Quick question for my audience

What is the right reaction to this antagonizing behavior?

Confrontational situation:

You walk in and calmly and explains the problem and ask for it to be addressed reasonably.

Your opponent stands up, defensively, and says loudly (so that everyone can hear his signal for this attack)

"Huan. STAY CALM! I know you are very upset, But let's be reasonable here, what you say is not the case and that we are right and you are wrong."

People on his side on seeing this attack pattern will swoop in and follow suit:

"Please, Huan, stay calm! There is no need to be so upset!"

At this point, all I have stated were the facts and then I stand there and listen to three people accusing me of being UNCALM and UNREASONABLE.

Now, if I reacted in any way, ("what are you talking about? I am calm!!", "But here are the facts...", "Would not be reasonable if xyz were the case instead"...) I will be met with the same

"Huan, stay calm! Let's be reasonable here."

And try as you might, your reasoning, your composure will not remove the coloring that your opponent in this meeting are putting on you. In fact, maintaining composure and not react to the obvious provocation is quite a challenge.

Later on, in a court of law, everyone in the room will say:

"We tried to reason with Huan but he was very agitated, we tried to calm him down, in fact we have recordings of us saying 'CALM DOWN HUAN!!'" and he just exploded!

What is the correct response to this kind of attack pattern? I mean, there doesn't really seem to be any option left for me, and the only exit, that would not lessen my ground in court, is an immediate and silent departure.

Hypothetically speaking, for those of you who are monitoring my blog for pay or glory. This blog entry does not purport to be related to an actual situation that have or will take place before, after, or on the instant of this blog entry's posting.

The King of California

In this day of post-christmatic Sunday, I watched a movie on Netflix. "King of California"

Apparently, according to the movie, the name California was originally a made-up name to mean a place with lots of gold...

Michael Douglas's character, Charlie, tries to find gold by digging into a Costco floor (yes through the cement, and into the sewage line). Needless to say, he died in search of the mythical gold leaving her daughter Miranda by herself. The movie ends with Miranda finding new immigrants, Chinese, I believe, asking her if he's arrived at America. (It's a thing of Chinese language to use some supportive sounds to ask a question. "America, ma?" I remember my own arrival in the US, when I had asked a similar question by saying "Shannon ne?", where the "ne", making it a question asking where is shannon, got swallowed by Shannon, and the person I asked could not understand why I was saying some girl's name at him, and explains patiently, "No, I'm Chris, Shannon is somebody else!"

Alas, I feel that I am closer to Charlie's gold than to Miranda's suffering from Charlie and certainly long time has past since that time when I was fresh out of the water.

Some days, like today, I really really envy Charlie, and I wish I had the faith, the conviction, and the vision of that bright yellow light so that I could take off my oxygen mask and swim through the narrow opening and into the wide golden brilliance.

Why do I care about privacy?

You might wonder why I spend so much time on my blog complaining about the lack of protection for personal privacy.

In my previous entry, I mentioned that one way to motivate personal privacy protection is to reverse the corporation argument. When the laws for corporations were established, it is modeled after a human being, with rights to hold property and to enter legally binding contracts. Certainly the supreme court recently upheld that view of corporation by giving corporations in the US the right to have political views and to participate in politics--just as any person would.

So, let's reverse this argument. If a corporation is modeled after a person, and there are secrets, as long as they're deemed trade secrets, that are protected by law. Should a person not be guaranteed his privacy in the same way?

More plainly, I think most people will agree with me that bank account names and passwords should be protected. Because that guarantees a person his personal property--a fundamental right in America. That means YOU CANNOT LOG INTO MY BANK ACCOUNT AND LOOK AT HOW MUCH MONEY i HAVE, and YOU CANNOT TAKE THAT MONEY OUT AND PUT IT INTO ANOTHER ACCOUNT EVEN IF THAT OTHER ACCOUNT IS MINE ALSO!!!!!!

Let's phrase it another way. This American Government has secrets. There are very strict federal laws that disallows making public information, or even make individuals aware of or aware of the existence of certain information. And some of these secrets are about disagreeable agendas or actions or mistakes or direct violations of laws by the government.

By the same token, and by the 5th amendments, individuals should not have to make public or even make the government aware of information that it does not want them to know, EVEN if it's evidence of my own wrong doing!!!

So this means if I have a secret contract to work with my employers competition, and I keep this information on my personal device. My employer should be breaking laws and should be punished severely if they come to know of this act by reading my personal emails (which I have kept off of company computers). If my employers put a camera in my home. If my employer put listening devices (AKA bugs) on my person, or in my food. If my employer installed a device on my pen to record the text of my writing. If my employer put a tracking device on my person, personal clothing, my car, my bike, my personal laptops.

ALL of these things are severe violations of my personal privacy rights!

If further, my employer make this information public, or to make it known to my peers at work. This should be considered a greater offense and should be punished severely!

If an agent does this on behave of my employer, the employer and the agent should both be punished.

If you are an employee of the company and you violate my privacy on your own accord for competitive reasons, then there should be federal law--not corporate rules--that prevents this act. I should be able to take you to court for reading my personal email because we work together!!

Now, needless to say I feel that my hypothetical taking of a contracting job with a competitor may be immoral and illegal, but that does not give the company the right to invade any of my personal privacies!!

Nor to do so indirectly!!

The company cannot spy on me! And it should also be illegal for the company to require or prefer the signature of a release allowing them to do so.

Btw, this release is stated indirectly, typically that you agree to not sue the company for privacy violations. Because it doesn't say the company will do that, but it prevents you from seeking justice after the fact. So think of it this way. After you sign that, they can put a camera in your bathroom and watch you and your wife and your kids shower, and they can take the money that your hard work makes for the company and hire a person full time to do this, and you cannot sue because you agreed to it as part of the condition to work for them.

Alternatively, companies may ask you to sign this agreement at the exit. Which means they might have done so already and just want buy the right to keep those tapes and watch them again and again and you release them for what? maybe 3-months severance? maybe 6 weeks? maybe 100 stock units? It's not worth it no matter how much they give you.

This clause should be as illegal as blacklisting union member!!

There really should be federals safe guarding day-to-day personal privacy of American Citizens.

Corporate e-spies

Ahh, I finally found the terminology for what I've been complaining about Industrial Espionage. So, all those people snooping on my computer, are dong so for commercial reasons.

There are people, be it hackers or government agents or people hired by the bosses to monitor employees, who have access to personal information: Full content of personal emails sent to me and received by me, recording of my verbal communication with other people, and video recording of my behavior.

The important aspects of my insecurity are two: privacy and identity. Privacy means information about me and originating from me, especially in a password protected situation, should not be known to other people. Aside from my believing that privacy is an important civil right, the more important fact is that it is important to my continuation as a live human that some things are private. If corporations are modeled after people (Legal entity being an alias for a person), why is it that corporation secrets (trade secrets) are protected but my personal secrets are not guaranteed? There must be reasonable privacy in America!

A second problem is one of identity. If you intrude into my electronic communication, it is obviously the case that you are also able to type in an email as if it was typed by me. In that case, my identity has been used in ways that I do not wish it to be used. For reasons I will not discuss in detail here, this should not be allowed. Identity theft should not be allowed in any case!

So in terms of privacy, if you are a....

Government agent and you are invading my privacy by monitoring my electronic communications: Please continue as usual. Please try to not understate my male prowess in your writings into the permanent records you have on file for me as it cannot be exaggerated.

Corporate agent from a competitor of my employee and you are invading my privacy: Please stop. I believe this is illegal under various state trade secret laws. If I find out about this you will be sued by my employer.

Corporate agent from my boss: please continue, please exaggerate my accomplishments in your report to my boss, if you let me know who you are, I will do the same for you.

