Mind on the Rise

Kiva Loan #4 - María Elsa Pérez García

2011-01-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

All three of my other Kiva loans have been paid back so it was time to make a new one! I absolutely love doing this!

María Elsa Pérez García is a hardworking and enterprising 56-year-old woman who puts a lot of effort into her work. She works selling clothing which she started little by little with a few styles of clothing, and currently buys and distributes a larger quantity of merchandise. Mrs. Pérez is married and has an adult son who helps her in the business.

She will invest the loan in merchandise like shirts, pants, blouses, jeans, T-shirts, and uniforms especially because classes are beginning.

Finite and Infinite Games

2010-11-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

In many ways the Internet Age feels like hedonism to me. I love to read and have fallen headfirst into the vice of information snacking fed by an endless stream of content sites, RSS feeds, twitter links, and Facebook posts. I enjoy learning about the latest news in science, business, economics, startups, and the tech industry.

But with all that it's still fun to indulge in old-fashioned books in print. I can't help but buy new books, I'm currently reading Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants", Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers." I also just finished Andrew Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail." The modes of interaction with the physical object of a book seem ill-substituted by content on a web browser or even e-book readers. Sitting with a book in hand invites reflection, iteration, and even conversation in ways "e-ink" does not.

The effect feels more pronounced when you come across such a sweet little philosophical tract like James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games. He has you from the beginning with:

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

The book proceeds from this little definition to elaborate ideas about culture, identity, power, property, title and society with the implicit backdrop that life is really just a series of games. I've always found the notion of a dreaming universe and worlds within worlds extremely romantic. I love movies like Inception and The Matrix and books like Godel Escher Bach.

I guess I'm come to learn what my niche is. I was surprisingly pleased to learn Kevin Kelly spent a decade penniless walking around shooting photos in China. Now he writes about the inevitable self-organizing movement of technology. I want to be a voice in this new culture where free thought addresses the changes that are drastically shaping our lives.

Move to Seattle

2010-09-11T10:35:00.000-07:00

After five enjoyable years in Santa Barbara, my wife Elizabeth and I have moved to Seattle, Washington as I have taken a position at Microsoft. As I wrapped up the doctorate, I was fortunate to be able to pad a couple of months of `time off' before work begins. The time has been spent well: a few weeks back East visiting family, a ten day transSierra hiking trip, a road trip up the West Coast, and now a couple weeks of exploring our new city.

Our initial thoughts on the city, coming from serene Santa Barbara are as follows. Once we hit Oregon, the white-gray/evergreen color scheme descended like putting on a tinted pair of glasses. Sun breaks replace constant sunshine. People in Seattle ask why we would move here from such a beautiful place, but I think people anywhere would say that. Seattle seems vibrant, lots to do, the people chatty, the roads confusing, and the traffic problematic. The Cascades are calling, I hope we find the time to answer the call.

Has the Internet Changed Your Thinking?

2010-01-12T21:39:00.000-08:00

Edge.org's 2010 annual question asks you whether the internet has changed your thinking. I decided to take a moment and ponder the question.

The internet came to play a part in my life, through dial-up connections and then early cable modems, in my late high school/early college days 15 years ago. And yet, the medium (or is it something more?) still feels novel to me, as if there are future world changing marvels around the corner in coming years. Why do I feel this way? I'm just going on what the past has brought; what could have stagnated as a collection of dull HTML text-centric pages has continued to evolve into much more. Some of the major innovations have included e-commerce (ebay, amazon), information organization (Google), streaming video (YouTube, Hulu, Netflix), file sharing (Napster, bit torrents), social networks (Facebook), encyclopedias (Wikipedia), blogs (Blogger,Technorati,TechCrunch), microblogs (Twitter), location based services (Google Maps, Foursquare, Yelp), and RSS feeds (Google Reader). The promise beckons of location aware, mobile enabled, recommendation based systems that could "do the thinking for us" as a set of algorithms, sensors, and keywords determine what information is brought to our attention.

The internet has changed my thinking in regards to what I feel capable of accomplishing personally. The bar has never been lower for the entrepreneur in terms of marketing and distribution tools. The paradigm has shifted from push media to pull. Consumers are now producers. The billions lost by print (and soon to be TV) media are being distributed amongst tens of thousands of bloggers and small web site owners. Your Uncle Joe advertises his sailing website to sell his self-published, print-on-demand/Kindle book, and he also makes money selling ad space. And this all happened in the last decade. A career under the umbrella of a lumbering organization is no longer a necessity for an army of freelance content creators, coders, and information brokers whom otherwise would never be able to connect to those willing to pay for their services.

The internet has changed my thinking about artificial intelligence, as well, which I now view will become manifest as data-driven, personalized systems which influence the way we behave. Already, an online presence can enhance our lives immensely in how others interact with us. Information shared on Facebook connects one to acquaintances in new ways. Dating and other social sites, like Meetup.com and courchsurfing.org, connect people digitally so they can interact personally. As services mature, algorithms will get better at directing us towards people, events, goals, objects, and media driving us towards new experiences. Certain types of knowledge, in mathematical (Wolfram Alpha), factual (Wikipedia), and person-to-person (Yahoo Answers/Elance) form, will continue moving towards anytime, anywhere availability. The rising velocity of solutions, accessible by the educated worldwide, shrinks the globe and provides hope.

Avatar 3D

2009-12-22T11:54:00.000-08:00

Caught this movie last night and was really impressed about how far rendering/mocap technology has come. I was expecting to feel sick watching a 3 hour movie in 3D, but instead after a few minutes my visual system became accommodated to the stereoscopy.

Also, while the environmental/spiritual/science/native = good guys vs. corporatism/military = bad guys was simplistic, I guess it's a welcome reversal from the film days of Cowboys & Indians and Alien. However, it does perpetuate the myth that indigenous peoples lived in perfect harmony with their environment while the truth is the Americas were groomed and the coming of humans led to mass extinctions of large animals well before the Europeans arrived. In other words, we should be doing BETTER than the Native Americans.

Anyway, I thought it was worth the $12.75 price of admission.

Michael Jackson : A Fascinating Mythological Figure

2009-06-26T10:24:00.001-07:00

The death of Michael Jackson has moved me more than I would have predicted. His hits are a part of my childhood and his passing reminds us of not only of our mortality but also of our collective cruelty.

There are so many fascinating things about the Michael's life. The magic image of his movements during his best performances remain a delight to watch. He assumed the behavior of a child as an adult; one wonders how much of that was also performance. The man changed his skin color and the shape of his face to the dramatic extent that he literally became a walking mask. When he was observed shopping in Arabia wearing an all-covering burqa, it was as if he had added a disguise over a disguise. For all the joy he had brought the world and through all the weirdness, it was easy to see a deeply hurt individual in his interviews. As he faced his accusers (see the interview with Diane Sawyer - which ABC foolishly does not have posted), he claims innocence and purity. It was natural for Michael, abused as a child, to use his fame and power to put himself outside of behavioral expectations. The worldwide acclaim put him beyond superstardom and he used the acclaim so that no one would ever tell Michael what to do again.

In the end, Michael Jackson will take a place in history as a rare occurrence of someone who became other than human. He was much more than an influential eccentric like a Howard Hughes. He had an otherworldly quality, in his performance, his actions, and his words that were weirdly like a possessed person; a saint sans the religion. He was the product of our cruel televised culture: one that allowed his tyrannical father to abuse him for profit as a child, one quick to judge and abandon over speculative events, one which raised the man to a self-destructive hyperstardom.

MJ dead at 50. Name any other entertainer credited with something as powerful as the moonwalk.

Hack Philosophy: An Argument Against Materialism?

2009-06-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

I admit my indulgence in thinking about lofty questions such as what it means to be alive, what the nature of the universe is, etc... As an engineer, I have inherited a distaste for theological explanations that stave off nihilism by positing the existence of supernatural beings. Yet, from my own experience, I can't deny the vast wonder and mystery that accompanies life.

