The F-Art Museum

Should it be legal?

2013-05-11T11:17:00.007-07:00

Time for another episode of "should it be legal ?"

Think of it… we're in Philadelphia, no the movie, not the city. And Tom Hanks discovers that the corporate email server is very slow… too slow in fact to receive the document he is trying to emailed to his assistant before the end of statute of limitations was set to expire the next day. Would this count towards illegal discriminatory behavior based on race, age, sexual preference or country of origin?

Actually a more important question to ask is does anybody even care of fairness at work place? Are there any amongst you that would agree to racial discrimination just to receive some shares of stocks or to feed your family? In this time of terrible economic crisis, I think most people in America do not have the liberty to act on concerns of unfairness.

Why has there been more frequent economic crisis? I think I finally know why. It is not because corporate America cannot keep accounts straight or evaluate risk on mortgage loans! The crisis for all practical purposes legalizes discrimination. Everybody is holding their own mouths shut for fear of being seen as against the company.

Is it legal in America to restrict employee work-place internet connections and bandwidth based primarily on race, and place of origin?

Personally, having no law degree, I feel that it is race based preferential treatment and unfairly bias against a certain group based on racial characteristics and place of origin.

Oh, I mean, I know it can't be traced to the company… just like that fax was lost and recovered inexplicably in Philadelphia. But the mere fact of this capability should be announced publicly like when police decides to arrest people they have to say out loud what and why they are doing it. When the company inspects the employee's connections from work place computer and delay it or disrupt it, it must be done in an unbiased way.

Am I, like, the only one?

2013-05-11T11:17:00.005-07:00

Dude, am I like the only one under the sun who don't know who or how emails are being "unsent" ?

The symptom is this: I type the email, hit send, it goes away. Next day (or several days later), I become aware that recipient did not receive the email. I look for the email and it is stored as an unsent "DRAFT" in gmail.

I did some quick search on google and didn't see anybody else talk about this. But my email (gmail) often become unsent after I hit the send button. I doubt it is a bug on google's side. I also doubt it is very wide spread, since I have neither seen or heard anybody mention this problem.

But it does happen often when the content of email is undesirable for the recipient. This happens both in google's free accounts and in a paid enterprise version of gmail. It happens both in work email and in personal email.

I mean, I guess I should admit, now that I'm at it, that I also have occasional ED… Because it is of similar level of embarrassment for a computer guy to not know this crucial skill is probably like ED to sexual ability of man--naturally occurring but failing. Oh, and!?, btw!? I also have urinary incontinence. Experiencing all three, I can tell you that they don't kill you, but all are very inconvenient and can be very very embarrassing.

Let's see, what have I tried:

* Tried google's 2-phase verification.

* Tried paying google for the gmail account.

* HTTPS always, man-in-the-middle due to invisible corporate proxy cannot be. And it happens at home too.

* And failing that, using a mobile device that goes through an entirely physically separate cellular network.

* Use chrome, which supposedly is more secure than other browsers.

* Bcc myself on all mail.

* porn, sex, not drinking water, and diapers.

Still, emails become unsent the next day. The problem with this is that if it is not a bug, then the people who cause this to happen is seriously detracting from my ability to work and live. I mean, I have thought about how it might be my boss who just want to delay a few projects so that he doesn't have to give me bonus, or my coworker who want to make me look bad so that he can get bonus, or the HR/legal of company who want to reduce liability of the company by making it look like I didn't communicate vital but damaging information.

But those are just suspicions of a really insane person. I mean, seriously, what are the chances that the silly secretary or office manager have more access to information and control my communications than I do? I mean, com'on I actually work and produce things that the company sell for money, it cannot possibly be that there is a person who sits there and reads every single email and evaluates them and selectively unsends them.

I don't have trouble believing that shrewd corporate competitors and business man and an occasional hacker have the means to do this, but the unsending of email happens at several companies, several accounts under management by different people. It happens enough to make me think that every company officially has the capability of unsending emails hosted by google?

Is this an attack by Microsoft? Part of the scroogle campaign? Some coworker do come from M$ family… Corporate conspiracy to defame google?

Despite these occasional intrusions, I have not been motivated to seek out a new email service provider (ESP) for my personal account, and certainly have no better alternative to recommend to work place.

Also, it could be that I just suffer from some kind of interruption in consciousness and somehow I have clicked on "INBOX" instead of "Send" on those occasions. But this is very unlikely as many of these emails contain important information. Also, there are occasions when I've checked that the email is in the "SENT" box before leaving work and then seeing the email in "DRAFT" folder several days later.

