September 2006 Archives

Heather left for her job in Akron Wednesday morning. Since I'm such a good guy, I got up at 6:00 AM to make her a breakfast of spicy fried rice (partially inspired by Yoshi's chahan, minus the MSG). I added mushrooms, bean sprouts, broccoli, pea pods... and jalapeno peppers. It wasn't all that tasty, but it was certainly spicy.

Well, while we were eating, somehow the fumes of the fried rice - and the jalapenos - got into my eyes a little bit. I instintively brought my hand to my left eye and got a whole lot of jalapeno juice into my eye.

Ouch.

It was so painful, actually, I thought that I had somehow gotten a jalapeno seed in there. I ran to the bathroom and rinsed my eye over and over for about five minutes. No relief - in fact, worsening pain - and somehow it got into my right eye. It was terrible - I thought that I might have to go to the hospital. I seriously thought that I might go blind.

"Maybe you should squirt some soymilk into your eye," Heather thoughtfully suggested.

"No! Just let me rinse," I barked, mucous membranes and tear glands flowing freely -- all the way down to my chin. Despite my belief that I actually might go blind, I foolishly didn't want her to see me like this. I was aware in the back of my brain that dairy milk, as it is basic, would help to alleviate my pain... but soymilk? Who knows, I was thinking... maybe soymilk would actually exacerbate the problem. What does Heather know about this? I was effectively completely blind, and I didn't have the time or patience to query her about it.

Following my outburst, I sensed Heather leave the room. Understandable. Somewhat relieved of further embarrassment - but not of pain - I continued to rinse. From the other room, and above the noise of the water flowing out of the faucet, I heard Heather call out, "Don't rub your eyes!"

I eventually got into the shower and aimed the water directly into my eyes for about ten minutes. Finally, finally, the burning stopped. I was not blind, but my eyes were pretty red. Heather checked on me before she left for work. When I finally settled down, I went to my computer to check my morning emails. The web page that greeted me on the desktop was about how to alleviate Jalapeno burns in the eye.

As it turns out, Heather had looked up information on the web on the alleviation of Jalapeno Eye. The Internet is a wonderful thing, and (and this relates to Jon Udell's talk yesterday) - I still haven't become fully accustomed to the idea that everyone, everywhere who has an Internet connection can become an expert in anything - instantly. Of course this is a gross simplification, but for many problem domains it holds perfectly well. I still hadn't - and haven't - become used to this state of affairs. Heather was using not just her own experiential knowledge, but the experiential knowledge of the population of the entire online world.

Cool.

By chance today, after my natural language processing course, I stumbled upon a University of Michigan STIET seminar next door. The guest speaker was Jon Udell - lead analyst and blogger in chief at the InfoWorld Test Center - and he gave a presentation called "Apprenticeship and Barter in the Knowledge Economy." He had a lot of good things to say. This blog entry is essentially a distillation of what I found most interesting about the talk.

One of Udell's interesting points was how much recent technologies have allowed us to share experiential knowledge through the web, and how multimedia has really, finally come to fruition. Udell is environmentally-conscious, and he's also concerned about reducing neighborhood noise pollution. He created a video about reel lawn-mower maintenance - which can be found here along with a related blog post - in order to share his strategies for success - his experiential knowledge - with his reel mower. His video has been successful enough that he's actually gotten emails from people requesting support!

More interestingly, I think (both to me and Udell), is that he was successfully using this medium to promote his set of values across the web. People who have watched the video have remarked to Udell, "Hey, you're not straining or anything," or "Wow, that's a lot more effective than I had expected!" I had that reaction when I watched the video. Propaganda has reached a new epoch: by the people, of the people and for the people.

