Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for January 20th through January 23rd:

• Data.gov – Featured Datasets: Open Government Directive Agency – Datasets required under the Open Government Directive through the end of the day, January 22, 2010. Freedom of Information Act request logs, Treasury TARP and derivative activity logs, crime, income, agriculture datasets.
• All Your Twitter Bot Needs Is Love – The bot’s name? Jason Thorton. He’s been humming along for months now, sending out over 1250 tweets to some 174 followers. His tweets, while not particularly creative, manage to be both believable and timely. And he’s powered by a single word: Love.

  Thorton is the creation of developer Ryan Merket, who built him as a side project in around three hours. Merket has just posted the code that powers him, and has also divulged how he made Thorton seem somewhat realistic: the bot looks for tweets with the word “love” in them and tweets them as its own.

• Building a Twitter Bot – "Meet Jason Thorton. To people who know Jason, he is a successful entrepreneur in San Francisco who tweets 4-5 times a day. But Jason has a secret, he’s not really a human, he’s the product of my simple algorithm in PHP

  Jason tweets A LOT about the word “love” – that’s because Jason actually steals tweets from the public timeline that contain the word “love” and posts them as his own

  Jason also @replies to people who use the word “love” in their tweets, and asks them random questions or says something arbitrary

  It took me about 3 hours to code Jason, imagine what a real engineer could do with real AI algorithms? Now realize that it’s already a reality. Sites like Twitter are full of side projects, company initiatives, spambots and AI robots. When the free flow of information becomes open, the amount of disinformation increases. Theres a real need for someone to vet the people we ‘meet’ on social sites – will be interesting to see how this market grows in the next year

• Website monitoring status – Public API Status – Health monitor for 26 APIs from popular Web services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and others
• PG&E Electrical System Outage Map – This map shows the current outages in our 70,000-square-mile service area. To see more details about an outage, including the cause and estimated time of restoration, click on the color-coded icon associated with that outage.

These are my links for May 3rd through May 4th:

• Dilbert comic strip for 05/04/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. – Secretary to Pointy Haired Boss: "I live in a rented trailer and all of my money is in my checking account. Your investments are worthless and your mortgage is underwater. My net worth is higher than yours now. I guess promiscuity and a G.E.D. was a pretty good strategy after all." Reminded me of a thought I had earlier this year, that much of Western Civilization is built on valuing delayed gratification, which hasn't worked out so well recently as opposed to immediate consumption in many cases.
• Without Warning, Twitter Kills StatTweets (Businesses Beware) – StatSheet.com ChangeLog – Owner of StatTweets post regarding his network of sports-related Twitter handles being banned. They had several hundred accounts, one for stats for each team. This makes sense for users, given the way Twitter works, but they don't like mass account creation. Interested to see how this sorts out, there seem to be at least a few similar Twitter networks with team/region/topic-specific handles.
• Dooley Online: What URL Shortener Should I Use? – Comparison of features and some usage data for URL shorteners such as tinyurl and bit.ly used on twitter and other services.
• Obesity and Overweight: Trends: U.S. Obesity Trends 1985-2007 | DNPAO | CDC – During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States. This slide set illustrates this trend by mapping the increased prevalence of obesity across each of the states. In 2007, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; three of these states (Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%. The animated map below shows the United States obesity prevalence from 1985 through 2007.
• Why text messages are limited to 160 characters | Technology | Los Angeles Times – A look back to the beginnings of SMS in 1985 – Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said. For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters. Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.

These are my links for April 30th from 05:57 to 07:10:

• SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."
• How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – 100 remedies for the fatal flaws exhibited by famous evil overlords of the past. Also some business executives, I think.
• Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early | Wired Science – Google’s search data may have been able to provide an early warning of the swine flu outbreak — if the company had been looking in the right place. Last week, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, Google took a retroactive look at its search data from Mexico. And there the team found a pre-media bump in telltale flu-related search terms (you know, “influenza + phlegm + coughing”) that was inconsistent with standard, seasonal flu trends.
• What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees (SCREENSHOTS) – Some screen shots of current admin tools at Twitter for managing user accounts, blocks, whitelisting, suspensions, and user stats such as # follow attempts, # updates, #directs, etc
• Twitter Aggregator Sawhorse Media Raises Seed Round, Launches Pets, Celeb Sites | paidContent.org – "Channelized" feeds from curated lists of twitter sources.

These are my links for April 12th through April 13th:

• Google App Engine Blog: Many languages, and in the runtime bind them – Now that AppEngine has a Java environment, there are a lot of possibilities for running other languages on top of the JVM, this is an all-singing, all-dancing shell interpreter demo providing a switchable command line interface to Beanshell, Clojure, Groovy, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme.
• High Performance Web Sites :: don’t use @import – Summary – use LINK instead of @import for stylesheet references. "Using @import within a stylesheet adds one more roundtrip to the overall download time of the page. Using @import in IE causes the download order to be altered. This may cause stylesheets to take longer to download, which hinders progress rendering making the page feel slower."
• Learn Korean Language :The Official Korea Tourism Guide Site – Flash-based Korean language lessons, from KBS World Radio.
• Korea rate of obesity ranks lowest among OECD nations – INSIDE JoongAng Daily – Korea has lowest obesity rate among 30 OECD countries, at 3.5%, vs the US (#30) at 34.3%.
• FT.com / Weekend / Reportage – Is a high IQ a burden as much as a blessing? – “High cognitive ability is very often a mixed blessing,” Patrick O’Shea, the president of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE), told me. Too wide a deviation from the mean IQ of 100 brings with it an inherent isolation. “If you have an IQ of 160 or higher,” O’Shea explained, “you’re probably able to connect well with less than 1 per cent of the population.”

This weekend appears to have been the start of allergy season for me. As a consequence, I get to try the new over-the-counter decongestants. The old ones (Psuedophed etc) were apparently being purchased in large quantities to be crushed and used for producing methamphetamine, so now when you go to buy them you need to register at the pharmacy desk, show your drivers license, where they check with a state-wide database to make sure you haven’t exceeded two packages for the month.

This process takes a long time and is actually more difficult than getting a prescription filled (since you can’t call ahead). So I’m trying the new decongestants. The main drawbacks so far are that they don’t have the 12- and 24-hour extended release versions, and they also don’t seem to work very well. On the other hand, I can run in and out of the store to get them, rather than waiting for 10-15 minutes at the pharmacy desk while they check my drivers license against their database.

Perhaps it would be easier if I asked my doctor for a prescription decongestant. The “new formula” decongestants are a poor substitute so far.

I recently went for my two-year followup to see how my eyes are doing after wavefront LASIK. At the initial exam and each followup visit, they measure the point spread function of your eye. Here’s a before-and-after.

The scale of the two graphs are different, so the improvement is even better than it appears at first glance. The upper plot corresponds to roughly 20/80 vision. The lower plot, two years later, is at 20/15.

This is a bottle of water I got recently while having a quick lunch at the Galleria Market (Korean grocery store) in Santa Clara. I was expecting a generic bottle of Arrowhead, Crystal Springs, or even Costco water, but this is apparently shipped in from Korea. The main selling feature is that it contains naturally occuring semiconductors.

Here’s what the label says:

Ge+Alpha is a pure natural mineral water which originates from the gold ore and sericite layers in the deep mountains. It is rich in essential minerals and contains 60ppb of organic Germanium.

The Geumgangsan Hot Springs in North Korea also features naturally occuring germanium water.

Apparently there are various claims that it’s good for your health, up to the point of curing cancer. I have no idea whether this is a good thing or not, but it’s pretty random. I tend to associate germanium with old transistors rather than drinking water.

This ultrasound imaging system is designed as a peripheral to a standard notebook computer. The prototype unit has been developed by a group at the Japan National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, working with the Hiroshima Institute of Technology.

