Times article on Academic use of AOL Data

the times has a good story on academic use of the AOL data, and how many academics are turning their back on the data. my prediction is that someone out there will really take the time to do a good job of anonymizing this data, and more academics may start to use that better scrubbed dataset.

what really got my goat was a quote from the article about Dr. Chowdhury, the AOL researcher who released the data (he was fired by AOL). the man is certainly very stupid if this is true:

Professor Etzioni said Dr. Chowdhury was horrified by what had happened. “He didn’t anticipate that this kind of data could be used to track down individuals.” Dr. Chowdhury declined to comment, at the advice of his lawyer.

idiot. sure, i wouldn't expect the average person to understand how easy it is to use this data to track down individuals, but an AOL researcher working with query data -- come on. i imagine that google didn't recently invest heavily in AOL for its technical people.

New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs: Mel Gibson

a few weeks ago mel gibson, in a drunken state, was stopped in his car with an open bottle of tequila. he yelled all kinds of anti-jewish slurs at the police who pulled him over. i hope mel gets his just dessert.

anyway, the august 21, 2006 issue of the new yorker has a fabulous shouts and murmurs concerning the mel gibson anti-jew fiasco. you can find the whole thing here, but i've quoted two of the stations below. NOTE: the first one is especially funny if you know that mel's father is against everything jewish and says the holocaust was exaggerated.

Mel Meets His Mother. His mother sayeth, “What hast thou done, that thy father is proud of thee? He yelpeth for joy.” Mel sayeth, “The Jews have started this war, as they have all the wars.” Mel’s mother sayeth, “Verily, thou hast started this war, thou idiot.” Mel sayeth, “Bring ice for my head, for it throbbeth.”

...

Mel Falls the Second Time. Whilst being interviewed by the Jew Larry King, Mel’s breath reeketh of alcohol. He sayeth on live television that he doth not like Jews, even those who maketh him rich unto the seventy-seventh generation. Larry breaketh to a commercial, during which Mel’s handlers sayeth unto him, “Art thou trying to give us ulcers?” They calleth for duct tape to be applied to Mel’s mouth.

The Edible Woman

i'm reading margaret atwood's the edible woman, and it is amusing and enlightening. the book was published in 1969 so it is dated, but atwood does seem quite timeless. i don't think any description does it justice (the description on the back of this paperback is awful) so instead i will quote from a paragraph i like, where marian (the main character) describes the women's christmas party at her office. she works at a surveying company.

[Marian] looked around the room at all the women there, at the mouths opening and shutting, to talk or to eat. Here, sitting like any other group of women at an afternoon feast, they no longer had the varnish of officialdom that separated them, during regular office hours, from the vast anonymous ocean of housewives whose minds they were emplyed to explore. They could have been wearing housecoats and curlers. As it was, they all wore dresses for the mature figure. They were ripe, some rapidly becoming overripe, some already beginning to shrivel; she thought of them as attached by stems at the tops of their heads to an invisible vine, hanging there in various stages of growth and decay ... in that case, thin elegant Lucy, sitting beside her, was merley at an earlier stage, a springtime green bump or nodule forming beneath the careful golden calyx of her hair ...

if there's anything you're reading now that you really love, please let me know. i'm on a bit of a reading tear.

the AOL debacle and the user search records

recently AOL majorly goofed and released poorly anonymized search records of hundreds of thousands of their users. the records contain over 30 million queries. you can see some news about it from google news at this link.

just to help people understand this: imagine if all your google queries for the past year were made publicly available. ie, for user bob, i would assign a number, say 42, and for each of his queries i publicly release that user 42 queried for such and such. so if you did 10000 queries over the past year, i know those 10000 queries (though i don't know that your name is bob, unless you queried for your name, or unless i do some digging). NOTE: it's actually more than just that.. there are click records as well.

i posted a comment about my problems with how individuals are treating this data over at a friend's blog, and i'm just so riled about all this that i'm going to post most of my comment here.

here's one problem: if it's clear that someone was doing some serious personal abortion research in these queries, i wouldn't say to my friends "look look, look at what this person is doing..." especially when the data is poorly anonymized (ie people can figure out where this person roughly lives, and they can use all their other queries to improve understanding of the user's context).

here's my thing.. i don't think people think of these records as they perhaps should think of them: they are like medical records. extremely personal! if suddenly a bunch of medical records were released on the internet, would you go scouring through them and post that a person in minnesota has a rare defect which causes him to fart whenever the word "gas" is said? it's funny, sure, but it's very personal.

