Unnaturally Long Attention Span

Redirect

2009-09-24T05:51:00.001-07:00

I've moved this blog to http://miketung.com/blog/

Friendly Big Brother is Watching You

2009-02-21T07:37:00.001-08:00

I'm actually a supporter of increased government surveillance.

My friends know that whenever I go to events, I rarely take pictures. I am the un-documentarian. And thus, I have suffered, as my episodic memory is not that great. I think the federal government should improve their tracking and satellite surveillance abilities. That way, I can have great photos and videos of myself wherever I go, 24 x 7, and never have to worry about bringing along a camera. They should also improve their internet traffic monitoring systems to snoop on my network activity, so that I never have to backup my e-mail files again. While they're at it, monitor all my financial transactions so that they can do my taxes for me automatically every year.

If you're reading this blog post, federal government, also consider this: After you've started collecting this huge database you can then create a premium level web service. Allow users to pay an annual subscription fee to log in with their federal credentials. You might even make some money off this and start paying back that deficit. I'd totally use this service as it's much more likely for the U.S. government to be in business in the long term than Flickr or Picassa.

UPDATE: http://io9.com/5191353/what-happens-when-security-cameras-get-involved-with-matchmaking

Jarvis 1

2009-02-04T15:47:00.001-08:00

>hi there old friend
Have we met?

War On Demand

2008-12-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

Peace Fail.

Hope you are all well and are safely enjoying your holidays. But sadly, all is not well in the world and we should remember those that, in these tough times, are far worse off than us. The Israeli Defense Minister just proclaimed that Israel is now in an all-out war with the Hamas-led Palestinians, formally ending the Egyptian brokered truce. Quote the Israeli Defense Minister Barak (not Barack):

This will not be a short operation. The war on terrorism is an ongoing one, and we will have to stand firm in order to change the situation in the south...I am confident that the American government would not have waited one day before they would have responded if San Diego would have been bombed or shelled or rocketed from Tijuana (Mexico) with thousands of rockets.

Sound familiar? Who would have thought that the Bush Doctrine of "bomb first and ask questions later" could be invoked by other countries as well? It seems things have devolved into "if the US can do it, then so can we." Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that soon we will start to thank G.W.B. for what he's done for America. I guess we can start now. He did help get the first black President elected.

The Nature of Fish

2008-12-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

THE NATURE OF FISH
Swirling and falling down from the glimmering surface
A school of fish spiral down in synchronized dance,
Tunneling into a dark, watery abyss. White fish,
Black fish, their souls darken as they approach
The nadir, each midlessly following his
Leader, continuing the structure of
Fish rules and Fish society.
They never recognize
The Truth. There is
No control,
No will.

Icarus

2008-12-01T04:47:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I came across an old tape backup of my old files. In the mass of outdated document formats, I came across some poems that I wrote back in high school, more than a decade ago. I'll start posting them here.

ICARUS

You may think me foolish, or rash,
As youth are prone to disregard the advice of elders.
You say, my wings have not hardened, that I am not ready to alight.
You warn me to hold a steady course, to keep to the middle.

But, I value adventure over safety.
I long for the exhiliration of the whistling winds beneath me and the freedom of unrestrained motion.
For the chance to soar among the eagles,
I would spit in the face of danger because I realize that many never attain such an opportunity.

No, Daedalus, old man, I prefer not to choose the middle path.
I long for this chance to steal divine insight.
You see, this is much more than a flight from this wretched place, it is an emancipation.

Look, Daedalus, watch how high I can soar!
Higher, and higher, and higher, as far as my breath can sustain me.
I will reach the sun. I will go beyond the sun, into the heavens, and escape from the pull of the Earth, which is humanity's bane.

But, what? Oh, no. It's seems my wings have deteriorated.
Cursed Apollo. They're playing a cruel prank on me.
Because they can't stand mortal intruders or boys with wings.

So, I fall.
Down into the violent, freezing waters below.

I will die soon.
However, you never even knew what life was.
Life is not measured in years, but in split-seconds.

It was worth it.

Smart

2008-10-21T14:16:00.000-07:00

Picked up this cool t-shirt when I was hanging out with my brother this weekend, which is great, because I love cute animals. I'm a smart donkey!

我有一隻小毛驢，
我從來也不騎，
有一天我心血來潮，
騎著去趕集，

我手裡拿著小皮鞭，
我心裡真得意，
不知怎麼嘩啦啦
我摔了一身泥

Come on Down!

2008-10-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

It's not every week you live out one of your childhood dreams. This past weekend, I was on a live taping of "The Price is Right with Drew Carey" in Hollywood. You can catch my mug on TV on the December 11 airdate. I'm right in the first row. Obviously, the show is THE classic game show and I spent countless Sunday evenings in my youth watching the show with my mom. To see it in person, though, was an eye opening experience.

Yeah, that's right, I snuck in my camera past security.

A) The set is TINY. On TV, the cameras make the set look wide, with expansive swashes of white, bright shiny lights, and immaculate sets and prize showcases. In reality, the entire studio is the size of a high school auditorium, with drab 70's-esque decor, folding chairs, dilapidated facades with chipping paint. Also, those trip showcases are all greenscreened, so as an audience member you just see the models standing in front of a blank wall.

B) When you watch it on TV, you just see an excited audience and with the host and the contestants being the only people on stage. However, the vibe in situ is totally different. During the show, the stage is full with 15 or so people , the producer yelling instructions, 5 massive cameras rigs shooting the stage and audience at various angles. In the crowd, we are looking up at TV monitors hanging from the ceiling showing what the camera sees. On TV, whenever you see the audience they are always in a constant state of euphoria. However, in reality, there are several long breaks between shots, when they have to set up the new games and showcases (there isn't enough room on the stage for multiple game sets). So, most of the time the crowd is pretty mellow until the lights come back on and everyone fights to get in front of the camera.

C) Another thing that you'd miss from watching the show is that the contestant selection from the audience is not random at all. Hours before the show airs, each of the hundreds of audience members goes through an interview with a talent scout to see who's going to be on the show. You have practically no hope of getting on the show if you are not female, humourously obese, and act as if you are on some kind of controlled substance.

In all, it was good to see "how the sausage is made." Next time, I'll know which drugs to take before trying to get on a TV show.

Thoughts on Free Will

2008-02-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, sitting alone in a room, I asked my powerful computer “If FREE WILL exists, where does it come from?”

To my surprise, soon many answers began popping up on my screen, each window containing a separate response and thread of justification. I suppose that’s what happens when you type the question into your IM away message and you have chatty friends. While the responses themselves varied widely, the interesting aspect is that everyone seems to have their own slightly different definition of free will, which is obviously a hindrance to any existential discussion. The best definition of free will is one I heard from my co-founder Leith. He defines free will as:

“the ability to make a choice such that that choice is not computable by a third party given the same inputs”

Now, that is a good definition because it is a statement that is both testable and fits within the popular notion of free will. Namely, the definition implies that if you have free will, then you have the ability to make choices that are not predictable by a third party. But, what kind of third parties?

The Case of Superbrains

Let’s say that not everything that we might want to apply the label of “having free will” to has the same computational capability. In other words, you have a brain, but there may exist entities out there that have brains with more computational capability or less computational capability. By computational capability, I mean that in the sense of computability, not speed. So while Johnny Boy may be faster at doing long division than you, he doesn’t have any additional computational CAPABLITY, because you could learn how to do and master long division yourself as well. On the other hand, you have more computational capacity than someone suffering from anterograde amnesia. Let’s call someone with more computational capability than yourself a Superbrain. God is a Superbrain. In fact, God is a Superbrain that knows everything. We can clearly see that if a Superbrain exists, then they could compute your choice given the same inputs. Thus you have no free will.

The Case of Equal Brains

Let’s say that either Superbrains don’t exist or they don’t really concern you because you don’t usually encounter Superbrains while walking to the bus stop. In that case, everyone has roughly the same hardware and hence the same computational capabilities. However, then our working definition of free will cannot hold, by the property of symmetry (or should I say asymmetry). That is, there cannot exist a choice that is computable by one party, but not by a third party, since everyone has the same computational capabilities. Practically speaking, what that means is, if I can choose the meatloaf sandwich, then another person with all the same data that my brain has, would go for the meatloaf sandwich as well. Hence, no free will in the case of equal brains either.

What we have shown is that either free will doesn’t exist or we have a bad definition of it.

Perhaps another definition of free will be more useful. I propose a definition of free will which defines it as a perception, and more specifically, as a feeling, in the same semantic class as terms like excitement, anxiety, or depression. A feeling, or emotion, is a pattern of electrical firings in the brain coupled with a certain biochemical signature. Thus, like with other emotions, on certain days I feel like I have more “free will” than other days and I have no "free will" when I am asleep. Under this definition, “free will” is the antonym of helplessness.

Why has the concept of free will been such a central topic of obsession over the ages? I think because the concept of free will is a “thinker trap”--our brains get stuck in it whenever we think about it. One theory I have is that the thing that makes catchy songs catchy is that all catchy songs have the property that the end of some segment in the song fits well with the beginning part of that segment, forming a loop. We can’t get the song out of our head because our brain keeps falling into that loop (if we don’t remember what the boring part of the song was) and so the song never finishes and our brain just ends up storing it that way.

Similarly, our minds get stuck on the concept of “free will” because it is a paradox in the same sense that “jumbo shrimp” is an oxymoron. The only difference is that that there are a few more deductive steps between the words “free” and “will” so it’s not as obvious to us.

