Podcast for last week's San Jose and Santa Cruz online

Sorry for the delay, just busy at work so didn't have time to edit and publish the podcast from last week's San Jose and Santa Cruz trip.

Listen to podcasts from the San Jose flea market, San Jose museum of innovation and Santa Cruz beach boardwalk.

Gilroy garlic festival

Today, I went to the Gilroy garlic festival which is in Gilroy, about 1 hour from Palo Alto. There were lots of cars that went to Gilroy. Did you know that Gilroy is the world capital of garlic? And that there are 300 different types of garlic? Anyways, from what I heard, the Gilroy garlic festival has all these foods that use garlic like garlic ice cream. When we arrived at the festival, it cost $12 to get in. There were so many booths with food and garlic. There was free garlic ice cream (which we had, and it was really good) as you can see below.



There was also a booth where you can taste samples of garlic foods like garlic jam, garlic chips, and pickled garlic. Every one was having a really good time at the festival, I managed to buy some garlic for myself! I made a podcast of the festival while I was there so you can download and listen to it, or subscribe to my podcasts. I also have photos up on Flickr as well.

The Gilroy garlic festival runs from Friday July 28 to Sunday July 30.

At Sun Labs intern visit right now!

I'm right now in Sun Labs at the Sun Labs intern visit, part of the Summer Intern Research Series, a collaboration with HP Labs, Microsoft Research, PARC, Google and Sun Labs. The location of Sun Labs is 16 Network Circle, which apparently is very close to where I live off of Willow Road. Sun Labs has a bunch of innovators, one is Jim Waldo who was one of the original developers of Java along with James Gosling. Ivan Sutherland is one of the founding fathers of computer graphics. Sun is a very open lab. I got a tech report by Ivan Sutherland called Technology and Courage as part of the intern package. The director of Sun Labs is talking about Sun Labs and their structure and he mentioned how interns make the world go around (laughter from the intern audience).

The agenda for the Sun visit is here. The Sun Labs portfolio consists of System Sciences, Hardware, Software, Media and Content and Sensors and Clients. The Sun Labs showed us a Sun SPOT, which is a sensor-based device that has accelerometers, a processor, sensors and can run Java. There are 2 technical talks, the first one is Our Work, Our Philosophies, and the Art of the Possible by Randy Smith and Rob Tow. In this talk, they are talking about how the media has changed, how computers have consumed TV. How does this relate with sensor networks? They say that sensor networks short circuit the human, and connect the computer with the environment. They showed a Sun SPOT where by shaking it, you can display digitally a phrase on the screen. The Sun SPOT kind of reminds me of HP Labs' work on SPEC where you can attach these sensors to you and to your environment for environmental monitoring. The Sun SPOT, according to the Sun Labs people, is a perceptual recognition device. They're now showing a demo of running a program on a Sun SPOT deployed wirelessly where the Java program is dragged and dropped to the image of the selected SPOT in the GUI. So, there is this new medium where older technologies are being swallowed.

The second talk is on Moore's Law and the Future of Microprocessors by Ron Ho. Moore's Law says nothing about performance but that CPU speeds will double every 2 years. Gordon Moore was talking about the number of transistors on a silicon die. Performance is equal to # of instructions * # of cycles per instruction * # of seconds per cycle (ah, this is ECE222 hardware architecture undergrad course deja vu). As a processor architect, we want to use ILP, instruction level parallelism to improve performance by executing multiple instructions at once and using pipelining and speculative parallelism. Sun has a new processor called Niagara that makes use of parallelism. In the labs, Sun is pushing around Moore's Law but eventually there will come a time when Moore's Law will end.

The best part of the Sun visit were the demos. It's interesting to see that Sun is really pushing their SPOTS platform for sensors, the majority of the projects that were in the demos used SPOTS. One interesting project was using SPOTS for real-time applications for sensing changes in the car direction with sensors. There was a toy car track with the toy car having a SPOT and sensors on the track that monitor the car and help the car to remain on the track. Another interesting project had to do with searching the space for music, where the delivery of music is done not through ID3 tags but through actual audio spaces and clustering of musical genres is done by analyzing waveforms of the music. There was also a demo of the digital home with digital broadband IPTV technologies.

