I just found this video on YouTube. Check it out. All I can say is “wow”.
Edit: A parody of the video is very funny…
Perception of Beauty / Advertising
November 9th, 2006Google Co-Op
October 26th, 2006Google recently started their new Co-Op service (see here) which allows users to create their own personalized search-engines to whichever topic they desire. More importantly, it allows for inclusion of the search into the website of the whoever created the search-engine. Especially the later is nice as before it was only possible to either drive the user away to the Googles’ homepage, open it in an iframe or a new window – all stuff that webmasters wouldn’t want for one reason or the other. I just created a search-engine for machine-learning related materials. I’m still adding sites, but I’m getting better results for my personal searches already. I also wrote a module for the PHPNuke content management system to include whichever personal CoOp search-engine you created into the system. You can download the Search-The-Web-module for PHP-Nuke on my website. It even comes with English, German and French language-files (although the French translation might be a bit funny).
Fire….
October 25th, 2006We had a small incident last night. Around 10 or so the firealarm in #208 went
of, at first only one, then two of these annoying beepers. A minute later
somebody knocks on the door and keeps knocking. So I go downstairs, open the
door and this huge cloud of smoke is outside. The neighbor girl is like: “Hi,
um, do you have a fireextinguisher we could borrow?”. I can see flames in
their kitchen-window and it smells awful like burning grease. Nobody got hurt, but their kitchen is now a mess. That reminds me to check the batteries in my smoke-detectors… you never know.
Random Number Books
October 15th, 2006A friend of mine just pointed me to the book of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. It’s a book full of random numbers from back in the days when random number generation was hard. However, check out the reviews at Amazon of the book. They are hilarious.
Data Mining of Social Networks
September 30th, 2006I just returned from the ECML Data Mining Workshop and one talk I found particularly interesting. In the talk Network-based marketing: Identifying likely adopters via consumer networks (S. Hill, F. Provost and C. Volinsky) presenter reported on a successfull marketing campaign. Rough summary from the talk: A phone company was introducing a new service and from past experience they had twenty-something marketing segments for people that were likely to buy that they would write to, call or otherwise inform of the new service. Since the phone company has access to the call records they extracted a list of friends these likely buyers frequently call and started marketing to these people as well. The cool part is that the response rate from the friends was about 3 times higher than the likely-buyers response rate (or was it even the buy-rate). That said, so many companies now started to collect (or have available to them) social networks data, e.g. Skype (now EBay), Google (GMail invites), MySpace, Facebook etc. Most likely this will change the ways of advertising quite a bit. Sidenote: the companys lawyers felt this is legal, because the company owns that call data. Interesting how this is legaly different from the NSA-survailance-program the US government has been doing.
Las Vegas and Roulette
September 17th, 2006I just got back from a brief stay in Las Vegas. I didn’t gamble, but got thinking about the game of Roulette. Obviously all the games that are played rely on unpredictability in one way or another and require real randomness, just like many cryptography applications such as SSL. If the state of, say the deck of cards in a black jack game would be known, the outcome becomes predictable (see also: cracking the Netscape SSL random number generator). The black jack card counting thing is getting old (and I noticed that they cut the deck of cards and throw away a number of cards – which leaves the gambles with no information what cards are now in the deck), but recently I read about people using a laser scanner to predict the roulette wheel outcome. An interesting bit I noticed was how Roulette is played differently here in the US. Besides that there are two zeros on the table (giving the bank an even greater chance to win) the croupier changes the spin of the wheel (he/she stops the wheel and starts spinning it again) and puts the little ball in after all the bets have been made. I recall that in Europe they spin the wheel and put the ball in and then allow for bets being made for a certain amount of time. That certainly makes it impossible to predict anything at all at the time of betting (unless the wheel would be biased somehow, say by a slight tilt). Also the displays that show the last couple of numbers seem to malfunction occasionally and display the wrong numbers. I guess the only way to win in a casino would be if any of their “random number generators” were unbeknownst to them were not truly random – but then again they won’t like it if people win.
Funny sidenote… you can find amazing, “infallable” Roulette Systems on the web for only $27 🙂 Then there others that are available for free. For example, the pivot system. The inventor claims that :”It is a fact that numbers on a roulette wheel tend to repeat often.” Some of them might even work (play simple chances, double your bet everytime you loose) assuming that there would be no limit at the table (and ignoring that the house still has an edge).
Data mining used to find new materials
August 27th, 2006I just read an Eureka Alert (see also ZDNet’s blog)mentioning that a couple of researchers at MIT found new, potentially useful crystal structures with AI and Data Mining techniques. You can find the abstract of their paper here. I’ve seen randomness and Genetic Algorithms around alot lately (such as the self-reconfigurable-modular-robot/) and a robot that can do bioinformatics experiments (DNA sequencing) all by himself (link?). I think that this is a very useful application of AI. However, it is only an application of the scientific knowledge. It’s fast testing based on the current physical models and insights. It automates science to an extend, but does not come up with new insights. It’s more data without more people to add an interpretation. For example, it took a few years before somebody found an application for Teflon.
I haven’t seen this around (will search again), but what would be really interesting is an algorithm that can form a new hypothesis (e.g. a differential equation) based on outcomes from Physics experiments. An algorithms that explains the data and forms a theory. It’s probably harder to build than regression algorithms…
“Shockers” in the Mainstream Press
August 24th, 2006Lately I found a couple of “shockers” in the mainstream press. Shockers, because my impression is that the press does not try to offend anyone. The articles were challenging the current model in society of where man and woman stand and how things should be. No matter what’s your take on this issue, it’s a loaded topic and I was surprised to find something like this.
- Daily Mail
- Forbes on Marriage and Divorce. According to Slate, Forbes pulled the original article. It reappeared later with the rebuttal on the side.
Gates Foundation helps company buy papers
August 21st, 2006Here’s something strange I found:
Gates Foundation helps company buy news-papers – I wonder how that fits in with the whole charity thing.
See also: MediaNews Buying in California Boosted by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Table prefix in PHP Nuke…
August 18th, 2006Ever tried to install some PHP app for your website? Especially the ones that come with a sql-schema file that you need to run through MySQL? What I wonder about is that many of these applications – PHPNuke for example – support prefixing table names. Having non-standard table names can be helpful in making SQL-injection attacks more difficult. Not impossible, mind you, it just adds another layer of obscurity – but of the shelf script-kiddie exploits won’t work anymore. And yet editing such a schema file is a pain for administrators. Which explains why people rarely do it…
Anyway… Here’s my perl one-liner for changing the schema files table names prefix for PHP Nuke:
perl -i -pe ‘s/(TABLE|INTO) (nuke_)/$1 qqq$2/g’ nuke.sql
This will change the default prefix “nuke” to “qqqnuke” in the schema file. Then you change the prefix in the config.php file accordingly (change $prefix and $user_prefix). Done…