Politicians and Moms are Right, but Partially So

2007-12-04T06:24:00.000-08:00

Once every three years, the Department of Education participates in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is a study comparing 15-year-olds' performance in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy in 57 participating countries. In particular, this latest assessment focused on science literacy, which the test's methodology defines as

an individual’s scientific knowledge and use of that
knowledge to identify questions, to acquire new
knowledge, to explain scientific phenomena, and
to draw evidence-based conclusions about sciencerelated
issues, understanding of the characteristic
features of science as a form of human knowledge
and enquiry, awareness of how science and
technology shape our material, intellectual, and
cultural environments, and willingness to engage in
science-related issues, and with the ideas of science,
as a reflective citizen (OECD 2006, p.12).

Now, whenever I hear discussion concerning the academic performance of American students in the context of international comparison, it is usually from two types of sources: politicians and moms.

By politicians, I mean mainstream news sources and personalities that draw upon the popular urban legend meme of the US being the worst in education around the world in order to work a crowd.

[sample politician at a rally]

"...the US has the lowest reading and math scores worldwide. Our children are our future and we need more funding to pay our teachers today!"

Crowd: "Yeah!!"

Being an immigrant, by moms I mean this of course:

"You know when I was your age in Soviet Russia, we were doing vector calculus and number theory in middle school. In the snow. Uphill. This American education is rotting your brain."

So, what does the report show? US students scored 489, on a test where the mean and standard deviation have been normalized respectively to 500 and 100. So yes, the report does seem to support the idea that US students underperform their international peers. However, if you break down the data more closely you'll find two interesting features.

Firstly, they do a categorically analysis of the data by racial group, which shows very statistically significant disparities in the scores between different racial groups. They range the gamut from an average score for black students of 409 to an average score of white non-Hispanic students of 523. The state of the American education performance in a nation that is itself multi-cultural and multi-societal, is a complex and non-homogeneous issue. There are definitely serious problems and widening gaps in education performance that are developing in America, but the data suggests to me that uniform across-the-board type policies, such as No Child Left behind, or universal minimum wages for teachers may not be all that beneficial, and potentially harmful, to the overall big picture. Instead target areas which are weighting down our national average should be pinpointed as areas to take a closer look at, and the best policies in those specific areas considered. But of course, this type of fine-grained debate never happens in the mainstream discourse.

In comparison, another feature of this study, and similar types of studies, that further aggravates this effect (of American students' underperformance) is that the distribution of the participating countries in the study is heavily skewed. In the list of member countries shown in the report, I noticed that the vast majority of the regions tested are in Europe and Australia. Not only are these countries much more racial homogeneous, making the comparison to a heavily multi-racial US an ill one, most of these countries are composed primarily of the "non-Hispanic" white population that scored the highest in the US breakdown. Let's not even address the issue of bias in question construction. Sadly, the entire continent of Africa is not included in the study.

What can moms learn from this study? The report also presents a limited what's called decile analysis of the scores. That means they break down the average scores in the 0%-10% range, 10%-20%, ..., 90%-100% range, etc. What the study found is that in the 90th percentile, a.k.a. 90%-100% range the US students scored 628, compared to a lower 622 for international students in the 90th percentile. That means, if you are an immigrant mom, and in the position to wonder which country would provide the best education for your child, you should have no qualms about having your children educated in the US. There are many good schools and almost any immigrant hub (read: major metropolitan area) in the US has some of the best schools in the world.

Read the report for yourself. It has some fun sample questions from the test that was given to the 15 year olds.

Highlights from PISA 2006: Performance of US 15-Year-Old Students

Animals of the Internet Refuse to be Adorable in Support of the Writers' Strike

2007-12-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

Oh, those snarky animals!

iRobot Packbot in Action

2007-09-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

"The Solution"

2007-09-08T00:00:00.001-07:00

The following is a link to a transcript, released today, of a speech titled "The Solution" delivered by Usama Bin Laden, the FBI's most wanted terrorist. The speech is addressed to the American people, commemorating the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It is Bin Laden's first public communications in almost three years. I have posted the link to the PDF of the transcript here because, ironically, it is quite hard to find it on any of the news sites.

The speech itself is well written and worth a read. Keep in mind that it is a translation from Arabic.

"The Solution" transcript.pdf

The Automatic Brain

2007-08-07T23:29:00.001-07:00

Have you ever driven to work, or walked to class and later had no memory of how you actually got there? Have you ever really needed to study for a test, but just found it impossible to concentrate, no matter what you tried? One theory that can explain this seemingly irrationality is that there is a second brain, a parallel brain, which operates below the observable threshold of consciousness. This is the primitive brain, whose structure we share with other animals.

This primitive brain has a much larger memory capacity. In contrast, the conscious brain has a rather limited memory; studies have shown that people generally can only keep about 7 numbers in our heads. That is why phone numbers in the US have that length.

Some would argue that this subconscious brain is what distinguishes people from each other mentally. This is what some people would define as experience. Observe the people’s reasoning and rationalization patterns. Are they all that different? If they were, we would not be able to hold a logical discussion. It is the primitive brain that distinguishes two people.

But what distinguishes humans’ and machines’ "brains"? Machines have an enormouse advantage over the conscious "reasoning" brain. A machine can store much more than 7 items in short-term memory. Also, the execution speed of sequential reasoning operations in a machine is much faster than in a human’s conscious brain. This is because human brain circuits are limited in their operation by chemical "neurotransmitters" that are physically bound by diffusion speed. Therefore latency of information transfer in humans is higher.

Humans are no match for machines in what you might consider the highest form of human ability, "logical reasoning." In fact there are many well-known efficient algorithms for performing this process.

However, humans do have advantages over machines. The advantage is in this primitive, animal brain. This subconscious brain has massive parallelism, which allow data storage and computation to happen simultanesouly across all circuits. This tradeoff of latency for massive bandwidth have allowed humans to outperform computers in most interesting tasks.

This advantage may be only temporary, however. Although the machines were initially designed for sequential execution, recently we have seen more and more growth in developing parallel computation. Large data-intensive parallel systems have been developed. Parallel hardware and parallel algorithms have allowed new types of programs, such as entire-genome mappers, world-champion chess programs, and search engines. Human brain evolution is relatively fixed. Machine brain evolution seems to be exponential. The cross-over point will be where amazing things start to happen.

© 2005

Meme Representation in Communities

2007-05-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote previously on clip culture, the trend of consuming content in smaller snippets (blogs, TV news, youtube, twitter) rather than in longer form (books, journal articles, films, Ph.D. dissertation). One perhaps non-trivial consequence is that shortening the form of communication actually changes the representation and content of the message. The shortened-form is not simply a summarized version of the original events and information.

Many years ago, when I was young and even more foolish than I am now, I tried writing a intelligent software algorithm for automatically trading stocks. These types of automated trading programs are commonly utilized by hedge funds and constitute a good portion of the current trading activity in our stock market. My idea was to have the software automatically analyze online news and market data and predict the direction on stocks using statistical machine learning methods. The program would be able to react much faster than it would take a human to read and understand news articles from thousands of sources.

Sounds like a lovely idea, right?

Well I'm not a billionaire today, so it obviously didn't work. And I'll tell you why. Essentially, predicting a stocks value reduces to predicting what people, in aggregate, think of a stock. In this regard, the content on the web is not an accurate representation of reality. Here's a crude demo. Consider for example the occurrences of the phrase "Microsoft is good" vs. "Linux is good" on the web. (Go ahead, Google it) You might falsely conclude from this data that you should be buying Red Hat stock and dumping MS shares. However, we all know that this is just selection bias. For another example, check out We Feel Fine by Sepander Kamvar(a Stanford professor, Google employee, and great guy, btw). This is a cool design experiment and has some neat graphs, but I doubt that those percentages are an accurate representation of how Livejournal users actually feel. These kinds of aggregations always tend towards the manic-depressive while most of us just feel normal most of the time. The content of the web is not an accurate representation of reality, and this selection bias is exacerbated by clip culture.

This is not a new disease of the blogsphere though, but a condition that has always existed in media. Anyone that's browsed a bookstore or watched TV can observe that it's the loud, the sensationalistic that gets facetime. And this misrepresentation is an important issue, because you can't expect every single person to have to the time to check all the facts. It's not practical. Whether you like it or not, people go by what they hear and see and this slowly shapes and molds their perspectives and behaviors.

What is new though, is that for the first time in history we might be able to address these problems effectively. Because of the internet, collecting and aggregating all the information together is no longer an issue. Now that the information can be aggregated to one place, the problems of representation and fact-checking can be attacked head on. In the future, intelligent software agents will be able to do this fact-checking for us at a scale that no human reader could possibly do in a lifetime. These agents will classify all of the viewpoints on a topic and determine which are legitimate arguments and which are just re-hashings of old propaganda.

Finally, the average citizen will have a weapon against the rising influence of mass media.

I Named a Chinese Book

2007-04-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

So, one of my Aunties is a quite well-renowned chef and cooking instructor in Taipei. She has previously published several of her cookbooks and now lives in Toronto, where she continues to give master classes in Chinese cooking. For the past few years, she has been working on her latest book, which is also a Chinese cooking book, but presents the dishes in a style reminiscent of French cuisine. Her book is titled "中菜西吃", which literally translates into something like "Chinese-Dishes-Western-Eating". Basically, the connotation is that while the foods and recipes are traditional Chinese dishes, the presentation, or display is in a more non-traditional Western-like style.