I know I won't be the first or last guy to complain about ED… But how come there isn't awareness campaigns and support groups for people who's email get unsent?

p.s.

Btw, if you ever get raging hemorrhoids that stay for months and months or anal fissure that reappear daily, try to use some baby diaper cream in addition to the fiber that the doctor prescribe. They cream help you heal just as much as they help baby. fyi I guess... At least I have found some solutions regarding this embarrassing matter.

Insurance, Universal Health, and BS (slight repeat)

2013-05-11T11:17:00.003-07:00

I would not be the first one to point out that this is the way things are. Hospital bills are insanely high. The birthing of my child including the subsequent 11 days of hospital NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) stay at the Stanford Lucile Packard Children Hospital resulted in a combined bill for both mom and child of $157k. And let me say upfront the staff at LPCH worked very hard to make our stay comfortable. We learned a lot about taking care of the baby there from all the wonderful nurses and Dr.'s

$175k is a lot of money: With that money I could three(3) base Model S's. Or I could pay off of some of my mortgage. Or pay off my parent's mortgage. At my planned saving rate of about $20k a year, it would take me 8.5 years to accumulate that amount of money, just for a single incident of child-birth(not including continuing costs after the fact). Now, being an informed modern man, I appreciate the 99.99%(estimated) success rate of child-birth that this cost buys me. And indeed my child is healthy and alive, and she may very well not be if we had her in a wilder situation where the cost is less. The peace of mind that we have knowing that there is a machine and two nurses watching over the child during those tenuous times is very much worth it.

Now there are two issues of concern. One of them is that the entire process was not 100% pleasant, there were times when we wondered if the doctors/nurses/staff were picking on us because of our minority status or apparent lack of wealth or influence. Some staff were quite obnoxious, one even dropped his badge in an inconspicuous place in order to lift my wife's cover to search for it. what a pervert!

Anyway, that's not the problem. This $175k bill would have put me in debt for 8.5 years if I did not have an insurance. The insurance company negotiated a different price tier and then paid for about 95% of the negotiated fees to the LPCH. Without insurance company, I may have simply taken the child home after birth and watched her stop breathing and then eventually rush her body to the hospital. Without insurance, my wife would suffer from untreated back injury from the birthing process. Without insurance, I would not be able to take the baby to a dr. about the mucky eyes she has and eating/pooping/peeing issues and various growths and spots and all kinds of weird alien things baby produce. Life would not be life as I know it without the group comprehensive insurance provided by my employer.

Recalling just a mere 6 months prior to this, I was rejected for insurance by a large PPO because I checked a box that said I snored--due to a prior condition. I am a fairly healthy person in my mid 30's and being rejected for health insurance was the last thing I expected... it kind of ended my consulting career.

Let's think of health insurance in more detail. Insurance is a benefit, part of my compensation package, my employee give me for my service to the company. What this means is that I must work for an employee that provides group insurance in order to continue to receive this kind of benefit.

It would seem that the pressure and flow of money is as follows: medical cost is high, insanely high, to a point that it would appear an uninsured person cannot pay for basic care. Each individual is highly incentivized to work for large corporations that provide group health insurance, because if they don't they cannot get health coverage and because the cost of health care is high, they cannot get health care. (oh, and also in the same breath, only spouse of a heterosexual marriage can benefit under group health insurance)

I personally appreciate the role of doctors play in society. They use their life's time and energy to become good at treating people's illnesses so that other people can live long and happy lives. I think the medical-industrial-complex that power advanced research in science and technology that produce advanced diagnostic tools (xray,mri, etc.) and drugs, and genetic therapy, and stem cell research, all these things trying to make people's life better are great! It costs a lot of money and require a lot of resources: universities, hospitals, buildings, power/computing infrastructure, lots of smart people to achieve advancement. So an expensive drug, expensive test, if charged by original developer, is cost to pay for past and future research. Expensive doctor is to pay for his educational cost and to maintain his alertness, dedication to the unbiased professional medical treatment of his patients. I want them to make more money because I don't want to have to wonder if my Jewish doctor treat Jewish children better than my child or if my Russian doctor treat his Russian patients differently from my wife. I want to receive good treatment and I believe that most doctors are paid above other people not only because of their unique skill sets but also because they rise above all that, ethically, and heal their patients any human patients to health.