My competing coworker: Please stop, this should not be allowed. Your act of personal selfishness is detrimental to my productivity and eventually to your bottom line.

Backlog: The Crucible

Just watched The Cruicible with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, which btw, is labeled as "Courtroom Dramas" on Netflix...

So, I am slowly coming to the realization that I have been a bad student in my younger youth. I never quite grasped or remembered the core conflict of The Crucible, which is that Rev. Parris peruses the witch hunt because of the potentially he could get all those witches and devil-worshiper's land.

I turned this video on as background noise to drown out the construction outside fixing the water way that supplies San Francisco with fresh water. I began to pay attention to it when I heard this uttered by the Judge Hathorne, who, at least in the movie version, seem to be conscious of the underlying struggle for land, and may well be paid under the table by the Rev. Parris for his bias. The sentence uttered is:

"""
[A] person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between
"""

And I always thought George W. Bush coined "You're either with me or against me" In his fight against modern terrorism... But it appears, after a briefing Binging session (as opposed to Googling, for some reason my Chrome defaults to Binging for results), that "You are either with us or against us" is quite well used and studied and has been spoken by the Romans and Jesus Christ. It is known as a false dilemma if the decision is not a two-way decision.

... Any ways, the main lesson of two hours spent hunched over laptop watching netflix is that irrationality and blatantly illogical reasoning arise out of ulterior motives. The McCarthy Era, the subject of The Crucible, apparently, according to Yahoo Answers, is a similar struggle by the Republicans for power.

It leaves me wondering, did this McCarthy Era actually strengthen America? Did the consolidation of the land in Salem Mass. have positive effect on the local political and economic system? Did it have a good side effect on American Christian communities? And why is it, that I, who am not a Christian, feel so moved by the recitation of the Lord's Prayer at the last hanging of John Proctor and the people against whom he could not lie, in this movie is based on a play written by a person of Polish-Jewish upbringing (according to wikipedia), but an atheist by his own account. I wonder... what really happened when these says were originally said, were they all on the edge of death from persecution, filled with regrets of a live shortened, yet hopeful in the correctness of choices made?

Have we humans really lived this way for these thousands of years, and continue in the same ways?

The Universal Recommender

So, I have been forced to think about recommendation on the web in recent weeks. My former employers laid me off from work and I had to interview and answer the question: "So what kind of recommendation algorithms did you work on?"

There have been many categorizations of recommendation systems, and here I will list just a few that I have had the chance to describe to my potential employers. The description is non-technical because often it is difficult to get into details of the algorithm due to numerous NDA's I have signed at many companies. However high-level description should be okay, and please let me know informally and discreetly if you object to my listing them. [[This is to say, more explicitly, I do not believe any of this information is secret. And if they are your secret, it is my believe that either you have made the information public it or that I found it independently.]]

Generalized View

In the most grossly general way, a recommendation is the indication of availability and desirability of a specific object to be acted upon by the internet user so as to benefit the recommender and the internet user. Typically, one can think of a product (balloons, diapers, beer, games), media (movie/music/picture), or textual content (news story, FAQ articles). Typically also, the indicator of availability is either a specifically designated area with a creative which represents the product and text describing it. The indication could also be a popup window, a link, a pre-roll, post-roll, inlaid text or video. The indication of availability could also be sounds of speech, music, or other human audible sounds.

The benefit to the recommender typically materializes when the internet user purchases a product, video, music. But there could be intangible benefit that are quantified by surrogate measurements: clicks, hovers, add-to-carts, etc.

The User Experience

Ultimately tho, if I had to explain to the internet user what it is that I am doing, then these are the typical categories of explanation out there:

• Relevance: This is your run-of-the-mill Collaborative Filtering algorithm making (item->item) recommendation, Items relevant to current item. (creative->blog page) (the blog page's text creates the context for which to calculate relevance, AKA Contextual Recommendation/Advertisement), etc. Content Based Filtering may also apply.
• Personalization: Typical collaborative filtering algorithm for making (item->user) recommendations. Typically, personalization is more personal than behavior targeting, but behavior results should fall under this category.
• Performance: Ideally, every single recommendation made should be performance based, however, this category, for me, contains non-contextual, non-personalized recommendations. Popular among DVD & music stores is Movers & Shakers, Bill Board top 100 music charts, Oscar Winners). "Most Viewed Video Today", notice there can be some restrictions to Performance based system--in this case "Today", but it should be minimal and easily comprehended. Also, secretly, these could be high converters, although you'd never say that to your customer...
• Referral: This is a very cool area of recommendation. This is your typical eHarmony match making (user->user). There is also (site->user), (blog->blog aka blogroll); Referral service is not very popular because it is very hard to put a value on the referral.
• Discovery/Navigational: And finally, if your site lacks hierarchical/facet based browsing capability, and it does not have a good search engine, then recommendations can help to orchestrate the user experience by leading them into purchasing the product.

Btw, I got laid off from work doing this for a living, so this information may not be the best thing to repeat in your interview or your next paper, Caveat emptor. And if you're a recommendations vendor or a retailer or a media content provider, Caveat venditor. [[And to say this explicitly, I am not certain of the value of this approach to making a universal recommender system. Writing about it may bring you bad luck. Using the system for commercial purposes may not generate the desired revenue]]

Interesting Future Work:

Explore versus Exploit: The precise meaning and nature of this style of recommendation is unclear to me. This must have something similar to active learning algorithms that selects some examples for exploration to improve it's performance...

User Experience versus Time-on-site versus Spend-maximization versus cost-minimization versus total user value.

User retention versus sales volume: If you sell lots of users a bad product, it can be made so that they don't return the product, but they may never come back again.

AOV versus revenue: This is a hard call. I think I'd go for revenue, but there're a lot of gotcha's...

volume versus margin: This one is pretty complicated too.

CTR versus conversion rate: very difficult to determine what to use. It's almost impossible to be sure form day to day and page to page and product to product and user to user which is more valuable.

Another thing not entailed in the above listing is the recently popular game theoretic approach to advertising. In the presence of many possible recommendations, Because the user are aware of the above five aspects of recommendation, they may second guess the value of the products being recommended based on the assumed underlying reason for those products being recommended. (More specifically, the user will think recommendations are being made to sell them something more expensive than something else that is of the same quality but lower price, etc.) This thought process obviously takes place inside most intelligent shoppers, but how do we leverage it so as to provide the best user experience?

The exclusivity of facebook

So I just watched "The Social Network" again. It seems that exclusivity is one of the key things of these social groups before they gain traction. I wonder if there are other exclusive groups in the world other than private schools and universities.

(Certainly I realize that having an university email address is a filter for minimal level of education, but what else could we have?)

• Money: Themoneybook.com: only people who can afford to pay $500k a month can join the club.
• Prestige: Only people who are willing to enter the prizes, trophies, and awards that they have received are allowed to join. (Looking for nobel laureates under 60)
• Political affiliation: TheUnitedWeStandPartyFacebook.com, or republican under 30, or democrats over 5..., Nazis4Democracy.com; Commie2Commie.com
• Large corporation: TheGMbook.com (only current, former, and aspiring GM employees)
• Power: TheExecutivesbook.com; only E-level officers of companies with > $1billion annual revenue may join.
• Physical: TheFootlongClub.com; yuck, kinda gay too; how'bout TheTwinTowersbook.com; sigh... the noise made by the vacuum of creativity here is astoundingly deafening.
• Mental: TheJediAirbenderbook.com; only people who can bend air like that jedi lama may join and seek others of the same persuasion.
• Moral stance: BlackSupremacy.com;

anyhoo... One of this will probly make somebody money... The reasoning is this: Because these people are extremists who will take every thing to the extreme, and certainly therein lay the money.

