• Stevia
• Marple syrup
• Agave syrup
• Xylitol
• Molasses

For the experiment, we were three people to judge the quality of the sweetener between 0 (awful) and 10 (awesome). The outcome is interesting. Marple syrup and agave syrup seem to be the best, closely followed by Xylitol. Stevia is ok (here I used dried and grinded Stevia), however, its sweetnes does not seem to get a full and round taste. Its taste is rather sharp and if used too much, it can be disturbing. Maybe it would be better with fresh stevia? Molasses has not been judged well, as it comes a long with a very strong taste and not so much sweetness.

For my last chocolate preparations I was using Xylitol (with a bit of stevia) as it seems to be healthywise (especially for the teath) the most advantageous sweetener. One downside during the experiments was that its crystals did not melt in the chocolate. Blending chocolate and Xylitol together at a high speed before pouring them into the molds has proven to be helpful. I like the final outcome .

Here is the final result of the average score along with standard deviation indicated by the error bars:

You can find my slide at slideshare.net.

My PhD jury (from left to right): Ivan Laptev, Martial Hebert, François Brémond, James Crowley, Alexander Kläser, Cordelia Schmid

For people who are interested in my research work on automated human action recognition in realistic video sequences, I invite you to visit my homepage at the LEAR research group.

After about 3 years and 8 months of doctoral studies + 8 months for my master studies, approximately 15,000 km of cycling, many ups and downs , a lot of new things that I learned, a deep dive into the French culture, many wonderful people that I met, a great shared flat in Grenoble downtown (!), many wonderful musicians that I was able to play with (thanks, light motif!), and a wonderful stay in a really nice city, my time in Grenoble has finally come to an end. Thanks to everybody that I was able to meet and to share a part of my path that led my through Grenoble!

And by the way, have you thought about this? You know somebody who has birthday? Here is the great idea: Make him happy and send him a link on this post !

I was contacted by Artem Galitsyn who arranged a big-band style Jazz version with a great femal singer and lyrics in Russian ! He kindly allowed me to put his version here online:

For people who are interested in the chords:


|| Gmaj7 Am7 | Bm7 Bb13 | Am7 | D9 |
| Am7 | D9 | Gmaj7 C#dim | Gmaj7 |
| Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | F9(#11) |
| Em7 A7 | Am7 D7 | Gmaj7 Bbmaj7 | Ebmaj7 Abmaj7 ||


Lead sheet online @ wikifonia: I put this Happy Birthday jazz version also online to the website wikifonia which is a collection a lot of publicly available leadsheets. This is a great website. There you are able to download a nicely layouted pdf version of the leadsheet, you can also transpose it automatically, and download the music file itself!

Lead sheet 2: Thanks to Roger (see his comment below)! He send me a lead sheet for Happy Birthday in jazz that you can download !

Now, here is the BASIC code for the makros:

Sub RunVideo(videoName as String)
	'get the path of the document
	dim odoc as object
	odoc = thiscomponent
	sURL = odoc.url
	i = Len(sURL)
	do while Mid(sURL, i, 1)<>"/"
		i = i - 1
	loop
	thePath = Left(sURL, i)

	'cut "file://" from the path
	thePath = Right(thePath, Len(thePath) - 7)

	'create the command + params that we need
	cmd = thePath + "videos/play.sh"
	params = thePath + "videos/" + videoName
	'msgbox cmd + " " + params
	Shell(cmd, 2, params)
End Sub

Sub DemoVideo
	RunVideo("demo.avi")
End Sub

In the makro RunVideo, I get the path name of the current .odp file and combine it with the relative video path (I always add the subdirectory video/ assuming that all videos are in this directory beneath the current .odp presentation file). I finally call the bash script play.sh with the absolute path to the video file.

The bash script (assumed to be located at videos/play.sh) to call mplayer looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
mplayer -xineramascreen 0 -fs -zoom $1

The option -xineramascreen 0 displays the video on the correct screen. I ran into some troubles when my externel display resolution was too high. So in case mplayer does not play the video right, try to set down the resolution (to, e.g., 800×600). If the video comes on the wrong screen, just change the 0 to 1 and try again.

Hope that helps somebody else, as well !