Udell pointed out a very interesting recent phenomenon. In the distant past, kids would almost always see nearly all aspects of their parents' roles, and what it was really like to operate in those roles. For instance, if they lived on a farm, they might have be exposed to animal husbandry, argiculture, ranching, farm finance, etc. They could easily see the big picture. In modern times, kids see their dads and/or moms leave for the office at 9:00 and come home at 6:00 - and that is the extent to which kids experience their parents' professional lives. Thus, kids don't have real role models - and I'm not talking about LeBron James, Brittney Spears or George Bush - I'm talking about attainable, real role models. Roles for everyday living. Or so the argument goes. Of course, this argument neglects to mention that Little Freddy Farmboy didn't have many attractive opportunities if he didn't happen to like farming - a condition for which modern First World society has thankfully created many remedies. But the level of skillset transmission for real role adoption has undeniably declined dramatically. Or so the argument goes - and it's a compelling one.

Recent technologies, however, give us the opportunity to broadcast diverse skillsets (or parts of skillsets) to anyone in the world, and Udell finds this exciting (I do too!). He gave a couple of good examples: fixyourownprinter.com and Juicy Analytics' Tiger Woods animated data using MS Excel are two great examples. Not only are we able to identify other roles and what it's like to be in them, but we're also able to learn many things previously inaccesible to us. The kicker is that this is all experiential knowledge. As Udell pointed out, through experiential knowledge transmission we teach and learn things that we don't even know that we're teaching and learning, and that's incredibly valuable in the knowledge economy.

Udell also said something about what he termed manufactured serendipity, and naturally I perked up my ears. Imagine this hypothetical cyberspace conversation:

A's blog: It's snowing in Boston right now.
B's email to A, where B and A share many interests: You're in Boston right now? Let's get together...

...and a beautiful collaborative relationship is formed.

A's blog entry is (perhaps unconciously) pragmatic... almost sneaky. A's letting everyone know about his location to maximize the possibility of such serendipitous interactions. Udell used a descriptive turn of phrase which greatly appeals to me. The artifacts of cyberspace - and how we use them - define a surface area through which we interact with the world. The more we build this surface area, the more we can interact with and effect influence upon the world. This manufactured serendipity is one manifestation of this surface-area increase. Very interesting stuff.

I guess I'll end it here. It's overcast and cold right now here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hopefully the weather will be much better when Heather and I go to Chicago this Saturday and Sunday. :)

I'm currently sitting here in my Knowledge Based Systems class... actually waiting for class to start. They have here what they call "Michigan Time." Though the start time of the class is listed on the hour for the North Campus (or on the half-hour, generally, for the Central Campus), all classes campuswide actually start ten minutes later. Classes consistently end, however, on time. Some call it convenience. I call it administrative laziness. :)

I woke up Sunday morning feeling really awful. My nose was running, my sinuses were killing me, and I felt light-headed. I thought maybe somehow an allergen had made its way into the apartment... but even after leaving the apartment for a couple hours the misery continued. I guess that I was starting to get a cold.

Well, lucky for me, Heather has been reading a lot lately about whole foods and natural remedies. I'm her homeopathic guinea pig. She prescribed a unique home remedy for me. Suck on a raw clove of garlic for fifteen minutes. Then chew it up and swallow it. Uggh.

Believe it or not, though, my symptoms went away pretty quickly. My health wasn't restored to 100%, but I did feel a whole lot better. Yesterday morning I took another clove of garlic, and I felt great all day. No symptoms. It might just be a coincidence - I'm not completely ready to formally extoll the remedial powers of raw garlic - but I'm cautiously open to the idea that it this home remedy has merit. I need to perform another trial. Next time I get sick I'll definitely try it again. I'll let you know the results.

The curative powers of raw garlic didn't end there, though. It also cured me of my ability to make new friends. I smelled - bad. Heather could smell me from three rooms away. Unfortunately, yesterday was also my first day of actually teaching in my GSI class. I'm sure that I made an impression. Nervous and anxious, I walked to the front of hot room. One can imagine the mixture of medicinal garlic and underarm sweat provided an olfactory experience most unpleasant for my students. I didn't actually catch anyone looking at me askance... but I wouldn't have been surprised to discover odor-inspired raised eyebrows and sidelong glaces amongst the students.

Cold's gone though.

Friday evening Heather and I went to a delicious Ann Arbor restaurant featuring Syrian cuisine. Oh, and baked goods. It's called Exotic Cuisine & Bakeries - The Syrian Cuisine. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but boy is it good food. Maybe even better than Lashish, which was our previous favorite Ann Arbor restaurant.

The food is what you might expect. I ordered the m’jeddara, babaganouj, and tebooleh combo meal. Maybe this is the first time that I really appreciated babaganouj. Man, was that good.

I've been working my way through Jared Diamond's most recent book Collapse. I love it, though it's taking me some time. It's so dense with really great information. In a nutshell, it's about the collapse of societies throughout history, and their ultimate (as opposed to their proximate) causes. The book makes a great case about how extensively - and in many cases invisibly - environmental destruction interacts with geopolitical stuggles, international trade, and ethnic tradition (and, interestingly, how ethnic tradition can spell doom for a civilization if it does not harmonize with its environment - see the Norse Greenlanders).

There's a lot of - justifiable - doom and gloom in the book. There are also many hopeful parts. And then there are parts that make me a little sick to my stomach:

The other major environmental problem besides water management involved deforestation, as revealed by the method of packrat midden analysis. For those of you who (like me until some years ago) have never seen packrats, don't know what their middens are, and can't possibly imagine their relevance to Anasazi prehistory, here is a quick crash course in midden analysis. In 1849, hungry gold miners crossing the Nevada desert noticed some glistening balls of a candy-like substance on a cliff, licked or ate the balls, and discovered them to be sweet-tasting, but then they developed nausea. Eventually it was realized that the balls were hardened deposits made by small rodents, called packrats, that protect themselves by building nests of sticks, plant fragments, and mammal dung gathered in the vicinity, plus food remains, discarded bones, and their own feces. Not being toilet-trained, the rats urinate in their nests, and sugar and other substances crystallize from their urine as it dries out, cementing the midden to a brick-like consistency. In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.

Ick!

As you may know, images.google.com is the Google service that allows people to search over images in their databases. Of course, trying to index images is much more difficult than text, when what you're searching with is text. For example, if I want to know about the Yukaghir, all I have to do is type "Yukaghir" into the Google engine and several pages will come up. About 49,000, in fact! How do these pages come up? Because those pages all have one or more instances of the string "Yukaghir" in them.

Images, on the other hand, generally do not have such text information automatically embedded in them. Up until recently, Google Image Search has - I believe - been primarily relying on the text surrounding the image tag in the HTML (as well as semantically relevant alt and/or title attributes and the like actually within the tag). This was pretty smart, but generally such text and tags were very contextual. If I had a picture of Heather on my website, for example, it would probably be annotated with the words "Heather" and, depending on the situation, "in Singapore" or "riding a bicycle." But I might not choose to embed less contextual information, such as "young woman" or "wearing a blue shirt." That's where the Google Image Labeler comes in.

The genius of the Google Image Labeler is that it is actually a game. Two players - who don't know each other - are paired up. Each player is presented with the same image. The players then enter in simple description phrases for the image; e.g. "girl" or "trombone." Sometimes there are words that are off limits; for example, if the picture were of a trombone, and the word "trombone" were not allowed, you wouldn't be able to enter it for any points. You might, however, enter a different descriptive word, such as "brass," "slide," or "dixieland." Each partner cannot see what the other has already entered for labels. If you and your partner have at least one matched phrase, then you both gain points and you move on to the next image. The game ends after one-and-a-half minutes. It's actually pretty fun, and every time you get points you're helping Google to better categorize images. It's brilliant. Try it out yourself - you don't need an account; you can log in as a guest. But if you DO have an account, your best scores are saved for posterity. ;)

Wow. I've been pretty busy lately with school. I'm taking nine hours this semester at the University of Michigan:

EECS 543 - Knowledge-based Systems
EECS 595 - Natural Language Processing
EECS 597 - Language and Information

I'm also GSI-ing (AKA TA'ing) a course:

EECS 494 - Computer Game Design

Everything is going pretty well so far. I'll write more about school later.