Okay, and I'm an extremist in my opinion about these, but... alas, everybody has his own mould right?

the negative sum game

Hmm, so I recently realized that I've been fairly silly in asking my neighbors how to stop cats from pissing and pooping in my front and backyard.

Yes, it's 21st century, and I live 5 minutes from downtown, but people cannot be made to train their dogs and cats to use a litter box. Reasoning with the pet owners has yielded nothing.

So, here is the problem. If I ask my neighbors how to prevent cats from coming to my yard to shit and poop, what in the whole wide world would make them tell me the most effective method for chasing cats away?

Because there is a non-trivially positive but finite amount of poo these cats and dogs can produce on a regular basis. Since the dogs and cats don't come every day, it would make sense that they are doing it else where when the poo didn't land on my lawn. So a reduction of poo and piss on my lawn is an increase on theirs.

So....., I actually asked,..., and the answer was a bunch of really good suggestions about how to clean the poop up after the fact...

How dumb was that...

Thus, I seem to be stuck in a negative-sum-game, where somebody has to lose and asking other people how they are winning is hopelessly useless.

But I will tell you the answer: Cactus! Plant lots of cactus, sure it'll hurt you when you trip and fall on it or when you garden around them, but just think of all the poo and piss that you won't be seeing. But the down side is that there is a chance that they'll do their business right on top of it, in which case you'll have a stinky and prickly situation at hand.

sigh... I guess I'm misleading you too, huh. sigh... gotta play that darn game.

The Social-Industrial Complex

Social networking is _the_ hot thing in today's economy. Well, the portion of the economy that I am part of any ways. I cannot imagine a product to work on that would get VC money and not have some component of social networking to it.

Being a fairly anti-social person since my migration to the United States around Jr. high time, I constantly find myself not being able to integrate into this very social society. And certainly, when it comes to work, I cannot think of a project that is not social in nature. The money, it seems, is flowing away from anything non-social.

So this brings to mind an expression the Military-Industrial complex that eisenhower used to describe the pervasive and dominating relationships of military, government and the industry in the 1960's.

One wonders, if the current movement towards a Social-industrial complex, a move that is also pervasive and dominating: not only on the net, but off the net, our music players, our cars, houses clothing, will probably one by one become social.

Could it be that by some cosmic rightitude, the Yin-Yang meta-physical origin of all things, that a the social industry is growing to counter balance, some day, fully, the military industry?

Will there be a merge of social military industry some day and the two separate forces will merge and wars will be fought on social networks?

sigh, that's probably too much to hope for.

And then maybe we can even consider this Religious-Industrial complex and all those other complexes out there...

AND i DON'T HAVE BED BUGS EITHER!!!

See tittle

I don't have a $%#ing compromised immune system

Future employers, please don't read titles on my blog and decide not to hire me. I know you cant say to me "I don't want you because you are HIV positive", but to be certain

I am NOT HIV POSITIVE!!!!!

Please do not discriminate against me for something that I'm not. You will be missing out on a really great guy who might help you to build you a successful team!


After I posted that entry a couple of months ago, I got laid off from my former employer for completely unclear reason. (Officially the company could not afford us, and laid off a lot of people), but we all knew that the company was doing really well. I really hope all those co-workers didn't get laid off because the company felt that they needed to make up a reason to let me go.


I mean, I can completely understand all of you. I would probably try to get rid of someone underhandedly if I found out he had bed bugs, much less AIDS, but I want all my friends, family, and potential coworkers to know:

I DON"T HAVE AIDS!!!

Scared of Math

I just read in the news today that Partha Niyogi died today of brain cancer. This seems like one bad news after another. Earlier in the year, Sam Roweis, another bright young Machine Learning scientist jumped to his death from his residence in NYU.

The horrifying similarity is that Niyogi is known for his (and his student's) work applying geometry and manifold to machine learning. Sam Roweis also published some work on visualisation and learning on manifolds.

There has got to be something kind of weird alien trying to prevent Humans from taking the next important step in learning and evolution?

Or maybe American or foreign military some how knows about some powerful related with geometries on manifolds and they sent spies to kill these people who know how to work this stuff?

In any case, let me declare that I know nothing of this area of math or computer science. Don't come and kill me!! The last thing I remember learning any where close to that is something called a "curl" and though I use it regularly to get data from the web, I don't believe that I should be executed for that kind of knowledge...

ugh. I'm scared...

Social Network

Wow, cool, I wish I was rich and had a gf and did something good for the social life of young people..




In total earnestness, Zuckerberg look prettier, smarter, and meaner in real life than he is portrayed in this film.I am having a really hard time imagining him having trouble getting laid at Harvard.

err. I didn't want to see this movie, since I don't have a date, or the money, but after seeing a raving review in the WSJ, I decided to see it after all. This movie moves at the pace that we're familiar with in the computer world. It's stream of conciousness is compatible with mine.

But obligatorily, I have to complain about the portrayal of Asian girls as power hungry sex fiends who are jealous to an extreme and at the slightest glimmer of money will turn completely around to be a little cute bunny. I mean, if that were really the case, how come there's never any horny Asian girl on my shoulders and being jealous of me looking at white girls? blah!!!


Hmmm, The movie is too kind to the winners, Sean Parker look like he got stabbed in the back by Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg look like the biggest loser at Harvard, so him winning is... is what we cheer for.

But then again, the loss of some big WASPs to Jewish kid... is getting too familiar. Last night's movie about Quiz Show discusses this pattern: "First a jewish person win, then a WASP wins and wins bigger than the jew" So.... I guess, the clubbing scenes are nice, some nice views of SF... Zuckerberg saying something about "the energy in the silicone valley"...

Hmmm, time for me to get a beer and write some shitty thing about girl, and start a website...

anybody know how to get some facebook stocks?

I have a compromised immune system

I am beginning my weekend of TV watching with Quiz Show, which is showing on hulu.com for free right now. What's this got to do with my immune system? Absolutely nothing. Just using a bait title to get u to read my blog. muhawhawhahhahahaaa. Anyways, I use Google Analytics and I know nobody is reading my blogs except for me.Sigh...

However, I do have a severely compromised ethics system. When I saw Charles Van Doren deny the offer from the Jewish TV producers, I felt... I felt...

I felt that I want to take the offer. I am really short on cash recently and if I am made an offer to receive $100k (in 2010 USD adjusting for inflation) a week for reciting a few facts that I am made to remember, honestly, I think I would do it. I mean, as I watch the show, and how Charles interacts with his dad and mom, I remember my dad and my mom and the values that they try to instil in me. And I felt... like I want to be in Charle's shoe. I felt like...

I want to be smart, handsome, white and blonde, and I want to have strong principals and say: "Well, I will have to say no" to two business men because I felt that accepting the offer would compromise my principles and values--be it academic principles, cultural principles, or personal values...

I so want that!!! Even if it only lasted for a moment (because after, he accepted and started taking answers from them)

I think the expression best express my feelings was said by a comedian:

"You know, I'm otherwise a normal heterosexual male, but in that one instance, for that one guy, I am gay. I want to put ****** into #%!#$!#! and *!# all oveR #!s %@#% #$ !#@$ ! #@%#! $ !#$ #!@ $#!@ $ !#@$ !"

Sigh, and from that point forward, watching the movie is just such torture.... it's like after that one homosexual climatic romantic moment, you find that other guy cheating behind your back, again and again, and again, and again, and it just just such a fucking heart break. And you know in your heart that he doesn't want to... well, you wish he doesn't want to cheat on you.


Sigh.....

okay, snap back to reality. Gota do laundry....

