On September 2005, Azadeh and I boarded a plane at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and traveled all around the globe before we landed in Winnipeg. It is fair to say that the land we started rebuilding our life on belongs to the people now politely referred to as the “aboriginals”. There is no need to look […]
On September 2005, Azadeh and I boarded a plane at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and traveled all around the globe before we landed in Winnipeg. It is fair to say that the land we started rebuilding our life on belongs to the people now politely referred to as the “aboriginals”. There is no need to look at the statistics; you only have to walk in the streets north of Winnipeg to see how off the society the original inhabitants of this land are. This observation will be complete when you talk to some “Canadians” and how much pissed off they are of “these people who reproduce to rip off more of our tax money”. Does that mean that I hate Canadians? Obviously not. Does that mean that I think the aboriginals are sub-human? Definitely not.
Imagine a Canada not surrounded by the Oceans, but by millions of Inuit ready to fight the European “occupiers”. Imagine an Indian leader having said “if each one us spits once, we are able to wash these bastards off our land”. Imagine cash and weapon coming from all around to fight off the “bastards”. Does that sound familiar? Yep, that would be called Israel and the leader will be the late Ayatollah Motahari of Iran.
The “occupiers” of Canada, including Azadeh and I, have been fortunate enough that none of the above has happened, that the first waves of immigrants were able to “push the indigenous people up north”, putting it very gracefully. Then, we came down the staircase and to the new city which embraced us and gave us new hope.
Does that mean that I think morality is not a factor in global affairs? I don’t know. Do I imply that we have the right to be where we are? Maybe. We are living here anyways. Do I mean that the same applies to Israel? Well, no European has had Canada being mentioned as the promised land and they are here. Israelis at least have the name mentioned in their “holy book”.
I wouldn’t want to be a Palestinian living in a refugee camp for sure, similarly not an Inuk living in a dusty reserve, if I could choose. Nevertheless, I don’t see what makes Israel anything more than a Canada established on the peak of a volcano.
A council employee in Japan has been punished after officials discovered he had logged more than 780,000 hits on porn websites at work in nine months (BBC).
BBC also adds that, “At his peak, the worker was looking at almost 10,000 pages a day” and Reuters reports that he has been “spending up to three hours a day”. Telegraph then goes as far as claiming that he “saw 780,000 porn websites in 9 months”. Finally USA Today realizes that these numbers do not match up.
I think what has happened here is the confusion of “page hit” and “browsing an actual page”. Right now, you have caused dozens of “page hits” on Kamangir’s server, one for every element on the page. That does not mean that you have watched thirty or forty pages on kamangir.net. Not that even this would make this man less of a porn freak.
Hamid Reza Moghadam-Far, the head of the state-run Fars News, when asked, “As the head of a major media outlet, do you already have a blog or plan to start one? “, stated [Persian],
I am not for what has become a trend for journalists to be active in the media and write their own blogs at the same time. The fact that a journalist (who already has the tools to communicate with the public) is going to spend a lot of time on his/her personal blog, more than leading to spreading information, is geared towards satisfying one’s need to be known by the public. We have banned this issue in Fars News … and a few cases have been prosecuted. [not exact translation]
If this is not the first time you are visiting this page, during the last couple of days, you have probably noticed that this page was down for about 48 hours. This is an answer to “what had happened” and “what will happen now”.
In short, Persian Kamangir just celeberated its first birthday and now I need to spend some time to go through what I have been able to accomplish and how I should rearrange things in order to be able to make a better schedule. Right now, my plan is to limit blogging in Persian to one post every few days, similar to what I have been doing here in the last few months. The time I can save this way I’ll invest on being with Azadeh and on my thesis, as well as on my work on the statistics of the Persian blogosphere and on a few other purely-technical projects I have wanted to work on for over a year now.
“Are you sure the Islamic Republic/Ahmadinejad have asked for Israel to be wiped off the map?” This is the question I have been asked by so many people over the course of the last few years. While I became more and more concerned why so many people kept asking the same question, I kept describing it, quite diligently, to whoever asked the question that “Israel is described as the tumor of the region by the former leader of the Islamic Republic and it is quite common to see slogans which ask for the destruction of Israel in military marches and such”.