here's a quote from the Technology Review blog which, if true, i find really irresponsible:

At the same time, though, other people -- Internet researchers, statisticians, sociologists, and political scientists -- silently cheered.

scientists, especially social scientists, work so hard in their studies to get consent and gather data ethically. now this gift is dropped on them: they can use it, but they should really think about how they can use it responsibly. for instance, there's a site which now lets you search over the AOL logs, and they will remove data if someone determines that the data is personally identifiable. but i really think that's the wrong way around: when such sensitive data is going to be made public, unless the anonymization is fantastic (which might not even be possible!) you get consent before revealing any of it, not the other way around. and poor anonymization, and no consent, are what we have with this data.

sigh.

on the wall street journal web site, there's an interesting online discussion going on that was prompted by a posting of a discussion between a lobbyist for internet firms, and a lawyer with the electronic frontier foundation (eff). in a response to the lobbyist, the eff lawyer writes:

Mr. Bankston responds: Markham, you wrote that "companies, with feedback from their users, are in the best position to determine how long such data should be kept." I'd like to think that the market could take care of this problem, and that companies insensitive to privacy concerns would be punished by the market. But the only way that'll work is if consumers actually have enough information about companies' practices to make rational choices about which search engines to use, and enough information about how the law protects their online privacy. On both scores, however, the consumer is completely lacking in information.

i completely agree with this and hope internet firms become more transparent.

tapas at commerc 24, barcelona

we went to commerc 24, a tapas restaurant in barcelona started by Carles Abellan, an apprentice of el bulli mastermind Ferran Adria. el bulli is considered possibly the best restaurant in the world, adria is a genius, and getting reservations takes at least 6 months to a year. so we couldn't do that, but commerc 24 has great reviews as well, so we made reservations and headed there.

anyway, in this blog post i'm going to focus on wheatgrass. if you've ever had wheatgrass, you'll know it's intensely grassy, and even maybe a bit pungent. a couple of years ago back at google i'd have a wheatgrass shot almost every day, because the pain of drinking one was satisfying, not to mention the fact that wheatgrass might be good for you.


anyway, one of the dishes was a tomato, wheatgrass, prawn soup. a cold soup. oh my god it was fantastic! the wheatgrass gave just the right kick to make the dish exciting.
typically i find wheatgrass overpowering, but with this dish i just wanted more and more (and they actually brought more, but then we told them that we'd already had it and they took it away... damn, shouldn't have told them!)

there was also a fantastic egg concoction, which i won't describe but instead will let the independent food critic work his magic:

Next comes Abellan's signature "Kinder egg", an immaculately trimmed egg shell served in a ceramic egg carton, filled with layers of soft egg, truffle and potato foam that is rich and mouth-filling, yet light and uplifting. (from here)

it was a fantastic experience. i'm so happy we took one night to experience the food genius of spain at commerc 24.

and what will you be?

at the Fundacio Antoni Tapies i learned that the artist antoni tapies determined he would be an artist while bedridden for months with TB. tapies is a genius of contemporary art, creating pieces like that above that fuse media and texture to evoke the subconscious and feelings that cannot be expressed concretely with language (or at least that's the gist i got from a video). he also does many other types of art.

what struck me was his statement that he figured out his life career-path while reflecting and lying bedridden for months. personally, i discarded the notion that long, deep reflection could lead you to the right career-path. first, life throws way too many curveballs that are just too pertinent and can't be easily factored into long deep reflection. second, "right" doesn't seem like a label you can apply to the path you choose for your life. there are probably many "right" paths.

in high school, my sister took a test designed to determine her ideal career path. i remember her telling me that the test told her to become a stevedore, a person who loads cargo on ships. how did it conclude this? had they analyzed the preferences and lives of thousands of stevedores, along with other professions, and determined that in some high-dimensional space my sister most aligned with the stevedore profession? i've read that if you take such a test a few weeks later, chances are your job recommendation will switch dramatically. this last point seems most pertinent...

a stevedore on the job

in an old star trek: the next generation episode (yes, geek alert) some children were stolen from the enterprise by an advanced society that could not procreate (how advanced are they if they can't do that...). a computer analyzed these children and determined their ideal professions. one was told to be a musician, another a woodcutter. they were given tools that would help develop these talents. talk about a form of hard paternalism!

van gogh worked in the art business for a number of years before becoming a painter, at the encouragement of his brother theo. would he have done better been told what to do initiallyly, hence avoiding his stumbling around? on the other hand, such advice might help a lot of people who have trouble directing their energy.