So here is a quick argument against materialism, which may not be original or even a good one:

Premises:

1) There are emergent phenomena in the universe that are the consequence of network behavior: provable ones include ant colonies, the internet. I also assert consciousness and language are such phenomena as well.

2) Altering the individual material components (ants, routers, neurons) which comprise these special types of network alter the system in unpredictable ways. The consequences of physical alteration are not ultimately knowable by any being with omniscient knowledge as to the exact, current state of the system. That is, there is a limit in the state of matter in the Universe towards randomness (witnessed in quantum mechanics) and this randomness occurs in nature (such as the entanglement which has been observed in plants).

Conclusion:
3) Therefore there is a separation between the material which creates emergent systems and the systems themselves. The material does not explain the system fully. Consciousness, built on memory and language, as such a system then is not ultimately a material one, even though, paradoxically, it depends critically upon material causes.

Ok, I feel good. Whether this is a good argument or not, (are the premises true?), and criticism arise, at least I thought for myself today which cheers me up. In my mind, we're all emergent behavior, something much more wonderful than a mere collection of cells.

[ASIDE: Do proponents of strong AI assert predictability? If you created the same strongly AI being from the same state, would it act exactly the same given the exact same environment?]

Torn Meniscus ?

2009-06-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

As I progress (!) on my path towards a PhD the journey has had its ups and downs. Last Thursday I injured my left knee playing roller hockey one short month before my Greece trip, conference presentations and wedding. Along with the stress of trying to finish a dissertation, establish solid foundation for what is next after grad school in dire economic conditions, and getting married, now I am adding this grace.

The MRI is on Saturday, results interpreted Monday.

25 bucks can go a far way

2009-05-15T11:34:00.001-07:00

Introducing Mandahsuren Baatar, my new Kiva loan recipient:

Mandahsuren Baatar is 38, married, and the mother of two: ages 11 and 13. Her family lives in a "ger" (traditional nomadic tent) district on the plot of land her family owns in Uvurhangay, one of the Mongolian central provinces. Both her children are attending an elementary school.

Mandahsuren started running a retail business in 2002. She used to sell bicycles and bike accessories outside a local market. In 2004, with her profit, she bought a little booth and started selling spare parts inside the market. In 2007 she bought another bigger booth to sell motorcycle spare parts. Her husband Dashhuu helps her run these businesses. Dashhuu goes to Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, once or twice every month to buy spare parts at the wholesale markets. Their regular customers are mostly herders who have motorcycles for their daily transportation needs.

Mandahsuren says that "with my profit I'm able to save money for my children's future university tuition." She requests a loan to buy spare parts for her business.

May my twenty five dollars go towards many spare parts. I'd let her go through the junk in my apartment, too.

Waltz with Bashir

2009-05-07T11:27:00.001-07:00

Caught the movie the other night here at UCSB. A dark foreign film in gripping animated format that follows the memories of Israeli men and their participation in the mid eighties invasion of Lebanon.

War movies have often glamorized a horrific aspect of human nature. This movie will bring reality to your attention. Highly recommended. I left the movie in silence.

How Many Overvalued Homes Does It Take to Break the Economy?

2009-04-06T23:24:00.000-07:00

A quick thought experiment: Let's suppose that on average an overvaluation of $100,000 was issued to sellers in the form of mortgages during the housing bubble. So when the housing market readjusts to a reasonable multiple of median income, $100,000 will have been lost.

How many houses makes up $1 trillion in lost money? Money that has already been issued to sellers? (i.e. some people got very rich)

The answer is 1x 10^12 divided by 1x10^5 = 1x10^7 or 10 million homes. When you consider the average house sheltering 4 people, that's 40 million people or 1/7th of the US population. Is it reasonable to say 14% of the U.S. got caught in $100,000 of overvaluation? Another way to put it is on average, if there are 70 million homes in the US, each one was overvalued by $14,000. Not a crazy amount.

Take this base amount of $1 trillion (an arbitrary number) and multiply by the illusory value of risk reduction in the form of packaged derivatives, and you have a potentially huge amount of money. Hence the IMF's declaration today that toxic debts could reach $4 trillion.

So the writing is on the wall and it's too ugly for anyone to point out the emperor's lack of clothes. The centers of the financial universe, large banks and other big players around the world, got caught holding tons of this crap when the game of musical chairs stopped. Huge swathes of money are owed which will never be repaid and this is going to wipe out individuals, towns, states and corporations.

People, like those who refinanced their home mortgages to fund buying another house, have lost amounts equivalent to 10+ years of savings from the drop in real estate values alone. With salaries not rising to match the cost of home ownership, one has to wonder who the people buying into these seller markets were expecting to buy the properties. Were they expecting large financial institutions (the only ones with access to the money required) to buy all these houses, which in effect they have?

Another way to think of it: if the price of your automobile had been skyrocketing each month, just now reaching $100,000 (and all this not due to limited supply) would you have sunk money into cars? It must be tempting, when your neighbor bought a 2002 Ford Focus last month at $30,000 and just sold it for $40,000.

But at some point you have to realize how insane the price is. The only option becomes to buy a horse instead and watch the world collapse around you. Probably too many people trusted that the powers that be would prevent the widespread fraud that went into the run up of housing prices.

Beware the Hyperinflation

2009-03-05T15:48:00.000-08:00

Which mechanism prevents hyperinflation after the multi-trillion dollar injection into the money supply eases the flow of money?

Cheney Becomes Potter from Wonderful Life for Inauguration

2009-01-20T14:38:00.003-08:00

Other notable comparisons I found on the web:

Dr. Strangelove

The Big Lebowski

I'm leaving out the Blofeld/Dr. Evil comparison as too obvious.

Word of the Day: Quertzy

2009-01-12T14:35:00.001-08:00

quertzy: a word that by definition has no definition save it to say it is definitely a word

- the null word
- also useful for scoring points in scrabble due to its high word score (78 pts)

Home prices must fall further...

2008-11-25T10:53:00.000-08:00

The New York Times today reports the troubled housing market dragging our economy down the toilet - with prices down as much as 30% in a year in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Here's the conundrum: the government will inject money into the system to try and prevent further decline in prices, thus saving those who re-financed their mortgages or bought into bubble. This is an obviously necessary step to prevent more foreclosures which in turn would further ravage the financial firms who foolishly, with an avarice that would make JD Rockefeller blush, sunk their teeth into the CDOs.

But with prices at 2004 levels, perhaps, you'd note that the ratio of median home price to median income is still unhealthy and a dangerous onus on the middle class. 2000 levels are more likely, with some predicting a fall even below that before all is said and done.

Now is the time to replace the GDP

2008-11-22T15:41:00.001-08:00

Economics has replaced poker as the armchair game of the day. I look forward to my spot at the World Series of Economics table. I'm all in.

I recently heard a talk by Patrick Yam of Sensei Partners LLC, an early stage venture capital group. Patrick had a lot of data ranging from debt as percentage of GDP measures to house starts in the realty market. I was surprised, actually, by how little new I learned as someone who gets his information from the New York Times, the Economist and a range of blogs brought to prominence via social aggregate sites like Digg and Reddit.

Patrick Yam suggested we embark on a New New Deal featuring infrastructure spending, increased regulation, and injection of liquidity into the financial system. I didn't see anything surprising about these suggestions, as I am sure Bernanke, Obama or even Paulson would speak in the same generics. There was no explicit critique of the Reaganomics that have led us to where we are today unless you count the suggestions of increased government spending and regulation.

But I feel even that would fall short. As an electrical engineer, I often try and frame the problems I am attempting to solve in an optimization framework. For instance, choose the solution which minimizes the probability of error given your observed data and models of class distributions. However, things can go wrong. Your models may be operating on incorrect assumptions. Or worse, you might find that what you are attempting to optimize does not solve your problem.

The entire framework of the modern economy revolves around optimizing the growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Our friends at Wikipedia give us that GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports), so essentially we're talking about the flow of capital.

