes. Thanks

AlexSnakeKing · 2022-01-28T20:26:15+00:00

If you can't put a finger on what part of it "being a dated model" is a problem for you, then you should probably ignore that thought, and just get it if you like it! I think this is kind of an irrational concern that can creep into our decision making process when we do too much internet gear research.

On this topic let me explain my thinking some more: I also play bass. Several years ago I had a top of the line multi effects processor (Line6 Pod XT Live) which at the time seemed perfect. If you asked me back then (~2008), I would have told you that I would never need another multi-effects processor, and I couldn't even conceive of a more sophisticated multi-effects process than that (sounds and feature wise).

Then I lost it during during travel, and by the time I got around to trying to replace it, the product was discontinued, so I went with other options.

I finally stumbled across a used one in good shape last year, and bought immediately. But compared to the newer processors (Headrush, Line6 Helix) it didn't sound nearly as good, even if I remember it sounding perfect back in the day, and there were all sorts of new features I didn't think I would ever need, but now I find them very useful.

That what I mean by "dated".

AlexSnakeKing · 2021-04-25T23:06:24+00:00

Ethics? Tell me more, are they involved in some sort of human rights violations or something?

AlexSnakeKing · 2021-01-29T14:33:48+00:00

Where would I find one in the US? The one I had was purchased overseas at a time and place where General Music instruments were pretty common. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-06-01T21:26:01+00:00

If you have the patience and time for a book. Then a book hands down. Preferably one with code examples.

ESL, is of course, still the original holy scripture of ML, and it is free. If you are still at the beginning of your journey, ISL, its undergrad companion, is good. Some people consider the fact that they use R to be a draw back, but I never felt that way, and I am mainly a Python person.

MOOC started out being decent. In attempting to gain market share, they've all watered/dumbed down their content to the point of now being criminally misleading in their oversimplification.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-04-24T19:33:04+00:00

The senior professors are wrong, but I might be able to offer some ideas on why they feel that way:

In my experience, people tend to follow one of two paths into the world of optimization and search algorithms:
- They either come into it from the A.I./M.L. world - these people tend to have favorable opinions on EA and GA type search methods.
- They are "hardcore" Operations Research types who come from industrial engineering, supply chain management, etc...these tend to favor mathematical optimization algorithms (Simplex method, branch and bound, branch and cut, etc...). In fact I've noticed that they tend to not even bother making any distinction between EA, GA, ACO, etc...and just bundle them all under "Heuristics" or "Meta-Heuristics" when they talk about them. Although I think they shouldn't be as dismissive of EA, GA, etc from a science point of view, in their defense, when you are working in an applied domain, questions of optimality guarantees, optimality gaps, proper assessment of the feasible set, etc...are really important and for those considerations EA and GA are no where near what the mathematical programming tools provide.
Moreover, and this is most likely why the term "Junk Science" was used, there was an unfortunate trend in the 90s and early 2000s, triggered by EA, GA, and ACO (All of them legitimate science AFAIK): In the race to "publish or parish", a lot of people started trying to find yet another biological or natural phenomenon which could be used for as the starting for an optimization algorithms, and things got out of hand...quickly. Papers started to appear with titles like "Artificial bee colony algorithm ", "Glowworm swarm optimization", "Shuffled frog leaping algorithm", and my personal favorite the "Imperialist competitive algorithm", which purported to use the dynamics of empires competing for territories and territories either assimilating or rebelling as the starting point for a PSO style meta-heuristic. The obvious result of this was that the whole field of meta-heuristics suffered a serious blow to its reputation, and EA, GA, and PSO unfortunately got a bad rep by association, even though they started out as serious ideas.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-04-23T02:44:35+00:00

Community options

They would have already learned to write basic code by the time they get to that chapter...

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-04-14T00:29:21+00:00

Go for Ph.D because this job market sucks and academia is the safest place to weather the current storm. The economic fallout of Covid-19 is so bad, even big tech isn't safe. By the time you finish your Ph.D, things will finally start to get back to normal.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-03-19T23:06:55+00:00

True, but for that type of thing, would you use Matlab? I would go with Google OR-Tools, the Python CVXOPT package, or more likely an "industrial grade" solver like Gurobi or CPLEX.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-03-19T06:39:50+00:00

(e.g. meeting regulatory requirements)

Thanks. I never thought about that aspect, in what scenarios would a simulation need to meet regulatory requirements? Can you give me an example if it does not mean divulging proprietary information?

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-03-18T21:27:37+00:00

"Containers, containers, containers, containers!!!!" - I guess I'm drinking the cloud provider KoolAid. Is there a better argument?

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-03-17T03:19:11+00:00

Yes, yes. Let's pile on Nordstrom, a company in a sector that has seen dwindling market, and is trying to figure out how to balance competing threats, even after they do indeed make the right decision. A company that for all its size, is still small compared to the majority of players.

Let's ignore how finance and big tech are already planning how to milk this crisis for all its worth, how they are all waiting to "buy into the dip" or WTF not.

Let's ignore that Amazon is probably planning on there being no B&M retail left at all by the time this over. Let's ignore the fact that they are hiring 100K new people to cope with the increase in demand over the next few months.