Thanks Sun for a great event, especially the demos and food!

San Jose and Santa Cruz trip

Yesterday, an intern from work and myself, we went to San Jose and Santa Cruz. We first went to the San Jose flea market. Oh man, no wonder why they call it the world's largest flea market, it was huge! It reminded me of being in one of those flea markets in Hong Kong except bigger and not so narrow. Here are some pictures of the flea market.

This is the entrance to the flea market.



Look at the inside of the flea market



After having lunch at the flea market, we went to the San Jose Tech museum of Innovation. It was so hot that day, it reached past the 100 farenheit mark, so it was really nice to enjoy air conditioning in the car and in the museum!

Here is the entrance to the Tech museum



The Tech museum has three levels, it didn't seem as big compared to the Ontario Science Center in Toronto. I podcasted the Tech museum with my iPod of some of the more interesting exhibits. I did a virtual armwrestle with another person who was in another state (I actually physically armwrestled with a metal hand where the strength of the force is dependent on the opponent on the other hand pushing), and I won! Another interesting exhibit was the view from space, where there was a 3D globe which is a screen that displays a 3D image. In fact, the museum guy explained that the 3D image on the 3D globe is just an illusion, it takes 4 projectors to shine a quarter of the image, and combining all them together gives the illusion of a 3D image. Nonetheless, it was cool, he showed the pictures of the planets. One of the pictures I took of the planets is shown below.



We also went to Santa Cruz and walked along the Santa Cruz boardwalk. The weather was much cooler and more comfortable in Santa Cruz and it didn't feel very hot. There were lots of people on the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

All these and other pictures are on the Flickr web site.

Great summer party at PARC yesterday

Yesterday, I went to PARC's summer patio party. It was great, the food was great, and it was a chance to mingle with PARC people outside of work. Oh yeah, and the band was also great too. It was a beautiful sunny day for a summer party! In fact, since I have been here, it has never rained one bit at all! In Toronto, it wouldn't be like that, there would be sunny periods just like in Palo Alto and then because of the humidity and mugginess, in the instant of like 1 hour, it will rain and there will be thunderstorms. It's nice not having to bring an umbrella to work, like I normally would do going to U of T in Toronto!

Going to visit Microsoft Research in Mountain View today!

Today is one of a part of a lecture series with summer interns with various research labs, and this one is with Microsoft Research. This is the agenda for the visit today. Certainly, this is not in my area of research, but nonetheless it's nice to have an open mind and see what other research groups are doing, what their culture is like, and get a different research environment. And it's Microsoft!

HP unveils small zero power wireless chip

Zero power? Is that possible with a wireless chip? According to the new HP Memory Spot chip, seeing is believing. The Memory Spot chip is a memory device that has a built-in antenna and 10 Mbps wireless transfer rate, comparable to Wi-Fi. So, how is it zero power, you say? According to the article,

The Memory Spot chip is completely self-contained, with no need for a battery or external electronics. HP said it receives power through "inductive coupling" from a special read-write device, which can then extract content from the memory on the chip.

Inductive coupling is the transfer of energy from one circuit component to another through a shared electromagnetic field. A change in current flow through one device induces current flow in the other device

HP said the chip is about half the size of a grain of rice (2 mm by 4 mm square). Working prototypes have storage capacities ranging from 256K to 4 megabytes, or enough to store a short video clip, several images or dozens of pages of text. HP said larger capacities are also possible for future versions.

HP sees a lot of potential in this and has filed lots of patents. It is now looking for partners to make this become a real product. It does give RFID a run for its money, but HP does say that there may be certain applications where Memory Spot would be desirable than RFID and vice versa.

It's nice to see that HP is getting back to its engineering roots and getting back into the innovation game, where HP first started as a company.

Visited the Intel museum today

Today, I decided to visit the Intel museum in Santa Clara. And I was blown away by the exhibits they had there and even blown away by the PDA that they had (in different languages) which was free to use! Here's the PDA that they gave me.



