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Taiwan vs American Culture: Public vs Private

27-Dec-10

Taiwanese and American cultures have different divisions between the trichotomy of public vs private vs intimate life. Taiwan culture seems to strictly divide public life and private life, with much more relaxed boundaries between private and intimate life. American culture, in contrast, has a more relaxed division between public and private life, while maintaining a very tangible boundary between private and intimate life. It’s most easy to elaborate on this architecturally:

Public vs Private: Fences: The archetypal American fence is the white picket fence. More symbolic than practical, it’s waist-high, non-imposing and it doesn’t do much to impede visibility of the interior for outsiders. The typical Taiwanese fence is a bit more imposing: seven feet high, cement, 6 inches thick, and (as if that wasn’t enough!) shards of broken glass embedded into the top to deter burglars. (And, no, this isn’t motivated by higher crime rates, though that was my first guess, too).

Private vs Intimate: Home layout. The typical American home has a bunch of bedrooms, separate from one another. When I was growing up, lots of kids would even close/lock their bedroom doors, to get that extra bit of privacy. The traditional Taiwanese home (not the modern flats, but rather the ones out in the countryside from 50 years ago) has bedrooms all connected. The master bedroom is in the very back, and to get through it, one has to walk through all the other bedrooms in series.

So, knowing this, what are the repercussions of public vs private vs intimate on use of the internet, social networks, and social software in general? Do we need to design for different cultures differently, especially in forums where people interact?

[some thoughts after spending a few weeks in Taiwan over the holidays, partially inspired by seeing a local Taiwanese parody of an American white picket fence, that reached less than knee-high]

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2011 – Let’s see if we can pick this up a bit.

26-Dec-10

An idle search for my name over the weekend yielded the harsh reality that my friendster profile from 2002 is at the top of the results.

If it had been any other page, I would have been complacent about the state of things. But… Friendster? Really?

Wow. Just wow. I think I’m going to need to pick things up a bit.

New Years’ resolution: blog at least 2x/month. I have no dearth of fun side projects I’ve hacked on over the years, maybe I can github some of them too…

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On Microblogging and Feedreaders

31-Oct-10

I’ve been hearing more and more, “I don’t really use my Feedreader any more, I keep up to date with news and interesting links via Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook”.

So, now I’m wondering: can I extract and distill this interesting stuff from microblogs?

  • Brute-force solution: extract all hyperlinks from twitter feeds of friends and friends-of-friend. Expose them in an RSS feed for syndication
  • More work: Keep track of the source of information (from friend, from friend’s network), aggregate it (x people posted this same link, x different friend’s networks posted this same link)
    • (aside: I remember reading somewhere that while the immediate-friend relationship provides lots of utility for news, friend-of-friend is mostly noise)
  • More work: Provide some sort of feedback/voting mechanism, to see which sources are actually useful (it’d be easy to hook these up as features to a machine learning classifier
  • Tangent: Aside from links, retweets could be an interesting thing to explore in the same way; less sanguine about this though.
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Quantum Mechanical Effects in the Brain?

22-Jun-09

<delurks>

I’ve been seeing евтини мебелиPenrose’s quantum mind theory gain more and more traction lately. Every time I turn around there’s a new discussion about it, a new paper published, or a new blog entry… all proposed by intelligent people that I respect.

It brings to mind a theory that I heard a long while ago, that throughout history we’ve always used the latest technology and science to talk about the brain.

The ancient romans said the brain was like a catapult. Later, people have compared the brain to a hydrolics system, a telephone switchboard, or a calculator. And, now we say it’s like a computer, Turing-complete with a Von-Neumann architecture.

This is by no means evidence that there aren’t quantum effects, entanglement, what not, going on in the brain… but it does increase my skepticism whenever I hear “Oh, the brain is just a system that can be represented by $theory_du_jour “.

</delurks>

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Cognitive release?

11-Sep-08

Twittering provides just enough cognitive release that I haven’t been feeling the blogging itch. It’s so much lower-maintenance.

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Back from NY

17-May-08

Spent this last week in NY, for a summit on Machine Learning for work. Had a wonderful time. Networking-wise I found the experience much better than academia (more possibility, ease for future collaboration with the folks I met).