Anyways, the literal translation obviously doesn't make for a very attractive book title, and she asked many of her Canadian friends for suggestions for the English title of the book, the book being completely bilingual throughout. Not satisfied with any of the suggestions, she called me up when I was in Taiwan to get my recommendation. I actually gave this quite a bit of thought, in order to come up with something catchy. Anyways, below is my end result (click to view detail) , which should be published later this year. What do you think?

Congratulations, Auntie!

Speech Synthesis + Wikipedia

2007-04-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

Ever simply wanted an MP3 of a Wikipedia article that you could take on the go in your Ipod?? Ever wanted to save a bunch of articles so that you could listen to them during rush hour traffic??

Yeah, neither did I.

However, today I found myself writing a quick script to do just that and if you by chance answered "yes" to any of those questions above then you are in luck! It's almost as simple as it could possibly be. You just supply the topic in the URL and the script generates a direct download of the MP3 in response.

The basic format I use looks like this: http://madfast.com/wikiread.cgi?q=[YOUR QUERY]. There are also a bunch of secret parameters I added that can be used to change the voice and file format.

Here are some examples:

http://madfast.com/wikiread.cgi?q=Robot
http://madfast.com/wikiread.cgi?q=Computational Biology
http://madfast.com/wikiread.cgi?q=台灣

Go crazy.

On Clip Culture

2007-02-21T08:41:00.000-08:00

One of the things that concerns me is that recently a vast majority of my information processing is reading these “snippets” of information instead of longer, more meaningful discussions. It’s not just a consequence of using Diffbot but I think where internet culture is headed towards– YouTube epitomizes the short-attention span cinema that is the trend. Perhaps due to the sheer number of news sources, these “info clips” are the only way to aggregate all these disparate sources sanely. Certainly its not for lack of longer original sources on the web. Plenty of journals and books are available online and corporations and governments publish many of their proceedings now in electronic documents online. The problem is current technology can't really deal with these types of sources. Have you ever had Google return a search result to U.S. Constitution or perhaps some company's SEC filing where the "real answers" might lie?

The hope of AI is the hope that we will eventually have a technology that can synthesize all these threads of information from the original sources into a longer, coherent story instead of relying on the "he said that he said that he said that he said" that is the current blogosphere. Theoretically, it would be able to synthesize over broader and deeper sets of data due to the increased temporary RAM compared to a human brain.

On an unrelated note, if you haven't already, check out the book God's Debris by Scott Adams. Yes, that's Scott Adams the Dilbert comic guy. It has some interesting ideas and even some pertaining to AI. It's also a free download.

An Unnatural Birth Has Occurred

2007-01-17T21:30:00.000-08:00

In other primate news, a female chimpanzee at the Chimp Haven Home for Former Research Animals has given birth to a baby girl [Source]. This is surprising due to the fact that all of the chimp males at the facility have had vasectomies. Management at Chimp Haven is now planning to do DNA testing on all of the chimp males in order to identify the cause of the unauthorized birthing.

However, this testing is largely unnecessary as I am already certain as to what the results will be. If I can call to your attention that case documented in the film Jurassic Park, this is obviously a case of where the genetic experimentation that has been conducted on these former lab animals has permanently altered their DNA. Hence, resulting in the activation of the latent reptilian genes, producing a sex-reversal of the female specimens, and ultimately spawning the creation of the super-raptors, er, monkeys.

I, for one, welcome our new mutant-monkey overlords.

Using Google Calendar in Microsoft Outlook

2006-11-16T13:17:00.000-08:00

I've recently started using the Google Calendar as my main calendaring application. It's neat because its accessible wherever I go, and you can easily add appointments from email messages if you use Gmail. However, when I'm using my notebook, I like to use Outlook for email so that I can keep copies of everything locally. So, I started searching for a way to integrate Outlook with Google Calendar, and found this [link: Incorporate Google Calendar in Outlook]. It's a nice solution, but it involves downloading pieces of M$ crapware (Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Runtime, Office 2003 Update: Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies) and an Outlook plug-in.

I, not a huge fan of installing unnecessary stuff, found a much easier way to integrate GCalendar with Outlook that is enough to meet my needs and requires installing nothing.

Behold!

How it's done:

In Outlook, right-click on the folder you want the GCal link to be in and do "New Folder...". Call it whatever you like.
Right-click on your newly created folder and select "Properties...". Under the "Home Page" tab, put in the address of Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1) and select "Show home page by default for this folder."
Click ok, you're all done.

One drawback of this method, is that you are not really using the Outlook calendar, so its not really a solution for you folks in corporate world on MS Exchange. But if you're happy using Google as your main calendar store, this'll be fine!

When Disgruntled Laptops Attack Their Masters

2006-09-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

So, this is what happened at work this morning. I think the pictures are pretty self-explanatory. Apparently, the smoke detectors in our 8-story tower are only for decorative purposes, since despite the thick black smoke and smell, nothing happened until someone manually pulled on the fire alarm. Comforting, eh?

On the other hand, my personal notebook is a Dell, too, that I've been using almost 4 years with no problems.

More coverage here:

Dell battery explodes at Yahoo HQ, hundreds evacuate (Engadget)

Flickr shots of the event

Valleywag

The Right Cognitive Testbed for AI - Babies

2006-05-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

The AI community has had a hard enough time defining what AI is, let alone defining milestones for achieving a functional AI. I believe that the obvious choice for funtional milestone is to achieve a functional AI equivalent of a newborn child. You might think this is a quite natural choice, but it differs from a lot of historical "milestones" of the AI community. An effective robotic baby is not going to help streamline your corporate environment, drive a war vehicle through enemy desert terrain, or handle urban assault situations. But then again, if you don't think a baby can cause mass destruction, you haven't spent enough time with one.

It's uncertain whether developing a functional baby cognitive model is the right direction towards human-level adult AI, but at least the progress is measureable, which can't be said for a lot of other approaches, such as animal models, games, or Turing-test-like setups. For example, just look at how the competition to create a Turing-test passing chat bot has turned out. Has creating a world champion chess computer advanced our knowledge at all of building a human-like AI? Not by much.

If you buy into my arugment so far that the baby model is the right approach, what does it actually involve? I will try to break down what I think the work in this track involves. I've citied the sources of the information at the end of this article.

This image shows how a baby's developing eye sees the world.

Below I have a timeline of an infant's cognitive development up to 1 year, and my own comments on what AI work is involved in emulating that functional behavior.

Between 1 and 2 months of age, infants become interested in new objects and will turn their gaze toward them. They also gaze longer at more complex objects and seem to thrive on novelty, as though trying to learn as much about the world as possible.

If you look at the image above, it suggests that during this time period, the sensors and the brain interface necessary to support them are still being constructed. An interesting cognitive feature--the ability to determine what is new--develops during this time. This ability to highlight "what is new" is the defining feature of what makes us alive. Basically, living things respond to changes, not to steady-states, so the central survival trait is the ability to detect and track changes. This feature is very complicated and affects us at many levels and deserves really its own discussion. At the lower level, this ability allows us to detect that predator lurking in the field or in the dark alley. At a higher level, why does that new song sound so good now, but so lame the next year?

The ability to detect changes also implies the ability to filter out what's old. i.e. pattern recognition. Old things are, by definition, things that fall into a pattern. So, I believe that the first step of AI is to have generalized pattern recognition(knowing what's old) and differencing(tracking the new changes).

At around 3 months of age, infants are able to anticipate coming events. For example, they may pull up their knees when placed on a changing table or smile with gleeful anticipation when put in a front pack for an outing.

The second cognitive ability that makes us living things, is an internal prediction engine. The prediction engine kicks in at 3 months, which is when the sensors finally start collecting reliable data. Prediction implies that there is an internal mental model of the world at this point, however primitive. There has actually been a lot of work that has been done on this component. We now have methods that can make predictions better than humans can. The key challenge, however, has always been in defining what are the inputs(how is this represented in the mind?) and outputs(how does this get translated into behavior?), and what is the structure of the prediction(does context play a role, and over what time periods?).

At around 4 months, babies develop keener vision. Babies' brains now are able to combine what they see with what they taste, hear, and feel (sensory integration). Infants wiggle their fingers, feel their fingers move, and see their fingers move. This contributes to an infant's sense of being an individual.

Sensory input development has finally stabalized and now we start refining the outputs(fingers and toes). Up until this point, we have not seen any fruits from our labors--there are no outputs! AI research has been stunted because there is so much upfront cost in developing a cognitive model, when the benefits(driving a war machine through enemy towns, translating natural languages) rely on the outputs. The point where a baby sees his own finger move and realizes what's going on is an important one. It's the point that completes the loop between sensors, internal model, and actuators and this loop creates a very powerful feedback cycle--Do something, predict the output, see the result, match it against the internal prediction, etc. This is the fundamental property of local optimization.

Between 6 and 9 months of age, synapses grow rapidly. Babies become adept at recognizing the appearance, sound, and touch of familiar people. Also, babies are able to recall the memory of a person, like a parent, or object when that person or object is not present. This cognitive skill is called object permanence.

In the last step, I hinted at some kind of learning going on, and this leads naturally to the development of a memory to store learned results. The key questions here are "what do you store?" and "what do you forget?". There have been many different approaches to answering the question of what to store. An approach that has been popularized by the press is that of creating a large "commonsense" database of knowledge that an AI can draw upon to do reasoning. The best example of this approach is the CyC project. However, I don't think this is compatible if we look at it in terms of developing a functional baby AI. Most people, not even adults, know the length of the Amazon river or the 25th president of the United States, so it seems that this type of knowledge is not a prerequisite for intelligence. A key feature of human cognition is the ability to forget, and these types of knowledge should be ones that a functional AI forgets(i.e. filters out).