Because the people who asked the question were more or less identifiable as belonging to the so-called “left”, I convinced myself that people are trying to negate the Bush administration’s perspective through saving the face of the Islamic Republic. When I was asked the same question for the last time by another friend a few days ago, however, I realized that the Iranian call for the “wiping off” of Israel might in fact be not about a “second Holocaust”.
A few days ago, I was asked the same question, this time by a friend who works for an institute some people accuse of leaning towards the “right”. When my friend Mark (name is fake) asked me the same question, I gave him the same answer, quite like playing a sound track I had stored somewhere in my brain. He refused to accept and sent me the link to the page on Wikipedia which talks about Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel. That was when I started doing a bit of research on the Persian sentence Ahmadinejad used in his speech at the “World without Zionism” conference on October 2005. Based on my knowledge of the Persian language, which I speak as my mother tongue, the translation given by Juan Cole, whose political viewpoints might be point of debate but his scholar weight in the field is irrefutable, and also given the translation published by MEMRI, which has no intention of apologizing for Ahmadinejad, I think the president of the Islamic Republic did not in fact ask for the “wiping-off” of the Jewish state. What he asked for, not that I find it legitimate, was the removal of the current regime in Israel.
Maybe this will make the issue more clear. My understanding of the average Iranian, and I am not referring to the super-ideological Armageddon-lover hardcore members of Basij, is that while they are mad at Israel because of its continuous portrayal as the “regime which has occupied Qods” in the national television, there is no strong anti-semitic sentiment in the Iranian public. I would compare that with what I have perceived in some of my Arab friends and how hateful some of them are when we talk about Israel. Without making any judgment about any person, I argue that in the Iranian case, even if Ahmadinejad does ask for the a second Holocaust, I do doubt that he would be able to gather an army who would fight for his “cause”.
I remember talking to a veteran of the Iraq war and he angrily remembered Iranian soldiers refusing to attend the fight when Iran started occupying land in Iraq. “The soldiers said they were not allowed to pray in occupied land”, he said. Although living under a hateful regime, the Iranian public is still very conscious when it comes to committing hate-inspired actions such as what Ahmadinejad is accused of having asked for.
The important question is, who should be blamed for the wipe-off misunderstanding. Is it the Western media which “took advantage of a vague remark”, as the following video seems to suggest? I think not. The number one person to blame is no one but Ahmadinejad, for being talkative and vague. He lacks the basic skills a politician, let alone a human being, has to possess, and that is spending more time thinking than giving speeches. He, whatever idiotic ideology he subscribes to, would have been told not to mention such a vague sentence, given he had asked for an advice before uttering his infamous “wipe-off” speech. The second place, in the list of people/entities to be blamed for in this misunderstanding, is IRIB (the state-run television), which started the use of the idiom in their English translation of the speech, without knowing what it exactly meant in English.
The fact is, as shown numerously on this blog and elsewhere, the English-language state-run media sources in Iran are hasty and irresponsible. They make such silly mistakes (see: Press TV’s Latest, and Funniest, Mistake) that I sometimes ask myself if, for example, the “prestigious” Press TV is taken seriously even by its own staff (see:Video of the Day: A very up-to-date PressTV Anchor).
The “wipe-off” sentence has been referred to in the media over and over and has become another “proof” that “Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler”. While I am not sure if he does not daydream about that, the Iran I used to live in was not a country he would be able to produce a genocidal army out of.
By the way, happy 60-th anniversary to all Israeli friends.
Three years ago, around these days, Masih Alinejad was banned from entering the Parliament [Persian]. At the time, Alinejad worked as the parliamentary correspondent for ILNA, a media source close to the reformists. When she published reports that indicated that contrary to their claims of “living an ordinary life”, the MPs do enjoy a high salary, she was accused of having stolen the regarding documents. Soon the allegations were denied, but she had already been banned from entering the Parliament [Persian]. Alinejad once again came to the spotlight when following Ahmadinejad’s request for “face-to-face discussion with Mr. Bush”, she asked for an uncensored interview with Ahmadinejad (see:Talk to Me Mr. Ahmadinejad, If You Dare To).
Picture from Ahmadinejad’s ongoing trip to Hamedan - Fars
Masih is once again on the spotlight, this time for a piece she wrote for Etemad Melli, a reformist newspaper [Persian]. In the piece, she refers to her recent experience in an aquarium, where dolphins danced to their instructor. She found a similarity between that event and the crowd which gathers around when Ahmadinejad goes to his numerous trips to under-developed areas.
