Shift Happens - We are living exponential times

I stumbled upon an educator's (seemingly) point of view on how we should think about now and near future in the midst of exponential changes in technologies and societies.

• The wiki mentioned in the video
• Similar slides on slideshare
• The author's blog
  

Mathemagical Entertainment

The presentation titled "Secrets of Mental Math" held at ETech 2007 is now available on IT Conversations here. Very entertaining. It's not only for technically/scientifically minded but also for others.

System administration in the cloud computing era

An long interview to Adam Jacob and Jesse Robbins on the Technometria podcast is quite interesting for me as an ex-infrastructure builder/administrator turned into web application developer/architect.

They are using the following tools to manage applications running on Amazon SC2 and other cloud computing environments.

• Capistrano
• Rake
• Puppet
• iClassify

13 year old singer

I came across this video and was impressed.
Can somebody tell me what this British TV show is?

Even a talented person takes years, even a decade

I'm a big fan of the radio program “This American Life”. The main personality of the program, Ira Glass seems to be a die-hard public radio guy and very talented. If you hear a couple of episodes of the program (all past episodes are available online), you know what I'm talking about.

And I got to know an interview with him is available on YouTube.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


A “O'Reilly Radar” posting and a “Signal vs. Noise” posting mention the part 2 of the interview regarding the importance of discarding not so great things to make a superb thing.

But to me, equally eye-opening was he took a decade or so to get to the level of a good radio reporter/producer. He played his radio reporting at his 8th year as an example of crappy one. He also said that many people cannot bear the gap between their superb taste and their not-up-to-snuff outcome and quit a career. He emphasizes that it's inevitable at the early stage of a career and the only way to overcome that is keep working.

Question your work

I came across a blog posting titled “Question your work” on “Signal vs. Noise”. It tells you to ask the following questions in your work regardless the size of a task/project you are working on:

• Why are we doing this?
• What problem are we solving?
• Is this actually useful?
• Are we adding value?
• Will this change (user) behavior? [(user) is added by me]
  
• Is there an easier way?
• Waht's theopportunity cost?
• Is it really worth it?

I posted it on my PC display at work.

This is along the line with what Tim Ferris said in the presentation titled “The 4-Hour Workweek” on last year's SXSW conference:

Ask your self periodically: Am I productive or just busy? Am I producing something or doing a crutch activity?

The list above is much more concrete and useful to me.

If you are still early in your career, you may not need to worry about what to do and what not to do. But as you grow matured at work, you will need to.

The Myth of the Rational Voter

I listened to a presentation at South by Southwest 2008 titled “The Myth of the Rational Voter”. The presenter was Bryan Caplan, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. It was a counter-argument to The Wisdom of Crowd. He pointed out several examples of The Wisdom of Crowd not holding true. He proceed to ask for re-thinking democracy.

Awesome future of biology

I came across impressive presentations and interviews on biology.

1. “Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention” by Craig Venter
   MP3 file is here.
2. “On the verge of creating synthetic life” by Craig Venter
   You can download the video to iTunes and the MPEG 4 file on the page.
3. “Fighting Virulent Bacteria” on Bio Tech Nation
   MP3 file is here.

Presentation one and two above are similar, but one is more comprehensive while with two you can see slides which help understand the content. So I'd recommend to listen/watch in that order. Both tell that genetic information from newly found micro organisms is mounting at a very rapid pace and no no sign of slowing down. And designing and synthesizing life is becoming reality.

There is a bacteria which makes octane (an ingredient of gasoline) from carbon dioxide and sunlight -- photosynthesis is not the only way for life to materialize sunlight energy. Vender's research team is working on engineering such bacteria so that it does that efficiently.

Interview three above says that a person has 10 times more non human cells than human cells -- we have a huge number of bacteria mainly in gastrointestinal tract. Bioscience now understands the importance of those bacterias. Human being depends on them while they don't.

Japanese ISPs To Ban File Sharers. NOT!