The unit can be used in health care or beauty facilities, or even in the home, to visualize the key components of the body (muscles, bones, subcutaneous fat) and give fat and muscle measurements. It is hoped that this technology will help to prevent elderly people from being confined to their beds.

Users connect Ubiquitous Echo to their personal computers and use the included software to collect detailed information about specific parts of the body. The ultrasonic echography equipment traditionally used in medical examinations is prohibitively expensive and too large to be used by health care and beauty facilities or in the home. This new machine is small, lightweight, and inexpensive and can even be put into a bag along with a laptop computer and carried around.

No pricing estimates are stated, but it is likely to be much less expensive than standalone ultrasound systems, in addition to being much more portable.

This might be a good addition to a mobile health unit or a field health center.

A newly created business called Global Health will work to bring it to market.

Links:

• AIST press release
• Global Health website (Japanese)
• GH site translated to English via Google)

via Medgadget

I’ve been only semi-functional for the past few days, having gone through three bottles of Robitussin so far in an attempt to fend off some sort of cold.

In the meantime, I see there’s more ominous news about the possibility of an avian flu outbreak. Latest is in CNN:

The latest outbreak, among geese, was in a village in the suburbs of Changtian city in the eastern province of Anhui, Noureddin Mona, of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters.

He said the Ministry of Agriculture had told him on Monday 2,100 birds had been infected, 550 had died and 45,000 had been culled.

“We are highly concerned about this,” he said of the outbreak, adding that the area had been sealed off at a radius of 3 miles (5 km).

Bill Bishop points out coverage in Caijing, a Chinese business magazine:

When Chinese scientists identified H5N1 in Guangdong in 1996, however, the authorities denied that China had been substantially affected by the bird flu. As late as 2003, official animal epidemic reports had never listed avian flu. That official stance contradicted scientific research results during the same period, which revealed several cases of avian flu infection.

In 2004, in the wake of the SARS crisis, the animal epidemic became more transparent. Avian flu is no longer a state secret. The 49 H5N1 infection cases among ducks and chickens in early 2004 were publicly disclosed, a move that won widespread applause.
…
On the other hand, Guan Yi, a microbiologist at Hong Kong University, said he and his colleagues have found the avian flu virus in southern China in one province where the authorities claim there is no bird flu. Guan told Caijing that the virus can be found in most of China’s poultry markets, but that “we are not informed of it.”

At this rate, I’ll recover from whatever this is just in time to deal with the flu season.

The Gmaps Pedometer is a great hack combining two of my current interests, running and map hacking.

I just tried entering a couple of routes that I run on regularly to compare the results from the Gmaps Pedometer with my logs from my Timex Bodylink GPS, and they’re pretty close. This seems like a relatively painless way to get approximate course distance without having to actually measure the course, assuming you remember where you ran.

update 2005-07-07 20:46 – looks like they may have exceeded the Google API 50k request limit, it’s complaining about the “Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site”.

 
Awesome. I love reading about people like Kozo Haraguchi. Most people would feel pretty good just making it to 95. I hope I’m able to run at all when/if I live as long as this guy, who just set a record in the 95-99 year old male running bracket. Plugging his 22.04 second 100m time into McMillan’s equivalent pace calculator, he would be doing something like 92-second 400m or 7:28 miles or a 4:12 marathon, which is around what I did in my first marathon a couple of years ago.

From Sports Illustrated:

“It was the first time for me to run in the rain and as I was thinking to myself, ‘I mustn’t fall, I mustn’t fall,’ I made it across the goal,” Haraguchi told reporters.

Japanese media reports Monday said that Haraguchi had beaten the world record of 24.01 seconds for the 95 to 99 age group set by Hawaii-resident Erwin Jaskulski in May 1999.

updated 2005-08-07 11:57:27 to fix broken image link. This one’s from the Sydney Morning Herald.

This is a typical cafeteria lunch here. I actually took this photo a few months ago during a previous trip; since then there’s a new caterer for this building. They have round trays instead of rectangular ones, and they have added a non-vegetarian option.