These days, when even the administration confesses that the inflation is pushing hard on the people…the dance of the dolphins does remind us of the gathering of people around their president [Persian] [not literal translation]
Although Mr Ahmadinejad called his opponents “young goats”, and there was no official reaction to it, Alinejad’s dolphin analogy did cause huge outcry in the conservative camp. The shock was complete when Mehdi Karroubi, the head of the newspaper and a prominent figure in the reformist movement, denounced the article and apologized for it [Persian].
During and off-the-record discussion with an active member of the student wing of the reformist movement, she told me “I dislike Karroubi more than I do Ahmadinejad”. The likes of Masih Alinejad’s experience seem to confirm the rising idea that the so-called reformists might in fact be too conservative for the younger generation. What the implications of this change are, we need to wait and see.
Akram Mahdavi is another victim of unjust and unequal laws in a country where, for the most part, the legal system considers females only half human, and where women’s rights, as well as their cries for help are routinely and systematically ignored, trampled upon, and even ridiculed. The now 32 year old mother of a girl in her early teens is facing imminent execution for conspiracy to murder. According to court and other reliable sources, including Akram’s defense attorney, Mina Jafari, when Akram was 27 years old, she sought the assistance of a young male friend and conspired to murder her then 74 year old husband. Akram, who suffers from epilepsy among other ailments, had been forced to marry the substantially older man; her own father physically beat her into saying “I do” for a second time (read more)
To save Akram from imminent execution, the campaign needs to collect the equivalent of $60,000 as ransom. A Paypal account has been set up and bank drafts are accepted.
The campaign has also been given the red dress the Iranian soap opera actress Nazanin Boniadi, recently seen on Iron Man, wore on the red carpet at the Emmy Awards 2007. The item is for sale on eBay and all the proceeds will be used to pay off the ransom.
To donate on PayPal click on this button, for other methods of donation send me an email arash@kamangir.net. I will put you through to Akram’s lawyer and the organizers of the campaign.
After I published the post “Why bombing Iran is a Must” in Persian, I received a lot of angry responses. The outrage was to the extent that I deleted the Persian post and apologized from the readers. The same day, later in the evening, a group of us gathered in our apartment to talk about the piece. Here, you can hear selected parts of the discussion we had, and we included Azadeh, Mahmoud, our Canadian friend Sarah, and our friend Arman, who had found the piece offensive.
Note: The podcast starts with a short Persian introduction.
Let’s accept that “word has been out in the Islamic community worldwide for some time (specially Indonesia and Malaysia) to begin overt support for Obama”. Let’s also accept that “[there are] rumors of the Islamic Republic of Iran also passing the word to their American agents and clerics to support Obama”. Let’s go further and accept too that this plan is actually materialized and that a Muslim is going to hold a banner in support of Obama and to encourage fellow Muslims to vote for him. In what language will he/she write on the banner, besides English? My guess would be Arabic. That’s why I doubt this picture is, as Anti Mullah suggests, “definitive evidence” for the claims mentioned in the above. Why? Because the word “Rahbar” is Persian for “Leader”. Shouldn’t they have used an Arabic word, written with English letters of course, instead? That way the whole Muslim community in the US would be addressed and not just the community of Iranian Muslims.
A major source of legitimacy for the Islamic Republic is through its claims of being the connecting period between the time of the Prophet and Imams and the end of time, when the Islamic Messiah overthrows all earthly governments. To make this acceptable, Ayatollah Khameneii is commonly claimed to be a descendant of the Imams, thus his black turban. Moreover, he is often called as “the true deputy of Mahdi”.
This picture is claimed to have been taken of a propaganda item in an unknown location in Iran. The item contains Arabic sentences which refer to Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah. Here, Ayatollah Khameneii is pictured as handing over the flag of “Shia armies” [not exact translation] to the person in the right, whom is supposedly Mahdi.
Such pictures are very rare but the notion that the Islamic republic is the predecessor to Mahdi’s uprising is an essential part of the state propaganda in Iran.
There are moments of pure joy in the blogosphere. There are times you wish you could touch the hands of people you have had the privilege to know through blogging but have never met in person. When these moments come, you are proud of being a citizen of the blogosphere.