The article titled "Japanese ISPs To Ban File Sharers" drew a lot of attention on TechCrunch recently. The article is rootless. Japanese ISPs observe net neutrality reasonably well and there is no sign of weakening of the attitude.

The origin and the chain of misreporting
The misreporting is originated from a Japanese article on Yomiuri Online, which is run by a Japanese newspaper having the biggest circulation in Japan. The article misreports the Japanese ISPs effort to reasonably restrict residential users' net traffic.

After it's posted, the following events happened.

1. The Yomiuri's Japanese article was translated into English and posted as "Winny copiers to be cut off from Internet".
2. The above article caught attention of TrentFreak and the article "Japanese ISPs Agree to Ban Pirates from the Internet" was posted.
3. The above article caught attention of TechCrunch and was led to the article mentioned at the beginning of this posting.

The nature of the original Japanese article
The crux of the original article is as follows.

The nation's four Internet provider organizations have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music, it was learned Friday.
...
According to the new agreement, copyright organizations would notify providers of Internet protocol addresses used by those who repeatedly make copies illegally, using special detection software. The providers would then send warning e-mails to the users based on the IP addresses of the computers used to connect to the Internet. If contacted users did not then stop their illegal copying, the providers would temporarily disconnect them from the Internet for a specified period of time or cancel their service-provision contracts.

Two days later on Mar 17, Japan Internet Providers Association (JAIPA) published the draft of "The Guideline on Traffic Control Policy"(in Japanese only) and started gathering public comments. The draft is endorsed by three other ISP associations in Japan. It's a guideline on which individual ISPs would set their traffic control policy.

Most likely, the four ISP agreement mentioned in the Yomiuri's article is about the guideline draft. But the draft doesn't mention measures against repeated Winny uses and the scheme for copyright holders.

There are two possibilities here:

1. The Yomiuri article has some truth in it when written. But the guideline draft was changed after the article was posted.
2. The Yomiruri reporter learned about the guideline draft from unreliable sources and/or lacked necessary domain knowledge hence forged the article.

To me, 2 is more likely. I guess the draft was published as scheduled on Monday. Then, it's difficult to make such a change in two days after the article was posted.

Legitimacy of the traffic control policy guideline
Please be noted that in Japan, 100Mbps Internet connection for home users via fiber optics is widely provided at 40 to 60 US$ a month. As of the end of 2007, there are 11 million fiber optics Internet subscribers in Japan. And there are 13 million DSL Internet subscribers, 4 million cable Internet subscribers.

As mentioned before, the guideline is about reasonably restricting residential net users' traffic.
Given the number of very high speed Internet users, Japanese ISPs have no option but restrict heavy users' traffic. The draft mentions that 1% of the users generate 50% of the net traffic.

The guideline draft observes net neutrality and communication privacy well.

Addendum on April 14, 2008
I had a chance to talk to a Japanese ISP executive and a central government bureaucrat dealing with the Internet. They said that the National Police Agency wanted to implement a rule along the line of the one reported in the Yomiuri article. But both ISPs and the ministry covering electronic communication have no intention to have such a rule. The Yomiuri reporter totally misunderstood the situation.

Miso Soup Is Not "Soup"

Outside Japan, there are Japanese restaurants run by people not familiar with real Japanese food and way. What bugs me at those places is the way miso soup is served. Those restaurants serve miso soup as soup in a western style meal -- miso soup is served before the entré and the restaurant assume it to be finished before that. This doesn't happen at genuine Japanese restaurants.

Miso soup is not "soup". It's made to be eaten with steamed rice. If you feel miso soup is too salty when you eat it by itself, you are right. Otherwise, it doesn't taste good when it's eaten with rice.

I don't go such restaurants voluntarily. But sometimes those are my non Japanese friends' favorites and I sometimes accompany them. I leave miso soup uneaten until the entré is served. Sometime, a waiter tries to take away untouched miso soup assuming I don't have it, in which case I need to defend my miso soup.