BUT, that fact is being exploited by large corporations. Only large corporations can afford group health insurance. Therefore only they have access to people who want health care. Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with this. But practically it forces all health-conscious people to subscribe to corporate culture. We do not have a choice in how we contribute to society, but as long as we want to see a doctor when we need, we must be part of a large organization full-time.

Some additional aspects of this arrangement: If I had a serious prior condition that requires constant treatment, then I must be employed at a large company in order to survive with life. If there are any bias in corporate employment then the same bias would occur in availability of medical treatment. If I stop working or have never had insurance, I must work for a company because I will not be able to get insurance having a break in health coverage. I cannot leave the company for injustice or corruption immediately and in the duration of dispute, I may not be able to continue with insurance, and the interruption in coverage will result in the impossibility of my getting health insurance.

I have always been in favor of universal health care in America. This is not because I come from a faux-social/communist China. I am in favor of universal health care despite the fact that the medical super industry will not receive as much money from patients because the US government will surely negotiate an even better price than the private insurance companies. I am in favor of universal health care--for basic maintenance care--because health, along with wealth, is part of our pursuit of happiness. I do not believe one can be happy secured with his wealth but insecure with his health, and we should have the freedom to choose health independent of wealth. Health is life. Right of life means right of health, protection for right of life means protection for right of health--in fact protection to right of health should be on par with the right to secure one's wealth. Health is happiness. Pursuit of happiness requires health. This is why I think universal health care--to a certain level--is a must. Even if it detracts slightly from advanced medical research.

Okay, moving on. A thought occur to me the other day on the way home from my health-coverage earning job in corporate America. I thought of the transitive action space(TAS) more. The TAS encodes actions between people, therefore should be thought of as only encompassing all endeavors regarding acting morally. Again, I justify this because the original thread of thought came form the golden and silver rules of ethics both of which directs us in how to act.

But clearly they have said more than that, for instance it has been said that one should "love thy neighbor as thy self." Granted this a command in the TAS, but more action this is a feeling. Love is a feeling, is a state of mind that can occur without visible action in the TAS. Perhaps we should also mention the existence of transitive emotional space, TES. Subsets of TES instructs us about the moral ways to feel--whether we have control over feelings, and are they moral if we control the feeling rather than naturally feel, is an entirely different discussion. We can, in fact, specify the subspace of TES that is moral, the Bible sure does.

There are of course yet other instructions in morality that instructs us on how to "be". "Be one with God," "Be one with the universe," "Being a higher being," "Being enlightened"... and so on and so forth. Some argue that the being is creating an internal state, and therefore being moral is the moral motive force that enable us to act and feel morally. Some even stipulate that without a moral motive force a moral space in TAS is not moral. For instance, if I feed my baby with an intent driven by the perverted curiosity of seeing a grossly obese 1yr old, then the action of "feeding a baby" in TAS is entirely moral (possibly universally), but the being inside BS is immoral. Most would agree that the act is entirely immoral.

Therefore we should also seriously consider BS--Being Space that contain all the ways that we could be. The challenge of such a space is that BS is of much higher cardinality than TAS. In the real world, we can very likely specify countable discrete TAS for a certain self contained situation in which we have to make moral choices, where as I am not able to imagine the "enlightened" and "universe" beingness of BS--do they intersect? does one contain the other? What are the sets in TAS that corresponds to their intersections? Does intersection and containment make sense in the BS? How do I choice to be something BS? How do I be something in the BS?

Ultimately, the choice of TAS seem rightous at this stage of my investigation. And I beleive that even if BS is ultimately the only space where morality is true, that there is a TAS projection from BS that can be modeled. From time to time, we may need to point out the relation between a TAS set and BS but until I have the language to discuss it, BS shall remain mysterious and unexplained.

Code.org Advertisement and no-WFH

2013-05-11T11:17:00.001-07:00

Recently code.org publicized a promotional video featuring ppl like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates of Micro$oft saying American schools should teach programming more.

I don't like it.

I don't think programming is for everyone and that more programming is for social good or scientific advancement. It lowers cost of labor for all those people in the Advertisement, but it isn't as good as it sounds.

As a person who completed a CS degree, I feel that computer language can be made much better so that there won't be a "computer programming"

The day that I tried to teach my dad to program a for-loop in C and he turned around and teased me about forgetting the closed form expression for arithmetic series was the first time that I thought about how stupid this stuff I do is. It was the expression on my dad's face... I remember it vividly... For it was then that I realize that I did not comprehend the sheer vulgarity of

for(int x=0;x<100;++x);

so primitive, so stupid.