A while back, Bluehost, the company which hosts kamangir.net, announced a partner program. In short, they allowed customers to find new customers and be paid $65 for each sign-up. So I posted an announcement on Persian Kamangir and invited fellow bloggers to take advantage of this opportunity. I offered to pay them back what Bluehost was going to pay me, as a mean to encourage Persian bloggers to move into their personal domains (we also worked out the legalities and let Bluehost administration know about the arrangement).
Soon, four Persian bloggers used the opportunity and set up their blogs in their new domains. That was a few months ago. I promised them that I’ll contact them as soon as I get the check from Bluehost.
Finally, the first check came in a few days ago. It was a $130-check, so I contacted the first two subscribers and asked them for their bank information. Their response is what I would like to call a “pure moment”.
Since a short while ago, we have been involved in collecting $60,000 for releasing a mother from prison. The convicted murderer of her 74-year-old husband, the 32-year-old Akram Mahdavi, is on the death row because she does not have the financial privilege to pay off the requested ransom. She killed her husband after a second arranged marriage was forced upon her by her family. Women’s rights’ activists describe her case as a very typical example of arranged marriages of teenagers to old men (her first husband was forty years older than her). Akram has a 17-year-old daughter from her first marriage (more information in Persian).
If you have not guessed yet how the case of a woman on the death row could have anything to do with “discount” a hosting company offers to its customers, well, that’s what I call the “Iranian Connection”.
Both people whom I contacted for the pay-back asked me to deposit the amount to the fund established for releasing Akram. Is that not something you can be proud of?
If you are willing to help us collect the ransom, please use this button and donate on Paypal. For more information, please send me an email at arash@kamangir.net.
The elaborate uranium enrichment facility that operates inside Iranians’ bodies.
Camels do not run on nukes. That, alone, is sufficient to prove that the Iranian theology is pursuing nuclear bombs. On top of that, with all Iranian women covering their faces, they are not at risk of skin cancer, eliminating Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric that the nuclear research in Iran is geared towards technological advances, including developing nuclear drugs for treating cancer patients.
In December of 2003, the historic city of Bam was devastated by an earthquake of magnitude 6.6 in Richter scale. 70 per cent of the city, including the historic Citadel of Bam was demolished, a moderate price the Mullahs paid for fulfilling their dreams of establishing the big Shia empire. Irrefutable sources have told Fox News that the city of Bam was similar to Israel’s Tel Aviv in terms of urban structure, and while the world was still unaware of the extent the Islamic Republic had gone ahead with its nuclear plans, the Ayatollahs carried out a secret nuclear test. After the blast, in a phone call, Ahmadinejad told Ayatollah Khameneii, “Eival!”, meaning “We did it!” in Persian, reported KillThemAll.com.
This event also proved how incompetent the mainstream media is. Rather than following the news and informing the world of the dangers of extremism, the BBC asked the despicable question “but Ahmadinejad was not in power then!” The mainstream media has long underestimated the level of secrecy of the regime in Tehran. A senior analyst told Fox News that “they are very clever. They always show a puppet to the world while the actual president runs the country from his office buried thousands of nanometers beneath a swimming pool”.
The world was shocked after CNN’s Anderson Cooper revealed the Islamic Republic’s most secret plan of all. Reportedly, in an attempt to disguise it nuclear facilities, the regime of Tehran is using urban areas as human shields. What is more disgusting is that the average Iranian is unaware of how they have become a part of the huge uranium enrichment plan which is running right now in Iran. A senior member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who wanted his name to be kept secret, revealed that the Iranians are now using a complicated chemical process engineered by Russians. Rather than using conventional centrifuges, which could be spotted easily by satellites, the cruel regime of Tehran is using the bodies of the average Iranians (including children) as chambers in which Dihydrogen Monoxide is combined with Yellow Cake, an essential chemical in the process of enriching uranium. Cooper stated, “when you buy confectioneries in Tehran, you are in fact inflicting exposure to nuclear material upon yourself. The material is digested in your stomach and when you go to washroom you pass enriched Uranium. The substance is then collected by Chinese-made machinery which processes the sewage in order to collect the nuclear components.” Reportedly, the recent death of numerous dolphins in the Persian Gulf occurred after an Iranian child urinated close to the shore.