On the PDA were three self-guided tours. In the beginning after fidgeting around, I finally got the tour working. They took away the stylus so I had to use my fingers to tap (no problem, I do the same thing to my Palm since I lost my stylus), but it wasn't responsive right away and sometimes I had to tap multiple times before I got the desired response that I wanted. Several perks happened on the PDA. The self-guided tours were button driven in the program interface on the PDA (it was quite intuitive). What blew me away was the quality of the video that was running, it was simply amazing! And the exhibit information comes to the PDA via Wi-Fi because I noticed the Wi-Fi button was on. So the video pops up when I am right near the exhibit of what the video is talking about. The PDA started stopping in the video sometimes, and a couple of times the PDA just turned off. I tried to turn it on again, but I couldn't. It seemed that after about 45 minutes, the battery was dying and it wasn't being responsive. Ha ha, that's PDAs and wireless for you, it drains the battery really fast (especially if Wi-Fi is constantly on which it was).

So, I went back and told the lady at the counter, and she gave me another PDA to use, and I continued right onto my self-guided tour. I almost went through every exhibit's video on the PDA, so I really stress tested it! I don't think anybody else used as much of the PDA as I did (but me being GadgetMan, I had to!). Anyways, back to the exhibits, there's so much to say, it's probably best to show you the pictures that I took (yes, the museum allows photos!) because it would be too difficult to explain them here. So here are all the photos that I took.

One thing that was really funny, was that I encountered an error box on the PDA, about object not found!



After I finished the tour, I filled out a survey on the computer (web-based) answering about how I felt about the museum, where I came from, etc. And you get a free souvenir (a ball or a pin). All in all, I really enjoyed the Intel museum, I really loved the interactive exhibits. As a kid, you will really love this kind of stuff, it teaches kids about technology. I wish I had this kind of stuff when I was young, it brings the technology to life. I've also made a podcast of my visit to the Intel museum.

Enjoy!

Finally finished reading Naked Conversations!

I have just finally finished reading Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book called Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.



I enjoyed reading this book especially the case studies of the businesses and people that are using blogs and how blogs have changed their company and have improved their productivity and communications. I think it is these success stories that show that blogs do indeed work, and help the small guys play with the big boys. This book shows that if you have something to say and make yourself heard, blog! And don't be afraid to make mistakes or that you will offend someone. In fact, this shows that you are human, and you will be respected for doing that. Otherwise, if you never make mistakes, then how else will you learn? You can't please everyone and it is not desirable to do so. Criticism on blogs actually can be a good thing, it can help your business improve, just like Microsoft is doing with their products and from the Channel 9 blog.

In the end, Israel and Scoble conclude that blogging is making a revolution in the conversation space and how businesses deal with their customers, rather than an evolution. In my opinion, the revolution has to deal with how blogging disseminates information that is faster than any other communication media that we have seen before. It is like the spreading of a virus, it has an entire viral effect not witnessed by any other communication means before. And because of blogging's hypertext structure, and links to other blogs, blogging social networks and communities are created (which I'm studying and researching). In fact, I have a conference paper titled "A Social Hypertext Model for Finding Community in Blogs" at the Hypertext 2006 conference.

Another thing that I liked about the book, is the footnotes of the web sites and blogs used in the book from which while I've been reading, I go to the web site to find more information about the topic in the chapter that Israel and Scoble say. I must admit that at the beginning, I thought how could anyone write a book on blogging, it seems something simple and it makes sense. But then I realize, there are many facets to blogging, it's good to see that even though Scoble and Israel are huge fans and evangelists for blogging, they also mention its downsides. And that keeps the book in perspective for the reader.

I can't wait to get my hands on Israel's new book that has to deal with blogs and social media which I wrote on my post here yesterday.

Shel Israel is writing another book

I've just read that Shel Israel, the author of Naked Conversations along with Robert Scoble, is going to write another book. Right now, he's thinking of the name of the book, so far it is "Global Neighborhoods: How Blogging & Social Media Are Changing Your Worlds". There's been many comments about his title. He's thinking about social media and going beyond blogging and how this enables global neighbourhoods and community. I wrote a comment about his proposed title and book here.