Rule by Secrecy

Hmmm, this blog entry is not about the book of the same title. I won't mention Skulls and Bones, and the Masons, and Common Cause, and Illuminati, Fight Club, weather club, The AA, Triads and Mafias. What is the problem?????

So, I've given this some thought.

Suppose I work at an Internet Startup (aka a DOT COM), and suppose there is a group of black hat hackers at work who constantly mess with my work ("mess with"=="cause damage to the company and make it look like my fault")

Suppose now that they're not the bosses (who themselves have pit bulls that can keep those black-hats at bay most of the time) and I complain to the bosses, but the bosses deny their existence. Even though their own Shins are getting whacked day in and day out, the bosses put a grin on their face, and tell me: "Nope, black-hat hackers don't exist and you are just a bad employee."

Now, theoretically, under Darwinian world view, these unstated secret groups of clout are natural evolutionary entities that come into existence and compete, semi-stochastically. Their(the hackers') continued happiness is the result of their fitness. As a whole, human society benefits from their existence. What's more, the bosses are probably grinning with a bloody shin bashed to the bone, exposed to air because they believe that these guys are good for the company(or to themselves somehow).

Now, as a non-hacker, I suffer constantly. And from my perspective, the bosses have the power, by virtue of their being the boss which entitles them unconditional rights to hire and fire for any reason at any time(at-will, non-competitive clauses). So either they are in cahoots and hired the hackers intentionally, in which case I wonder why it appears to me that they're blooding in such a painful place, or they do not have control. Personally I would prefer the prior, even though that would make the bosses my original antagonizer, and that my shines is the only one that's bleeding.

In general, why, beyond the fact that I am not a member of some secret power, is governance under secrecy a bad thing?

Well, decisions are not made democratically--how can it be democratic decision if the decisioning maker are unaware of the problems ?? (Okay, CS people spare me the "news" about ZK algorithms, because then I'd have to ask "is the system bug free? and does it always terminate in acceptable amount of time?")

Unmonitored decision making process is not trustworthy. I don't trust it! You shouldn't trust it! The secret power shouldn't trust it because how does it know that it's actually not the secret and that it is actually being played by a bigger/different power that is being deliberately kept secret from them?

I believe that only a clearly stated and strictly enforced policy of open government, free government and honest government can have a chance of being a lasting righteous government. I believe paranoia and unwarranted diligence in self discipline are key characters that can help us attain it.

The secret societies will still exist.

Clouts, political parties will still exist.

Nazi's and 911 and Communism and Capitalism and imperialism (ahh, the ISM's) will all still happen.

so... what changed? What good did this mental reverse big-bang do for me?

I'm not too sure. But, I guess, I lost sight of the driver of this universe. I lost faith in that good is always prevailing...

sigh... I feel lost.

Mail Order Wife

I saw a movie on hulu today about Mail order Brides

http://www.hulu.com/watch/179430/mail-order-wife

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377088/

For starters, the lady that they chose to play the Chinese whore Eugenia Yuan's(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1067699/, actually an ABC, picture, tom.com) quite beautiful, reminds me of HK movie stars and speaks awesome Mandarin Chinese--unlike many real HK movie stars who couldn't be bothered to learn it for hundreds of millions of dollars...

It's sad though, Zhang ziyi (the lead in Memoirs of a Geisha) once said that Chinese female stars can only play whores in America, and indeed, this talented female Chinese movie star stars as a conniving sex fiend. Her face tells me of her uncompromising strong personality and knowledge of her Chinese heritage beyond her genetics, but her character, .. ahh, her character ring so bad and so real! I don't know if it's typical for mail order brides from Burma to speak very good Mandarin, but I was very drawn by her Chinese--strident, confident, intoned correctly, surely a native Chinese speaker. Apparently she's a language buff who also speaks Spanish and Russian... Could have played a Russian mail order bride...

Her name 原丽淇 sounds like her character's name as she first appear, yuan2li4chi2, so lichi==leeecheee.

Personally, I've been swindled out of a lot of hard earned cash by Chinese girls. Sometimes it's a wad of cash, sometimes it's small bits of meal and gifts. well, it's not really that much money, but the circumstances are especially disgusting (I feel disgusted, not that the mutual situation is disgusting, ugh, just pause your imagination for a second here...), the circumstances had been at my loss in the same way that the characters of this movie had been at loss financially, except I didn't get to make a movie or take revenge, or the girl as hot, but that's beyond the point.

And I have definitely personally experienced Chinese girls turn from innocent helpless servants barely surfacing from millenniums of cultural oppression and physical cruelty to suddenly become tigresses in heat for money, power, and other men, and then suddenly cools to absolute zero when confronted with the man's true feelings. It's not too far from what the movie shows. (Her marriage to Adrian is a modern metaphor of Chinese women's past. Her lack of language and social skills represents her Chinese female heritage; her repeated attempts to get married--fighting for her right to be in America where she has rights; her marrying Andie is her success in gaining her freedom and respect; her attempts to put pigs in Addie's apartment despite his insistence of moderation is metaphor for her struggle for power in the relationship, and finally, she use her reproductive right and theoretical biological clock, albeit understandable, is quite an unwieldily unruly beast hungering for absolute dominance!!)

sigh..... I hate this movies. I so don't want to hate the movie like he doesn't want to love her, accidentally falling into a shallow pit of slutty slushy muddy mix of bodily fluids, so bad but borderline not that bad but so so bad!!!

The story telling is so endearing, the narrative is so gripping, the actors are so talented. All are wasted on such ugly side of the Chinese and the American. I hate her for such a great performance, with the same passion Andie loved her, with perverse curiosity, tasteless initiation, so pointless, stretched out beyond normal necessity and human patience (the character's normal human patience, not the viewer's normal human patience), and concludes with WTF? who? what baseball? what did I miss?

Why did it end on a high note celebrating a baseball player?

I don't want to criticize America because Baseball has to be one of the gayest games there are on TV, guys scratching balls. Important signals being signaled right in front of the crotch for another guy to pay attention.

Homosexual realties aside, the mention of baseball, the toasting and drinking of beer, by a group of cooperating men, brings back a sense of normalcy... I felt comforted by the fact that the women and all that she represented was gone. In the circle of men there was a sense of closure, feelings of trust, camaraderie, accomplishment, clarity, safety and merriment.

Does this symbolize the success of America in defending the American ways and the forced return of ugly Chinese people and their culture to their homeland of Burma? The Americans united to rid the country of foreign devils' evil and unrighteous influences.

The portrayal is so polar that after the film completed, I did not miss her boobs, and that handsome face, those sexy legs after the film's portrayal of her. Too real... I mean Wilhelmina(Ugly Betty) is still likable, Kathryn (Cruel Intentions), Angelina Fox ( Wanted), Mystique (Xmen), Michelle Cat Women (Batman), Sharon Stone(Basic Instinct), .... err, plenty of examples of female villainy... But I felt like I was thoroughly rid of her imagery in my mind, just as Andie and Adrian were rid of their desire for her.

Sad! I hate the movie even more now that I blog about it...

Fedora 13 Broken Menu Bar

I found the instruction on this page helpful in trying to get many applications working (eclipse, gimp, etc) in fedora 13. I performed a

rpm -e gnome-globalmenu-common-0.7.8-1.fc13.x86_64 gnome-applet-globalmenu-0.7.8-1.fc13.x86_64

and the menu now shows up. In the duration of 2 hours of trying to find this answer, I've competely wiped my home directory with all traces of all my settings,... ugh! but I have the "File" menu now.

Here are some things I searched for.