This, unfortunately, is not how low the regime of Tehran is willing to go to develop nuclear capabilities. Documents recently extracted from Ahmadinejad’s pocket, while he was giving his infamous “we don’t have gays in Iran” speech at Columbia University, unveil the pathetic soul of the Iranian fanaticism. Reportedly, in the note Ahmadinejad suggests to Khameneii, “we will order the suicide-mission guys to fill up their stomachs with a lot of cookies and cakes before they go to their holy mission.” Ahmadinejad continues, “this way, when they blow themselves up, not only the enemy will be covered with stool, but also there will be a lot of nuclear contamination in the scene and that is just glorious!”
The only feasible way to tackle such a brutal regime is to turn the country and all its inhabitants into glass parking lot. The enemy is not Ahmadinejad or his administration, but rather the real enemy lies inside the intestines of each and every Iranian and it is our duty to save the world from contamination with hazardous material. The sole thought of Iranians peeing here and there, after all the washrooms are destroyed in our eminent attack, should haunt every environment-loving person. In fact, it is our duty to help the Iranian public and let them die in a respectful manner, and not from nuclear poisoning.
Let’s bomb Iran.
Mr Smith was a member of the team which searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for five years. Recently, after that project failed, he was assigned to find them in Iran.
- This is the article I wrote for the joke version of The Manitoban, the University of Manitoba students’ newspaper. Picture (c) The Manitoban.
What would Ahmadinejad look like if he was not born in Iran? I used this online tool to see the Chinese Ahmadinejad, as well as the White Ahmadinejad. There is also the Ape Ahmadinejad, in case you are interested to see. Find all the pictures at this address, or watch this video.
The sign reads, “No service to people with loose veil, not even to our old customers”. This sign I wish was rare in Iran, but it isn’t. The fact is, there are stickers which carry the same message and are printed by the Police. These stickers are widely used all over Iran and their use has been mandated by the Police in many instances. You may also remember the hospital which mandated the veil as the condition for service to patients.
The following video is rather old. At the first sight, it might seem to be providing proof that discrimination does exist widely in the US. Watching the video till the end, however, my catch was that discrimination does exist over there, as it exists in every corner of the world, but with the heartwarming observation that ordinary people oppose to it and choose to boycott the offender. Whereas, in Iran, discrimination is a daily practice prescribed by the government and followed by the nation. At best, the Iranian nation is ignorant, and that’s when you do not take into consideration the fact that discriminatory judgments have become a part of the Iranian moral code: “women with loose veil are perverts”. Similar observation can be made regarding judgments against people with different sexual orientations, minority religious groups, etc.
My conclusion is, when left alone to decide for themselves, people everywhere in the world are for justice and peace. Propaganda and political agenda, however, agitate people and turn them into discriminators, for obvious goals of the leading gang.
Geert Wilders’s famous video finally found its way to the Internet. The much anticipated 15-minute video carries footage of Islamic leaders cursing the west and its values and advocating for Islam and its ways. The footage gives subtitles for the various languages spoken in it, the Persian parts of which are accurate. I wasn’t able to find any mistake in the Arabic part either.
I am not a Muslim. Having said that, this video is not about Islam. Islam, like Christianity, Judaism, and other schools of thought, does not kill. Nor does it stone, amputate, or circumcise women. All this is carried out by a beast named man, one of whose most developed talents is to find phony justifications for his/her horrible actions.
Mr. Wilders shows us pictures of crimes carried out by Muslims, from the infamous 9/11 attacks to London bombings and executions in Iran and Afghanistan. I do agree with him that not only many Muslims commit disgusting actions these days, but also that the mainstream Islamic world fails in condemning these atrocities. Even worse than that, the average Muslim seems to have sympathy for murderess, or at least they are fast in condemnation when a fellow Muslim is attacked, but seem to forget to be fair when Muslims kill others. Greet Wilders’ video might make this more clear, as if we had any doubt about it, but does not present a solution. At its core, it merely makes racist remarks about the rise of Muslim population in Europe.
It is a fact that the conventional interpretations of Quran and Islam do lead to issuing death Fatwas against non-Muslims. As rational human beings, this is what we need to talk about. Wilder’s presentation, however, mixes up the faith with the actions of human beings and fails in telling us what we don’t know. At the middle of the carnage, we need to sit together, Muslims and non-Muslims, and make it clear that discussion is the only way. This video, and works similar to it, only stir up the fight.