Babies observe others' behavior around 9 to 12 months of age. During this time, they also begin a discovery phase and become adept at searching drawers, cabinets, and other areas of interest. Your baby reveals more personality, becomes curious, and demonstrates varied emotions.

This marks the point where the baby is able to acquire completely new pieces of knowledge on its own. I think this is the point where it is effectively an "adult" AI. At this point, the baby has enough capability to learn to be a rocket scientist or computer programmer. The AI equivalent, I think, is one that can learn by simply crawling, reading, and understanding the entire internet.

sources:
[1]Gizmodo-Seeing the world through the eyes of a baby
[2]Yahoo! Health-Cognitive development between 1 and 12 months of age

LED Letters!

2006-05-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

Want to use a cool LED-looking font while fooling spammers? Read on..

The other day I was doing some work in Javascript, to try to fix some things in Diffbot, when I re-discovered a cool thing about element borders in HTML. Adjacent borders actually come together at a 45° angle in most browsers. Here's what I mean:

This is a div element with borders.

Now, if you take two of these blocks and simply stack them on top of each other, you get a pattern that resembles the LED "8":

Like its circuit-based cousin, these HTML LEDs consist of seven parts, which can be turned on or off to create a variety of characters. Having spent countless hours in the circuits lab during my undergrad working with these dreaded LEDs, I realized that now you could design an entire display system using this as a base--you could go as far as creating a scrolling stock ticker! I wrote a quick Javascript demo that turns any text into this form. To try it out, simply include led.js (less than 2k) and the following call to your html <body>

makeText("hello", parentElement);

Below you see an example output:

Try to select the above "hello" with your mouse--it's neither an image nor text.

The interesting thing about this is that you can use it to make text without actually having that text in the source code. This is great for preventing crawling robots and spammers from reading your text, while still allowing your human readers too see things fine. Some applications of this might be to cloak or email address, generate CAPTCHAs, or to do evil search engine optimization by hiding text from Googlebot. This method might be better than the straightforward method of rendering your text as images because it requires the robot/spammer to have

a javascript interpreter/browser
the ability to snapshot/render a certain region of the screen
Optical character like recognition capability

The image rendering obfuscation method, on the other hand, only requires #3. Obviously, a specific implementation can be defeated by reverse-engineering the html/javascript without these three components, but the resulting spamming algorithm would be implementation specific, which would not scale well for the spammer.

The Nerve Center that is SF

2006-04-10T09:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a video where someone did an interesting thing. They graphed the locations of every Yellow Cab equipped with GPS in San Francisco over the course of a day. The intensity of the red represents how fast the cab is going.

http://clients.stamen.com/cabspotting/cabspotting_01.html

Doesn't this remind you of the videos of nerve firings in the brain?

Diffbot Invites

2006-03-14T13:20:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before, I'm launching a new website called Diffbot on April 1st. Diffbot is a cool new kind of web-based RSS reader and bookmark manager. Have a handful of sites that you read daily? Diffbot lets you know when those sites have updated and only shows you the portion that changed. It's also just a convenient place to put your bookmarks so that they are accessible wherever you go. This is still very much a work in progress, so we'd really appreciate any feedback on how we could do better. You can now signup to get an invite when it's ready!

Engineering Software

2006-03-09T08:44:00.000-08:00

Many of my technical readers out there have job titles that match the regular expression "(Sr.|Jr.)? Software Engineer (I)*". For the non-geek readers, that means we call ourselves "Software Engineers" :-). But, what would you consider the difference is between someone who is a "Software Engineer" and someone who's title is a "Computer Programer"? They seem like similar lines of work, yet one seems to imply a higher level of education, perhaps at least a 4-year college instead of a technical trade school. Historically speaking, there has been a huge difference between an engineer and a programmer. During the second World War, "computers" where actually women that caculated artilliary projections using desk calculators. These women became the first computer programmers when they were assigned to program the ENIAC, a room-sized computer with 18,000 vacuum tubes. Engineering, on the other hand, implied not the people that operated the machines, but those that designed the system and solved the larger problems.

Most major universities separate the School of Engineering from the School of Sciences. Engineering includes departments like chemical, mechanical, nuclear, bio and electrical engineering. Science includes departments like chemistry, physics, biology and computer science. Although, it seems like there's a lot of duplication here with the sciences, supposedly, this is because engineering has some common skillset. Engineering cirricula require a certain type of maths. Engineers usually study topics like design, tolerances, robustness, production processes, and technical writing.

However, let's return to what is software engineering? One of the most popular degrees that Software Engineers graduate with is Computer Science, which is not an engineering degree. What I'd like to argue--and this point has been made before--is that software engineering, is not only not taught in formal education, but is consequently different from the other types of engineering. This is why large companies recruiters complain about fresh college grads knowing nothing about debugging, why there are so many software internships, why most software engineering jobs require a few to several years of prior experience--its because that's when you actually learn some "software engineering"!.

However, I say software engineering is fundamentally different from other types of engineering, because the field itself is still in its prenatal state. Maybe that is one of the reasons why it hasn't been developed yet in formal education; we don't really know yet what are the best practices and fundamental formulas in software engineering. The level of engineering that goes into building even the largest software projects is nothing like the level of engineering that goes into building something like a car. It's more like the amount required to build a snowman. Even when I was working at Microsoft on the Windows source code, the Hoover Dam of software engineering, there was very little engineering in place to manage the complexity and uncertainty. To get a sense of this, compare the reliability of your office buiding to Microsoft Office. If your plumbing system or electric system failed as much as my MS Outlook or Firefox crashes, you would be a very unhappy camper. Yet for information workers, both things are equally important to their day.

Software engineering is a newer discipline than mechanical engineering, or even electrical engineering. Obviously, the software world is undergoing a very rapid change right now. We haven't had time yet to sit back and understand the principles and fundamental formulae that govern software. There are lots of well-specified problems, where there is no agreement on what is the best algorithm. Sure, there are small groups of people every studying problems like software reliability, static source code analysis to identify software weaknesses, and theoretic guarantees for software correctness and performance. I think these efforts will become increasingly important.

I've explained in my mind what the distinction between software and other forms of engineering are, but why do I think this is an important issue? There's no problem with working in a field that is largely unstructured, complex, and ad-hoc. That's part of the excitement of being in a brand new field. Life is great as a software engineer. The problem is that software is increasingly replacing the function of physical objects and electrical components. That is, computers are used to replace other things. Your typewriter has been replaced by your word processor. The control center of your car has been replaced by a small computer running an embedded operating system. Your telephone has been replaced by a small computer which emulates the phones functions. The stock market itself has been infused with tons of small programs, trading trillions of your dollars. Take the typewriter as an example, the mechanical engineer that designed it knows that unless the few joints between the key and the hammer fail, your keystroke will translate into a mark on the paper. The materials in the product have been carefully chosen with respect to their well known structural flexibility, strength, and mass. I won't even begin to explain all the things that could go wrong between the time you hit a key on your computer and see a letter appear on screen. In this "design", the components involved were chosen because they seem to work. It's crazy talk to try to estimate how reliable this design is. Yet, this fundamental unreliability is what we entrust to keep our airplanes in the air, our cars on the highway, our bank accounts and financial markets secure. It's just a matter of time before a catastrophic software failure occurs (many major ones already have), or we decide to design responsible software. Software that works as reliably as a toaster. Software that just doesn't break, no matter what the user does.

Most Popular Posts:
Ranking Colleges Using Google and Open Source

What is Web 2.0 ?

2006-02-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

Everyone in the sphere seems to have an opinion on what Web 2.0 means to them, and I will add my own here. Web 2.0 is the new software tradition which we have all but transitioned to. The features of this new tradition that differentiate it from the older tradition are that products are more focused on design rather than on capability/features. Take for example products like Flickr, Firefox, MacOS X, Office 12, and the slew of AJAX service-based microapps. A good example to illustrate this paradigm shift is MS Word. In earlier versions of Word(1-7), each release added more capability to the editor evolving it from something like Notepad to the current Word 2003, while essentially keeping the interface consistent and familiar. However, if you look at Word 12, the first thing you will notice is a new interface focused on making tasks more efficient and discoverable. Even the data is stored in open formats with the goal of making it easy to consume and access by third parties.

Why did this shift occur and does this mean that software companies will eventually evolve into pure design companies? It's conceivable that with technology becoming more and more accessible and the wider availability of powerful tools, the software company of the future may be staffed almost completely with artists, psychologists, anthropologists, and designers, with maybe a few technical school graduates to write the tools.

And also, why is it that features and capabilities are less emphasized now? Aren't those the cornerstone of the computer revolution--being empowered by technology?

The truth is, the software industry is stuck in a rut. You can see it across all specialties--office productivity software, on the web, in gaming--no new features have been added, no new types of websites, no new gameplay, just more efficiency, more polygons, more psuedo-chrome. Since we have no new features to add, we have been keeping busy by making things pretty and usable, to keep us employed. Why this rut? Some might say that it is because the industry has entered a stage of evolution rather than revolution. We've reached a critical mass where now the improvements will be in small increments. I agree and also disagree. I agree that is the state of the industry, but I think the cause for no new features is simply that we have no new technology.