Brain Plasticity PARC forum talk

I'm in an interesting talk at the George E. Pake auditorium at PARC called Brain Plasticity Bases of Human Ability, Disability, and Recovery”
Michael M. Merzenich, PhD

Abstract:
Brain plasticity – the remodeling of effective brain connections as a function of brain use – is the primary basis of the acquisition of the specific skills and abilities that define our individual operational capabilities. Abnormal brain-remodeling progressions contribute crucially to developmental and acquired-adult disabilities. Using computer-guided approaches, we have employed the powerful capacity for functional brain remodeling to develop novel rehabilitation strategies designed to help impaired children and adults. We have also developed “brain fitness programs” designed to grow and sustain high performance capabilities in older-age populations. This talk shall provide a brief summary of our state of progress in this rapidly growing field.

Here is the summary of the talk. My thoughts are in italics.

The brain is an adaptable machine and brain plasticity shows remarkable development of our skills and abilities. This shows in children, who develop the skills rapidly and this is a lifelong process. Humans are incredibly adaptable (which explains why we still haven't gotten computers to surpass human intelligence in AI). The normal primary auditory cortex decreases in size from an infant to an adult in rats. Tonal frequencies in regions of the cortex show which parts of the cortex are responsive to modulated signals and stimuli. Therefore, he says that we can manipulate the rat's brain to successive stimuli by creating a cortex which responds to certain frequencies. By doing this, we are manipulating the cortex of a mammal and if we apply this to humans, we are changing the human brain. This means then we could create specific humans with certain abilities, and this impedes into God's creation and evolution of human beings. We are beginning to play with God's creation with nature, so this has moral implications. This can be good for creating therapies to address impairments in children, but what if that is not the case, that we do it to address a natural weakness and provide a significant competitive advantage compared to other humans?

An older brain controls its own plasticity. He is mentioning that he could take any person in the audience and could manipulate our cortex and brain plasticity and is wanting to do this kind of experiment (audience laughs). We can use our understanding of plasticity to model the origins of human training. The training was conducted on impaired children to improve their reading. This can be used for adults to improve memory (everybody in the audience acknowledges). There are computer-based game type of exercises in the brain plasticity-based training program for adults. Their results are encouraging and show that there is some reversal and a 10-15 years of memory reversal (wow, that's cool, I could use something like this, I always depend on my Palm handheld to remember things) The adults that used this program enjoyed it and didn't want to stop. In an older brain, the cortex slows down and the brain wears down, so the idea is to train the brain to improve the speed of processing.

There are five (of many) training modules to address different types of brain activity: complex thinking, listening, fine motor control, seeing and balance, posture, mobility.

Mashup Camp

Mashup Camp is on for 2 days from July 12 to July 13, with Mashup University from July 10 to July 11. And it's held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA which I was at the past weekend. They have a blog and wiki for this unconference (they call it an unconference). From a look at the web site, they have lots of sessions on mashups like mobile mashups, social networking with mashups, just a lot of different information. It's great to see that there is all this discussion on mashups which is all part of Web 2.0.

Social network analysis of the World Cup

For those people into soccer and watched the World Cup where Italy beat France, here is a network diagram of the passes made from a particular player. This was compiled by FAS Research, who had several talks from the Sunbelt conference this year.



For a larger picture, you can find it here.

BayCHI meeting tonight

The BayCHI meeting is happening right now. This is the July monthly BayCHI meeting. The first talk is the Dunbar Number, Unstructured Trust, and Why Groups Don't Scale and the second talk is The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy: Seen As a New Level in the Massively Multiplayer Game Known as Western Culture.

The Dunbar Number, Unstructured Trust and Why Groups Don't Scale
Christopher Allen
- Life with Alacrity blog web site
- Christopher Allen is doing social software design
- What is the Dunbar number?
- named after Dr. Robin Dunbar, there is a strong correlation between size of the brain (neocortex ratio) and the social group size, and found out the mean size of group size is 147
- the Dunbar number has been featured in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (which I first heard about from the CASCON blogging workshop conference and was mentioned by Joey De Villa)
- Dunbar number also applies to survival groups like military, mafia and terrorist organizations
- what causes this limit?
- Dunbar speculates that 42% of the time is spent in social grooming
- organization requires social grooming, he is talking about the Sopranos TV show where the mafia spend time together
- this is unstructured trust, it is irrational

Unstructured Trust
- No trust
- Familiar stranger, work at Berkeley, you see familiar people you don't know them but you see them while going to work every day
- as unstructured trust progresses, this causes conversations for discovery with the familiar stranger, this is where you find common interests, you move from familiar stranger to start an acquaintance
- we can now become casual friends
- as casual friends, you are likely to meet other friends, then the size of this group becomes like a band
- this is where the group size increases so much, it becomes difficult to participate in the group
- this is the beginning of hierarchy, a group will find a leader or divide into smaller groups
- band becomes a group, and then a mob, the unstructured trust fails and start to impose structure otherwise becomes chaotic
- what are the limits to group size?
- the Dunbar number gives clues as to when the group changes from unstructured trust to structured trust
- there are limits to group size based on his research on an online game called Ultima Online
- Nic Ducheneaut and his group at PARC have done research on social networks and groups in the world of Warcraft (called PlayOn)
- can do network analysis to find cohesion in groups
- size of groups can have impact on group satisfaction -> this is his own personal hypothesis

Concept: Group Size Problems
- small groups, there are too few people, unable to sustain conversation, you feel alone, there may become groupthink, lack of leadership or commitment
- too many people, becomes too noisy, there is lack of trust, cliques and bad gossip

Concept: Cycle of Flames
- text is missing emotional cues in online conversations
- we over-interpret emotions
- message gets sent, then reply is answer to message that is misinterpreted, and then insults happen
- this leads to a vicious cycle of irony -> sarcasm -> insult -> flame (this happens all the time but people are not aware of it)
- therefore need to be careful of emotional words so don't use emotional words like "should, didn't and forgot"
- when necessary, use smilies to avoid confusion :)

Concept: Appropriate Size
- what software works for small groups which is 2-12 active people and best for 4-9 active people (chat room, teleconference w/Backchannel, cooperative editor, discussion list - flat, blogs - shared only to private, blogs - group authored)
- for medium groups (13-150 active, best for 25-80 active)
- instant message, avatar chat, discussion list - threaded, wiki - single workspace
- for large groups (more than 150 active participants), can't rely on unstructured trust, need to have structure
- discussion list - reputation filtered (ie. slashdot)
- wiki - multiple workspaces
- blog - public (structure is controlled by the owner of the blog)
- social network

This looks very similar with what I'm doing with online communities in my research.

E-mail: ChristopherA AT LifeWithAlacrity DOT com

Q & A:
Q: where does the number 42% spent in social grooming come from?
A: Dunbar looked at the groups of monkeys and extrapolated this out for humans. Social grooming includes getting eye contact, there is this act of feeding each other that helps

Q: Transition from unstructured trust to structured trust
- difficult to say, no easy answers
- look for subgroups in Wikipedia, if look at their social networks, the biggest contributors tend to be cohesive and unstructured size range
- support for unstructured trust involves human contact


Q: What is the role of the inactive (lurking) in the group?
A: 90% that participated in AOL were just watching, as group gets noisy then start to get more lurkers. Everytime he converted a lurker to a participant, got 10 more lurkers. You have to work hard to convert the lurkers.

My Question:
Because it's difficult to create a relationship with people online using text and we use emoticons and animated characters, Are we going to start losing the human language from moving to online environments where we start creating own language (like emoticons in instant messaging), should we be concerned with this? Is this going to become a threat?

His answer:
The English language will continue to evolve so there is no threat is losing the human language. What we should be concerned about is that interaction decreases from the online environments.

Q: How to make lurkers become passive participants and passive participants to become active participants?
A: Give credit to smart questions, try to reward the question by giving a really good answer, this then sometimes converts the lurker. Get the casual participant to become active by appreciating them, giving positive reinforcement.

The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy: Seen As a New Level in the Massively Multiplayer Game Known as Western Culture
Michael H. Goldhaber

- an economy is most generally a massively multiplayer, single-level game that involves some kind of passing of scarce entities between players so as to knit all the players intricately together
- this reminds me of the talk that I went at U of T on virtual worlds and how some of the virtual worlds can become an economy
- there are three types of economies from history: feudal, market-money-industrial, attention-driven economy
- attention is not information going backwards and is not time, attention is not a commodity available for purchase or a resource or something that comes in packets or anything that can be precisely measured
- the attention that matters (from an economic standpoint): it goes from person to person, it involves both mind and body, it "mirrors" motions, emotions and intentions, and attention is retained in memory
- attention is to the whole gestalt of the person
- the attention economy is like a cycle where start with:

attention seeking -> some attention from others -> attention from existing stars (and from some of their fans) -> fans who are attracted by other fans -> attraction from stars' fans

- this reminds me that we really are now in an attention economy because we have so much information and content and bombarded by ads, that our behaviour and actions are based on what we are attentive to
- for example, if I'm attentive to the talk that I'm listening right now, then I will be listening intently and thinking of what the talk means (but I guess I'm being passively attentive, cause I'm writing this blog right now and my attention is on writing!)
- Michael is making a comparison with the various economies and mentioning the forms of wealth. In the attention economy, the wealth is audience sharing
- a measure to compare the levels called TPI (Transactions per lifetime)
- TPI coefficient of economies = transactions per lifetime * pool of people transacted with

BayCHI meeting tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the monthly BayCHI meeting at PARC's George E. Pake auditorium. The topics are as follows:

The Dunbar Number, Unstructured Trust, and Why Groups Don't Scale
Christopher Allen, writer & columnist, Life With Alacrity

The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy: Seen As a New Level in the Massively Multiplayer Game Known as Western Culture
Michael H. Goldhaber

As always, there will be a dinner before the meeting.

And I will blog about this as it happens tomorrow night like I did last month!

An Inconvenient Truth

I just finished watching the movie An Inconvenient Truth based on the book and talks by Al Gore. It's a startling wake up call to the global warming crisis that we are now experiencing and how we need to act now. A thought provoking movie, I didn't know that Al Gore was heavily involved in this global warming even in the 1980's and 1990's when he was a politician and tried to labour Congress to start making changes. The US has not signed on to the Kyoto agreement which other countries have (including Canada). I think that we know that global warming is a problem, but Al Gore paints a dismal picture of what the earth will become if we don't act now. And it reminds us of how we can take the first steps to reversing the global warming trend, how politicians and the big businesses like the oil and automative industry have been kept silent or have not publicly voiced warning on this.

You must go watch this movie!

Social networking becomes a patent

Friendster got a patent for its design and computer system for doing social networking. This was reported by Red Herring, apparently Friendster just won the patent on June 27, 2006 after filing a couple of years earlier. What does this mean, do all social networking sites like LinkedIn violate the Friendster patent, and do all of these sites have to pay royalties to Friendster for using their patent? I'm not sure exactly what this patent will mean to social networking sites, if it will infringe on Friendster and that this will cause a whole bunch of lawsuits. It just boggles the mind as to what kind of patent you can get these days from the US Patent Office. For example, Amazon patented their 1-click buying model on their site, I mean a process like that can be patented? There needs to be an overhaul of the US Patent system.

This is not good for social networking or for technology in general, because patents stifle innovation, when ideas are locked and are not free for others, society does not benefit but is hampered because you start having lawsuits and companies start suing other companies.

Went to Computer History Museum today

Being a computer scientist and a geek, I was ecstatic to find out that there was a Computer History Museum in Mountain View which is near to Palo Alto. It is the largest computer history museum in the world, so I decided to go there today to have a visit. The cost to get in is free, which is great, but the museum operates with generous donations and from sponsors and donors, like Bill and Melinda Gates who contributed 15 million dollars to the museum.