Ironically, the video contradicts itself when at the end it asks for the Islamic ideology to be defeated. If that’s what you are asking for, Mr. Wilders, which I totally agree with you in it, then why offend billions of Muslims? Really, what’s the point of agitating Muslims by that cheesy “tearing Quran apart, oops! no! it was a phone book” scene?
Given the number of posts I used to publish here, in the last couple of years, it just sounds too quiet in here now. I do know this and I do hope to have your support for the time when English Kamangir is going to become more active.
The fact is, I have to finish up my Ph.D. Furthermore, I am falling in love with blogging in Persian. Where else can you find such a vast population of youth looking for an alternative perspective, and a critical look at the state-run media? On top of these two, as if there would be any time left, I am pursuing my work on the statistics and the structure of the Persian blogosphere, which I am so willing to turn into a post-doc.
These days, Persian Kamangir seems to have no rival in the use of multimedia. From audio chats with people who have different views than him, to videos not seen by many, and of course with his many posts everyday, you can find all these in Kamangir. He has been recently gathering statistics of the Persian blogosphere, something which has attracted the attention of the Blogestan.
Well, that sort of makes me feel good. The only problem is, I am not just a blogger and my other involvements do demand a lot more time and attention. Wish me luck!
Enough with bragging. Happy new year, if you celebrate the Persian New Year, and thanks for reading this. A good friend of us took this picture yesterday, of me and Azadeh. I am the person standing, and sort of strangling the lady. She is alive, I assure you! :)
The boy is arrested for having long hair and is beaten by the Police. They then set his hair on fire, in order to humiliate him. Do spread the video (direct link to video).
Update: Some people claim that this video is fake. These people, however, do not manage to provide acceptable argument for their claim.
“The ceremony will focus on designating rewards for the assassination of three Israeli top officials”. This is how the close-to-state website Farda describes an event to be held in Tehran. The three officials are Ehud Barack, Meir Dagan, and Amos Yadlin. The amount will be awarded for the “revolutionary execution” of these three individuals. The executive committee, which calls itself the “justice-seeking movements of students”, also registers people who would donate their kidney to help increases the reward [Persian].
The first report of project KiBeKi (Generation 1) is available. According to this report, the ten most favorite websites in the Persian blogosphere are,
Before referring to the results of project Didish, the analysis of links shared by Persian bloggers, do make sure you have read this page. Please send me an email in case you have any question.
Etemad, a newspaper published inside Iran, reports that they have received word that the Ministry of Communication is considering complete blackout of the Internet in Iran for the day of the Parliamentary Elections [Persian]. Reportedly, this is the first time computerized polling will be integrated into the old paper-based system and the ministry is worried about the chances of technical problems as well as viral attacks.
A paper I wrote three years ago, as a result of my masters research, has been finally sent to print. This is a non-technical introduction to the issue. Read the whole paper here: pdf or html. This is quoted from here.
This is a work I did a long while ago, during my masters. The aim of this research was to capitalize on the concept of principal colors, suggested by us, and exploit it in order to carry out image processing tasks on color images.
In short, having collected a set of images which correspond to the same material, for example a set of skin images as shown below, we proposed a method for extracting the principal color related to this material, through intersecting the corresponding cylindrical representations.
This approach then leads to color image segmentation, as one application.
It was in the news that,
Hamid Reza Moghadam-Far, the head of the state-run Fars News, when asked, “As the head of a major media outlet, do you already have a blog or plan to start one? “, stated [
“Are you sure the Islamic Republic/Ahmadinejad have asked for Israel to be wiped off the map?” This is the question I have been asked by so many people over the course of the last few years. While I became more and more concerned why so many people kept asking the same question, I kept describing it, quite diligently, to whoever asked the question that “Israel is described as the tumor of the region by the former leader of the Islamic Republic and it is quite common to see slogans which ask for the destruction of Israel in military marches and such”.
Masih is once again on the spotlight, this time for a piece she wrote for Etemad Melli, a reformist newspaper [
This is a work I did a long while ago, during my masters. The aim of this research was to capitalize on the concept of principal colors, suggested by us, and exploit it in order to carry out image processing tasks on color images.