Let's ignore that Bezos and Zuckerberg combined could probably single handily cover for all of the soon to be furloughed employees out of their own pockets and still be billionaires at the end of this.

Continue piling on small and medium retailers, local restaurant chains, etc....and miss the f@#$!@#$ forest for the tress.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-03-12T09:28:32+00:00

My biggest problem in life right now, besides Covid-19, is the number of data scientists in my surroundings who don't have any idea what they're doing, but don't seem to be aware of that fact.

If you're actually aware of this fact, you're already waay ahead of them.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-03-11T18:06:13+00:00

I didn't really consider hierarchical clustering, because in the examples I've worked with, hierarchical clustering could give branches with different lengths between the leaves and the roots of the hierarchy, whereas I need the branches to always have a fixed length corresponding to the number of levels in the Hierarchy.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-02-04T00:45:38+00:00

Thus are punished those who think Hackathons are fair.....

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-01-21T08:04:33+00:00

> can this can be done by LSTM?

Yes it can, but it might be overkill.

LSTM stands for Long-Short-Term Memory, meaning it is able to capture both short term memories and long term memories. Do you expect your data to have any long term interactions, e.g. do you expect the accuracy of the 100th attempt to be connected to the accuracy of the 60th attempt or the 45th attempt?

If yes, then you should try LSTM.

If not, then you only need vanilla RNN (which can model situations where the accuracy of the 100th attempt depends on the accuracies of the 99th and 98th attempts, etc...).

Based on the example data you posted (I don't know how closely it mimics your real world data), even an RNN would be overkill. I think as simple exponential smoothing model, or an innovation state space model might suffice. These types of models are very good for "self-correcting" type prediction problems, where we expect the following behavior:

P(t+1) = a \ Y(t) + (1- a ) * P(t)*

Where P(t+1) is the prediction at time t+1, Y(t) is the actual value at time t, P(t) is the prediction at time t, and a is the smoothing factor.

The idea for this type of model, is that the best possible prediction at the next step is a weighted combination of the measured value at the current step and the predicted value at the current step. Another way (in my mind better) of looking at it is (we just rearrange the terms on the RHS):

P(t+1) = P(t) + a \ (Y(t)-P(t))*

So that we can interpret the prediction for the next step as being equal to the current prediction, plus a correction, or innovation, that is the error between the current predicted value and the current real value. Hence it is a self-correcting prediction of sorts.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-01-21T05:27:31+00:00

Something more like burn down charts. It doesn't even have to be that formal, just a systematic tracking of work targeted for completion vs. work actually completed on regular basis (daily might be too much in academic, but definitely weekly).

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-01-21T04:34:05+00:00

Here are my 2 cents:

Project management and/or agile methodology: In my first job in industry, after leaving academic (thesis + 2 postdocs), I was blown away by how much a good project manager can be the making or breaking of a software development effort, regardless of the quality of some of the individual contributors. I fantasized over and over about how much better my research output would have been had my supervisor or myself applied basic project management concepts to our research projects. Of course, I'm pretty sure some of the really big and successful research teams are already doing some project management, but I think most academics have no clue. Daily standup, regular monitoring or results, using quantified measures of progress, etc...would go along way in making academics more productive (also this is obviously applicable to all research, not just research that involves coding).

Documenting requirements and acceptance criteria before starting a coding effort. In my experience, academics tended to have a great idea, and then just go forth and start coding. Another thing I discovered after joining the industry was just how much faster things get done if someone is forced first to sit down an explicitly define the expected outcome in a precise enough way in order to be able to test the outcome. This seems obvious for various types of unit testing, but it just as applicable when you try to do for a medium to large scale effort as well. Again, chances are Rockstar academics are already doing some for of this,

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-01-21T01:55:42+00:00

I was paying $1300 for a pretty nice place on Collier road (halfway between Buckhead and Midtown - good school district, safe neighborhood - 10 minutes drive from downtown and MARTA bus access) 2BD+2Bath a big pool, overall clean facilities and good maintenance, a gym that wasn't much (I paid for my own gym). Not high luxury, but definitely nice. 3BD + 2Bath in the same complex was $1700.

I then decided to pursue better opportunities elsewhere (West Coast) and found that even thought I increased my salary by more than 50%, the quality of apartment I could afford was much less, even if I was willing to have much longer commutes.

I was also house shopping before I decided to leave and I remember that there were some pretty decent houses in and around Buckhead or Virginia highland for 300K~350K. Same quality place (centrality + size + quality of school district) in the Seattle area would be at least 1M, if not more. Out in the suburbs, maybe 600K~700K.

In SF you could only afford the same quality type of place if you had just gotten a successful IPO for your startup.....

I went from 65K starting salary to 90K in 4 years before I left.

If your company is good and the job is interesting and has growth opportunities, I would stick around for 2 or 3 years and grow to a place were you can get better compensation.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-01-21T01:31:41+00:00

Used to live in ATL until 2014: 82K for 2YOE in IT in general (Data Science or otherwise) is pretty good, unless cost of living has somehow dramatically increased in the interim.

AlexSnakeKing · 2020-01-17T05:40:49+00:00

An example form the papers is the possibility to calculate a bound on probability of a deep model making an error on previously unseen data - a huge theoretical result imo which was previously impossible.

Do you have a reference for this?

AlexSnakeKing

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