The way the cafeteria works, there aren’t really choices of what to get. I generally bring a protein bar with me to have with lunch, as otherwise it’s hard to maintain an adequate protein intake to support my training routine. If you look at the tray, you’ll see white rice, brown rice, lentils, flat wheat bread, a chick pea/spinach/carrot curry, some fried rice puff thing, and some onions. There’s also some sambar on the rice, which is more or less vegetable broth.

The cafeteria lunch here usually has some milk curd which would provide some protein. I tend to skip milk products and fresh produce, though, since I’m not in country long enough to acclimate to the local microflora and fauna. Even the milk at the hotel has odd lumps floating around in it from time to time. The concept of “skim milk” is a little alien here.
So, without the milk or yogurt component of the lunch, I’m pretty much left with carbohydrates, carbohydrates, fat, and whatever proteins can be coaxed out of the combination of legumes + rice.

…or at least it may prevent the Avian Flu.

In today’s Wall Street Journal (Wednesday May 11, 2005) there is an article by Hae Won Choi reporting on research at Seoul National University on using kimchi extract to cure avian flu. (Link – unfortunately it’s only available to WSJ online subscribers)

South Korean microbiologist Kang Sa Ouk thinks he’s come up with a new weapon in the battle against the bird flu virus: kimchi.

Last December, Dr. Kang used a bacteria extracted from kimchi, Korea’s fiery national dish of fermented vegetables, to treat 39 chickens with avian influenza. Over 10 days, 22 of 26 chickens given either a diluted or concentrated culture fluid of the bacteria as a substitute for water showed signs of recovery; all 13 chickens given just water died.

This following part sounds like familiar advice from Korean friends and relatives:

Kimchi is credited with helping digestion, fighting cancer and delaying aging. When severe acute respiratory syndrome hit Asia, many Koreans believed kimchi protected them. South Korea had no confirmed cases of the disease, unlike neighboring China and Japan.

Here’s an earlier article from the BBC back in March 2005, available without subscription:

Scientists at Seoul National University say they fed an extract of kimchi to 13 infected chickens – and a week later 11 of them had started recovering.

The researchers said the results were far from scientifically proven and if kimchi did have the effects they observed, it was unclear why.

Obviously, there are some differences between chickens and humans, but this is a great excuse to eat more kimchi at home and with your friends…

Update 02-16-2006 21:44 PST: LG Electronics is introducing an air conditioner with a kimchi-extract-coated filter, presumably to help protect from avian flu. Assorted links and comments at BoingBoing.

Update 05-21-2006 13:10. PDT: Too much kimchi might be bad for you. (LA Times, via Boing Boing).

Just over a week left before the Big Sur Marathon, found this blog linked from the web site. Reading about these guys over at the the Monterey Herald makes me feel a little better about how this training cycle has been going.

The Longest Mile is an online diary following the triumphs and travails of Ken Ottmar and Jon Segal, two overweight, out-of-shape, newspaper desk jockeys training for the brutal Big Sur Marathon. Come and taste the pain.

Just looking at these guys makes my feet and knees ache. Hope they do ok next weekend, or at least avoid major injuries…

I had a another periodic post-surgery eye exam today. I keep meaning to collect and post my notes on my experience with wavefront LASIK, which I had done on both eyes last November. Starting out at 20/80+, I am consistently doing 20/20 to 20/15 on the vision chart and have essentially no discernable vision artifacts, and no problems with dry eyes.

In the meantime, I am happy to recommend my eye surgeon, Dr. Edward Manche at the Stanford Eye Laser Center. There are places that have trendier decor, and other places that are much cheaper, but he’s the guy with his name on a lot of the clinical trials for laser eye procedures and lives and breathes this stuff. As an added bonus for me, his office is 10 minutes from my home.

It’s not for everyone, but if you need a good laser vision surgeon, look him up.

Disclaimer: I have no afflilation with Dr. Manche or the Stanford Eye Laser Center other than as a happy client.