Technology as a whole, even outside of IT, has actually slowed down. Where are the Bell Labs of today? PARC is a shell of its former self. What are the new Information theories and quantum theories, new internets. Technology innovation has flatlined after it was made unecessary after we came out of wartime. The internet itself is a wartime child.

Okay, I've gotten a little too caught up and started rambling, but I think the solution to this technological rut is clear. We need more fundamental research. We've reached the limit on how far we can milk the results of past research. Whether or not there is a wartime neccessity, we need to do this basic research in order to improve the capabilities of our systems, to claim that things are still getting better.

So, what kind of new capabilities should be developed? Computers today are used almost solely to input, output, store, or transmit human data. But, instead of just being repositories and pipes for the data, I believe computers can consume and reason with data, much like a human can. How this can be implemented in our current market, I'll talk about later.

Ranking Freedom of Press

2006-02-14T18:01:00.000-08:00

Here's another interesting ranking: the World Press Freedom Index. The list is topped by Denmark. At the bottom of the list is North Korea. The US? 44th. Another interesting data point is the United States of America (in Iraq) [sic] listed with rank 137. Defenders of freedom?

Using Statistics to Uncover Human Rights Violations

2006-02-12T14:57:00.000-08:00

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group , which used to be incubated under AAAS has just released a study they did on the analysis of the human rights violation datasets from Timor-Leste. I'm poring over their paper right now

The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974-1999
A Report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group to the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation of Timor-LesteThe actual datasets are available for download as well. I encourage you to check them out(zipped CSV files):

the graveyard census database, called the Graveyard Census Database (GCD)
the fatal violations data from the Retrospective Mortality Survey (RMS)
the Multiple Systems Estimation (MSE) data file

Diffbot Launch Date

2006-02-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

Some of you may know that I've been working in my spare time on a new type of news reader. Until now, the service has been a closed test involving about 50 users. Last week, though, Leith and I have finally decided on a launch date for a public beta. It's going to be April Fools Day, 2006. That gives us less than two months to get things tidy (and boy are there a lot of things!). Stay tuned...

Ask the Geek Grammar Lady #1

2006-02-07T20:22:00.000-08:00

In the course of working with fellow geeks, I've noticed a few language usages that are unique to us geeks. One of these is the tendency to classify problems and issues as either "trivial" or "hard". Now, you have to understand, part of this standard geek colloquialism comes from the math tradition of formal proofs. Trivial is used to describe the obvious, non-interesting solution. "Hardness" could be a shortening of NP-hard, used to describe a class of problems that requires a lot of computation.

Next time you are tempted to use these labels, maybe consider some of the following more meaningful alternatives:

Instead of "This such-and-such problem is trivial"... consider replacing it with:

This such-and-such problem is easy to solve!
This such-and-such problem is small in scope.
This such-and-such problem is easy to talk about, but would require a team of grad students 10 months to implement.

Instead of "So, we all know such-and-such is hard"... consider replacing it with:

So, we all know such-and-such is computationally intensive.
So, we all know such-and-such is impenetrable.
So, we all know such-and-such is something I have no idea how to do.

Latest AIDS Cure Hoax

2006-02-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

"Researchers believe they have found a new compound that could finally kill the HIV/AIDS virus, not just slow it down as current treatments do. While most of the community is still hesitant to comment on this until it passes peer review, initial results show that their method attacks and kills ALL variations of the virus. A fast track through the FDA could have one of the world's leading problems licked in less than a decade."

Funniest thing heard on Slashdot

Theoretically, Chuck Norris' tears could cure AIDS, cancer, paraplegia, herpes, common cold, mouth ulcers, and hangovers. Too bad that it is impossible to make Chuck Norris cry...

Neurosurgery is Innate

2006-02-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

Scientists have discovered a species of wasp, called Ampulex, that has evolved an ability to perform brain surgery on cockroaches. Not only that, but it has reverse-engineered the brain-physical map of the roach in order to control its movements, a feat which has only been performed by scientists in recent history. Seems like hacking is not only something that humans do.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

Update on China Censorship Situation

2006-02-03T08:26:00.000-08:00

It appears now China has added http://google.cn to the "Great Firewall"

Tests on a Shanghai-based trace-route server, located at http://www.linkwan.com/vr2/, indicated that the site was being blocked at the government-operated backbone server. The analysis from the trace route said 'IP packets are being lost past network CHINANET backbone network at hop 4.'

On Google Censoring China

2006-02-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

Many people have been commenting on Google's recently implemented censorship of Chinese search results. If you search at google.cn from within China, certain sensitive queries such as "falun gong" or "democracy" will recieve censored results. Some have demanded that Google not comply with the Chinese government's request.

So, yesterday I was sitting in a small burrito shop on the corner of Rengstorff and Middlefield waiting for my order. I was scanning the local paper while observing the hyper-efficiency of the Mexican burrito assembly line. The reason I mention this is that a front page article featured a story of an American citizen's recent experience with the Chinese government. It really puts things in perspective.

Here's the full article. Some excerpts..

ET: Tell us about the trial.
Dr. Lee: The trial was conducted in such a way that I was denied every possible legal right. I have evidence which can prove my innocence and they did not allow me to present it. I tried to defend myself, but they did not allow me to do that, especially when I was talking about the reasons, why I was trying to reveal the truth of the persecution. They interrupted me many times; whenever I tried to speak, they would stop me. So I never got a chance to defend myself. And no evidence whatsoever was presented from me, even though I requested it many times.

...

ET: How were you treated?
Dr. Lee: When I was arrested in the very beginning, in Canton, and then was transferred to Guangzhou, they tortured me with handcuffs, which cut into my flesh to the bone; it was extremely painful. They did not allow me to sleep for 92 hours in total. They used the handcuffs as a tool to torture me. They pulled my arms upward, from the back, so it was extremely painful and I could not move at all. If I moved at all, the pain would get worse.
I conducted a hunger strike from the very beginning on January 22, 2003 until February 10—18 days in total.
I still insisted on practicing Falun Gong, so they handcuffed me on March 27, after the trial; the trial was March 21. They handcuffed me, and I started a hunger strike on the 30th, one more time. The reason I started was because I wanted to write an appeal letter, because the trial was unlawful, and I had to make three copies, plus one for myself, thus I had to write four copies of the appeal letter, and I was handcuffed.
On May 9 my appeal letter was denied, and I started a hunger strike again, because this was totally unlawful, so I wanted to protest again. After that, according to their law, that was the final decision, you had to be thrown into prison, so then I was transferred to Nanjing prison on the 12th of May. I was still doing a hunger strike to protest, and then on the 14th of May I received a phone call from the U.S. consulate and I said, "I have some materials over here, I want to give them to you. I will stop the hunger strike today, and if you do not get the materials in two weeks, I will start the hunger strike again." Because those materials are extremely important. They recorded all the details of the trial, what they (the authorities) said, what they did, why they did not allow me to do this and that, and also my appeal letters and how they tortured me. After two weeks, they did not send what I wanted, so I started a hunger strike again.
The forced feeding was extremely painful, and I resisted their treatment. So they just poked the big, thick tube into my nose and into my stomach. It was so irritating that I threw up several times. It was crazy—I was screaming as it was so painful. The cameraman, who was green—just from the police academy—he fainted, right at the scene. On June 2, the U.S. consulate received all the materials I wanted to give them.
They still had my Zhuan Falun [the central text for Falun Gong practitioners], and I said you need to give me this Zhuan Falun , or I won't stop the hunger strike. They started the force feeding again on June 3. Before they did, they yelled, "Taste the power of the people's democratic tyranny!" They were full of exultation before they were going to torture me, like it felt so good. They left the tubes in my nose, which I pulled out myself.
They used the forced feeding to torture me, actually.
They had these so-called group study sessions, anti-Falun Gong group study sessions. I was surrounded by 15 people, yelling at me. Falun Gong is this and that, so crazy, why do you believe in these things… calling me this every day. So I started a hunger strike again, because that was so bad. I was protesting against the torture.
I started a hunger strike again on July 14 to 18, and at that time they left the tube inside of my nose for 33 hours, and they had all of my body tied up on a bed. 33 hours I lied there without moving; it was extremely painful—agony.
Then came the brainwashing. From August, 2003 they started to force me to watch the videotapes. Every day, it was three hours of videotapes. Then they had condemnation meetings on Falun Gong, three-hour sessions; then the policemen would come and talk to me. This continued for three to four months, and they didn't see enough results, so they changed their strategy.
Starting at the end of 2003, they forced me to do slave labor, to make shoes. The shoes used a sort of industrial glue that contains benzene; it's very toxic and irritating, and I felt short of breath and had a headache, that sort of thing. The other thing is, I always tried to refuse to work, because I was innocent—I should not be doing this. They forced me to stand for 16 days, from morning to evening, stand in front of other prisoners; they verbally attacked me, insulted me, that kind of thing. If you didn't stand straight they would kick you and push you.
They tried to force me to confess to the crime, by using forced sitting. They say you have to sit there and think about your wrongdoings yourself, like repentance. You're forced to sit there, just sit there in a fixed position. The longest time was 48 days straight, with my heart problem surfacing as a result. After breakfast it was 7:30 a.m.; then you start sitting there, and at lunchtime you have lunch. Then you start sitting again after lunch, then have dinner, and then come back and sit there for some time and watch their CCTV (China Central Television). Every hour they gave me five minutes to walk around in the cell. The stool was this size [gestures to describes a stool less than a foot high, less than a foot wide, and around six inches deep], you sit there and then your bottom develops this hard callus—it's extremely painful, and your back is also very painful. I was exhausted for such a long time.
After maybe two to three weeks, my brain worked very slowly. When the consulate came, I found it very difficult to speak; somehow, my brain didn't work anymore!
ET: What was your day-to-day life like?
Dr. Lee: They have something for you all the time, like brainwashing sessions. It's always brainwashing, from the very beginning to the very end. They say you are a prisoner, you have committed a crime, that you have to be punished.