The next time is when I read about Map-Reduce--sooo freaking cool. I think tomorrow I will find another way to think, another way to say, and another way to program.

I want to make a better programming language. a better computer. That would be better than community colleges teaching Fortran IMHO

Oh, and p.s.

I think Yahoo!'s new no-policy is nice. I think is real progress for protection of civil liberty in America. Technology companies insists on ownership and monitoring of its employees while working, and admittedly justified to do so. Therefore when Marissa Mayers decided to cancel all WFH, she made a call that will end monitoring of employees' home networks--because if you don't work from home, the company will have no cause to instrument any kind of monitoring of your home network.

I think this is a really forward thinking technology leader who care about her employees. I am buying myself some Yahoo! stocks in support of this bold move.

The Ethical Hiearchy III

2013-05-11T11:16:00.006-07:00

Recall, from last time, this illustration of the Ethics Hierarchy overlaying capability sets in the space of all transitive actions:

I should simplify terminology. The set labeled "Things I want" are "my desires", "things Jesus wants me to do" is the Jesus way, "Things Confucius wants me to do" the Confucian way, "Things I can do" are "my strengths" and "Things can be done to me" are "my weaknesses".

I should also like to begin referring to what I have been calling the Ethics Hierarchy as the Moral Hierarchy. My own postings exhibit cultural bias. I include more from eastern culture than western culture. Some comments I have received indicate that there are others out there who have looked at culture/art/literature comparisons with the opposite bias. The fact of matter is, this Moral Hierarchy itself does not imply absolute superiority of any kind. Relatively speaking, one is larger, contains more transitive actions, than the other, but bigger is not necessarily better. In fact, it is one of my hopes to understand how they are different. Reasonably speaking, I should not expect to find that one is superior to the other--quite the opposite, I feel that exhaustive investigation of this subject will reveal to us more about the way the world, humans, and our society are than about the rights and wrongs within their contexts. Because morals have cultural biases and ethics is the philosophical study of morals, I may switch back to Ethics Hierarchy when I wish to emphasize that I am trying to be objective.

Therefore, to continue, let us be fair, what is drawn are idealized sets and intersections. The Jesus way is actually one of many allowed sets of actions that has an inner-bound restriction of being bigger than the my desires. Under this prescription alone, one can do everything in the universe and still not violate the Golden rule. The Confucius set, similarly is one of many possible sets fully contained in my wants set. The Silver rule has a maximum outer bound, one can only do things within my wants. Under silver rule, one cannot do everything in the world.

Some extreme examples might be, for instance, a person that goes around slaughtering each person with a knife is allowed under one interpretation of the Jesus way, as long as he also does everything that he wants for that person. This can be quite arbitrary, say, the perpetrator wants to be fed carrot cake, then he feed everyone carrot cake and then knifes them. What's worse is if the person is masochist, then he is forced to act as sadomasochist. If he wants to be fed carrot cake and knifed, then Jesus way requires that he _must_ both feed everyone carrot cake and knife them.

On the other extreme, suppose one tries to follow Taoist suggestion to do nothing, it easily fall within Confucian way without regard to the size of my desires. While the only way for a person to do only nothing under the Jesus way is for him to want nothing. This is impossible because follower of the ways of Jesus at least want to enter heaven, so trivially Jesus way is never empty and prevents follower from doing nothing.

It's interesting to think of the possibilities. Let's look at just the Confucian way. Set D is outside of my strengths, and it is outside of my weaknesses, however, because I desire it, it is within the Confucian way. Set A are things I desire, within my strength to do and outside of my weakness to receive. These are the things that I can only give and will never receive in kind. On the opposite end, set C are within my desires and weaknesses but not within my strengths. O is the set of my opportunities--these are the things I want but am not yet capable of receiving. Set B is a sweet spot. Here, not only are we within the ways of both Confucius and Jesus, we also desire to do so. This is a region to maximize, if we had the choice to do so.

It should be pointed out that zone B contains only actions that we can reciprocate when receiving and receive reciprocation when giving--in kind--in other words, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth zone.

Zone U in this graph points out an area of the an-eye-for-an-eye-a-tooth-for-a-tooth zone that is outside of my own desire and therefore not recommended by either Confucius, but is allowable by the Jesus way.

