Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, gave the commencement keynote at CMU. Here is the video:
May 18, 2009
May 17, 2009
Korean Financial Nostradamus
NYT writes about the troubles of a korean finance blogger that captured nation’s imagination to only end up in jail.
Park Dae-sung with his mother after his release from prison last month
SEOUL, South Korea
FOUR months ago, Park Dae-sung became South Korea’s most celebrated — and vilified — blogger, when he was arrested on charges of spreading false information on the Internet with malicious intent. Prosecutors accused Mr. Park, whose financial postings under the alias Minerva had attracted a cultlike following, of damaging the nation’s economy with his “extremely pessimistic forecasts.”
On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted in a court of law, but his troubles persist in the court of public opinion. In a society still negotiating the gulf between its traditionally hierarchical culture and the free-floating online world, he has been sharply criticized for, in effect, not being the authority figure most people had imagined him to be.
“I am disillusioned and disgusted,” Mr. Park said in an interview in his Seoul hide-out, where he was holed up to escape from most reporters, as well as online death threats. “I have seen the madness of Korean society. I can’t live here anymore. I want to emigrate.”
For months last year, Minerva riveted South Korea with his uncannily accurate analyses of the economy, his often scathing criticisms of government policy and his predictions of, among other things, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the Korean currency, the won.
When some of his prognostications proved on target, readers dug up his earlier postings and eagerly awaited more. A civic group gave an award to the anonymous “citizen journalist.” A national television anchor called on the government to heed Minerva’s advice. Bookstores gave special displays to economics books recommended by Minerva.
It was not until January, with Mr. Park’s arrest, that the mystery of Minerva was finally solved. Mr. Park, 31 and jobless, had attended a two-year vocational college and had never even invested in the stock market. He was charged with spreading false information on the Internet “with intent to damage the public interest,” punishable by five years in prison.
Among his crimes, prosecutors said, was to state that the South Korean government had barred banks and major companies from buying American dollars in a desperate attempt to check the fall of the won.
On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted on the grounds that, while not everything he wrote was correct, there was no evidence that he knew it was wrong or acted with malicious intent.
But his difficulties — at what seemed to be a moment of triumph — were far from over.
Mr. Park’s evolution from a former employee of a wireless communications company to a national sensation to an embittered outcast reads like a case study of what can happen to an unprepared blogger in this highly wired, and politically divisive, society.
Are we wired to acquire?
Seed magazine reviews the book ‘Spent’ written by univ of new mexico psychologist geofferey miller.
Why do some people pay a 100,000 percent premium for a Rolex when a Timex is such a sleek and efficient timepiece? Why do others kill themselves at work just so they can get there in a Lexus? Why do we pay 1,000 times more for designer bottles of water when the stuff that gushes from our taps is safer (because it’s more regulated), often tastier, and better for the planet? And how do we convince ourselves that more stuff equals more happiness, when all the research shows that it doesn’t?
In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.
Spent is about “display” consumerism. It leaves aside strictly utilitarian purchases like baloney or tampons. Understanding display consumerism, according to Miller, requires adding one part Thorstein Veblen to one part Darwin. From Veblen’s classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Miller appropriates the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” whereby people live and spend wastefully just to flaunt the fact that they can. From Darwin, Miller appropriates sexual selection theory—“costly signaling theory” in modern parlance—whereby animals compete by sending signals of their underlying genetic quality. As with the gaudy displays of peacocks, purchasing decisions frequently represent attempts to advertise “fundamental biological virtues” like “bodily traits of health, fitness, fertility, youth, and attractiveness, and mental traits of intelligence and personality.” Why spend $160,000 on a prestigious university degree? To make a “narcissistic self-display” of one’s intelligence and diligence. Why stuff yourself into a push-up bra and smear pigment across your lips and cheekbones? To try to enhance—or fake—your fertility signals.
May 9, 2009
New Age Discovery
WSJ has an interesting article on how the digital age is helping discover old never-seen-before lieterary treasures. These types are articles are the reason we need the newspaper industry to reninvent itself and prosper. Good old fashined journalism will be even more important in the new digital media world.
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Some manuscripts are in poor condition, like this worm-eaten, 17th-century Christian Arabic Book of Hours from Balamand Monastery, Lebanon.
In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.
In the process, they’re uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable — blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.
A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.
By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.
Among their latest findings: An alternate version of the Greek play Medea, later immortalized in a version by Euripides, on a darkened piece of papyrus, dated to the 2nd century A.D. In the newly discovered version — written by Greek playwright Neophron — Medea doesn’t kill her children, says Dirk Obbink, director of Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project.
War and political instability in artifact-rich regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where untold numbers of antiquities have been lost through looting and destruction, have ignited the push to digitize rare documents. Recent tragedies, such as the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, and the collapse this past March of the Cologne city archives in Germany, where conservationists are still working frantically to retrieve texts from the rain-soaked rubble, serve as reminders of how quickly cultural relics can be wiped out.
For as long as great manuscript collections have existed, their contents have been vulnerable. The ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt burned down in 48 B.C., incinerating works by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles; today, out of more than 120 plays by Sophocles, only seven survive.
While conservationists are quick to stress that pixels and bytes can never replace priceless physical artifacts, many see digitization as a vital tool for increasing public access to rare items, while at the same time creating a disaster-proof record and perhaps unearthing new information.
May 3, 2009
Larry Page Commencement Speech at Univ of Michigan
Pretty nice speech from someone who truly changed the world. Here is the video:
April 29, 2009
US economy declines for the 2nd straight quarter
From NYT:
The economy contracted sharply in the first quarter of the year as businesses scaled back on investments and cut their stockpiles of unsold goods, the government reported on Wednesday. But the numbers suggested that the worst of the recession may be fading as the government’s stimulus filters into the economy.
The gross domestic product shrank at an annual rate of 6.1 percent from January through March after a 6.3 percent decline in the fourth quarter of 2008. Not since 1958 have Americans experienced such a sharp contraction over six months.
But on Wall Street, investors barely flinched at the worse-than-expected decline in economic output. Stock markets rallied 2 percent in midday trading as two big media and entertainment companies beat earnings expectations and analysts upgraded their outlook on bank profits.
Although economists expect the economy to shrink again in the current quarter, they said it would do so at a slower pace and level off in the second half of the year as one of the longest downturns since the 1930’s begins to lift.
“The 6.1 percent decline in the first quarter was very bad,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “But the situation is not nearly as dark as this number suggests. The details suggest a more stable economy this summer.”
April 27, 2009
Do Universities still work?
Following up on an earlier post unschooling, here is an NYT op ed piece on the end of university as we know it.
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
Learning from Baby’s brain
Here is a fascinating story about the workings of baby’s mind and what we can learn from it.
WHAT IS IT like to be a baby? For centuries, this question would have seemed absurd: behind that adorable facade was a mostly empty head. A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A newborn, in this sense, is just a lump of need, a bundle of reflexes that can only eat and cry. To think like a baby is to not think at all.
Modern science has largely agreed, spending decades outlining all the things that babies couldn’t do because their brains had yet to develop. They were unable to focus, delay gratification, or even express their desires. The Princeton philosopher Peter Singer famously suggested that “killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby’s mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they’ve revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.
This hyperawareness comes with several benefits. For starters, it allows young children to figure out the world at an incredibly fast pace. Although babies are born utterly helpless, within a few years they’ve mastered everything from language - a toddler learns 10 new words every day - to complex motor skills such as walking. According to this new view of the baby brain, many of the mental traits that used to seem like developmental shortcomings, such as infants’ inability to focus their attention, are actually crucial assets in the learning process.
In fact, in some situations it might actually be better for adults to regress into a newborn state of mind. While maturity has its perks, it can also inhibit creativity and lead people to fixate on the wrong facts. When we need to sort through a lot of seemingly irrelevant information or create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option.
“We’ve had this very misleading view of babies,” says Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the forthcoming book, “The Philosophical Baby.” “The baby brain is perfectly designed for what it needs to do, which is learn about the world. There are times when having a fully developed brain can almost seem like an impediment.”
One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults - this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia - that view is being overturned. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gopnik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly realize that they’re seeing things you don’t even notice.”
April 25, 2009
Raising Bill Gates
Most people would have heard of Bill Gates. But many of them may not much about his parents. WSJ has a nice story on them and Bill Gates’s growing up.
![[SB124060685554554093]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-DO058_bgseni_D_20090424165750.jpg)
Sean Flanigan for The Wall Street Journal
William H. Gates at his home in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle, WA.
SEATTLE — Spend time with the family of Bill Gates, and eventually someone will mention the water incident.
The future software mogul was a headstrong 12-year-old and was having a particularly nasty argument with his mother at the dinner table. Fed up, his father threw a glass of cold water in the boy’s face.
“Thanks for the shower,” the young Mr. Gates snapped.
The incident lives in Gates family lore not just for its drama but also because it was a rare time that Bill Gates Sr., father of his famous namesake, lost his cool. The argument presaged a turning point in the life of a tempestuous boy that would set him on course to become the Bill Gates whom the public knows as co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the world’s richest man.
Behind the Bill Gates success story is the other William Gates. The senior Mr. Gates balanced a family thrown off kilter by a boy who appeared to gain the intellect of an adult almost overnight. He served as a quiet counsel as his son jumped into and thrived in the cutthroat business world. When huge wealth put new pressure on the son, the elder Gates stepped in to start what is now the world’s largest private philanthropy.
Bill Gates Sr., 83 years old, is now co-chair of his son’s $30 billion philanthropy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He has avoided the spotlight. The public details of his life include little beyond his official biography at the foundation, which says he was a Seattle lawyer, World War II veteran, nonprofit volunteer and father of three. He has compiled his thoughts on life in a short book to be published next week.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates and their family shared many details of the family’s story for the first time, including Bill Gates Jr.’s experience in counseling and how his early interest in computers came about partly as a result of a family crisis. The sometimes colliding forces of discipline and freedom within the clan shaped the entrepreneur’s character.
The relationship between father and son entered a new phase when the software mogul began working full-time seven months ago at the Gates Foundation. For the past 13 years, the father has been the sole Gates family member with a daily presence at the foundation, starting it from the basement of his home and minding it while his son finished up his final decade running Microsoft. They now work directly together for the first time.
At six-foot-six, Bill Gates Sr. is nearly a full head taller than his son. He’s known to be more social than the younger Bill Gates, but they share a sharp intellect and a bluntness that can come across to some as curt. He isn’t prone to introspection and he plays down his role in his son’s life.
“As a father, I never imagined that the argumentative, young boy who grew up in my house, eating my food and using my name would be my future employer,” Mr. Gates Sr. told a group of nonprofit leaders in a 2005 speech. “But that’s what happened.”
A Battle of Wills
Bill Gates at an early age became a diligent learner. He read the World Book Encyclopedia series start to finish. His parents encouraged his appetite for reading by paying for any book he wanted.
Still, they worried that he seemed to prefer books to people. They tried to temper that streak by forcing him to be a greeter at their parties and a waiter at his father’s professional functions.
Then, at age 11, Bill Sr. says, the son blossomed intellectually, peppering his parents with questions about international affairs, business and the nature of life.
“It was interesting and I thought it was great,” Mr. Gates Sr. says. “Now, I will say to you, his mother did not appreciate it. It bothered her.”
The son pushed against his mother’s instinct to control him, sparking a battle of wills. All those things that she had expected of him — a clean room, being at the dinner table on time, not biting his pencils — suddenly turned into a big source of friction. The two fell into explosive arguments.
“He was nasty,” Ms. Armintrout says of her brother.
Mr. Gates Sr. played the role of peacemaker. “He’d sort of break them apart and calm things down,” says Ms. Blake, the eldest sibling.
The battles reached a climax at dinner one night when Bill Gates was around 12. Over the table, he shouted at his mother, in what today he describes as “utter, total sarcastic, smart-ass kid rudeness.”
That’s when Mr. Gates Sr., in a rare blast of temper, threw the glass of water in his son’s face.
He and Mary brought their son to a therapist. “I’m at war with my parents over who is in control,” Bill Gates recalls telling the counselor. Reporting back, the counselor told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him.
April 18, 2009
Silicon Valley Hurtin’
Silicon Valley unemployment soars to 11% in March 2009, highest rate in 30 years.
Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate jumped to a record 11 percent last month, and more than 100,000 people are now unemployed and looking for work in the area, the state reported Friday. The question now is how many more will join them before the recession ends.
No one claims to have the answer, but some analysts say there are inklings that the job losses may slow over the next few months, even though the region’s jobless rate rose from a revised 10.2 percent in February.
The March rate is the highest since the state began keeping comparable records for the valley in 1990, the Employment Development Department said.
California’s rate reached 11.2 percent in March, the fourth-highest in the country and the highest since 1976, which is as far back as EDD records go.
“It’s the most brutal labor market I’ve seen in 30 years,” said Michael Bernick, a San Francisco lawyer who was the EDD’s director from 1999 to 2004 and who has volunteered for decades with job training groups.
But there are also some encouraging signs. Stock prices of high-tech firms are up, as semiconductor companies such as Intel report an uptick in orders and a possible bottoming of the business free fall.
Housing at the lower end of the market is beginning to sell, with multiple offers becoming more common. Banks are reporting profits.
And amid the layoffs, a lot of hiring is going on, though less than usual, said former EDD director Bernick.
“The numbers we look at are net numbers,” he said. “Within that, there is an enormous amount of job creation and job destruction going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s considerable job creation and hiring going on in Santa Clara County. There’s just more loss.”
Still, the job losses in this recession pale in comparison with the dot-com collapse, when 123,900 jobs were lost during one 12-month period. The valley has shed 36,200 jobs in the past year.