"File Menu Missing in Fedora 13"

"Missing Menu Bar in Gimp"

"Linux Eclipse How to Hide Menu Bar"

"Gnome Linux Hide Menu Bar"

"Gnome Menu Font configuration"

Ohh, here's another oddity: To select sloppy focus in Fedora 13, you have to install control-center-extra package.

ugh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

drunken poste

I'm drunk.

I just took my prescription pills. One of these pills is a soft-gel that I found to work the best when I chew it before swallowing (probly works better in the upper digestive system than lower). Maybe someday, we'll have nutrition pills that require chewing like real food. And we'll just chew on pills for sustenance.


Anyways, I wanted to post something I was discussing with a really good friend last night. The models and algorithms that we were interested in require analysis and optimization in these properties:

• Latency and Throughput (Needs to respond fast enough, and supply solutions fast continuously)
• Relevance. (This is often ignored because most of the time designers of algorithms will not deviate with from the problem)
• Performance. (Actual performance in the sense of accuracy, coverage, generalizability, stability and robustness, and min-max properties, etc.)
• Cost: how much is it goina cost to apply an algorithm satisfying the above three types of specifications. This should also include implementation cost. Something like TCO, possibly minus the O at some point. :(
• Long term performance: What it will do in the long term. This includes every thing else that is more global than what is required to satisfy the above four and contain things like environmental issues, game theoretic problems, and the likes.

This may seem completely out of context to everybody, but that one friend who's email system suddenly all barfed, here they are. the properties that I want to keep track of.



goina drink more now. wanted to get that down on electrons before I pass out.

Documentaries and Boardwalk Empire

I just watched the premier of HBO's new series Boardwalk Empire(Wiki). The first episode was directed by Martin Scorsese.

I enjoyed watching it. However, I'm trying to come to terms with the drama, the history of the 1920's America, and Big Business. The show masterfully puts us in the right mood with Enoch speaking at a women's temperance movement. He speaks for universal suffrage, as any sane politician would do in a room full of women just around the time when women gained the right to vote. In matter of minutes, the audience is completely enveloped in the period, the sounds, the smells, and the taste of alcohol, the politics, the money, and the crime. Gotta hand it to martin Scorsese, master film maker, awesome show!! Oh, and the Italian mobster, the

However, entering into this show, I had just watched a documentary called The End of America hosted by Naomi Wolf, author of a book by the same name. For a moment, I won't talk about all the parallels she draw between post-911-USA and the Nazi's (the Swarzwasser private police force and the modern day Black Water), and I won't think about how the guy who had business rights to the world trade center was(and still is) a Jewish person(Larry Silverstein). It all suddenly seem to me that 911 is mostly a war to destroy Jewish properties; and as a second purpose to enforce a police state, justify secret and illegal spying on citizens;and as a third reason to play out all kinds of sex-kinked tortures; and lastly a white-dominance thing...

But most importantly, from the documentaries, I learned that there is the possibility that the prohibition, was put in place not for practical/moral/ethical/social reasons, but for the exclusive purpose of forcing people to use Gasoline. The wiki entry for John D. Rockefeller does not mention the prohibition. But apparently Ford (the founder of Ford) had decided to make his cars(Model A,T) operate both on gasoline AND alcohol. For Ford, this technological feature was something that was very useful at the time. Farmers can pull up to any farm and ask for some home distilled alcohol and the car would run. For Standard Oil it would mean the end of lucrative business, Rockefeller's oil company lobbied to pass prohibition laws, and that's where Al Capon makes his cameo in Boardwalk Empire...

The prohibition ended, in fact, the very year after Henry Ford gave up and stopped making his cars compatible with alcohol. Coincidence?? I think not!!

So what?! you say, what does it matter that these dead people did some lobbying to get their ways?

Well, it puts things in perspective... It also makes a manufactured 911 much more believable. If Rockefeller could pass a law in a democratic country full of the freest people in the world so that they can't drink any more, I can imagine those people jumping from the world trade centers volunteering to be victims. This must be the power of... no, not power of the devil, the power of money at work!

And knowing that Ford was an innovator who gained money by building technologically superior quality products and not through entirely selfish politicking, I feel very proud to be driving a Ford to work tomorrow morning!! Designed and built in America by Americans!

I did not know about Bhopal

omg, I did not know about Bhopal. Apparently, a pesticide company Union Carbide India Limited had a plant in Bhopal India, a city located smack dab in the middle of India. The pesticide company had an accident December of 1984, killing more than 8000 people with in one week, and up to 16k people in the following time, 550k injuries, 38k severe, 4k permanent. The release hurt so many people because it was high temperature, high pressure gas released into atmosphere which covered the entire city. It also killed a lot of trees within the first week.

Wow, the poor Indian people.

I learned of this from a documentary The Yes Men Fix the World. The company Union Carbide is now owned by Dow Chemicals(DOW). The Indian people are continuing to pass aid package for the people affected by this disaster. The United States, on pains of economic consequences, refuses Indian any additional aid or payment.

I am at odds with myself on this. I mean, yes, really, the original people who caused this should pay for it. Subsequently, the current owner (as the movie demonstrates) should pick up the tab to improve their own corporate image. (Because China is watching, and Europe, and Africa, and South America... are all places that can afford to refuse Dow Chemicals) Lastly, the United States government should restrict it's corporations and make finally remediation.

As an American, I feel sorry for the poor people of India and wish that they can be helped. But at the same time, I feel that their government was most negligent, and continues to be friendly with US corporations to an unnecessary degree. The Indian people should pay for recovery because they were partially responsible for it happening by electing a government that allowed this to happen.

As an American, I am certainly not willing to pay in taxes to help them fix this. I mean, I'm not a stock owner of DOW and never was, and never owned mutual funds with DOW chemicals as a component, and I never was part of that decision making process, and not part not because of my negligence but because it just didn't involve me. Some entrepreneur decided to get the money, goto India, bring a risky technology there, and..., and I don't know what happened between then and the accident,..., but those involved in the process should pay for it!

If they're all dead and gone, then certainly the current government should pass legislations to prevent it from happening, followed by technological and financial aid to help clean up the mess. It should be powered by a charity, paid by people who have vested interest in India.

Heck, if such a corporation existed, the "Help Bhopal India To Recover" for profit corporation, I may even by stocks in it.

But I am really sorry this happened to India, and I'm sure it's happening in China too, but with less visibility...

Apologies

I feel that I want to write in my blog following my last post apologizing to Jewish people who suffered greatly from Holocaust. I don't mean to suggest that malice towards the Jewish people during the Holocaust was an inconvenient side effect of failure in communication.

Also, I will apologize to Chinese people who think that I am writing about the cultural revolution and saying that those in power arranged for atrocities to achieve personal or political interest counter to the interest of the Chinese people. I'm sure that was... well, I won't characterize it here, but to say that I'm not talking about that at all.

However, my confusion and questions about 911 and post-911 decade remains. I mean, the terrorist may have some how smuggled state of the art explosive material onto the plain before boarding, that would explain why they found that in the debris...

Sadly, to me, at this moment, that seems less likely than a government inside job--having watched the movie.

Mmmm.

memories of 911

I just watched a documentary called "Loose Change 9/11" The movie claims that many of the things about the 9-11 attack on the United States seem to be faked by a certain group of Industrialists who are lead by the Bush family. The movie claims that explosives were used to stage the various crashes and tower... It claims to find evidence of very powerful state of the art military grade explosives through out the towers, and shows shots of explosions happening on several floors as the tower falls to that floor.

There're somethings that are contradictory about the movie though. If the forces behind the conspiracy that lasted centuries were so powerful, how was it that he is able to make this movie? How is it that they didn't arrange for his and his crews' death? (As the movie claims that witnesses of foul play were killed after they came public)

What would be even more fascinating to me, and if some centuries later this is proven, would be for the conspiracy to have occurred not by direct arrangement.

How can that be?

Well, in America, as I am sure is the case else where in the world, superstition are reinforced. Many times I would observe irrational behavior of individuals in power, and could not explain it for many years after (even after all the facts come to light and all parties that were to benefit from the secrecy of the knowledge of the act have fully gained the benefit of the secrecy) The irrational behaviors could still not be explained.

Many times, large companies operate based on "communication skills" that are quite often emphasized in modern corporate world. These skills tend to be unclear, unnecessary, and really really mean things that people say and do to each other in corporations to get their point across. But most importantly, on big important decisions, unclear mumble is the key feature. And if communication skills are taught using these very same communication skills, then would we not certainly get unclear communication on top of unclear language?

I have a feeling that because of a great emphasis on this type of "communication skills", that somebody, or the whole military/government/large corporate powers may have inadvertently developed a completely different identity--a massive blob of intelligent sub-agents, who will transmit messages they were given, and act on messages that they receive. But these message's original intent were not transmitted (intentionally for purpose of secrecy).

So, this massive chaotic intelligence built on top of units and organizational units of humans, groups, teams, departments, corporations, squads, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, corps, armies, ... all these hierarchical groups operating in total darkness of true intent of the message and tasks that they were given.

I don't really believe that money is so powerful that it could move a person, or even a whole group of (democratically elected, no less, professionally trained, no less, highly educated with the knowledges of human civilization, no less) people to do something like this.

However, I can bring myself to believe that this would happen due to lack of global intelligence on the part of each of the units participating in this system. I can believe that each units were eventually given orders to put explosives in place (if that were really the case), and followed the orders as soldiers are trained to do, but that the orders or given by misleading communications to different levels of the military, and that large orders broke down into small orders, and at each level, the order were transmuted in this unclear communication that we have developed...

This idea came from an algorithm in the Machine Learning community called "belief propagation" which will lead to a global solution when each node of a Baye's Net send it's current belief to the other nodes it is connected to. Because each unit receiving orders are receiving unclear orders that they can only pass on what they believe was the intent of the order. And through this kind of message passing algorithm, 911 was arranged, executed, and covered up.

I mean, really, if we're to believe 9-11 is a self-inflicted terrorism act, are we to believe that the Holocaust was all a hoax too? But certainly I absolute can believe that the human system of the time eventually exploded due to lack of global situation awareness by each individual participant and unit of participants, and that caused holocaust, and that the Germans, Japanese, and Italian people are still people, just as Americans are still people even after 9-11 and all the wars that it caused.

...and all the economic problems America suffered, and probably continues to suffer today.. All that, due to a maladjustment in our human system...

Naive Bloomier Filter

I've been playing with the Naive implementation of the Bloomier Filter recently. The Bloomier Filter is just a stack of several Bloom Filters on each level. (Well the Naive version described in the first few pages of the paper is any ways) Is it me or is it that I just realized that there is a huge savings that can be had by allocating the second layer to have size FPR*N where FPR is the guaranteed False Positive Rate and N is the total number of items we inserted. So, but how small is the set of items that may make it to the next layer? Well, the expected value can be calculated as FPR*N. I guess if I am smarter, I would go ahead and calculate the variance of this RV, and compute how much variance to the overall expected false positives I add by making this second layer just a fraction of the first layer....

I guess he probably says this in the paper some where, but alas, took me a day to figure out.

Actually in reality it is very rare for me to break out of the first layer unless I construct a really really obnoxious case where I tell the BloomFilter that I plan to put in 100 items, and that I want 0.00001 FPR, and then put in 100k items, then it explodes and generates extra false positives.

This is such an interesting data structure. Have you had success with this algorithm?

An experiment in Obamamania

Okay, I'm running out of cash. I admit it. I've been spending like a crazy person since my purchase of a house here in the slums of Redwood City. My bank accounts are on the verge of depletion and I've been paying 10% APR on my credit cards for several months now.

Why I Spend so Much?
It's kind of surprising how you expect to spend no money on the house other than the closing cost on the Good Faith Estimate, but then later, once the house closes, the moving costs, the blinders... ugh, where did all that money go? all I can recall is buying some blinders for the house, and yet my monthly expenditure, aside from the mortgage payments and utilities, has gone up by at least $1000/month.

The Blog Entry
Anyway, I decided to try to take advantage of President Barack Obama's Credit Card reform. According to this article on creditcards.com, when the credit cards will receive your monthly payment, it will take the "minimum payment" and do as it please with it, and the remaining money in the payment will be required to go towards paying off the portion of the debt that has the highest interest!!

Let's say that I have a credit card that I've used to make "auto-payment" of about $500/month to utilities, phones, tv, and the likes. These auto-payments occur every month, and I have arranged for the credit card company to withdraw that exact amount from my bank account monthly. If I do not pay this amount on time, my interest rate is something like 12% APR charged monthly at 1% a month.

Now, I have also received an offer of $5000 12-months 0% APR Promo-check from the same credit card company.

Prior to this legislation, my monthly auto-payment to this credit card will go towards paying off the $5000 0% APR debt, and the $500 I spend every month will accumulate and charge interest until the $5000 is paid off. So the payment/balance looks like this for the first few months

Month	0% APR balance	12% APR balance	Payment	Total Balance	Interest Charged this Month
1	$4500	$500	$500	$5000	0
2	$4000	$1000	$500	$5000	$500 *.01=$5
3	$3500	$1500	$500	$5000	$1000 *.01=$10
4	$3000	$2000	$500	$5000	$1500 *.01=$15

Today, under the new rule, the same charge/payment that I make monthly would produce a table like this:

Month	0% APR balance	12% APR balance	Payment	Total Balance	Interest Charged this Month
1	$5000	$500	$500	$5000	0
2	$5000	$500	$500	$5000	0
3	$5000	$500	$500	$5000	0
4	$5000	$500	$500	$5000	0

So that 0% apr promotional charge is a real 0% APR.

Now, I don't believe my eyes when I read this "policy update" from the bank. So I found the legislation. Here's a snippet of the relevant portion:

And here are some links to the text of the bill passed:here, here, and here. 111th Congress, H.R.627;

I guess even after researching into the bill and reading the text of it, I am still sceptical. Why has the Obama administration not spend any marketing money on the passage of this bill? It would surely stimulate the economy by making more people take advantage of the true 0% APR? There must be a catch that I haven't seen yet. I'll probably get slammed by a loss of job, bodily injuries, numerous car accidents and traffic tickets, tree falling on my house, etc, for taking advantage of this 0% APR. I mean it's happened before that some thing random and rare happens every single time I used one of these 0% APR checks to interrupt my monthly payment. It's almost like the efficient market is efficient in taking my money in super-natural ways.

But despite my misgivings about the free market, the whole credit card industry and Obama brand of hopus-believous, I have taken one of those checks on the credit card I describe above and cashed it.

Call me stupid.

Call me gullible.

But having hope is right? I hope it's right...

12% interest is worth the price for even 1% chance of discovering a change that we've hoped for and can believe in.

The Greatest Magic Show on Earth

According to the Christian Science Monitor, "The Chinese traffic jam that has lasted for over two weeks has vanished overnight." The article cites both MSNBC and French press AFP as source.

More supprisingly than the magic of 60 miles of traffic disappearing is the fact that western media did not make a glib remark about how it's another communist PR ploy, and how they mobilized local farmers and burried the 60 miles of cars to fool the western media into believe the incredible powers of the Chinese communist party.


I mean, the article does go into detail about how bad the traffic is in China, which is completely fair. I just cannot get used to the neutral tone of this report.

The Mechanisms of the Hack

I am attempting to demonstrate to every person who has basic knowledge of the computer that it is fairly easy for another employee at my company to accomplish these acts remotely:

• Screen shot of my computer at work.
• Take a video recording of my screen at work.
• Take a video of me or anything else that is currently in front of my laptop with the built-in camera.
• Make an audio recording from my laptop's microphone.
• Send timed key-stroke sequences to my computer as if I pressed those keys.
• Send mouse movements to my computer as if I moved the mouse.
• Interact with application on my screen as if they are sitting in front of my computer.

There are many over the counter software that facilitate this on a modern computer. If you do not believe me, go ahead and download these software and try them for free. You will need two computers on the same network to see how you can manipulate a remote computer.

• On the Mac, Viola is an application that allow for recording of the screen.
• On the Mac, Command-Shift-3, and Command-Shift-3 will result in a picture of the entire screen or a selected window, respectively to be saved to a file on the desktop. 
• On Window machines, the [Print Screen] key and [Alt]-[Print Screen] will result in a picture of the the entire screen or a selected window, respectively, to be saved to a file.
• On most OS's VNC is a program that allows you to see and control a computer remotely.
• On most OS's Synergy is a program that allows you to control mouse or keyboard from a remote computer system.
• On XWindow systems, XTEST from XAutomation package has a command called xte which produces key stroke and mouse movement ad specified time without a person actually moving the mouse or keyboard

All I wish to demonstrate in this blog entry is that you, any of you who knows how to open a browser window and read a blog entry, can go to these websites, download a program, and read another person's email, send email as another person, or fake typo's while he is typing.

Next time I or anybody else speak to you and say: "hey, you know? I think xyz at work has been spying on my email." or "My work has been sabotaged by my cube-mate." That you do not dismiss him as an escapee from an insane asylum.

This issue must be dealt with openly and rationally.

re-repigged

So, here's the solution to the question in my previous post.

The most obvious way is to perform a partial aggregate and then merge the results.

A = group TABLE by (f1,f2,f3, ((long)(random()*100));
B = foreach A generate FLATTEN(group), SUM(f4) as sf4, MIN(f5) as mf5, MAX(f6) as mf6;
C = group B by (group::f1, group::f2, group::f3);
D = foreach C generate FLATTEN(group), SUM(f4) as sum_of_f4, MIN(mf5) as min_of_f5, MAX(mf6) as max_of_f6;


simple and effective. Does not require extra programming in java at all. This algorithm can be applied to all associative reducing functions. But associativity is not a necessary condition. The Algebraic functions in Pig actually allows for more general implementation where by an operation is divided into two stages. The first stage is required to produce tuples, which the second stage then processes.

You will probably never meet a problem that produces a bag larger than one compute node can handle. I mean I work for one of the fastest growing internet eCommerce servicing companies and our processing never even come close to seeing this problem.

But, in case in some distant future, when you encounter bags in computation that overflow one or even two compute nodes, and even at that time Pig/Hadoop still does not have a built in mechanism to deal with this automatically. So the above is an workaround.

Hope this helps you in your work or play when I'm long gone and dead.

Artificial Errors

Errors

Errors during human computer interface can take many forms. The most common one is the "typo". A "typo" or typographic error is one where the intended word, phrase, expression, or command is issued into the computer with minor error such that it is not exactly what the user wanted to enter.

Most of the time, these errors are do not have grammatical meaning. But other times, the changing of one character could cause the entire sentence or program to change in meaning.

Typos can occur in many places. The names of files for instance often may be mistyped or miscapitalized.

Missing punctuations is another type of typo that causes a great deal of headache for programmers and writers alike.

Other changes include altering file structure within the folder hierarchy that is now the norm on computers.

The errors can roughly be categorized by size and effect.

1.) Deletion of a punctuation.

2.) Errors that are less than 3 character edits away from the original input.

3.) Whole word replacements. two words adjacent to each other being swapped.

4.) Scrambling meaning of entire sentence or programming blocks.

5.) Systematic changes: renaming a variable will make it difficult to detect other changes because it will have changed many lines and spacing.

6.) Rewrites: Rewriting an existing system that has the exact same requirements facilitates the introduction of malicious code. Since it is a rewrite, it will be difficult to detect subtle changes.


Effects include:

a.) Completely useless error: Does not cause any misunderstanding or program compilation or run time error.

b.) Immediately detectable: Compilation errors. Spelling mistakes detected by spell checkers. detection by inspection.

c.) Eventually detectable: Changing a ">" to ">=" will be detected during unit testing, for example. Changing "will" to "will not" in a feature spec.

d.) Malicious and difficult to detect. These are bugs that cannot be caught by normal unit testing, integration testing, code review, or editorial process.

e.) Malicious and impossible to detect. These are bugs that are introduced publicly as features. The reason behind its introduction is explained and may be widely scrutinized. However, the true intent of the feature is eventually materialized causing massive or specific systematic failure. After failure, the original person or group that caused this feature to be implemented will not be faulted for introducing the bug.


These forms of sabotage occur everyday. More often than not, they are detected and then dismissed as a true error, and silently corrected so that the fact of a natural error is hidden when in fact the error is not nature and the concealment of its existence has conceals its true cause and prevents true remedy.

Respond to my blog entry if you feel that you have been the target of an artificial bug insemination.

Let the truth out so that humanity can move on!!

What if you worked for Madoff

What would you do, if suddenly one day you stumble upon that extra floor in your office building where your company has been faking data all these years to create the appearance of profitability ?


The better question is, I suppose, how do I maintain my personal safety, my professional integrity, and my networth all at the same time?


Personal safety is important because often, your co-workers WILL HURT YOU if they think you are about to expose the company!

Professional integrity is important. This actually will give this whole blog it's meaning. Because without professional integrity, it's actually pretty easy to just keep an eye closed.

And finally maintaining networth will make this whole endeavour challenging. Because it's very easy to just quit and not get the payoff. It is also easy to expose the company and not get any payoff.


So, what can a person do???


For my self, I want to actually start taking lawyer classes to learn the laws governing corporations and fraud. The Ponzi scheme apparently is illegal for reasons in addition to it's structure: Fraud, Money laundaring, perjury, etc.


Each of these have specific meaning and is associated with actions. So by learning about the punishments for each count of illegality, I would be able to assess my risk and weighing the trade-offs.

For instance, would I be willing to trade 5% chance of 20 years in prison for a payoff of $10,000,000 in 5 years ?

Read that carefully: Ten Million Dollars for an expected prison time of 1 year (expected value)

For most people, the answer is no. But for some people, the answer might be yes...

map reduce is so repigged

okay, so here's a problem I ran into today. In PigLatin, I needed to calculate the following:

A = group TABLE by (f1,f2,f3);
B = foreach A generate group, SUM(f4), MIN(f5), MAX(f6), (f7 is null)?1:0;


My problem is that for the data that I have (about 100gb) there are actually only about a dozzen combinations of (f1,f2,f3), so the consequence is that the execution crashes with the reducer running out of memory.


The question is, is it possible to make this calculation even with sparse keys?

Jessica!!

I've been watching true blood on HBO. One of the movements I think fans can do is to start a blog about Jessica, Bill Compton's progeny...

Man, every time Bill yelps at her:

"Jessica!!"

and she snickers

"heheeehee"

and I think, damn! I wanna be Bill.

In fact, I like her so much, I wana start a fantasy campaign titled "Jessica for Queen"..... I mean, if the vamp's are a democracy.


"Jessica!!!"

National Discrimination

I don't pretend to understand international politics, but when I look at statistics table like the one below from The DHS:

But how do we justify that the ratio of Asian Indian naturalized into the US is somewhere between 1.7 and 1.3 times the number of Chinese from PRC naturalized into the US?

1.7 times is almost twice the number. Consider a simple calculation. suppose that X is the percentage of world's population that the US would like to have as it's citizens. Would X * 1.1e9 be less than X * 1.3e9? Instead of being almost twice as much?

What the heck am I missing here? As dutiful citizen of the US, I'd like to point out that we might be making a serious mistake here not sampling fairly from the world's population!!

Take a look at this stats table:

Note that the ratio goes the other way. The legal immigration of Chinese Permanent Residents exceeds that of India to the ratio of 1.4 times as much. So why is it that only 40% of PR of Chinese origin choose to become Americans and as much as 77% of Indian origin choose to be come Americans?

Dare I suggest that Chinese are not as competitive? Less adaptive to the Culture of the United States? Too loyal to their indoctrination from Communist upbringing?

What could possibly be the reason why this is  happening? Well, perhaps this may shed more light on the subject. The number of newly issued visas by country breaks down as follows:

So, according to this table, the US actually imports 3 times as many Chinese people to work in the US as the number of Indians recruited. However, Indians were more able to bring their relatives into the US by Immediate or family preference Visa's. So it would appear that Chinese people are being brought over as labor for the American economy and the Indians are just bringing their families over to live.

It seems that China contribute more to the American Economy than India, but India contribute more to the USA by way of culture (Slumdog), population, and of course consumers.

Overall, I think Indians have a better strategy than Chinese. Slaves and Laborers  are really not part of the population until they rebel and live up to human level of quality in life. Then they can even begin to be part of the society.


Sigh, the ever suffering Chinese...

Short sales as call and put options

I made an interesting observation with a co-worker today. It would seem that the "short sale" in real estate world can be viewed as a call option for the buyer and a put option for the lender. Short sale takes place when the owner (and eventually seller) does not pay mortgage for 6 months, and bank that loaned him the money to buy this house(the lender) agrees for him to try to sell the house at a price below his loan amount to minimize the bank's loss (which would have been the entirety of the remaining loan principle minus whatever the house is worth) The missing amount between short sale price and the remaining loan principle is either forgiven or put into a separate payment program which the owner/seller would have to pay over the next few years.

This situation, though somewhat painful for the owner, creates a great investment opportunity to a buyer. The conventional wisdom is that short sales are some percentage below market value of the house. So for instance, if the house that is for short sale is worth $100,000 at market value, then it is likely that the lender will allow me to buy it at $80,000, or $75,000, or even $50,000 depending on the market and the house.

A buyer, may put in an offer at a price slightly higher than 20% discount (after inspecting the house, of course), say 10% below market. This gives him the advantage over all other buyers who will have made offer assuming 20% to 25% mark down.

If all goes well, he will receive an approval from the lender of the short selling owner, typically three months after the offer is accepted by the seller and submitted to the lenders.

At that point. the buyer has the option of continuing with the purchase at 15% discount, or making an offer on a different, and presumably better, house at the same price.

So, by being involved in a short sale, he creates a call option for himself on an opportunity that may or may not be a good deal. But this choice is almost entirely free. (The offer, cost only fees to a realtor).

And often, it is an entirely legitemate reason that bank takes too long or market recovers for buyer to back out of the offer. So it is nearly zero risk and zero cost to the buyer, but the upside is possibly 10% to 20% guaranteed mark-down from market price of a house.





Now, I realize that the lender may be doing the same thing, which is that they are using the offer as a probabilistic put option, which just means that the arbitrage is shared between the buyer and the lender...




This appears to be common practice amongst professional real estate investors and contractors who flip houses. Just today, I saw two houses close within the same week, the short sale being a good 25% larger in square footage, has an additional pool, but identical lot size, right next to each other on the same street (literally xx1 and xx3 on the same side of the street), exactly same age. And the larger home with the pool that is a short sale sold for something like 7% less than the smaller house right next to it. This illustrate an expert use of this technique I describe above.

I of course also suffer from the same situation. What I paid for my house, bought a short sale that closed exactly within a week before my closing next block over(1xx vs. 2xx). And that house has twice the square-footage of my house, same lot, 10 years older than my house.

The only thing that it does put to question is the professional ethics of my realtor, my seller, my financial agent. Only these people knew of my purchase progress, and only they could have informed that short-seller (or that lender) of my purchase price. I am beginning to wonder about the professional integrity of the people in the real estate business in the San Francisco Bay Area....

到底是何方神圣?

America is such a wonderful country. It's so vibrantly full of life and cultures. Today, somebody blanked my computer screen while I tried to work.

My initial reaction was to search on google

"Jewish Holidays in 2010"

because I know that previously, some people with advanced hacking skills will hack into my computer and blink my screen or screw with things on Jewish holidays so that I stop working and observe it with them.


Nope, nothing Jewish today, next I searched

"Indian Festivals in 2010"

For some reason, my company is gaining Indian population at an alarming rate. Nope, nothing Indian today... And plus we aren't competing or anything, so it makes no sense for them to mess with my computer.

"Christian Holidays in 2010"

I said to google, and google said "nope", today is not a Christian holiday either.

WTF, why would somebody be screwing with my computer on a non-holiday? And why did they screw with my computer on their holidays to start with? Is there a deity unknown to me in each of these religions and corresponding cultures that espouse slothery? Is there a god in their religion that says: "Today, you may not work!!"

Man, I feel so ignorant.

Oh, and the Muslims. That's the people who believe in Islam a religion, as far as we're taught in America, that is essentially an organized terrorist organization.

Oh, and Koreans, Man! America is so complicated... Has Koreans invented a saint of some kind after their separation from Chinese culture that I don't know about?

Which of you deities have I offended today that causes my screen to blank every time I'm about to type a command into my console?

what kind of animal sacrifice must I make to appease you? Can I light some fireworks on July 4th? Does that count???

Happy July 4th everybody!!

The Psychology of Giving Fewer Options at Startup

There's something strange about the Incentive Stock Option system at Startups in America. Suppose the founders want to make employees work harder. It is to his greatest advantage to give his employees as few stock options as possible. This is not to preserve his own stock options or reduce dilution, but to motivate the employees to work harder.

Because typically, bosses at work get somewhere from 100x to 1000x the stocks an employee has. So a founder who is comfortable with a $1Billion IPO means his employees will only get similar level of reward if the company IPO's at $100Billion or even $1 trillion. So the employee has to aim much higher than the founders.

This may explain why often the executives at companies will make obviously irrational decisions. They already have $10million, why go to the extra leg of getting to $20million?

But the employee has only $100k, getting to $200k is a huge improvement on quality of life.

How Old is Your Computer

I came to an interesting measurement of age of computer today. Suppose we use something simple minded (such as throughput rate of Integer Arithmetics) as measurement of computing power. Let us further suppose that Moore's law is really followed by the development of computers during it's entire development since the very first transistor, then we can make a very interesting calculation.

Let T be the total computing power of all humanity today. (This should be estimable based on number of CPU's Intel and AMD produces each year).

Let O be the origin where the very first transistor was invented, when the total semi-conductor based computing power of humanity is some small number like (1 integer add)/minute.

Fit an exponentially growing curve between the total computing power between time T and O, plot a graph of this curve with time on the X-axis and total computing power of humanity on the Y-axis.

Now, then, to determine the power of your computer (or computing cloud that you own), simply find on the Y-axis the power of your computer and drop down to X. At that point you can claim:

"My computing cloud is equal to all of human computing power as of February of 1981."

Makes for great PR snippet.

Also, you can use it as a pitch to get more funding:

"Our computer cluster is still in the 1980's !!"

"But Dad! My laptop is like so 1950!"