Let's backtrack and admire the an-eye-for-an-eye-a-tooth-for-a-tooth zone T in its full glory

Wow! It does exists!

With Higher Knowledge Come Higher Responsibility

2013-05-11T11:16:00.004-07:00

The other day, at work, (and by now you know I work for a Japanese Automotive Electronics company), we talked about autonomous cars for consumes. Since everyone is either technology freak or car freak the discussion was pretty intense.

I explained to every one the ethical issue surrounding autonomous cars that may be not be completely resolved or resolvable by technology.

The matter is this: an autonomous car will with absolute certainty be faced with a situation where it has to choose between two actions each will be killing a different person. Suppose two person suddenly dash in front of the car to the left and to the right, and suppose that the car is moving too fast to stop. it can veer to avoid one person with certainty. But which will it choose?

Another scenario: the car can brake very hard and avoid killing a pedestrian, but in the process it will have killed the passenger because the car is mechanically able to endure much higher de-acceleration than its occupants.

The legal problem also, if I configure the car, or if some car company configure the car to always protect its owner (rational), that I the owner, the designer, the manufacturer is then liable to be sued for killing people?

"But your honor, the car swerved!! I had nothing to do with it"

Okay, so the people who want autonomous cars (myself partially included), will say that with better equipment, high-speed video/audio recording and black-boxes, there might be far fewer arguments about who was responsible for accidents. But there are some things in our current law that are absolute. If a car hits a person inside the cross walk, the car is always responsible. If the car is rear-ended the car in arrear will be responsible. What will happen to these absolute laws that are in many circumstances unreasonable but serve to protect the safety of the population?

And finally, even if, and I believe it will, autonomous vehicles reduce death to 1% or less of today's vehicle related death rate, that 1% where two person dash in front of the car, and the car has to choose, what then? Why is this so hard?

One of the big problems is informed decision is hard. The car, given today's technology, machine learning technology for object detection, vision algorithms, radar, laser range scanner, eeg/ekg, EMR technologies can pretty reliably detect with plenty of time to choose which one to save, that there are two person dashing infront of the car one to the left, one to the right, velocity, estimated trajectory, mass, the certainty of these estimate and the margins of error (where else could each person likely be by the time we collide, etc.)

The reason human get away with killing in this situation is that we do not have the speed and ability. It is beyond our control--until we programmed a computer to do it, and then we are suddenly faced with choice that we never had to make before: kill left, kill right or maim both? or risk killing both? or kill myself to completely avoid their injury?

Hmm, let's see, What would Confucius allow? What would Jesus insist? Well, I don't want to be killed, so don't kill other people. I would want other people to save me so I would want to brake an save both crazy people. Hmm, I guess it really depends on the person's desire. One would say a more moral person may not wish for another moral entity to suffer in exchange for his own sake, as well to exchange another's life for his own. But by and large most people would ask the car to save himself no matter which place he is in.

The moral problem arise in that we are not in any of those three situations. We are in the autonomous car's designer's shoes. We are in Asimov's shoes. What should we write as the laws of autonomous vehicles? When we know that at some point, the car will know almost certainly that it must kill/damage/disrupt someone/thing, and knows exactly which wire to send electric signal down to to choose which person. What should we tell the car to do?

Because soon the car will be looking at that scenario in slow-mo... with 10ms to decide and then 250ms seconds to turn the steering wheel left or right and apply brakes.

So, as you can see, the mere knowledge of morality and capability to choose encumber us with the responsibility of behaving morally. Because I know it's wrong, I must not do wrong. Another person may think that the root of this evil is the fact that I know of this moral dilemma and that I have gained the speed to travel fast or gained the speed to determine people's fate.

I wonder if the are right that those things are works of devil and that the absolute best moral thing to do is just to stay away from them? I should consider this carefully. What if I find that it is wrong for me to live? or wrong for me to blog about morality? What if it is found that internet is not moral? or god forbid that it is immoral to have stereo audio in cars? Because I already of the ability to terminate any one of them--at least for myself.

*shiver*

p.s.

I can accept an argument that placing one's self into a situation where there is no moral choice is immoral. The autonomous car makers will insist that car drive carefully so that it will never be faced with 2 people in said situation. But somehow, science, technology--human inquiry--may find a way to inform us that that is just delusional, that it is provably impossible to avoid crazy human. ;) back to square-one I suppose.

