Graham Glass, etc.

Mercy Ship

I just came across the Mercy Ship web site. Doctors on hospital ships tour developing nations and provide free medical care to people that badly need it. In many cases, they perform surgery to remove horribly disfiguring tumors.

This blog does a great job of providing insight into what it's like to work on a Mercy Ship, with some stunning but disturbing examples of the difference their help can make. After visiting the site, I felt compelled to make a donation; just a few dollars can make a huge difference to someone's life.

Ocean Quiz

I bet you can't name all the world's oceans!

One of the side effects of working on my education venture is that I'm learning about stuff that I wouldn't have otherwise encountered.

For example, during a supposedly simple attempt to upload information about the world's oceans into a semantic database, I came across not only a controversy about whether the Artic ocean should be classified one of the world's oceans, but also the mention of a Southern ocean which I had never even heard of. According to Wikipedia, the Southern Ocean is the body of water encircling the contintent of Antartica. This is verified by the CIA World Factbook.

So the answer to my initial question is officially: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Artic.

Adventures in the Semantic Web

As part of my new venture in the education space, I've been working on a semantic database and techniques for loading the database with useful content.

Because so much content is available on the web, it's important to be able to parse it for particular pieces of information. However, since most of the content is only available as human-readable HTML, this task can be challenging and time-consuming.

In order to speed this process up, I've been working on various approaches for doing this automatically and have had fairly good success with some simple stuff. For example, the first version of my algorithm can extract lists of countries, states, professions, elements and planets from the web without any a-priori knowledge of specific page structure.

The goal for the next version of the algorithm is to be able to learn properties of things and extract their values automatically, such as the capital city of a particular country, the atomic weight of a particular element, and the distance of a particular planet from the sun.

While information extraction is not the most important part of the software I'm writing, it's certainly one of the more interesting and challenging areas. It's also a great way to truly learn the ins and outs of semantic processing.

Russian Trip Part 2: Moscow

This is part 2 of a series about my recent trip to Russia; part 1 is here.

I traveled to Moscow from Washington Dulles airport via Frankfurt. The flight times weren't too bad; about 8 hours to Frankfurt, a 1 hour stopover, then about 3 hours to Moscow. I was a bit worried about my connection because the stopover time was so small, but Frankfurt is efficient and I had time to spare. I ended up arriving in Moscow at around noon.

During my trip research, I noticed that many people talked about getting ripped off by taxi services, so I arranged private transportation through my travel agent for all airport, hotel, and train connections. My private car whisked me efficiently from the Moscow Sheremetyevo International airport to the Metropol, a 5-star hotel right across from the Red square.

The Metropol is an old-fashioned hotel with a feeling of "old Russian opulence". The rooms themselves aren't particularly luxurious, but the entrance hall is impressive and they have a small orchestra that plays during dinner times. Even your breakfast is accompanied by a harpist!

When I checked in they asked for my passport which apparently is then registered with the local officials. This is normal procedure and I got it back a few hours later.

I didn't sleep at all on the flight to Moscow so I immediately took a 2 hour nap to get refreshed for an afternoon walk around Red Square. When I awoke I booked a personal tour guide for a couple of trips around Moscow as well as getting tickets to the local Circus and Ballet. When I travel I like a combination of guided tours, local events, personal walkabouts and some night clubbing, so I made sure I didn't over-schedule my 4 days in town.

When I left the hotel to walk around Red Square, the first thing I noticed was that the weather was glorious. Most people think of snow and rain when they think of Russia, but apparently August is a great time of the year to travel there and most of my trip was 75F and blue skies.

The next thing I noticed was that the people were in generally good physical shape and dressed fairly casually; I was expecting more high fashion in the streets of Moscow. Relative to cities like New York and London, there were not as many tourists as I expected; maybe this is due to the additional visa requirements.

Walking into Red Square was an awesome feeling. The buildings of the State History Museum and St. Basil's Cathedral are impressive when viewed on TV, and in real life they are stunning. The cathedral is especially beautiful, with towers topped by colorful swirls.

During my walk, I was constantly on the lookout for the various characters described by the hilarious Exile Field Guide; I definitely saw a few Trophia Minigarchias!

After a few hours of wandering around, I ordered a drink and a snack from one of the fine restaurants by the side of Red Square. You can sit outside and watch the world go by, which is an enjoyable thing to do when you're in an exotic place like Moscow. I was relieved to see that the portions of food were sized according to European sensibilities; about half the quantity of a typical America portion.

After an hour or so relaxing in the restaurant, I headed back to the Metropol to prepare for a night on the town.

This series will be continued in part 3.

Optical Illusions and the Role of Context

This is one of the best optical illusions ever; click here and then select "Illusion3".

In the example I linked to above, even though the absolute color in the center of the structure is the same in both pictures, they appear quite different in context. This kind of optical trickery makes you wonder what other kinds of illusions occur in everyday life that we're not aware of. For example, in the case of wealth, when a person travels from a country with a high monthly salary to a country with a low monthly salary, the amount of money in their personal bank account remains the same but the perception of their own wealth is quite different.

It makes you realize how much affect context has on the way we process information.

p.s. While searching on Google for a suitable picture for the bottom of this blog entry, I stumbled upon an amusing and slightly racy optical illusion. Click here to see it.

p.p.s. Some more brilliant optical illusions are here and here.

Virgo

I'm not a big believer in astrology, but I was quite pleased to read this synopsis of my star sign:

• The article says "Virgo is the sign in the zodiac most dedicated to serving" and my high school motto was "serve and obey".
• It mentions that one of my ideal careers would be as a teacher, and education is the focus of my new startup.
• It says that we make "excellent lovers and dedicated spouses that love to live on the wild side once in a while".

Don't you just love horoscopes!?

Home Recording: Take Me There Again

Here's part 7 of my home recording series; part 6 is here.

I recorded this song while I was renting a room in a house that had an upright piano. Although I prefer electronic keyboards, I wanted to use a real piano for this particular piece. The rest of the household was gone for an afternoon, so I used the opportunity to record the piano and vocals in the few hours that were available to me. I remember that it took quite a while to record the piano part, since it had to be played perfectly from start to finish.

Click on the following link to play the song:
Download TakeMeThere.mp3

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Take Me There Again
copyright 1987 by Graham Glass

You're in my heart,
Here tonight and forever.
And from the start,
We've been in love,
We've been in heaven.

Take me there again.

You are the one,
Who loves me when nothing goes right.
Just like the sun,
You shine your light,
You gave me my sight.

Now I can see again.

The feelings I have,
Will always remain (not fade away).
So don't you worry at all,
I'll always be there.
Whenever you need me,
You only have to call.

(instrumental)

Now I can see again.

The feelings I have,
Will always remain (not fade away).
So don't you worry at all,
I'll always be there.
Whenever you need me,
You only have to call.
If you need me,
You only have to call.

You are my friend,
Here tonight and forever.
And 'til the end,
We'll be in love,
We'll be in heaven.

Take me there again.

Manhattan, NY

I enjoy the buzz of city living, and am considering a move from Georgetown, Washington D.C. to Manhattan, New York.

I'm paying so much for my current apartment that I don't think it will cost much more to live in NY. And even though you don't need a car in NY, I love my SL55 so much that I'll probably end up keeping it in a garage for the duration of my stay.

I've heard that there's a fairly vibrant software scene in the so-called "Silicon Alley" area, and the social scene is of course second to none.

If anyone has any advice on living in Manhattan, please let me know.

Understanding the Placebo Effect

According to the Register, scientists are making good progress on understanding the placebo effect.

When subjects suffering from some pain were told they would receive painkillers, the parts of the brain that produce our bodies' natural painkillers, the mu-opioid receptors, kicked up a storm. This happened whether the subjects were actually given painkillers or instead given a placebo.

The brain activity was proportional to the expectations the subjects had about how effective the painkillers would be. The researchers say this is the first direct evidence that endorphins can help explain how the placebo effect works.

New Venture, Part 4

This is part 4 of the series; part 3 is here.

I mentioned in part 2 of this series that I started developing the education product by creating a hardcoded HTML version of the web site using Dreamweaver. Then, after getting a rough feel for the user experience, I converted the initial data into XML and wrote a simple semantic database for storing and manipulating the content. Now that I'm back from Russia, I'm working on a version of the web site whose content is extracted dynamically from the database.

Once again, I'm keeping things simple and using JSP on Tomcat for the initial prototype. Since most of the content is dynamic, the JSPs themselves are very simple and mostly just turn around and call database APIs. I'm putting almost no time at all into the look and feel of the web site, because the purpose of this iteration is to figure out the main use cases and make sure the database APIs can handle them.

The first iteration of the dynamic web site is only read-only, which means that it allows you to navigate through the existing content that was read in from the handcoded XML, but not to add or modify content. I'll probably have this part done by the end of the week.

Next week I'm going to start on a writeable version of the web site which will allow users to add and modify content. To avoid having to enter the same content again and again, I'll also add a simple persistence scheme to save semantic data onto disk.

One of the interesting spin-offs of working on this project are some ideas on how to simplify the fundamental concepts behind the semantic web. I don't want to drift off unnecessarily into R&D mode, but there's a part of me that hopes that I'll need to implement the ideas in order to support some of the features I have in mind.

Part 5 of this series is here.