GDP is a critically important measure. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP. Now optimization does not imply maximization always, but instead economists seek to maintain a stable and healthy amount of growth.

I propose that now is an ideal time to flush GDP optimization down the toilet and replace it instead with an alternative measure that represents the problems facing us today and in the more long-term future. The former kingdom of Bhutan famously incorporated the measure of GNH, Gross National Happiness, reflecting wellness in 7 critical areas ranging from social to ecological.

Let's admit our addiction. Consumerism has caused a wealth of problems that can't be addressed by our current macroeconomic system. Short term business profits have no way of considering sustainability, hence the threat to the world's environment and even to the companies themselves (GM, Ford). Happiness, a universally agreed good, has been famously shown in studies to suffer diminishing returns as a function of income. What if instead of focusing on productivity, we focused on work that increased happiness?

If GNH works for an obscure Himalayan kingdom, why not the world?

A Nation Divided...

2008-10-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

Things are certainly tense with the lead into the presidential election nearing three short weeks. Even hockey columnists have become political pundits, like Larry Brook's criticism of Ed Snider's choice of Sarah Palin to drop the puck at the Flyer's home opener.

Perhaps worse, though, is the commentary. Larry Brooks writes for the New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News, so it's not surprising that his readership would react adversely. Quotes like these really go a long way to show how 'us' vs. 'them' national politics has become:

Congratulatons to Ed Snider for realizing this and having the courage, intelligence, and conviction to publicly support a Republican

Yes Snider is a republican and this is staged as a "Hockey Mom" thing, so there should be no problem. Why don't you get on the rest of the media for pandering for Obama. Go vote for Obama like the rest of the clueless people in this country.

I feel this undercurrent in America, and it equally applies for Democrat supporters, that somehow if you vote the opposition you are 'clueless' or not 'intelligent'.

The irony that this has boiled over into a hockey column is poignant. People bring the same immaturity to Red vs Blue as they do Rangers vs Flyers. The fist fights that break out in the stands will show you what I mean.

Photo of the Earth and Moon from Mars

2008-06-11T10:52:00.000-07:00

Counter-culture turned cyber-culture visionary Stewart Brand (influencer of Wired, Steve Jobs amongst of others) campaigned in 1966 for the release of a then-rumored NASA satellite photo of the Earth from space. The blue marble image, well represented by the 1972 Apollo 17 one, is iconic and revolutionary. Brand says it induced mystical experiences as people got their heads around how magnificent our island in a sea of darkness truly is.

Boingboing pointed out this photo of the Earth and Moon taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera from Mars.

I've often wanted to see a photo of planets in space combined with another with a long enough exposure time to image the stars one would see appearing in the 'blackness' if one were in space.

The blackness, introduced by a limit in our imaging equipment, is misleading. It makes us feel alone rather than at awe by the possibility that many of the bright dots surrounding us may each have a blue, green or red rocky marble with thriving intelligence in seeming contradiction of the law of increasing entropy.

Famous quotes of the future

2008-06-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

In order not to have doubts, avoid mentioning having any.

The theory of evolution was a war in the realm of the mind. The fittest idea won.

America is the continent Europe dreamed up.

Musicians know not to use out-of-the-box synth sounds. Aesthetics implies taking every element into consideration.

People who dislike the south are like people who dislike the north.

Everyone is working for the future while paying for the past.

Scotch whisky: a gruesome life-saving drink.

On the essence of a zen koan: it passes it on even when it doesn't pass it on.

The expected does not capture anyone's attention.

The strongest men are those who admit knowledge.

Mental Detox Week

2008-04-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

Well I just spent a week observing adbuster's mental detox. Formerly TV-turnoff week, it has been updated to include video Ipod, DVD and laptops. As I approached the week clearly I had to make some decisions on what was allowed, as I couldn't quit computers altogether unless I were to take a vacation.

I decided to include Ipod music in the banned list, as I feel I spend all too much time in ipod 'isolation' - avoiding interaction with the world around me as I listen to music. While it helps when coding, too many times in a week I find myself having to remove my earphones to hear what someone is saying to me.

I also decided to include news websites and rss feeds: too much time reading digg and reddit only brings me down anyway with all the depressing news about recessions, oil prices, the primaries, conspiracies not to mention the twaddle that reverberates around main stream media and the blogosphere.

Youtube and video sites were banned. Facebook and twitter were banned. The blog was temporarily shut down.

I would allow email, SMS and informational websites I needed for work.

So, how do I feel now that it's over? Refreshed actually. So much so I don't feel the need to check reddit and the new york times twenty times a day like I might have. I read a lot more, went for walks, and generally felt more in touch with the world. I got a lot more work done, taking breaks by getting up and looking out the window rather going off on some website tangent.

I don't feel that mental detox week led to anything life changing, but it did feel good to know I can just step away when need be.

Aboudoudermane Yakoubi on Kiva

2008-04-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

I previously wrote about Kiva.org - a website that combines the best of the social web with microloans, and how I made a $25 loan to Abraham Abagado in Togo for a barber shop.

Well Mr. Abagado has repaid his loan in full and so it's time to re-loan the money: this time to Aboudoudermane, winner of best first name ever award, also in Togo, looking to borrow money to buy milk for his general store (really).

Tremendous Podcast on Chinese View of Olympic Protests

2008-04-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

NPR's On Point host Tom Ashbrook is in Beijing this week and has been doing great interviews about the coming Olympics. The attitudes in the podcast (link below) are exactly like the ones I experienced talking to students while working as an intern in Beijing.

If anyone knows how to embed NPR's podcasts in Blogger please let me know. For now here's the link: Young China NPR Podcast

Amazingly, the youngest Chinese are the ones who toe the party line the most and are the fiercest nationalists.

Two moments stand out, at about minute 32, Ashbrook asks about the genocide issues in Darfur which prompts the infamous Asian sucking sound in response from the student.

Also, at 38:00, Ashbrook responds to another student's claim that CNN doctored its images with Nepalese police with this query: "Are you sure? How do you know? Do you have a free press in this country to assure you can know?"

Priceless work, Tom.

The Incredibly Shallow Quest for the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

2008-04-06T23:36:00.001-07:00

Malcolm Gladwell tells a great story in his TED talk about the man who didn't invent the perfect spaghetti sauce - he invented the perfect spaghetti sauces. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - which makes contests and press on 'who is the most beautiful person' silly. Everyone chooses movie stars, whether from Bollywood (Rai) or Hollywood (Jolie). Models seem to me to be like Frankensteins, freaks of nature - tall cruel and so unhealthily thin that no red meat eating heterosexual man would cast their vote for such a body being the spaghetti sauce of his choice.

Take for instance, Gisele Bundchen whose high cheek bones suggest a wanton ruthlessness:

Can you imagine an evening with Gisele? What a reminder of everything you don't have that would be!

Cat's Cradle

2008-04-06T23:22:00.001-07:00

Is a brilliant novel. Really. I've read some Vonnegut before - Time Quake, Slaughterhouse Five, and this one I think is the best of his I've come across.

Bokonism, the religion invented on San Lorenzo in the novel, is a charming cocktail of freethinkery.

"Science is magic that works."

Brilliant!

Perhaps best of all - I got the novel for free in electronic format at wowio.com. I've been reading it on my Sony Reader after I converted the pdf to lrf format. There are some layout issues but the file is readable enough.

We need more data...

2008-03-31T10:52:00.000-07:00

Anand Rajaraman, an associate professor who teaches data mining at Stanford had a nice post on the power of more data today over algorithms.

One of the stumbling blocks, though, is acquiring that data in an intelligent fashion. For instance, in the TRECVID evaluation - where teams develop systems to identify the presence of concepts, such as U.S. flags, in a large of collection videos, there are often very few positive examples to train on. On the other hand, the evaluation in general had discouraged enhancing the training set by designating those teams' systems that do so 'C' type - a rarely used designation thus limiting what can be learned by comparison with other systems.

That is, how do you properly evaluate systems when you open the dataset and simultaneously allow varying algorithms?

Science!

2008-03-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

I recently was invited to help judge a middle school science fair. There was a wide range of experiments from hilarious: "Do people lie more often to kids or adults?" based upon responses after subjects ate salt-laden cookies, to engineering-like: "Can water be made into hydrogen and oxygen?"

Perhaps the best one I saw measured how well different thicknesses of wire would transduce vibration to electricity.

It's great to see young minds taking part in what gets demonized in American culture as a 'for geeks' process - the scientific method. Some projects were better than others, as some kids have more of an inclination or knack to tackle science, but doubtlessly the exposure will lead to less fear of 'what's hard' as they grow into adults.

One observation though: the format of the science fair submission were all uniform. Cardboard stands, demos, and a report - no videos, no websites, no audio explanations, no flat layouts, etc... A certain creativity in display design was missing. It's not surprising to see such 'to-the-letter' assignment following and typical pedantry in an environment where the state controls the educational content.

Even undergraduates in college suffer from this mentality - I did task A, to get points B, to get grade C - rather than look beyond the process in order to grasp true understanding of the assignment's lesson.

---
UPDATE: Make your own aerogel - a ten year old's awesome science project.

Dawes fakes Brodeur out of his jock strap

2008-03-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

Forward to 2:52 to see Nigel Dawes hypnotize the living legend:

Obama for Network Neutrality

2008-03-13T19:32:00.001-07:00

How can you not like this guy?

Hockey is Dead

2008-01-17T18:33:00.000-08:00

As a teenager in the glory years of '94 and '95, with Gretzky on the Kings and roller hockey in San Diego on ESPN, I thought my favorite team sport had a chance of breaking into the national consciousness. I mean, which sport is greater? Institutionalized fighting, skates, impossible to pronounce last names which once you learn you're in the club ... and it's not like the other big 3 in North America have been setting themselves apart, thugball is a circus, baseball has been plagued by roids and strikes, and the NFL might as well not run the games and just show commercials.

Yet as of today I officially declare that hockey is dead. The water hit its high mark years ago and it is receding. I tried three stores here in SoCal looking for hockey gear, and not so much as a single stick for sale - even Play It Again Sports - which has cricket gear! has cleared its shelf space of used hockey goods.

So sure I'll fire up an occasional game on TV or lace on the skates, but my visions of hockey glory are as dead now as stamp collecting.

Good thing I took up surfing.

It Doesn't Look Good for Roger

2008-01-08T09:35:00.002-08:00

Poor Clemens, yesterday in a press conference he played an audio tape of a recorded phone conversation with his trainer McNamee. Listening to the men talk I'm left wondering why Clemens avoids asking him straight out why he lied, and avoids going into detail about the allegations. It's as if he wants to avoid the truth. The whole thing reeks of OJ syndrome - denial.

The 2000 bat incident with Piazza sure look the rage to me:

Organologists in a Bathroom

2007-05-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

This video reminds me of Dungeons & Dragons for some reason...

So Easy a Caveman Can Do It

2007-05-16T10:25:00.000-07:00

Yes it's true - ABC plans to make a sitcom based on Geico's commercials. Finally - a TV show I might watch. Yeah right.

Dalai Lama to Retire

2007-05-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

The exiled Dalai Lama - post China - became an international spokesman for his religion unlike his predecessors who never left the forbidden city of Llasa for significant periods of time.

Here's an article about his possible retirement:

Life after the Dalai Lama

The Indepedent, UK[Tuesday, May 15, 2007 07:09]

The spiritual leader of the Tibetan people is now 71 - and finally talking about retirement. But his successor is likely to face the same life of exile as China's persecution continues. Peter Popham reports

He seems always to have been around. Was there ever a time when the Dalai Lama's chuckling, roly-poly form was not on television or in the magazines and newspapers, as familiar as Father Christmas or Terry Wogan or the Queen? And now we hear he's going to retire. It's hard to believe.

"Old friends pass away, new friends appear," the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, said once. "It's just like the days. An old day passes, a new one arrives." But in the case of the Dalai Lama himself it is not easy to be so phlegmatic. He has become part of the world's furniture, happy to attend the opening of an envelope if the word "Tibet" is written on it, available equally to be made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool University, an honorary citizen of Canada, and recipient of the Life Achievement Award of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organisation if it gives oxygen to the cause of Tibet's liberation.

He has been excoriated by Christopher Hitchens, bitterly attacked, but only in private, by Tibetan exiles who wish that he would press their cause with more aggression, damned by Qi Xiaofei of China's religious affairs administration as "a saboteur of ethnic unity and a pursuer of splittism". Mr Burns once gave Homer Simpson the task of splatting a cream pie in his face. But Homer funked it. And who can blame him?

It would take the vitriol of a Balliol dandy like Hitchens, the state-sanctioned bile of a Chinese bureaucrat, to find fault with the old geezer. And now, aged 71, he plans to fade away. The news emerged at the weekend from Brussels, where Tibet support groups from all over the world are meeting with the exiled community's Prime Minister, Dr Sandhong Rinpoche, and other members of the government to discuss the difficult months ahead, in the run-up to Beijing's Olympics.

Beijing had promised greater freedom of expression in advance of the Games, and for the first time in Tenzin Gyatso's 47 years of exile he has been in negotiations with the Chinese. Yet increasingly Tibet supporters see China's emollient words as exactly that, designed to lull the West into complacency while inside China, and in Tibet itself, the state repression intensifies. And now this: no Dalai Lama at the helm.

"He will keep his spiritual role but wants to lessen his political burden as he moves into retirement," the report went. Yesterday, Tibetans denied that they were taken aback by the news: recently in the US, they pointed out, he had told a group of students that he was already "semi-retired", and would "retire completely" within a few years.

Chhime Rigzing, the Dalai Lama's private secretary, explained from Dharamsala, the Himalayan headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile: "The political leadership will be transferred over a period of time. But he will continue to be the spiritual leader, because as the Dalai Lama the issue of relinquishing the post does not arise. The temporal part he wants to transfer but you can't transfer spiritual leadership in Buddhism, you can't change that."

Of course that begs the question, where exactly do you draw the line? As 13th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, like his predecessors, was Tibet's head of state as well as its religious leader. The unique presence he has established in the West since fleeing from China has been the result of this dual role: he spoke for the Tibetans as a people and for their suffering at the hand of the invader, and no one except the Chinese government challenged his right to do so. At the same time, and with startling directness, he told the truths of Buddhism.

The trampling of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army, the trashing of its monasteries and the brainwashing of its monks and nuns, the colonisation of its towns and cities by Chinese settlers, all of which continues, was an outrage of which the Dalai Lama spoke with unique eloquence, and because the outrage was so stark he found a huge ready audience everywhere. And then, almost without us being aware of it, he was telling us about values, about morality, about happiness, in the simplest words. And because of the way he did it, most of us lingered to listen to that message, too. Tibetan Buddhism is a fabulously exotic construct, as remote and strange a religious tradition as any in the world, ineffably far away. Yet Tenzin Gyatso has a way to make it simple, without cheapening its truths. "Happiness is not something ready made," he will say, "it comes from your own actions." "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher."

"His Holiness has expressed his wish to retire," said Yael Weisz-Rind, the director of the London-based Free Tibet Campaign, "and the Tibetans say they wish he will remain ... It's not the first time we are hearing this message about semi-retirement. This is in his long-term vision, so that on the day he dies the Tibetans will be able to carry on, both those in Tibet and those in exile: there will be no need for emergency procedures. The announcement didn't come as a surprise." But who on earth will take his place? The Tibetans have an answer to that, too.

Tenzin Tsundue, a Tibetan activist and poet, said: "His Holiness has been making such statements [about retirement] for quite some time and he has been doing a lot to empower the Tibetan community, to democratise it. He will hand over to the directly elected prime minister, elected by Tibetans living around the world. His Holiness has been nurturing this process of becoming independent from within for a very long time. The arrival of democracy is the biggest thing that has happened to the Tibetan community in the past 50 years." Dr Rinpoche, 70, is a doctor of Buddhist philosophy but he is not a monk. Neither, sadly, despite his democratic credentials, does he have any kind of a profile outside his own community.

The Dalai Lama's authority - like that of the Pope - derives from the universal acceptance by Tibetans of his legitimacy. A democratically elected prime minister, however desirable, does not come with quite the same mystique. The Tibetans will still need their high lamas.

And that is where the Chinese have presented the Tibetans with a grave dilemma. The Dalai Lama is number one in the Tibetan religious hierarchy; number two is the Panchen Lama. It is the Dalai Lama's job to help identify, with the help of dreams and visions, the newly reincarnated Panchen Lama; and vice versa, so the hierarchy of reincarnated religious leaders leapfrogs down the ages. By abducting the newly identified Panchen Lama in 1995, and keeping his whereabouts secret ever since, the Chinese attempted to hijack this process; the puppet Panchen Lama they appointed in his place is duly expected to name a puppet Dalai Lama, once Tenzin Gyatso dies, and the People's Republic will then have the whole arcane system in its pocket.

Things might not go so smoothly for them, however. The Dalai Lama himself has said clearly that, owing to the oppressive conditions prevalent in Tibet, he expects his own reincarnation to appear outside, among the exiles. There remains of course the problem of who will identify him. "The absence of the Panchen Lama is one of the areas of anxiety in the Tibetan community," conceded Yael Weisz-Rind. "The Chinese are aware of this, and that's probably why the Panchen Lama was abducted."

But all is not lost. Another high lama is coming to ripeness just as the Dalai Lama prepares to leave the stage. Third in the hierarchy after the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, the 17th Karmapa Lama is unique in that he is recognised by the Chinese and the Dalai Lama. And, although he was believed by many in the Tibetan community to have come unhealthily under Chinese influence in his childhood, he redeemed himself dramatically in 1999 when he fled as a young teenager with a few companions from Tsurphu monastery and travelled hundreds of miles along unmarked tracks to avoid detection before turning up in Dharamsala.

This "Black Hat Lama", Ogyen Trinley Dorje, has not established a reputation in the West because Delhi has not yet allowed him to leave India. But his supporters in Dharamsala believe it won't be long before that happens. "He turns 22 next month, he now speaks six languages, and he's becoming more and more of a magnet here," said Jane Perkins, author of Tibet in Exile, from Dharamsala. "Even mainland Chinese are coming over to hear him speak, 90 came to his last appearance in southern India. There's absolutely no doubt that he is the new star: dynamic, powerful, full of young energy but with tremendous discipline and dignity, enormously sage for his age. We hope he will be free to go overseas soon. In which case he could take some of the load off His Holiness's shoulders."

She added as an afterthought: "Every teenage girl is in love with him..." And that's something not even Tenzin Gyatso can claim.

The Dragon and the Chimera, Battling Two Environmental Monsters at Once

2007-03-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

There are two major crises on the horizon: depletion of the oil supply (a Dragon) and global warming (a Chimera), and solutions to one problem often contribute to the other.

As an example, Thomas Friedman wrote a piece on how environmentalists were able to stop the construction of multiple coal plants by TXU in Texas in an unprecendented fashion. However, we're going to need energy to make alternative transportation fuels (electric cars, hydrogen fueled cars).

David Talbot in Technology Review writes about this in a review of ahydrogen fueled car by BMW noting:

The reason hydrogen-powered cars would produce more carbon emissions than regular cars starts with the fact that it takes energy to create hydrogen.

That is, circumventing the oil depletion problem with hydrogen cars is going to require coal plants! (Renewable sources, like hydropower, currently only supply 2% of the world's energy).

So which problem is worse? Are there solutions that can provide clean, renewable energy that is also easily and sufficiently converted for transportation purposes? Environmental conscious people - let's not forget about the Chimera while we're fighting off the Dragon, and vice versa.

Also both of these problems considered together come down to one - finding clean, renewable energy. Now that we're aware of global warming we'll learn to fight the Chimera by conservation, reducing commutes, increased mass transportation, buying more efficient vehicles and lighting systems, fazing out 'suburbia' (the internet lets us do this), and regulating carbon emissions by industry through carbon markets.

But unless we find a clean, renewable energy source before the wheels stop turning (the oil has made transport overly expensive), we will in our lifetimes see the 1st world as we know it disappear.

Surprisingly, there will be little noticable difference in the lives of 70%+ of the people in places like Africa, India, and China, if you don't count the widespread famines caused by desertification (happening in Africa now) and other climate change.

Go see the movie Children of Men.

Peak Oil: Is the end nigh?

2007-01-17T17:16:00.000-08:00

I just heard Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in the energy industry, give a talk on peak oil. He told us he had struggled to find a title for his latest oil book that wasn't 'to hell in a hand basket.' Things are looking very grim.

The demand for oil has essentially no limit to growth as supplies dwindle. Simmons calls for a swift, massive effective oil conservation effort to mitigate the chaos that will occur as prices dramatically rise and as we struggle to transfer to renewable energy.

He feels the need for a worldwide 'Energy War' implementing the following:
- energy data reform: make all oil fields release accurate production data so they can be aggregated and wiser decisions on how to manage energy can be made.
- transfer to safe, clean energy
- enact a massive change in oil use by:
1) liberate the workforce. stop requiring commuting, instead pay by productivity. 2 hour commutes would disappear as people who could would work from home
2) ship people and goods primarily by water.
3) reduce long-distance food miles
4) make goods close to home
- undertake a 'Manhattan project' for Energy R&D

This comes from an industry friendly guy, with close contact to key data and key players in the oil arena. His warnings have nothing to do with conservationism. When guys like this begin to have talks like this, people should start to get really, really scared and see the writing on the wall.

Simmons predicts that prices in 5 to 7 years are going to force many of these changes anyway, so perhaps it's time to start preparing for them now. The dream is over, our energy supply was not unlimited at such a low cost (oil costs less than water in a bottle).

Maybe it's like Kurt Vonnegut said - the world is about to come off a massive oil high and he doesn't want to be around for the withdrawal symptoms.

Tellingly, Simmons lists his key critics as: CERA (who he derides as having reports full of bogus data), Exxon, BP, Shell and Saudi Arabia.

Microlending to save the world

2007-01-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

Let's face this fact: a large part of the world's problems stem from the depressing futures people living in poverty have. The world buckles under the strain of dissatisfied masses with no hope for security, a fulfilling life, nor escape from destitution. This is the root cause of terrorism.

A simple thing for 1st worlders to do would be to lend some small amount of money, $20, $50 directly to developing world people in need of a lift. Kiva.org facilitates this in an exciting way never possible before.

I've currently funded part of Abraham Adamamo's, pictured above, loan request which he would like to use to open his own barber shop. I'm assuming his request has been legitimately vetted, and this money isn't really going to gunrunning. Call that my leap of faith.

Here is the description from Kiva. I hope more people participate in the microloan process:

Mr. Abraham ADAMAMO is a single, 20-year-old man. As he comes from a large, poor family, he abandoned school early to come to Lomé to work as a porter in the large Lomé market. As this job became more and more tiresome without earning him decent wages, he quickly became an unlicensed street vendor in the large intersections of Lomé. With this job he earned a small amount of savings, which allowed him to study for two years to be a barber. As he did not have the financial means to open his own workshop after his training, he worked in a shop helping a friend, who was only taking advantage of him.

A brave a courageous man, Mr. Abraham ADAMAMO has decided to open his own barber shop in order to take his destiny into his own hands. To do so, he is requesting a loan of $950, which will allow him to rent a shop and buy the necessary equipment, such as mechanical and electric clippers and necessary cosmetic products. This very dedicated young man deserves to be supported in order to allow him to better his life and get out of poverty. He would serve as a good example for other young people who are falling into difficult situations.

Translated from French by Kristina Jackson, Kiva Volunteer.