I went on a tour of the Visible Storage exhibit which was the only tour that they had, since they're doing renovations on the other exhibits. There is also a virtual visible storage tour as well which you can find here. The Visible Storage exhibit showcases all the history of the computer. I saw the Hollerith machine which Herman Hollerith used for the US census, the ENIAC, the EDVAC, UNIVAC, the IBM 360 and IBM's early mainframe computers, the Jacquard loom, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, the Zuse computer, the Cray supercomputers, Xerox PARC's Alto computer, the first laser printer made by Xerox which was created by Xerox PARC, are just some of the many things that I saw. It was really cool and amazing to see the things that I read about and studied during high school about computers, and see the actual machines physically. It's amazing how the museum was able to grab all these artifacts. What's even more amazing is that they got a PDP-1 computer (made by DEC) and restored it and actually have it working to play a game (however, they didn't have it running when I was there today).

It's also cool to see the stuff that Xerox PARC did in the heydays when they were mighty and revolutionized the computer industry during the 80's. And a lot of computer scientists that revolutionized the computer industry and paved the way towards computers today, worked at PARC like Alan Kay and Mark Weiser. The docent who gave the tour explained about the history of each artifact, it's quite amazing how much knowledge he was able to explain. Apparently, talking to him afterwards, he said that some of the artifacts are on loan from the Smithsonian Institute or from other museums, and the rest are donated (for example, some of the stuff was donated from Gordon Bell (who worked on DEC's PDP-6 and is now a Microsoft Researcher working on MyLifeBits which is a project to archive and record everything in your life, and make it easy to search, retrieve and annotate, to achieve the vision of the Memex by Vannevar Bush).

It was just awe inspiring to be in the presence of all the historical machines, the precursors to the Internet and the computers that we have today. What was really cool, was that I saw the first server that Google used, now that was cool! The Visible Storage also showed the evolution of calculators and mobile computing, with the first notebooks and handhelds, yes the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot. In fact, I bought a video of the PalmPilot story which was a discussion with the 3 original founders of Palm, Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan (and I just finished watching it tonight). It's just amazing how Palm started and how much work was involved on the part of Jeff Hawkins to realize his dream of a Palm handheld, how so many people thought he would fail (cause every other company did, witness Apple's Newton, it was way ahead of its time but it didn't catch on).

After the Visible Storage exhibit, I went to go see a History of Computer Chess, an exhibit showcasing the origins of the dream of building a computer and software for chess that could beat a human. The exhibit showed how computer programs play chess, how they use algorithms to compute all the possible moves and then select the best one. Until May 11, 1997, no computer could beat the best chess player. Of course May 11, 1997 was the day when the chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue (the computer built for playing chess). PC chess software can now play chess just like IBM's Deep Blue which is simply amazing.

After the chess exhibit, I went to see the Innovations 101, a celebration of Silicon Valley companies and pioneers. There I saw the beginnings of Apple Computer, PARC, Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, Intel, HP (and Hewlett and Packard's famous garage where they started the company and started the HP Way), and Palm.

If you're in the Bay Area, you must go see the Computer History museum. And if you're not, you can also visit the exhibit virtually online and can see the photos and exhibit information.

LA Trip for the July 4 long weekend

I just came back from LA where a couple of us interns from PARC went for the July 4 Independence Day long weekend. It was a great trip, went to go see Hollywood and walk along Hollywood Blvd and Sunset Blvd, saw Superman Returns (which I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend everyone to go see it), saw Nacho Libre (which I thought it was pretty stupid and a waste of my money, so don't go see it, or if you want, wait till the DVD comes out), went to Beverly Hills, Bel Air, UCLA, toured the Getty Center and MOCA museum, and went to Venice Beach.

Photos from the trip are available from Flickr and I also made podcasts during the LA trip (On the way there, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4 in LA).

Mining information in blogs from the US DoD

This is probably no surprise since the NSA is mining blogs from MySpace to discover any possible terrorist activities like I pointed out in my blog post here. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is conducting a study on blogs to look for any information that can help fight terrorism. Valdis Krebs talks more about this in their blog here. Relating to business, there are lots of data that are hidden in blogs and I think businesses are missing the opportunity to harvest that data on possible customers and existing customers. I believe that blogging will become one of those necessary tools just like e-mail has become. Blogging is something that is simple to do, yet powerful in its impact on the network. Of course, one of the things that comes into question, is the privacy of the data and so there will need to be policies for this (which become very difficult and hairy to do).