but for me, i'll continue stumbling, and avoid long bouts of reflection. don't get me wrong, i think reflection is good. i certainly think i didn't do enough reflecting when i chose computer science. for instance, i forsook my writing. since university i haven't really written seriously, and i used to be a half-decent writer. maybe i'll stumble into that...

gaudi's barcelona

heading into architectural genius antonio gaudi's casa mila (la pedrera)

onto the roof, where we encounter strange faces and undulating paths


the spanish weren't so tall when this was made..


scary, fascinating faces on the roof. note the curves. gaudi is so curvy, so organic. and he's fascinated with light. to badly butcher quotes of gaudi's i heard during the tour:
1. nature: light and organics are the key. and...
2. architecture is the process of structuring the placement of light.

 

my amsterdam: an incomplete summary in a few photos

come with me to explore the streets and canals of amsterdam

i did the gassen diamond tour. in the end they tried to get me to buy a diamond but the bling bling just didn't look good against my skin

the rijksmuseum: majestic, and full of master art... but the line was too long!

on the other hand, the crazy heineken museum was a cinch to get into, probably because the art isn't up to rijksmuseum quality

iceland: the great outdoors

halldor took us on our long trip


we walked on precarious cliffs


and saw waterfalls

and drinking boxes

not to mention blue blue pools


and finally ended up on a glacier

you can see more here

on our way to iceland

at san francisco international we heard the loudspeaker blaring our names and so we rushed to the gate to make sure everything was ok. we were worried that the flight to iceland was overbooked. when we got to the front of the line the guy said he had only good news, took our tickets, ripped them up, and handed us new ones: saga class! (a la icelandic sagas... it's their first and business class, rolled into one). when i think of "saga," i often think of a grand quest, with people getting killed by fierce vikings. not sure it's the best name for first class, but of course we accepted the upgrade.

now i don't think i can ever fly economy class again on long flights. i managed to sleep peacefully in saga class, with my eye mask on and my chair fully reclined, legs up. i can never sleep on long flights. this was a miracle! my theory is that the airlines all band together and have a big database of people who have been bumped up before. they track the effect of bump ups on later ticket purchases. for long flights i might now be a saga class traveller... (though i haven't looked at the prices yet :) )

when we landed in iceland, we were picked up by halldor and we headed to the blue lagoon. halldor is pictured below.

 

chick pea soup, indian style

i've been reading bill buford's Heat and i'm loving it! buford goes to work for a famous new york chef and he picks up a bunch of cooking skills and funny stories along the way. and he inspires me to want to make a dish or two!

so i called my parents and got the recipe for chick pea soup, indian style. i love this soup... one of my mom's best. and the recipe is surprisingly easy. The output is pictured above.

Ingredients:

1. 1 can of chick peas, drained (19 oz can.. so in america they seem to have 15 oz cans so you need to improvise on the spices a bit)


2. 1/2 can diced tomatoes (28oz can.. ie 14oz of tomatoes)


3. 1/4 tsp red chili powder


4. 1/4 tsp black pepper


5. 2 tsp masala spice mix (i used mostly chana masala, which is the chick pea spice mix typically used to make curried chick peas.. it's a mix of a bunch of spices and can be bought at any indian spice store)


6. pinch of salt


7. 3 cubes veggie bouillon


8. 3 cups water


9. 1/4 cup chopped onion

Recipe:

1. In a large sauce pan boil the tomatoes, water and bouillon.
   When boiling, add the chickpeas, onions and spices.


2. simmer 30 minutes (until chick peas are done)


3. puree in a food processor/blender


4. serve and enjoy! (neha and grant suggested adding fresh coriander or some cream to the final soup to give it a more restauranty feel)

I doubled everything in this recipe and used 3 15oz cans of chickpeas and hence added a bit more to everything else. It turned out great.

sitting in the bathroom vs being out on the town

as you live your life the moments that trail behind you accumulate and define your character. that character is evoked by how you act and how you're perceived.

when i think of my life as a series of moments that accumulate to define who i am (ie history matters, you are stuck with your past) inevitably i start to wonder which moments are most valuable. tonight i was thinking about going out on the town.

going out is fun, no doubt. you meet people, talk about their ideas, your ideas, the world, soccer, chit chat. sometimes it isn't fun... those times, the minutes were essentially thrown away, seemed useless, boring, unenjoyable.

now consider the bathroom. a great place for thoughts! alone time! reflecting. in some cases quite a bit more fun than an awful night. and don't forget the relief!