A Theory of Enlightenment

2007-01-15T20:19:00.000-08:00

A Theory of Enlightenment

As someone involved in a straitfaced engineering career, I probably shouldn't post about this, but one should stick to their guns or beliefs. In January 2004 I had a life-affirming, life-changing spiritual experience while traveling in Australia which led me to feel firmly that something similar to what the Buddhists describe as enlightenment really exists. Call it grace from God or some super-ecstastic emotional state. I also would like to go on the record as not believing in God in the old-world sense. I'm agnostic about being agnostic, which I feel makes my ideas about 'enlightenment' more credible - they're free from dogma.

Here are some of my ideas about that now:

Latent within many minds, based on condition, is the ability to step above one's ordinary mode of consciousness, into another that primarily observes the ordinary sense of consciousness, perception and sensation. While in this state an overwhelming compassion fills ones being along with a gratefulness for being alive.

Necessary conditions for entering such a state may include:
- freedom from distractions, environmental noises
- freedom from concern with satisfying primary needs of clothing, food and shelter,
- freedom from social rejection
- intelligent curiosity about the nature of existence

This latent ability is not talked about openly in society, although it is part of the Eastern religions and as such is often dismissed in West. Its existence is doubted. It may be that prophets experienced a strong, special, and long-lasting shift of consciousness but given the evolution of human thought such statements can be merely speculative. Enlightenment 'by the masses' is not necessarily, and probably is not, a lifelong shift of consciousness that occurs but instead occurs for short periods of time such as minutes, hours or days. The state is unlike any of the emotions felt in ordinary consciousness, unlike attractive, familial, or friendly love, and unlike the change in consciousness due to any drug including hallucinogenics. Firsthand experience will convince one that it does truly exist, although due to its subjectivity there is no proof of attainment. The state carries with it a strong spiritual sense, and does not seem to be able to be induced via any known technique including prayer, meditation, contemplation, concentration. It is as if the grace of a higher power, a being behind the veil ordering everything, is solely responsible for the higher level of consciousness, and entering it is one of the existence's greatest gifts. Belief in such a being is not a necessity, nor does the state reveal any characteristics of such a being, name, wishes, etc...

The state may be related to near death experience.

Good 'ol Henry Rollins

2007-01-15T09:46:00.001-08:00

I've enjoyed Henry Rollins marathon spoken word sessions, here he goes on Net Neutrality:

Find this video and thousands of others at vSocial!

Engineers Without Borders - Lighting projects

2007-01-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

Engineers without Borders, EWB, is a relatively new organization for professionals mirroring the groundbreaking organization Doctors without Borders. To some extent, volunteering medical counseling has much more immediate impact and is easier to set up logistically - a doctor can arrive at a clinic (hopefully with a bagful of meds!) and start treating people. Engineers, on the other hand, have to make inroads with a potential site, assess needs, and then continually work with local politicians to implement a project which usually consists of some new technology, whose production can be taught, and whose construction is from locally available materials.

EWB suffers from the fact that construction projects of high impact usually require a commitment of years, and professionals or students are lucky to afford a period of weeks abroad. Even the Peace Corps, given 2+ years presence in a village, is lucky to leave behind any long standing infrastructure. However, the point may be more to spread good will & compassion than to build skyscrapers in the Peruvian Andes, and change the mindset of fortunate souls in the affluent first world.

As an electrical engineer, at Shuji Nakamura's institution (inventor of blue and white light LED), it appears a natural tie in to work energy efficient solid state lighting into my involvement with the EWB chapter here. The chapter has had a continuing commitment of years with a project at Araypallpa, Peru, and has developed sustainable solar panels for the village who have been until very recently unconnected to the electrical grid.

I'll be updating my progress with the EWB lighting project in Peru as things proceed, but for now I wanted to share a quick compilation of lighting facts, comparing incandescent, flourescent, and solid state solutions:

EWB UCSB – Peru Project, Lighting Subgroup.

Prepared by: Jim Kleban 01/11/07

Some Lighting Facts

Sustainable lighting – lighting powered by a renewable energy source, for example solar lighting

Energy saving lighting – more efficient lighting in terms of Lumens per Watt (compared to incandescent bulbs). Flourescents or LED

Compact flourescents – fluorescent bulbs have traditionally been long tubes in ceiling mounts. Recently developed compact fluorescent light bulbs fit in conventional lamp sockets. These use roughly ¼ of the power of incandescent bulbs for the same amount of light

Source Wikipedia.org:

There are two main parts to a CFL: the gas-filled tube (also called bulb or burner) and the magnetic or electronic ballast. Electrical energy in the form of an electrical current from the ballast flows through the gas, causing it to give off ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light then excites a white phosphor coating on the inside of the tube. This coating emits visible light.

Walmart’s 2006 goal: sell one CFL to every one of their 100 million customers. So far failing.

You can buy 4 Rite-Aid CFLs for $4 that give same light as 60W or 75W incandescents. Or you can buy 4 incandescents for $2.

LED lighting – (SSL) solid state semiconductor physics causes photon emissions creating visible light with virtually no heat or parasitic energy dissipation.

Advantages (Source Wikipedia.org):

· High durability - no filament or tube to break

· Long life span - LEDs last approximately 100,000 hours

· Low power consumption - reduces overall electricity bill

· Flexible application – small size of LEDs can lead to unique lighting devices

· Low heat generation – very little parasitic energy loss

“Currently, however, there is no SSL on the market that can be offered as a true replacement for incandescent or fluorescent lamps, even though several manufacturers have gone forward with the introduction of such products. White LEDs produced today are too expensive to be considered affordable, and the lumens produced by the LEDs today are not as bright as traditional lighting.”

However there are portable lighting possibilities: flashlights, headlamps, mining lamps, bicycle lights.

Cost: (from superbrightleds.com) - $590 for 1000 – each LED emits 18 lumens with 30 degree viewing angle

A typical 60W incandescent might yield 900 lumens and costs 50 cents. Equivalent LED lamp (ignoring the narrow viewing angle) would require 50 white LEDS so would cost $29.50 in diodes alone.

Some Economics

Average energy cost US - $0.106 per kWh (2006)

Average electricity cost Peru - $0.10 kWh (1999) (source:http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/publications/reports/pedc/cases/peru.asp)

Mean annual income US – $60,528 ($43,000 median)

Mean annual income Peru – $2,390 (US)

The Holiday Season & the Coffee Strikes Back

2006-12-28T07:48:00.000-08:00

Well kicking the coffee lasted until Dec 25th... turns out my parents drink way too much coffee, and give and receive too much coffee to say no while I am back East. Not sure whether I'll give it a go again this year - I was still getting headaches on day 5 of kicking.

I'm not really a gadget person, but the end of the year brings about best of tech reviews which can be interesting. PC World has a review that lists Microsoft Office 2007 as the #1 most innovative product, but their piece seems very old guard to me - Intel, Sony, and Dell are also on the list. David Pogue's top 10 features of the year piece is more interesting - he includes the Zune's wireless song sharing feature and then sinks it for its 3 day/3 song expiration caveat.

Different sources will give you lists of scientific stories for the year - for instance Scientific American's top science stories and Technology Review's emerging technologies list. My vote for tech breakthrough of the year would be John Bower's work with optical interconnect on silicon. Communications and computation are intertwined and one always limits the other, improved bus speeds will do much to speed computation tasks.

It's interesting whether and when these types of university level discoveries make it through to mass production in the world. Many of the things I've read about, like a new type of fiber optic cable with vanishing attenuation invented at MIT more than 5 years ago, simply seem to disappear. Others, like lasers, make it into our disc readers and popular use without much fanfare.

Technology management programs at universities try to help graduate students take their projects into entrepreneurship, but at the class level I don't see much talk about this type of thing. Maybe, to be realistic, this only happens at Stanford.

Kicking the Caffeine Addiction Day 2

2006-12-20T22:26:00.000-08:00

Overwhelmed by all of the Xmas shopping that I've put off until the last minute - I was on my feet driving around Santa Barbara/Ventura counties all day. It's day two of quitting coffee. Yesterday went smoothly enough. However, last night I was miserable - tossing around in bed, flailing my limbs, suffering from nightmares.

Today I had heachaches, dizziness, nausea, pain, felt lightheaded with symptoms intensifying in the afternoon (50 hours no coffee). I had to stop home and lie down and take a couple of aspirin. Some 'chai' tea helped - a small dose of caffeine to tide me over. Starting to feel bad again this evening.

I drink coffee mostly to help me think, read, write. At what price? They say there is no major health risk involved with coffee addiction except for people who have heart troubles. Somehow I imagine in the future they'll discover that coffee takes away your soul. I LOVE IT I LOVE IT I LOVE IT

Break my coffee addiction

2006-12-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

Well it's the end of the quarter - wound up my last exam in Information Theory... given that I have a few weeks off, ostensibly, 'tis the time of year to shake my one true vice - addiction to coffee. I once read somewhere, I think it was in a Carl Sagan book, that mathematicians can be thought of as machines that convert caffeine into equations.

Years ago I learned that caffeine helps me think faster and get more done. Also years ago coffee went from something I'd drink when settling done to study, to a ritual morning and oftentimes afternoon beverage. Coffee breaks.

Now I succumb to headaches, crankiness and I even fill like I'm getting sick when I go a day or two without a cup of coffee. But again I'm going to prove to myself that I have control over my habits - and break the addiction, at least until the new academic starts again in January...

Here is my strategy:

I usually drink one 'grande' or medium cup of strong-ass Starbucks, Peets, or Java Jones joe a day... plus a bonus espresso or small coffee in the afternoon if feeling low. One 16 oz. cup a day wouldn't qualify as a lot of caffeine if it weren't for Starbucks & co.

-> drink green tea as a substitute ... often in the first few days, until I cut even that out altogether. (I don't drink sodas or energy drinks so I don't have these to worry about)

--> take aspirin if headaches get bad

---> work out --- try to go biking, running & surfing at least once a day

----> drink lots of water. The idea is that I can pee out the toxins.

Well let's see if I can do it (again I've quit for 2-3 week periods maybe a half dozen times). I've read that drug addiction actually causes a change in the wiring of neurons in the brain, I wonder how fast these can be altered? Or is it once an addict always an addict?

-------------------
Unrelated great news - my stipend check is in! Thank you Uncle Sam, now I can get a few extra weeks of 5% juice off of that Paypal money market account.

Visual Speech

2006-12-12T13:19:00.001-08:00

As technology enables us to become creators of 'content' rather than just consumers it may be new modalities of communication emerge - not merely new mediums (IM, VOIP, mobile telephony, blogs, podcasts, webpage based).

A teenager in his bedroom can do a halfway decent job throwing together a music track with the basic appealing elements - rhythm, suspense/resolution, melody ... or script up and shoot clips that do the same in the movie domain, capturing storytelling, plot, character, conflict etc...

The pros just do it better - I'm not saying the masses will replace the pros in the media we intake as a culture - but the collective effort allowing us all to be songwriters and filmmakers, singers and actors, etc... will cause a profound impact on how we interpret what we see or hear.

Some homemade content creators may only be looking to make a buck - eg Ask a Ninja on Youtube, but I think that most are really only creating in order to share the interpretation of their world with their friends, family and colleagues. It is all about communication, and it's sexy to have a collection of songs, mixes and videos to share with the world.

Communication... is it possible then for ever-present unlimited bandwidth to create for us a new modality for communicating - beyond the major ones of writing, speaking and gesticulating? Visual speech, in which we access a collection of photos, pictures, and other symbols, for use in discourse may emerge as an abstract way of representing our moods, desires, needs, and imperatives.

As is we have the variety of 'emoticons' in IM and we also have photos to represent our social page personal profiles (it's us!). What I am envisioning is something beyond even this.... For instance, it may be that in the future we can simultaneously interact with the world and view some sort of information display - and it may be possible to project to any or all people observing us a series of images that represent partially what we wish to communicate.

Sexy pictures of Facebook, pictures of drinking, etc... all slightly subconscious methods of doing this already.

As humans and machines co-evolve will we acquire the visual analog of speech?

Data Mining Projects part Two

2006-12-12T10:28:00.000-08:00

ok where did I leave off???....

Student Projects in Data Mining----

#4) The Netflix Million Dollar Prize

A few months ago Netflix announced a million dollar prize would go to the group who could outperform their current movie recommendation software (Cinematch) by 10% in predicting how their customers would rate new movies (they do so on a 1 to 5 star system). Cinematch currently scores at about0.95 RMSE.

The student group tried a number of approaches, the best of which involved finding users who have viewed similar movies and gave similar predictions... they reported below .9 on RMSE on the training set - but when running the probe RMSE shot way up... of course generalization is a huge design issue in these types of problems - but some people in group discussion argue that Netflix has purposefully filled their test data with outliers...

The group in class has not tried using data on the movies themselves, for instance from the internet movie database (IMDB)... I'm sure someone somewhere has...

I'm kind of skeptical about the whole prize anyway - it seems like a gimmick by a company on a badly leaking ship (technology will make their business model obsolete). On the other hand scalability in data mining algorithms is an open research issue and this contest and its large training set (100 million ratings) might contribute something in the end after all...

To date the best score, wxyzconsulting.com, has shown 6% improvement (~.89 RMSE).... I think that puts them in the running for the $50,000 progress prize.

#5) EEG analysis

My project. I'll write more about this at a later date.

#6) Retinal Detachment analysis

By this time I was a little out of it as the caffeine was beginning to wear off after 2 1/2 hours+ of non-stop presentations. The gist of this effort was to develop methods to determine via images of detached retinas (in cats) the state of health of the cells. Cells were segmented, features in the cells extracted using MPEG-7 texture descriptors, labeled, and a Kullback-Leibler divergence distance was applied.

The dataset comes from an intensive area of research at UCSB in bioinformatics.

#7) Blog Mining

A group, building off of experience as interns at Google, undertook the task of mining and associating similar bloggers using Windows LiveSpaces as a dataset. Essentially, they clustered by keywords to create categories with some interesting results -> usernames closely matched the blog topics in some instances, e.g. jesuslover for religious blogs having frequent keywords - faith, hope, love, peace etc...

I see this moving towards companies contacting 'experts' given a certain category and hiring them to help promote items, or just selling directly to them - kind of Google's context analysis driven marketing on steroids.

#8) Delay Testing

Applying statistical analysis to predict device (silicon chip) failure based on input-output delay times for an exhaustive array of input vectors. This project suffered from the fact that the data was generated via an emulator - i.e. the results may be meaningless, but the overall technique seemed applicable. Unless I missed something I don't know why many in the class were so critical of this.

#9) Drunken Recommender Based on Delicious

Petko Bogdanov ... one of those brilliant guys that actually seems to have a personality, or at least a sense of humor - came up with the idea of randomly walking through related Delicious tags to provide link recommmendations. The drunken metaphor seems very Bulgarian/Eastern European to me.

Petko complained about Delicious' API - how his crawler would get booted often for polling too often. Seems to me that Delicious, known for its server issues, also tries to keep some control of its data, maybe moreso since Yahoo bought them... kind of weird considering its supposed to be one of the defining social networks...

in that sense maybe it's parallel to gov't databases - they'll collect your data from everywhere: tax forms, credit card companies, phone companies, healthcare providers but you'll never have access to your own information!

and one day a 37 dimension hyperplane might decide you are a terrorist and you'll have to clear an extra 2 hours of hurdles before boarding a plane. wait - this already happens.

God Save the Outliers.

Data Mining Student Projects

2006-12-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

Ok so I'm feeling a little down about the information age - and the realization that many of us will be tied to desks and computers for 40 years of working. Where's the human-to-human interaction, the sense of spirit and risk and adventure?

The Renaissance man is dead.