The problem with Transitivity II--Unfixing Trivalency

2013-05-11T11:16:00.001-07:00

Looking at my old blog entries, I think there is a problem with our earlier attempt at addressing tri-transitivity and higher order valences. The problem actually points to a larger issue. Let us try an extended example of trivalency

I am giving you a slave named Tom.

Subject: I

Object: you

Object being done with: A slave named Tom

Thinking of ethical issues: My giving a slave may be considered wrong and you allowing a slave to be given to you my be considered immoral. But ultimately, that Tom is a slave is perhaps something not ethical in and of himself. What about

I am giving you a slave named Tom to keep you alive from being quadriplegic and demented.

This seem to make me a good person and give you just cause to require full time service of a devoted person. Is this act allowable? I would if I followed Jesus's way, and I could if I followed Confucian way.

What about the veil of innocence, how come it isn't compatible here? at first glance, it seems that it should, what if you were Tom and you were being given. You would then choose not to give tom as slave right? But in Bi-transitive Action Space, let's call it BTAS for short, we have no way of evaluating that, you are either subject or object, there is no third position.

The reasoning here, therefore, must extend analysis of Tri-Transitive Action Space, TTAS, and other higher valencies, HTAS's, to analyze the TAS itself for inclusion and usage of ethical entities that are considered of same importance as the subject and objects of TAS analysis.

* Giving a person as slave is unethical.

* Using a person as a slave is unethical.

* Being used as a slave is unethical.

The first two come from a traditional ethical systems. One cannot use another ethical entity in a subjugated manor, and one should not force an ethical entity into such a position. But what about the third, that seems a little stranger, allowing oneself to be enslaved is an unethical act. Certainly an ethical entity may be able to enslave another and should do that instead of being enslaved. Alas, these problems are indeed at the heart of concerns driving these current carpal tunnel stiffened hands into worse states than they are in already. At least, our action space needs to give us the ability to consider the third ethical entity.

Let us be more specific about BTAS as well, it is really very easy to include HTAS inside BTAS. So we need a class of TAS that include exclusively Bi-transitive verbs where the verb themselves do not use or influence any other entities affecting ethical value. This class of actions we shall refer to as Full-Bi-Transitive Action Space, or FBTAS(ef-bee-taz) for short. And similarly FTTAS for tri-transitive verbs with clearly distinguishable subject, object, and third thing which the action uses and affects evaluations of ethical nature.

I fear soon we will run out of letters and theory synonyms as we look into this matter deeply. I am driven to think of another way to think about this issue... Naming a new space for different situations is too troublesome and impractical.

IG and the Quantification of Privacy

2013-05-11T11:15:00.002-07:00

A while back, I talked about computing IG--information gain--by clandestine methods via an otherwise secret(personal) email. I will point to some other prior blogs entries about what can we reasonably consider private and some reasons why I think it's bad (Because it removes competition....

The basic challenge is this: If your competitor can spy on what you do (unilaterally) then they will never be motivated to innovate. Their key strength will be their ability to hack your secrets and they will work hard on that, but not on how to build a better product or cure a disease or solve a new problem. If you can both spy on each other with perfect information then there is no need to innovate, just calculate the equilibrium and aim for that. If you can disinform your opponent then all your effort will go into disinformation instead of innovation. Basically it is much easier to do something sneaky and cheat than to do the right thing and innovate. This is why the government, a non-competing body whose interest is to make sure everyone compete (at least in America government this is the case), should provide for information security.

)

I realize in retrospect that IG may not make sense to most people based on the formulation I laid out. Let's review. IG is the change in entropy from a state without additional knowledge to a state with knowledge

IG = H(secret) - H(secret | private email)

This measurement seem to be of a quite abstract concept of entropy--a unitless measurement. Why would I think this useful for any reason other than that it is called "Information Gain?" Well truth be told, what I had in mind was more of the IG from machine learning literature: Class purity after conditioning on some private information. It is actually used more as a measurement of correctness of predicting discrete output than abstract change in entropy of distribution after conditioning. I will refer reader to these excellent introductory books regarding "classification" algorithms.

… Some days passes and the books will hopefully have arrived on your desks…

So the example is if my secret is the probability that I will have Chinese food tonight. Let's throw in several more classes, say Italian, Mexican cover 99.9% of all possibilities. This probability may be internal to me. Or it may be an externalizable model like I will toss a three-sided die and figure out what I will eat tonight.

Actually, this system forces us to think of a new class. I will call this new class the innovation class. It covers all cases where something new might happen, such as tonight when I went off on a tangent and forgot to eat dinner completely. Or I might be abducted by Aliens for demanding privacy, Japanese paramilitary for blogging, or God for thinking all these awful things. The fact is, I do not know what will happen, but what I do know is that things I don't know will happen. So the class is called IC, Innovation Class--now we have a 4 sided die: Chinese, Mexican, Italian, IC; Let's write naively that the probability for each class is:

Chinese	Mexican	Italian	IC
33%	33%	33%	1%

The formula for the entropy of these classes is written as:

-H(Dinner)= p(Chinese) * log(p(Chinese)) + p(Mexican) * log(p(Mexican)) + p(Italian) * log(p(Italian)) + p(IC)*log(p(IC))

the above evaluates to almost the maximum possible entropy in three-class situation: H(Dinner)= 1.6499060116098556

that's it. that's the formula for calculating entropy that we will use repeatedly. Now, suppose that you have read my email to my wife saying "oh man, look at this great deal on groupon, 50% off on Indian food right near our home" What is the right thing to think about the distribution of my dinner?

P(IC)=99%

Indian food is not Chinese or Mexican or Italian, but we have thought of that and put in IC to account for it.

Chinese	Mexican	Italian	IC
10%	10%	10%	70%

gives us the conditional entropy of probability of dinner after reading my private email. This entropy H(Dinner|private email to wife)=0.09596342477405478

IG(Dinner; private email to wife) = H(Dinner) - H(Dinner|private email to wife) = 1.6499060116098556-0.09596342477405478=1.5539425868358008. This corresponds to an IGR of 1619.31%, that is, 15X more information after you saw the email than before.

Great! so now we know how much information is gained by reading that one private email of mine. This number, I think quantifies my loss of privacy.

Btw, this innocent example contain some hand waving. H(Dinner) for example is something that we may or may not know. Most people have trouble writing down a distribution for dinner choices. also, P(Dinner|private email to wife) here written as a table contain assumed values. What if after reading my private email you feel that P(IC)=85%? Who is to say what the reality of this probability is? This is why I felt that this model will not make to main stream legal system because the link between private email and the actual secret itself is not so obvious. You might use naive Bayes as the definitive of reality (refer to chapter in books or wiki), logistic regression, decision trees, or you might use something else… You may even use a distributions system like SVM or god forbid rule based systems…

If you understand this computation above, then it will be easy for you to understand the continuous version. Let dinner be a continuous variable, we can still write the same expression

IG(Dinner; private email to wife) = H(Dinner) - H(Dinner|private email to wife)

and it would have the same meaning. How far are we from the truth. This idea, btw, is indeed partially inspired by the name Information Gain, which also goes by Kullback-Leibler divergence when computed over distributions. The above formation exactly with the exception that "private email to wife" is a distribution, say, perhaps, my emails are generated randomly.

KL( Dinner|private email || Dinner )

But KL divergence does point us to some other interesting characterizations. Divergence--distance without some properties of distance. Namely that it is not a metric distance:

* Nonnegative dl(x,y)>=0: yes

* Indiscernability: dl(x,y)=0 iff x==y: yes

* Symmetric dl(x,y)==dl(y,x): NO

* Triangle inequality dl(x,y)+dl(y,z) >= dl(x,z): NO

This has some serious implications regarding this formulation of privacy. Somethings that we naturally think should make sense do not.

Let's say I have two emails, e1 and e2, and let's say dinner is still the subject of intense TLA investigation:

KL(d;e1) + KL(d;e2) != KL(d;e1,e2)

All private information must be considered together, because considering them separately would yield inconsistent measurement of privacy loss

Let's say there're two secrets, d1 is my dinner choose and d2 is my wife's dinner choose

KL(d1;e1,e2) + KL(d2;e1,e2) != KL(d1,d2; e1,e2)

All secrets must be computed together, because computing IG separately and adding is not equal to the total information gain.

Let's say we have an intermediate decision called Mode of Transportation (mt), and it is a secret just like my dinner choice.

KL(mt;e1,e2) + KL(d ; mt) != KL(d; e1,e 2)

The intermediate secret can be calculated, but again, it must be calculated carefully and not by additive increase of IG.

Bummer, but fascinating!! But we we must make some choice about how to proceed. Knowledge about the nature of information (and especially electronic information), I believe, informs us about how we make choice in our privacy laws:

Should the whole data be analyzed all at once?
or should we only allow each individual's data be processed all at once?
or should we only allow daily data of everyone to be processed together?
or should we only allow daily data of each individual to be processed separately?

Each of these choice (and many other) impact the private information loss due to clandestine activities.

EMR and Troubles with Identity Privacy

2013-04-02T22:10:00.004-07:00

So recently I received a bill from an out of the state medical clinic. The bill charges me with treatment that were obviously not rendered unto me. The bill contained my name and physical address.

I called them and they very quickly rescinded the bill.

However, there is one remaining issue, which is that the US has promoted Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system. In fact, it appears that there might even be a mandatory EMR system in the near future. Consider for a minute that such a thing happened when mandatory EMR system is in force. What would happen?

I may be rejected for health insurance on the basis of pre-existing condition based on treatment a hospital claim to have rendered. Is this possible? Well, I have a bill here from an out-of-state clinic that says YES they can make mistake like that and can affect my permanent medical record.

Mandatory EMR/EHR is a godsend for insurance companies. It means they can receive the full history of a person's past and perform sophisticated risk analysis that produce premium rates according to the person's risk for illness or injury.

One would react to a $25 insurance premium by not buying insurance and react to a $5,000,000 premium by committing suicide. Because if it is entirely based on risk and incidence prediction a $25 bill means that insurance company expects to pay that or less for your treatment, and similarly a five million dollar bill would mean there are significant evidence that I will need to pay that much to live.

I had written a bit about how this company found my address and put me down for the bill, but I realize that by talking about it, I am letting the world know how that company found my personal address, and I don't want that, so let us not talk about the privacy problems here and move on to a larger issue:

The problem it could cause for us when an error is made is that our permanent record will be marred forever. I hate telling horror stories but let me tell this one:

4 months ago I leased my new 2013 Chevy Volt. California has a law that allows drivers of these environmentally friendly cars to drive in HOV lane using a "GREEN STICKER" which the DMV must issue. This is one of the main incentives that moved me to lease this car.

Needless to say it has been 4 months and I have not received the sticker to drive in the HOV lane. After two(3) series of phone calls and four(4) form submissions, I found out finally that my registration address had a problem from the start when I leased it from Boardwalk Chevy. I had a horrible experience leasing this car from them, being forced to sit through negotiation on a national wide promotional program with my eight-month(8) pregnant wife; being forced to sign contract three(3) times with numerous line items changing without due notice to me; the contract requiring me to pay upfront for 9 oil changes that must be used in 3 years(ON A FUCKING PLUGIN HYBRID that will not be burning gas most of the time); and then, after all that, having the wrong address entered into the computer so I cannot receive my green sticker.

But that is besides my current point, which is that there is a lot of racism and hatred and unkindness and merciless greed in this world added on top of legitimate human error and the Devil Satan. I do not believe we, as a species, have overcome these hurdles sufficiently to instrument an EMR system that will be central to our medical treatment.

If the address is wrong in my EMR, and I don't receive prescription or communication from the doctor, it could be a matter of life or death. I mean, having to sit in traffic for an extra 60 minutes every day is a matter of wasted life, but at least it is not something that caused the complete cessation of life as an EMR error of this sorts could cause.

I am against universal mandatory EMR in the United States any time this decade.

The Problem with Transitivity

2013-04-02T22:10:00.003-07:00

Transitive Action Space is fairly concise space containing all those actions that are divalent. These actions are the first class of actions that we consider because it occurs most frequent in interpersonal relationships. Also because the Golden Rule and Silver Rule of ethics both syntactically refer to precisely this class of actions.

Linguists have long thought of this issue and discuss the concept of valency of verbs. monovalent verbs are intransitive, transitive verbs are divalent… Other verbs are more expressive and some has multiple valencies: do and have both can be monovalent, divalent and trivalent.

The example given in wikipedia is the following American southerner statement:

I am having myself some dinner.

"I", "myself" and "dinner" are the parameters of "have", which in this case is trivalent.

The interesting fact about this is that the first two np's associated with this verb are covariant (vaguely speaking). And by this I mean

He is having himself some dinner.

She is having herself some dinner.

They are having themselves some dinner.

and so on and so forth. The first two vary together. I can never have, for example

I am having themselves some dinner…

it just wouldn't make any sense.

We should let this sink in a second. First of all there are multivalent verbs beyond transitive verbs. