I was excited to be a part of “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer”, a documentary that premieres tomorrow night (Tuesday November 14th) at 10PM Eastern / 9PM Central. Here’s a taste:
Can’t wait to see how this 5-episode series turns out. It was very exciting to work with such a great group of code breakers, investigators, researchers and filmmakers.
If you are interested in the Zodiac ciphers, be sure to check out my site dedicated to the topic:
Posted in Uncategorized
I hate calling strangers on the phone (it’s why I was fired from my first real job in high school, lol). But congressional staff are required to count how many calls they are getting for and against various issues. When enough people call, it can make a real difference. It feels better to me to vent at a public official rather than at each other.
I called my representative Bob Goodlatte (R, VA) (202-225-5431) with this message:
I’m a constituent who lives in Roanoke County. I wanted to share my concerns about the new president’s immigration order.
I was disappointed to read Goodlatte’s praise of Trump’s immigration order.
I respect that we need effective vetting to deal with the threat of terrorism. The immigration ban might have good intentions but it is harming more people than it is helping. The order is also illegal and unconstitutional. This is because people are being held without due process. And it discriminates based on religion.
It hurts many innocent families affected by detainments and deportations.
It is hurting many innocent Muslims worldwide. They are first to suffer at the hands of terrorists. They are the first victims. Instead of turning them away, we need them to be our partners against terrorism. We need to unite with them against terrorism. The executive order punishes the victims of terrorism.
The ban is helping extremist groups. ISIS uses these rising tensions to prove to recruits that a religious war is happening.
Fear and ignorance are radicalizing many Americans against Muslims.
We all want America to be safe from radical Islamic terrorism, but not at such a high and dangerous cost to the world. Please don’t let the new administration provoke a religious war. This new extremism is not what America should be. This is not going to make us safer.
Posted in Uncategorized
I’ve upgraded the blog software and moved this much neglected blog to a new host. I was curious to see which of the old posts were popular over the years and so here’s a sampling:
Posted in Uncategorized
I’ve finally finished the web site for my new book of puzzles.
Go there and check out the book. You can even download a free edition!
Posted in computing, evolutionary computing, toys, Uncategorized
You enter a contest. A million dollars is at stake. Forty-one thousand teams from 186 different countries are clamoring for the prize and the glory. You edge into the top 5 contestants, but there is only one prize, and one winner. Second place is the first loser. What do you do?
Team up with the winners, of course.
The Netflix Prize is a competition that is awarding $1,000,000 to whomever can come up with the best improvement to their movie recommendation engine. Their system looks at the massive amounts of movie rental data to try to predict how well users will like other movies. For example, if you like Coraline, you may also like Sweeney Todd. But Netflix’s recommendation engine isn’t great at making predictions, so they decided to offer a bounty to anyone who could come up with a system that has a verifiable 10% improvement to Netflix’s prediction accuracy.
The contest recently ended with two teams jockeying for the prize. During the two and a half years the contest has been active, several individuals and small groups dominated the contest leaderboard;, with competition among 41,000 teams from 186 different countries. The competition became fierce, resulting in coalitions forming. The team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” formed from the separate teams “BellKor” (part of the Statistics Research Group in AT&T labs), “BigChaos” (a group of folks who specialize in building recommender systems), and “PragmaticTheory” (two Canadian engineers with no formal machine learning or mathematics training). Another conglomerate team, “The Ensemble“, is made up of “Grand Prize Team” (itself a coalition of members combining strategies to win the prize), “Vandelay Industries (another mish-mash of volunteers)”, and “Opera Solutions“.
;
At first, it looked like BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos won. But now it looks like The Ensemble won. Netflix says it will verify and announce the winner in a few weeks.
Who the hell cares? Why is this interesting in the slightest? Ten percent seems so insignificant.
Well, predicting human behavior seems impossible. But this contest has clearly shown that some amount of improvement in prediction of complicated human behavior is indeed possible. And what’s really interesting about the winning teams is that no single machine learning or statistical technique dominates by itself. Each of the winning teams “blends” a lot of different approaches into a single prediction engine.
Artificial neural networks. Singular value decomposition. Restricted Boltzmann Machines. K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithms. Nonnegative matrix factorization. These are all important algorithms and techniques, but they aren’t best in isolation. Blending is key. Even the teams in the contest were blended together.
United we stand.
Each technique has its strengths and weaknesses. Where one predictor fails, another can take up the slack with its own unique take on the problem.
BellKor, in their 2008 paper describing their approach, made the following conclusions about what was important in making predictions:
;Yehuda Koren, one of the members of BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos and a researcher for Yahoo! Israel, went on to publish another paper that goes into more juicy details about their team’s techniques.
I hope to see more contests like this. The KDD Cup is the most similar one that comes to mind. But where is the ginormous cash prize???
Posted in computing, evolutionary computing, math, movies, science, tech, Uncategorized
Bob Parsons, the entrepreneur who started the highly successful GoDaddy domain registration companies, published a list of his 16 rules for “success in business and life in general” way back in 2006. I only recently discovered the list, and many of his rules really ring true to me, especially #3, #7, #9, and #16:
1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe that not much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone. I hear people say, “But I’m concerned about security.” My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.”
2. Never give up. Almost nothing works the first time it’s attempted. Just because what you’re doing does not seem to be working, doesn’t mean it won’t work. It just means that it might not work the way you’re doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity.
3. When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think. There’s an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”
4. With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be. Very seldom will the worst consequence be anywhere near as bad as a cloud of “undefined consequences.” My father would tell me early on, when I was struggling and losing my shirt trying to get Parsons Technology going, “Well, Robert, if it doesn’t work, they can’t eat you.”
5. Focus on what you want to have happen. Remember that old saying, “As you think, so shall you be.”
6. Take things a day at a time. No matter how difficult your situation is, you can get through it if you don’t look too far into the future, and focus on the present moment. You can get through anything one day at a time.
7. Always be moving forward. Never stop investing. Never stop improving. Never stop doing something new. The moment you stop improving your organization, it starts to die. Make it your goal to be better each and every day, in some small way. Remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Small daily improvements eventually result in huge advantages.
8. Be quick to decide. Remember what General George S. Patton said: “A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
9. Measure everything of significance. I swear this is true. Anything that is measured and watched, improves.
10. Anything that is not managed will deteriorate. If you want to uncover problems you don’t know about, take a few moments and look closely at the areas you haven’t examined for a while. I guarantee you problems will be there.
11. Pay attention to your competitors, but pay more attention to what you’re doing. When you look at your competitors, remember that everything looks perfect at a distance. Even the planet Earth, if you get far enough into space, looks like a peaceful place.
12. Never let anybody push you around. In our society, with our laws and even playing field, you have just as much right to what you’re doing as anyone else, provided that what you’re doing is legal.
13. Never expect life to be fair. Life isn’t fair. You make your own breaks. You’ll be doing good if the only meaning fair has to you, is something that you pay when you get on a bus (i.e., fare).
14. Solve your own problems. You’ll find that by coming up with your own solutions, you’ll develop a competitive edge. Masura Ibuka, the co-founder of SONY, said it best: “You never succeed in technology, business, or anything by following the others.” There’s also an old Asian saying that I remind myself of frequently. It goes like this: “A wise man keeps his own counsel.”
15. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Lighten up. Often, at least half of what we accomplish is due to luck. None of us are in control as much as we like to think we are.
16. There’s always a reason to smile. Find it. After all, you’re really lucky just to be alive. Life is short. More and more, I agree with my little brother. He always reminds me: “We’re not here for a long time; we’re here for a good time.”
Is it working for him?
Perhaps. 🙂
I’m very guilty of violating rule #3 (“When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think”). I find it very odd how quickly I’ll neglect some project when it is very close to completion and/or success. Must be some kind of weird self-destructive streak. Or fear of FAIL.
I like Bob Parsons’ list because it is practical and not as “touchy-feely” as many of the other self-improvement lists out there. Maybe it will help me get rid of my boarding pass to the FAIL BOAT.
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted in Uncategorized