so in this calculus of character building, of who you are, how do things stack up? the thing i've considered is the potential of each situation. the bathroom is very structured. sure, i may have a eureka moment. but its positive (and negative) potential to change my character is likely quite small.

so in this calculus, for me, bathroom loses. which jives nicely with my normal thoughts, which are that a nice sauvignon blanc and conversation are wonderful, wonderful things.

ps: i think people are a lot more than just the accumulation and expression of their past moments. there's this potential to choose at each moment, and whether that choice is in a hip bar or a bathroom seems irrelevant. but the bathroom likely makes poor theatre.

hokusai

while sick this past week, i had a lot of time to sit around and reflect. as you've already read, i played and thought a lot about the cats. but i also had a chance to pick up my big book of hokusai, a famous late 18th, early 19th century japanese artist.

hokusai was a genius. his art and literature are fantastic, and he was constantly learning and exploring new themes. he worked up until he died, and is quoted on his deathbed as saying "If Heaven had lent me but five years more, I would have become a great painter." of course, he was fantastic. you probably recognize the woodcut at the top, one from his series on mount fuji.

i started reading all the fascinating articles in my hokusai art book. i usually just look at the prints, but i must encourage people to read the articles themselves.. they are so enlightening and fun! one article touched on hokusai's difficulties with his publisher. hokusai sent some woodcuts to his publisher, who would get them made by professional craftsmen. now the quality of these works is a function not only of what hokusai produces, but what the mastercraftsmen do in their shops. i guess hokusai had been burned one too many times, and so he sent this amusing letter to his publisher, constantly dropping the name of this one craftsman who he thought would do the job splendidly... hokusai even went so far as to say that he wasn't in cahoots with this craftsman (ie taking a cut when the publisher chose that craftsman because hokusai made it happen) but in fact loved his work. i'll add some quotes here when i get home.

here are some prints (i especially like the "small flowers" and "large flowers" series, but i couldn't find many of those online):

Poppies and Yellow Butterfly, 1833-34


The Ghost Kohada Koheiji

an inconvenient truth

i saw an inconvenient truth this weekend, and it was fantastic. before i saw the movie i thought that a movie which is mostly a multimedia presentation by al gore would be boring and stupid... i thought i'd fall asleep.

i didn't, and i was completely stoked to help out in some way after seeing gore's moving presentation.

that's where the movie failed.. at the very end, gore disappears and suggestions for what you can do are posted along with the credits. that sucked. gore should've said way more about this.. a whole section of the movie should've been devoted to that, because let me tell you i wasn't the only person who at the end of the movie was really ready to help out and wanted suggestions.

anyway when i went to the movie's website (climatecrisis.net) i found some links that indicate how you can help.

calculate a rough estimate of your contribution to the global warming crisis here

read some things you can do about the problem here

as an aside, i found it really funny how much they showed gore working on the presentation on his nice little mac. moving around slides and building slides. gore came across as quite mac savvy :)

lazy cats

these past two days i've been sick as a dog, and so i've stayed at home. it's good for the cats, because my roommate's away. i've played with them, pet them, fed them treats, and they, for the most part, have slept. i wonder what they think about, as they lie there, twitching.

raja gives me angry slits as i use the flash on him

zelda cannot be disturbed in her sleep. yesterday i saw her fall off this chair while sleeping

mika, the champion sleeper. if you pet her when she looks to be sleeping, she'll flip over and adjust into optimal petting position, all the while keeping her eyes closed

then there's me, sick and bored (no picture provided). i watched germany beat argentina on espn360, and i was sad, but the german keeper really was extraordinary in penalty kicks.

 

should all content be readily available?

let me motivate the title of this thought. this past week i was reading the new yorker, specifically a wonderful article by Bill Buford called "The Dessert Lab: A pastry chef's quest for the new" about Will Goldfarb's new dessert place Room 4 Dessert in new york city (dessert pictured above is from Room 4 Dessert, courtesy yelp). i loved this article. i can't explain it exactly, it was just so perfect and fun and informative. i'll give you some fun quotes. goldfarb couldn't get a reliable bartender, so he had the author tend bar. the rules:

There were three rules. Break nothing. ("Please!") Make no money mistakes. And let people wait. "A pastry rule," he [Goldfarb] added. "Better to be perfect and slow than fast and flawed."

so buford tends bar for a bit, giving advice to the customers and having some fun. goldfarb does not approve of buford's work:

He [Goldfarb] took me aside: "You are too frantic. You've got too much adrenaline. You don't understand. There is no fourth wall here. There is no kitchen to hide in. Everything you do is on view. You have to be relaxed. Easy. Listen to the music. You are the atmosphere. Do you understand?" He paused, clearly convinced that I wasn't understanding. He was trying to be polite. "And the advice you keep giving? Do me a favor. Don't."

i wanted to share it with people i knew wouldn't have the new yorker. i have some friends who would really appreciate this article! of course, the new yorker site isn't serving this article (they only serve a subset of what they publish each week).

furthermore, i couldn't buy the article online. after some snooping, i found a blog that had posted a pdf version but they subsequently took it down when the new yorker came a servin' legalese. i contemplated scanning the article but never got to a scanner. in a last ditch attempt, i photographed a page of the article, but that came out poorly.

so i give up. the new yorker doesn't want its content flowing in the world. i'd be happy to pay for this article, to share it! and if ads mean more, then by all means make it available with ads all around it, online.

but i guess that the new yorker can distribute in any way they want. what if they never want an online copy? what if having that paper, the funny cartoons, the odd cover, the package is what matters to them? well, all i know is that i will be visiting Room 4 Dessert when i'm in nyc. here's the cartoon from the new yorker:

live HDTV sucks

i was in berkeley watching the first brazil game of the world cup a week ago. it was displayed on a beautiful hdtv in the front of the bar, and, if you arrived late, on a normal tv in the back of the bar.

so, brazil's applying some pressure when suddenly i hear this scream from the back of the bar. i turn around and see people cheering and clapping and i'm wondering: "what game are they watching?" suddenly i turn back to my tv and kaka has scored
(pictured above celebrating the goal).

it turns out that the hdtv broadcast has a few second delay compared to the regular broadcast! the back of the bar knew about the goal before me! i thought this only happened in different solar systems where the exploding star reaches me years later! this completely blows. there's no point watching if i can just wait and listen for the people behind me.

mihai pointed me to an article about this on bbc. supposedly the bbc spokesperson advises that people shut their windows so they can't hear celebrations from normal tv watchers. ridiculous. that is not a solution. live hdtv sucks!

bad commencement keynote speech

oh man.. i was at a college graduation today, and the keynote speaker was the ceo of some fairly large company (depicted at the left). he had us hooked on his idiocy from the beginning:

he started his speech by saying that he was a really busy man, and he didn't have time to write the speech, so one of his staff wrote it, and so if anything is wrong with the speech, don't blame him, blame his staff.

what a beginning. the speaker to inspire the next generation of business people tells them that they should delegate to their underlings, and if anything goes wrong, blame them.

it gets better: at the particularly corny moments in his speech, the speaker paused to note that what he was about to say wasn't actually written by him, so again, blame the real writer.

at one point he got into a verbal exchange with an audience member whose last name was fani (he asked for the student's last name) and then made a butt joke.

is there anything good to say about this speech? well, we had a good time laughing at the speaker... the picture above seems appropriate since we think he wasn't completely sober. however, i feel really bad for the graduating class. at least their valedictorian gave a solid address.

ps if any of you hate this blog entry, don't blame me, blame the ceo

broken social scene

i've told a lot of people about broken social scene, but now i want to announce it more widely: i love them! i bought their most recent album, "Yor Forgot It in People" and it's fantastic. you can listen to some of the songs here if you scroll down to the samples. what's amazing about the group is that they are a supergroup -- a conglomeration of many artists, with a few core artists directing the vision. the album really speaks to this diversity that's unified despite its wide scope, from soft, strictly instrumentals to really moving vocal pieces.

i especially like tracks 5,6 and 7 (this supports my theory that the best tracks on a cd are track 7 or thereabouts.... i strongly believe this!). track 6 is called "pacific theme" and it just makes me wish i was sitting down by the ocean relaxing and listening to a band (broken social scene would be ideal!).

dealing with anger

this week i realized that i deal with my anger in a quite peculiar way, in the sense that it's quite different from how other people perhaps deal with their anger. i've created a graph below to illustrate:



i don't think this is good because it means the person or thing that is angering me gets almost no feedback until a point at which i express feedback in a strongly negative, labeled bad, way. i've drawn a normal person as linear, though i doubt the average person is linear. this is also bad for me because sometimes later on i realize that i was angry (my curve starts to look more "normal") and yet it's too late for me to give any feedback. the moment is lost.

i'm going to try and get away from this step function. it isn't good!