And this was an AMERICAN citizen.

Yeah, you don't want to mess with the Chinese government. I think what Google has done in order to bring their service to China is a positive step forward. They even display a message to the user when the results have been censored. Since many of the sensitive sites are filtered anyway by the Chinese government at the ISP level, showing the search results for those would have limited usefulness. Any change that we want to enact in China's humanitarian policies will have to happen at the governement level, not by companies.

Thoughts on Adsense

2006-02-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

An early text ad

GMail and Google Maps may be incremental improvements to web based email and mapping, but the reason Google is as talked about today as it is is because of its success on Wall Street. Despite a few recent lackluster product releases, we give Google the benefit of the doubt because, hey, if they were able to more than quadruple their stock price then they must be pretty smart guys. The majority of it's financial success, Google owes, to Adsense, Google's little text ads. (They have recently gone into graphic ads as well)

How sound is the concept of Adsense? Imagine what your elevator pictch for Adsense would be back in the day. Is it as useful as being able to buy books at bargain prices online or trading my used stuff with others? Well, I can only speak personally, but I have recieved little, if any value from Adsense. I've never found anything "relevant" to what I'm looking for in an Adsense ad. I've definitely tried, and I still don't understand it. When I search for something on Google the most relevant results are the natural search results. That is the justification of the search results--The ads inherently cannot be in the best interest of the user and I've trained up my mental adblocking circuits to just simply ignore them.

But, Google continues to milk money from Adsense, now up to $1.9 billion in this last quarter alone. Who's buying this stuff? I think the proper analogy is that Google is cashing in on the online Gold Rush it has created. It's selling picks and shovels to the miners when there is no gold in the mountains to be found. In the American Gold Rush, the real winners, at least financially, were the hotel owners and city developers that provided the support framework to the many westward bound migrants. Of the composition of Adsense traffic, I would conjecture that the majority are "mistake clicks" that do not lead to information the user actually wants to see. The design of the Adsense ad itself is optimized for these mistake clicks. For example if you hover over the Adsense ads on the right, you'll see that the entire surface of the ad is a clickable area, even the empty space between the ads. This goes counter to the web convention that only underlined, blue text represents a hyperlink. So the common behavior of underlining text as you read it will invoke the ad, causing the poor advertiser who thinks he has bid his money on a legitimate user to his site, to pay money to Google for the user's action.

In addition to these "mistake clicks" others have estimated that up to 20% of Adsense clicks are malicious clicks, or spam clicks. Google would never admit to this being a serious problem, but the advertisers themselves have noticed by examining their webserver logs that much of the traffic coming in from these Adsense clicks is suspicious.

So, there seems to be many misconceptions at multiple levels in the Adsense system, both between the user, Google, and the advertiser. How long can the parties involved remain in the dark? John Battelle, in a recent interview, said that this misconception persists because despite the false clicks, advertisers still believe that they are receiving some net benefit from Adsense, in terms of new users to their site. However, John thinks that there is some point at which these benefits will be outweighed by the costs of traffic acquisition.

Where will Google be when that point comes?

Ranking Colleges Using Google and OSS

2006-01-30T22:31:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again when many people are deciding which college they should attend come fall. Whether they are a high school senior, aspiring professional, or seasoned veteran seeking an MBA, the ultimate decision of which college is based largely on reputation.

The perennial data source for college ratings that most students turn to is the US News America's Best Colleges Rankings. Despite the limited usefulness of reading rankings, there is only so much information you can get from first-hand experience. Taking the campus tour, talking with students and doing your own due diligence is about as far as you can go short of attending the school. The US News ranking methodology is based on many factors: peer assessment, faculty resources, selectivity, class sizes, and financial aid, among many others. What does it really mean to rank a list of schools? I can define a personal value function for determining which school I prefer to and by doing pairwise comparisons, I can sort a list of schools based on which would be the most beneficial to my personal goals. However, you can imagine though that an integration of these value functions over a large sample of students would pretty quickly create a ranking distribution that was rather flat. While the US News Rankings strive to give a complete overall view of the school, there are few weaknesses to its method. Some of these weaknesses have stirred criticism for the rankings by both students and colleges.

First, many of the metrics are subjective, such as peer assessment and selectively. This allows for "smoothing out" of the rankings to what the editors expect by "reinterpreting" the selectivity.

My major problem with the US News rankings, however, is that they are not free. In fact, only the top few schools rankings are viewable. Too see the whole list you have to pay $14.95.

So, to this end, I've decided to try my hand at generating my own rankings. Since I'm no expert in the field of evaluating colleges, I'm going to cheat and use statistical learning techniques. I'm going to do this with the help of just Google and some open source software. You won't even have to pay $14.95 to see the results!

First off, I found a list of American Universities from the Open Directory. I parsed out this page with a quick hand-written wrapper to get the names and URLs. Now, the fun part. What kind of "features" should I use for evaluating each school? This is where a bit of editorial control comes to bear. I wanted to capture the essence of what the US News methodology used, but I wanted to do this in a completely automated way using Google. So for each feature, I defined a Google Search query (shown in brackets) that would give me a rough approximation of that particular attribute:

Peer assessment [link:www.stanford.edu] - This is how some search engines approximate "peer assessment", by counting the number of other pages citing you
Size [site:www.stanford.edu] - a larger school would have a larger web, right? =)
Number of faculty [dr. "home page" site:www.stanford.edu] - hopefully those professors have websites that mention "dr." and "home page"
Scholarly Publications["Stanford University" in scholar.google.com]
News mentions ["Stanford University" in news.google.com]

So then I just iterate the list of the schools and perform each of those queries using the Google API. Let it run for a few hours and I have all my data. Now, you may be thinking there's no way that 5 numbers can tell you everything you need to make a decision on a school. Well, let's take a look at what the data looks like.

First, I load the data into WEKA, a free, open source data mining software package in Java. It implements many off-the-shelf classification and regression algorithms with an API and GUI interface. Let's take a look at few slices of the data:
This figure plots newsMentions on the x-axis against scholarlyPublications on the y-axis. The points that are plotted are those 50 schools that have a score in the US News rankings (schools beyond the 50th place don't have an overall score in the US News rankings). The color of the dots goes from low(blue) to high(orange). The color trend is blue in the lower-left to orange in the upper-right. As you can see, not only are the two Google queries correllated, they seem to also be jointly correlated to the US News score.
Plotting numberFaculty against scholarlyPublications shows also a positive correlation. So maybe these queries weren't totally bogus and have some informational content.

The next step is to fit a statistical model to the training data. The basic idea is to train the model on the 50 colleges with USNews scores and to test the model on all 1700+ American colleges. The natural first step is to try to fit a 5-dimensional line through the space. The best fit line is

USNewsRank = (-0.0003)peerAssessment+(0)sizeWeb+(0.0063)numFaculty+(0)scholarlyPubs +
0.0002 * newsMentions+68.7534.

This simple model has a root mean squared error(RMSE) of 10.4223. So, in the linear model the size of the web and number of scholarly Publications don't play a role. Fair enough, but can we do better?

The answer is yes. I next used a support vector machine model with a quadratic kernel function. This gave me a RMSE of 7.2724 on the training data. The quadratic kernel allows for more complex dependencies in the training data to be modelled, which is why the training error is lower, but would this result in better evaluation on the larger data set? There is no quick answer to this, but we can see from the ouput what the model predicted.

Name USNews SVM

University of Washington 57.4 98.929

Yale University 98 98.081

Harvard University 98 97.953

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 93 92.996

Stanford University 93 92.922

National University
92.523

Columbia University 86 92.255

Princeton University 100 90.609

New York University 65 85.271

University of Chicago 85 85.052

Indiana University
83.973

University of Pennsylvania 93 83.91

Duke University 93 79.487

University of Southern California 66 78.645

University of Pittsburgh
78.274

Cornell University 84 78.051

University of Florida
77.864

University of Colorado
76.877

The American College
76.597

University of California, Berkeley 78 76.192

This table shows the top 20 scores given by my program, along side the US News rating, when available(i.e. when the school was in the top 50). As you can see, many schools recieved consistent marks across the two ratings. However, there are quite a few surprises. My program ranked University of Washington as the best school, where it was only ranked 57.4 by US News. Having visited UDub myself while I was working at Microsoft, I'm not completely surprised. It's a truly modern university that has recently been producing lots of good work--but let's not overgeneralize. I believe that "National University" being high in my rankings is a flaw in the methodology.There are probably many spurious matches to that query like, "Korea National University". Ditto for, "The American College". They just had fortunate names. However, I think the scores for other schools that were unranked by US News like University of Pittsburgh and Indiana University are legitimate.

Now, is this a "good" ranking?It's hard to say since there is no magic gold standard to compare it too. That is the problem with many machine learning experimental designs. But without squabbling too much over the details, I think this quick test shows that even some very basic statistics derived from Google queries can be rich enough in information that they can be used to answer loosely-defined questions. Although I don't think my program is going to have high school guidance counselers worried about their jobs anytime soon, it does do a decent job. An advantage of this approach is that it can be personalized with a few training examples to rank all of the schools based on your own preferences.

Extracting useful knowledge by applying statistics to summary data(page counts) is one thing, but I've taken it to the next level by actually analyzing the stuff within the HTML page. The result of that work is a project called Diffbot, and you can check it out here.

If you're interested, take a look at the full ranking of all 1720 schools(in zipped CSV format).

The Untimely Death of MusicSearch

2006-01-18T19:23:00.000-08:00

You might have noticed that I have disabled my MusicSearch script. The page was up for a grand total of 3 days(1/13-1/15). During that time, it got over 3400 hits from around 11o0 unique visitors. That means the average person performed about 3 searches using the script. I'm not sure how it got so popular, but it seems that someone initially discovered my page through the blogspot network and posted it on French news site. From there, the promise of free music started spreading and my link started showing up at several other french, spanish, and greek sites as well as music forums. Some of those links are still there: (here, here, here). Since I don't read any of those languages, I don't really know what they are saying about my page. The Google Translation of the comments gives me this:

piranha - 15/01/2006 to 13:04:36 thank you for the bond! Nicolas - 16/01/2006 to 09:41:45 it was surely a good idea. When that functioned coconut - 17/01/2006 to 01:43:30 It was well yes, and there was also French song! Not like there bond

Although, my script later used caching, at some point the operator of the radio.blog network started to take notice of the traffic and sent me the following e-mail:

From: astro@mubility.com
To: mike@cs.stanford.edu
Hello,

I'm the owner of radio.blog.club.
What can I do that make you remove your script ?

What you do will bring us nowhere. When you make it easy to download MP3
from my website, you take both of us to an illegal level. One day or another, someone will ask to shut the site off because of this, and we will have no choice that take it down.

I'm not sure this is what you want. So PLEASE, remove your script.

Regards.

-astro

So, I have complied with astro's wishes, and removed my script, which was completely functioning at that time. Radio.blog's system encourages people to upload their music into publically accessible locations on the webserver. Their search engine at http://radioblogclub.com makes it easy to find anyone's radio.blog music.

Behind MusicSearch

2006-01-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

Some people have been asking me how MusicSearch works and where the songs come from. Well, you know those embedded flash players that people put in their xanga/livejournal/myspaces that blast embarassing music everytime you try to visit your buddie's page in a library or coffeeshop? I took a look at the code for one of the popular ones, radio.blog. It turns out that the sound files are stored in an obvious, public directory. So, the MusicSearch that I wrote is just a simplified interface on the radio.blog search engine, which makes the public path to the audio file more explicit. The sound files are typically radio broadcast quality, 64kbps or lower, but give you a good sense of the song.

A New Home

2006-01-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

I've started building a page at http://ai.stanford.edu/~mike. It's a work in early progress. Also mirrored at http://miketung.com

MusicSearch

2006-01-12T13:40:00.000-08:00

Try out this thingy I just wrote : http://www.streetpricer.com/MusicSearch
Works only for Windows users with Windows Media Player(WMP). The songs are full tracks, not short clips, which you can download to your computer using "Save as..." in WMP. You'll notice that actually it generates an ASX playlist that plays in WMP. If you hit the "next track" button, it'll play other similar songs on that playlist.

UPDATE: If you can't get it working there are a few things you might need to do in WMP.
1. Turn off Shuffle in Play>
2. Turn on "Connect to the internet" in Tools > Options > Player
Hey, it only took me a few hours to write...

An Illusion

2006-01-12T07:46:00.000-08:00

Count the number of men in the picture before and after it changes. Where does the extra man come from?

On Stock Trading

2005-11-22T09:07:00.000-08:00

I've made quite a bit of money this past week trading stocks in my Roth IRA. Here's a few things that I learned, which I hope will be of use to you as well.

1. The reward function of playing the stock market game should NOT be the stock price itself. The reward function is actually SELLING stocks at a high margin over what you paid for them. So, if you are training a reinforcement learner (such as your brain or a Markov Decision Process) , no reward should be applied when the stock price increases, unless a sale is to be made.

Taking this into account, only two modes of short-term stock trading make sense to me:

1. Betting on a Bull Market
In this mode, you begin the trading near the beginning of a big event, such as the winter shopping season or the end of the fiscal year for a particular industry. You choose a basket of stocks that reflects how you predict the industry will be changed at the end of this quarter. Take all of the companies that you think will be affected positively, subtract out those which everyone else thinks will be positive (since those expectations are already reflected in the price) and buy those stocks. So for example, if you think AMD will beat out INTEL in the next batch of processor releases and it is counter to what the public believes, then buy it! Hold on to the stock until the event passes, and then sell your stock at the end of this 1-2 month period. Your gain/loss will reflect exactly how good your prediction was.

2. Interday/Week trading
The most important thing to remember is that each trade costs you $7 (with Scottrade, which is what I use), so you must try to make trades that at least cover you for the $7. This means that the trades necessarily have to be in larger volumes on stocks that have higher volitility. This translates into more risk. However, there are techniques to balance the risk by choosing a set of stocks that balance each other. Unlike the first mode, this type of trading can be done even when the market is flat, since you are just betting on the small changes that happen day-to-day. In addition to choosing stocks that move a lot from day-to-day, you want to choose stocks that have a sufficient information streams. What I mean, is that even though those penny stocks might have huge amounts of movement, if there is not much news related to that company, you don't really have enough information to make an informed trade. So, you really want to choose companies that have a mid-size stock, information-rich news stream, and those that are not likely to go out of business the next day. For this type of trading, you want to hold onto the stock for at most just a few days.

Grad Student Orientation Event this Friday

2005-09-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

Hi friends,

Sorry for the relative dearth of posts recently. There are a few reasons for this:

1. We are in scramble-to-get-it-done mode for prepping our DEMO Fall05 here at the startup. Our biz-dev guys are down in Long Beach now getting ready. Check out live video updates at http://www.demo.com/

2. I've been catching up with a lot of friends and family lately

3. I've been putting some time into my own hobbies.

Hopefully things will change soon and you will start to see more posts.

Later this week, I will be back on campus! I have been volulntering my time to help out new incoming Grad students. The department will be hosting an orientation lunch on Friday to welcome the new students. For those of you that have been busy asking me questions all summer, this is a great chance for you to network with your future peers and I highly recommend it. It's really true that you will probably meet your best acquaintances at orientation. It'll be nice to finally put a face to an email address and I'll be able to give you the inside scoop on how to get RA and TAships, getting around paying tuition, finding jobs and venture capital, the local housing situation, and what are the best seafood bars in Silicon Valley.

Looking forward to meeting you all,

Now, coming to you on location from Mountain View, CA

2005-08-18T00:43:00.000-07:00

OK, so this past weekend I finally moved out of Stanford campus into Mountain View. Thanks a lot to my girlfriend for the hard labour, I couldn't have done it without you! Now, I'm literally a short bike ride away from work, the San Antonio shopping center, the movie theater on Shoreline and yummy ethnic foods of Cupertino. It's a great location--I'm paying less rent and my room is now double in size, we have pool table, private gym, and garaged parking. For those of you that know the Stanford campus, it is the absolute worst place to get food after dark(or even during the day). Not the ideal environment for the hungry late night hacker. Now i'm walking distance from food 24/7...

Ahh, Missing Good Old Berkeley

2005-08-18T00:42:00.000-07:00

A 6 year old programmer

2005-07-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

http://davidbau.com/archives/2005/07/29/haaarg_world.html

This is a cute post about a dad teaching his son to program a game. I got started in CS by programming my own games, too. This was because, unlike the other cool kids, I didn't have any games on my computer, since my Dad had an Apple. My first CS book was TRS80 Basic Computer Games, which I bought with a quarter while I was out yard sale shopping with my mom. This was an old book, even at that time, and it was not all that useful, since I didn't have a Radio Shack TRS80, so I had to port the code myself. This was back in elementary school, and my Dad quickly figured out that I had an interest in this sort of stuff and got me my first compiler: MS QuickBasic for Apple. The rest, as they say, is history...

How many other coders got their start this way?

San Jose Grand Prix

2005-07-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 7AM this morning, stupefied at my inability to sleep. I had been awaken, not by the humming of the quad-proc rank mounted server under my bed, nor the by the persistent sounds from the street outside, but by an algorithm. I had an idea for a new algorithm in my head that just needed to get out. It had been bothering me for days.

Maybe this is why I can't sleep.

I take a short drive to the office. 3 hours later, I had written 20 pages of code. I grab some drinks and snacks from the break room and scan the daily newspaper. Apparently there's some major event this weekend in downtown San Jose, so I decide to drive down and check it out. The first ever San Jose Grand Prix is Indy 500 meets street racing. They had blocked out several streets in downtown San Jose near Almaden (by the Adobe building) to form one long makeshift racetrack. I saw several Formula 1 racecars, black dudes spinning out on motorcycles, and NASCAR dads grilling burgers. As expected there were plenty of hot dogs, beer vendors, and scantily clad women. I wish Palo Alto was this cool.

Anyways, I was just there for a short while, but here are some photos other people took.

Birds mimic ringtones

2005-07-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

German ornithologists claim that some birds are now singing the songs of cell phone ringtones. Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation center near Tuebingen says that jackdaws, starlings, and jays are the best mimics. Still, the birds apparently can't copy more complex polyphonic ringtones. From Deutsche Presse-Agenture:

One reason for the phenomenon was that these birds were increasingly common in the urban environment, even the relatively shy jay, (Schneider) said. "There is food and an increasing amount of green space in modern cities."

The birds were simply adapting to their environment in imitating human sounds in what he termed an "evolutionary playground."
Link

Stanford Shots

2005-07-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

Check out this great collection of Stanford Panoramas.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/madh/22775430/in/photostream/

There is a rare shot of Lake Lagunita with water!

Humorous Links

2005-06-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

http://gameads.gamepressure.com/tv_game_commercial.asp?ID=1535
http://www.monzy.com/intro/drama_lyrics.html

US Politics

2005-06-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

If you want a good laugh, try reading CNN sometime. US politics and FR are such a joke these days..

Gen. John Abizaid's testimony came at a contentious Senate Armed Services Committee hearing at which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld clashed with members of both parties, including a renewed call by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts for him to step down.

Citing what he called repeated "gross errors and mistakes" in the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, Kennedy told Rumsfeld: "In baseball, it's three strikes, you're out. What is it for the secretary of defense?"

"Isn't it time for you to resign?" Kennedy asked.

"I've offered my resignation to the president twice," Rumsfeld shot back, saying that President Bush had decided not to accept it. "That's his call," he said.

Kennedy has called for Rumsfeld's resignation before.

Wow, I wonder how Rumsfeld's self-esteem is doing these days.
source: CNN

Weekend Movie Review: Howl's Moving Castle

2005-06-21T18:06:00.000-07:00

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones seems especially suitable for adaptation by Hayao Miyazaki because it has many of his favorite themes. The central character is a young girl who shows determination and loyalty when she is brought into a world of strange and magical characters, many of whom appear oddly remote. She faces challenges that teach her that she is more capable and loving and deserving of love than she knew. And it has the kinds of settings that Miyazaki loves to illustrate, with intricate mechanical devices, characters who are transformed or disguised, and shifts of angles and planes that show off his gift for vertiginous perspectives.

The story is about a girl who is transformed into an old woman by a witch whose spell prevents her from even telling anyone what happened. So, she becomes the cleaning lady for a mysterious wizard who lives in a magical castle that flies from one place to another.

It turns out she is not the only one who is not what she seems. A graceful but silent scarecrow, a wheezing dog, a little boy, the wizard, and even the wicked witch will all have unexpected transformations as they try to escape from the order of the king, who wants all magicians to help him fight a war.

There are some gorgeous visuals,a lush field of flowers, a charming town, and the endlessly inventive castle, which moves along on chicken feet. But like the title character, it seems to be missing a heart. The characters are reserved and distant, and they tolerate, even seem to expect a level of disengagement from enemies, friends, and even family that is disconcerting. The voice talents include Lauren Bacall, Blythe Danner, and Christian Bale, but they never mesh; it's as though each is in a different movie. It is unsettling that the objects -- a flame (voice of Billy Crystal), a scarecrow, even the machines seem to have more personality than the humans. Ultimately, it is easier to appreciate the movie than to be enchanted or engaged by it.

Parents should know that this movie includes battle violence and frequent peril and tense confrontations. Characters are transformed or disguised in forms that may be troubling to some in the audience. A character smokes a cigar. There is brief non-sexual nudity (tush) and implied off-screen nudity.

Families who see this movie should talk about the advantages and disadvantates Sophie finds in being old. Why does she change her mind about the witch?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. They should read the book and some of the other stories by Diana Wynne Jones. They will also enjoy the books of Lloyd Alexander, Brian Jaques, and Tamora Pierce.

Happy Father's Day

2005-06-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

Made it into office at a record 12:45PM... I'm putting the finishing touches on this vertical crawler I'm working on and eating a Honey Ham sandwich I brought for lunch. All of the sudden I'm surrounded by three skinny Latino girls with short frilly skirts, bleach died hair, and tight revealing tops.

"Hi, Michael! Is that your name?", I hear as I swivel around and notice the out-of-place female in front of me. I look across the hall at Scott, sitting in his office and giving me a smart smirk.

"The Elements of Statistical Learning, how is that book?"
"It's a bit dry", I say.
"We're here selling perfume for Father's day", she says as she sprays a liberal amount of yellow liquid and massages it all over my arm. "How old are you?"
"I'm 22."
"Oh, so am I! What do you guys do here?"
"We make websites.."
"I have a website, too! Do you want to see my pictures?"
"It's ok."
"Normally, I would charge $30 for this cologne, but today, for you, It'll only be $15 since for Father's day. We take checks, too and it includes the box."
At this point I escort the ladies out of our office, and send them off. I go to the bathroom to wash off the cheap cologne off both my arms. I still smell it...

LOL, only in the Valley.. I wonder how far they walked today. Reminds me of the days in high school me and Saee used to walk into high-tech companies and through tech park parking lots looking for jobs.

StreetPricer.com

2005-06-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

I was looking Dell coupons to buy a Plasma HDTV and came across this awesome deals site. You definitely want to check it out! They have all the best coupons and some pretty good special offers. http://www.streetpricer.com - I've put the link permanently on the right side, in case you want to visit it again in the future.

A Great Stock Tutorial

2005-06-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

Recently, I found this great stock tutorial online. It goes over the basic types of stocks, short selling, and derivatives and options. Check it out for a great overview of the market as well as for an excellent directory of merchants. Visit http://www.stocktutorials.com

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

2005-06-14T01:52:00.000-07:00

Video clip

PALO ALTO, California -- Steve Jobs told Stanford University graduates Sunday that dropping out of college was one of the best decisions he ever made because it forced him to be innovative -- even when it came to finding enough money for dinner.

In an unusually candid commencement speech, Apple Computer's CEO also told the almost 5,000 graduates that his bout with a rare form of pancreatic cancer reemphasized the need to live each day to the fullest.

"Your time is limited so don't let it be wasted living someone else's life," Jobs said to a packed stadium of graduates, alumni and family.
Jobs, wearing sandals and jeans under his robe, was treated like a rock star by the students, in large part due to the surge in popularity of Apple's iPod digital music player.

A group of students wore iPod mini costumes over their robes and several shouted, "Steve, hire me!"

Jobs, 50, said he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out after only eight months because it was too expensive for his working-class family. He said his real education started when he "dropped in" on whatever classes interested him -- including calligraphy.

Jobs said he lived off 5-cent soda recycling deposits and free food offered by Hare Krishnas while taking classes.

He told the graduates that few friends could see the value of learning calligraphy at the time but that painstaking attention to detail -- including mastering different "fonts" -- was what set Macintosh apart from its competitors.

"If I had never dropped out I might never have dropped in on that calligraphy," Jobs said.

Jobs also recounted founding Apple in his parent's basement and his tough times after being forced out of the company he founded when he was only 30.

"I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the valley," Jobs said.

Instead, he founded Pixar Studios, which has released enormously popular films such as Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc.

"It was awful tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it," Jobs said.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs said his doctor told him he only had three-to-six months to live. He later found out he had a rare, treatable form of the disease -- but he still learned a tough lesson.

"Remembering you are going to die is the best way to avoid the fear that you have something to lose," he said.

Roll-your-own Root Beer

2005-06-14T01:33:00.000-07:00

You know, I used to somewhat like Root Beer. I would often get it at restaurants or fast food places to go with dinner. That is--before my girlfriend mentioned that it tastes like toothpaste. That just ruined it for me, and I haven't been able to bring myself to drink it since. Maybe there is hope, though, if I make my own. Here are instructions for how.

Hiring is Obsolete

2005-06-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Paul Graham gave an excellent talk at Berkeley about the future of hiring. Classic Paul Graham stuff. For those of you that missed it, he's written up a short essay based on his talk on his website: http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

Beyond Google Maps

2005-06-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

Think Google Maps is cool? Try out this new mapping site (http://map.search.ch/) to see an even better mapping program. Try double-clicking on the map!

My First Post!

2005-06-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

I open my eyes to a pulsating red glow and deep sweat. I am in bed and it's 6:30 in the morning. The text message on my cell phone that has awaken me politely informs me that our machine in the server facility has gone down again. Shit. Time to reset the crawler, merge the indicies, start up the query processing backend, and reboot the web application. I jump out of bed, through clothing, and into a car. I barrel down the 2.5 mile stretch of El Camino Real that connects the Stanford campus and my office, passing by green lights and small coffee shops just waking up for the day. Burger place, gas station, internet company, burger place, internet startup, Starbucks, internet startup...

So, another day begins at the internet company I work at. After resolving a certain persistent server crisis, I head over to the company gym across the building. A short jog, 5 sets on the bench press, curls, abs, squats and I'm awake. Life is beautiful. I sit down on my black task chair in my corner office on the first floor of our Mountain View building. In front of me are two laptops, four bottles of water, two protein bars, three paper notebooks, a stack of charts and tables, and a stack of research papers. One of the laptops has a blinking console open to the NERSC supercomputing cluster at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. So much to do, so few CPU cycles..

Name	USNews	SVM
University of Washington	57.4	98.929
Yale University	98	98.081
Harvard University	98	97.953
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	93	92.996
Stanford University	93	92.922
National University		92.523
Columbia University	86	92.255
Princeton University	100	90.609
New York University	65	85.271
University of Chicago	85	85.052
Indiana University		83.973
University of Pennsylvania	93	83.91
Duke University	93	79.487
University of Southern California	66	78.645
University of Pittsburgh		78.274
Cornell University	84	78.051
University of Florida		77.864
University of Colorado		76.877
The American College		76.597
University of California, Berkeley	78	76.192