If I could I'd make a million dollars or so from computers and then never use them again for anything other than a publishing outlet.

So today my graduate seminar course on data mining and pattern recognition concluded, with a 4 hour session of student group project presentations. Thankfully, the topics were not pre-assigned but rather the primary criterion for topic selection was 'non-traditionality' in the data set... So we had presentations ranging from analysis of EEG signals to mining social networks for recommending bookmarks to studying retinal detachment.

Here is an outline of the projects presented, which may in a way be a way of sampling current hot research topics in electrical engineering and computer science... (except wireless networks are not represented):

DATA MINING STUDENT PRESENTATIONS PART ONE

- Atomic Decomposition of Musical signals.... my friend Bob Sturm's dissertation topic.

Speech analysis may be dead. It's been compressed to death, recognized and synthesized to a T, and now you see prominent speech experts like Larry Rabiner attending music signal processing conferences. hmmm

Bob Sturm has one of the most unique approaches to representing waveforms in terms of a non-orthogonal decomposition using an algorithm known as matching pursuit. In this project he looked at ways to cluster collections of atoms (think mother wavelets with different scales, offsets and amplitudes) in meaningful ways. A flute signal's atoms, for instance, may be clustered into notes consisting of atoms that make up the harmonics.

The big question everyone wants to know is: why? and what can this representation be used for really? In one sense the technique is the opposite of computer composer Curtis Roads' granular synthesis method... and so new methods for granular-based 'sampling' for music might fall from this.

I want to mention that Bob gives some of the best presentations I have ever heard other than by really famous experts.

- Image-based retrieval

Another group was interested in improving methods for retrieving relevant images given keyword searches in the Cortina database - can relevance feedback be used to eliminate non-relevant results (ie. if you search for dog, and dog leashes are returned, can user feedback eliminate this?)

I don't think you ever have users willing to do this... you may hire human experts to do this, but the cost to cover the most popular searches seems prohibitive.

I should mention that Cortina uses lower level image features to return its results - like edge, texture and color information, along with meta data like surrounding text, website category, etc... is it a huge open research area how best to combine lowlevel features with higher semantic-level information? I don't think Google Images uses low level features at all, and the results there are usually excellent... - they have so much data to work from!

- Automatic photo annotation for personal photo albums

This is a student's doctoral thesis project. Her technique only applies to outdoor photos - it is possible to do a rough segmentation based on a mean-shift approach to divide images into two main regions, and then train a classifier to automatically label these regions into the categories of sky, snow, waves, grass, trees, etc... The big question is are these particular tags of any use?

People are probably more interested in identities of the people in the photo or adding tags that can't necessarily be garnered from the image itself - ie which place the photo was taken or what occasion it was. Still, automated annotation can never hurt - why not be able to pull up all the best sunset photos in your collection for instance, or all the outdoor ones?

3 down, 6 to go in PART TWO!

2006-12-06T21:26:00.001-08:00

Technorati Profile

The Unknown Function of the Spleen

2006-12-06T21:14:00.000-08:00

Until recently doctors did not know which purpose the spleen serves. Imagine an entire organ's functioning unknown through the end of the twentieth century! Well I suppose they've figured it out now - removing it predisposes people to certain infections. So it must serve to prevent those infections. Oh, and it removes dead blood cells.

With the overwhelming avalanche of facts, and the death of the Renaissance Man -> only the specialists really understand any one field, it's become impossible to sort out what we do know, what we don't know, which folk wisdoms have some scientific validity, and which previously scientific consensuses are no longer held.

It is not only an information labyrinth we're forced to navigate in modern life - but a knowledge explosion as well.

Even worse - a technologist's current exposition on the state and moving trends behind modern life get dated FAST. I am currently reading Robert Lucky's Silicon Dreams, partially because I am enrolled in an Information Theory class and his book helps me bring the concepts to life. However I have to skip over major portions of the book (its 17 years old) - now that the internet, mobile phones, email, pervasive video, VOIP, mp3 players have revolutionized the way we live and work.

Brain Computer Interface

2006-12-04T21:32:00.000-08:00

The year is 2045. What was once called the digital divide has now become the 'innermind divide' - people who can afford it now surgically opt for a brain interface chip in their teenage years. This chip can perform fast, accurate imaging of the brain... Scientists are still at a loss to produce a full model of the brain's functioning, but people with this implant actually learn new neuronal pathways to control and receive information from the interface. It is connected wirelessly to world network, of course, and able to access information about everyone and everything important to you which for the richest of people gets displayed via a nanoscopic retinal implant fused to a portion of the optic nerve.

Of course I am probably the ten millionth person to write about this... but this technology will develop. It is only a matter of time.

One of my more interesting research projects at UC Santa Barbara involves an important aspect of the above vision - pattern recognition of meaningful cognitive events using signals measured from brain-based sensors, in my case an EEG array. Pattern recognition methods continue to advance, now out of the box software packages can run today's modern techniques with all the bells and whistles attached. SVMLite is a great open source package for support vector machines, and I've seen packages that run Brieman's random forests and different Adaboost-style ensembles.

Controlling the stimuli is a challenging problem for BCI in real settings, as eye and muscle movements can destroy signal-to-noise ratio in EEG measurements. Chamber-based imaging systems, PET and fMRI for instance, are impractical for real world BCI. DARPA's augmented cognition program is hyping fNIR, functional near-infrared imaging, as the way to the future... it seems tissue absorbs near infrared light at varying levels depending on the presence of oxygenated hemoglobin. The idea then is: strap a head band with IR LEDs on one side, photoreceptors on the other, and measure light absorption in the skull. Of course the modulation schemes and absorption models are important, and I'm not claiming building a tempo-spatial map of oxygen in the brain from LEDs, digital filters, and communications schemes is a trivial thing - but here is a way to essentially have a mobile fMRI device for a few hundred dollars, maximum, in components and software.

The question is: does it really work? I've been told fMRI has drawbacks too concerning which regions of the brain it can accurately image, and that oxygenated hemoglobin is not exactly analogous to cognition, but the thing I'm most curious about is whether it can do what EEG cannot - create a strong signal for BCI.

Some big people in the AI research world are getting involved in this including Eric Horvitz at Microsoft... maybe their products suck but their research direction doesn't...

My Background

2006-12-03T21:31:00.000-08:00

At the time of writing this I am a 2nd year Ph.D. student at the University of California Santa Barbara, studying Electrical and Computer Engineering - specifically signal processing and communications. I am interested in web and search, content analysis of video, pattern recognition, data mining, computer vision, music signal processing, cognition and statistical approaches to neuroscience, and well... maybe I better just stop.

I am lucky to be an NSF IGERT trainee - I receive a stipend from the NSF to devote myself to interdisciplinary research in interactive, digital multimedia. The "digital" seems to me redundant. My field historically addresses issues in compression and channel coding of signals that are not memoryless - speech, audio, video, etc... I am more interested signal analysis for knowledge deduction -> can patterns be recognized in multimedia from low-level and semantic features that lead to more fruitful human intake of such streams?

At times I rail against life as a graduate student - the open-ended freedom causes me to place a lot of unnecessary pressure upon myself. Other days I feel as if a human element is missing somewhere in the algorithm-creation business. I might be better off editing a travel magazine.

But let's take things as they are for the time being ... onwards!

Diving Right In

2006-12-03T21:23:00.000-08:00

First, why a blog? and not a livejournal or myspace or even a Facebook?

Livejournal - which has been around the longest seems suitable for travelers or day-to-day diary style entries. It might devolve for that around here, but I'd like to keep these posts focused on goings on in the 'Information Age'

Myspace/Facebook/Friendster/Orkut - are for social networking...

The ability to offer information is marketing.... being perceived as the expert and building a network is how to succeed in today's world. Success, to me, does not mean salary or financial wealth - instead I see it as collected potential to help solve the world's problems or 'access' to the issues of the day.

Will the day come, wanting that success - where I am forced to choose between it and loved ones?