Jetlag did a number on me (going to sleep at West Coast Time, then waking up in time for 8am EST talks…). Feh. Talks were worth it, though.

Met a bunch of really interesting people. It was great to talk to other folks that are doing classification at Google (including taxonomic classification like I’m doing!). Learned a lot (note to self: read up more on gibbs sampling, latent dirichlet allocation, and the RCV1 corpus). Also got to hang out with Chih-Jen Lin a bit, had great discussions about academia, publications (quality versus quantity of publications in China/Taiwan), and how to reform the academic publication system to give better signals as to what is readworthy. Right now, reviewers and conference organizers are the gatekeepers, and that doesn’t scale well. When you think of how many smart people read academic publications, the only way that they can give feedback is to publish something themselves. That’s such a high cost to communicate, it leads to stagnation and monoculturality in the community (echo chamber!). I wish I could easily see, for the profs I respect, a “Papers I read last year that I found really influential” list. Aggregate these and you get great, quantitative metrics of a paper’s worth. Also, “best in conference” awards for papers are so short-sighted; we really don’t know what’s good for a couple years. It would be great to have a “best 2 years ago” retrospective award for conferences and journals. компютриCiteULike starts to address these issues, but it isn’t in wide use and it’s not perfect.

The city itself

  • So nice to be somewhere that prioritizes pedestrians over cars. By contrast, Santa Monica issues tickets if you start to walk in a crosswalk when the “walk” sign turns into a blnking red hand. Sigh.
  • I’m reminded of Taipei every time I visit NY. There’s a semi-tangible energy in the air of both, lots of people crammed into a small area, everything walkable, and alive, all hours of the day and night. I would love to live here, at least before I have kids. Probably not going to happen, but it would be fun.
  • One night, instead of going out, spent a chill 3 hours out on Google’s 8th story balcony overlooking the cityline, admiring the view and talking to co-workers. Amazing.
  • Ate some good food there, but I have three regrets: (1) didn’t order any morning street bagels, (2) didn’t get any late-night pizza, (3) likewise for late-night street-gyros. Sigh, will have to come back again.
  • Also, damnit, this is twice I’ve been to the city and haven’t yet heard any good jazz!
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I can has consciousness?

28-Nov-07

Conversations at work recently have turned again and again to consciousness and self-awareness (what, you thought “Android” was just a phone? ;) ). Now, I’m not going to belabor the point with discussions of artificial intelligence and yet another amateur’s resummarization of Searle’s Chinese Room[1]. Instead, I’ve been thinking about self-awareness in groups of humans.

A bullet-point braindump:

  • As background, remember that short story in Godel Escher Bach, where the ant-eater communicated with the colony of ants (not the ants themselves, but the colony), and ate certain individual ants as a way to shape the colony into something that’s more intelligently connected?
  • It’s a cliche’d remark that groups of humans begin to resemble organisms in their own right. Corporations seek after the good of the corporation rather than the good of any of its individuals. Cultures grow, intermingle, reproduce spawning new cultures. OK, so these macro-groups of humans are animals, that’s for sure. But are they self-aware Conscious? Would we recognize it if they were?
  • It’s interesting when a group of people who’ve been meeting for a while realize that they are in fact behaving as a group, and in turn have a group identity. Is this awareness of group identity the same as self-awareness in the group? (answer: I don’t think so, this is something different).
  • To extend the brain metaphor, imagine humans to be the neurons in a larger collective brain. Urgh, the speed of signal transition along axon-dendrite gap is horribly slow. What effect does this slowness have? Also, humans are damn intelligent signal processors compared to neurons. What effect would our individual intelligences have on the larger structure?
  • Would such a self-aware “organism” think thoughts that are entirely separate and entirely transcendent above the thoughts of its constituents?
  • Scale? Seems to be the general belief that intelligence is the emergent result of massive amounts of highly, highly interconnected neurons. How many people do you need in a group before it can be considered an organism? A self-aware organism? Is the interconnectedness of humans even on a large enough order of magnitude to support a functionally processing organism? What are such an organism’s inputs, outputs? Would human sub-organizations specialize into computational functional tools, similar to how neurons in the brain are specialized into groups like the PFC, the amygdala, etc?
  • I imagine an extraterrestrial coming to the earth, and conversing with society as opposed to individuals. That would be an interesting story. But not the kind of sci-fi that would entertain a puny human mind, though, that’s for sure.

Hmm, I’ll have to think more about this… so many premature thoughts… And most of them the result of only 4 hours of sleep for the last couple days. My apologies, dear anonymous reader, for the unpolished words, the undeveloped concepts, the flaws. “Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness.”

[1] (In any case, I love Ben Goertzel‘s take on the situation, which, to paraphrase: “When the time comes, and you’re actually arguing with the computer whether it is self-aware or not, then the point is already moot, isn’t it?”)

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The Windhover

13-Oct-07 
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
   dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
   As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,-the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, early 1900s

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Weekend hacking

06-Aug-07

Two things this weekend:

  • Port/migration/(possible downgrade) of my personal wiki to an earlier version of MoinMoin. I kept on getting a “CacheNeedsUpdating” error. Source diving and hack patching was no help. Fix was to go to “data/pages” directory, and run 
    find . | grep "/cache$" | xargs rm -rf

    . Basically removed the outdated cache. Not sure if it was internal file format thing due to different version, or timestamp thing or what. But, it works now.

  • Installed dd-wrt on my router (Belkin F5D7230-4, version 1010). There were a few bumps (the tftp copy wouldn’t take very well, I had to do it a couple times, and the router took a long while to reboot, which I mis-diagnosed as a crash). However, it all worked in the end, and I’m pretty happy with the results. Even the micro version of dd-wrt is pretty featureful, with traffic shaping, static IP address asignees for DHCP via MAC address identifiers, and other tasty bits. And a wonderful interface, compared with the factory-shipped firmware (this is, perhaps, the first instance in the history of the world when Free software has a better UI than closed software). Open source is a wonderful thing.

Also, this morning, via conversation with Hao-Chuan:
I need to think more about intellectual foraging. Metaphor of information tracking/consumption, based on food tracking/consumption.

  • What are internal mental model & goal structures, instinctual to finding food gathering that we’ve now operator-overloaded to deal with information gathering, esp on the net?
  • Peter Pirolli (PARK) : http://sigchi.org/chi2003/docs/t23.pdf, http://www.amazon.com/Information-Foraging-Theory-Interaction-Human-Technology/dp/0195173325
  • How can we design information architecture, and web page architecture, to make information foraging more intuitive, more productive? (i.e. how can I format my stuff to be more tasty, digestible)
  • Tangentially, what if we compare the “tastiness vs healthiness” of information. How do different sites (digg vs metafilter vs reddit vs slashdot vs my delicious feed vs my blog vs my reading habits) fit on this cartesian plot? Pages that are “naturally desirable” are not necessarily the best way to spend our foraging time.

(aside: It’s now August, last post in April… where has time gone? I think I was a lot more motivated to blog when i was back in Academia. The atmosphere back then was a bit… stagnating intellectually, so the internets became my vent. Now, here at Google, I’m in general more intellectually fulfilled, work around great people every day. This is so strange, I thought it was supposed to be the opposite (academia being the haven and nurturer of free thinking, and industry being the great pit of stagnation). Both, at least in my own microcosm, are anything but).

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Changes

14-Apr-07

Migrating my life away from the ISI servers, as I don’t know how much longer I’ll have access to them. That means this blog needs a new home. And this is where it will stay, I guess, perhaps for the next decade at least…

My email, too. It’s now nick-at-motespacedotcom. Hosting everything myself, away from university hardware. The old email addresses I had will remain indefinitely, but I’m phasing them out. I suppose it’s good to change things up, but I’m going to miss fairuz, my old server that was sitting on a fat pipe out where ARPANET was birthed and, coincidentally, a couple floors below ICANN.

I suppose this is all a roundabout way of saying that my academic life is unfortunately on a bit of hiatus right now. I’m taking a one- or two-year leave of absence from USC, and am working for Google in the interim. When I come back, I’ll likely be transitioning away from Computer Aided Language Learning (that half-written thesis will be good for kindling next time I go camping, perhaps), and into the Ontology depths of Natural Language Processing.

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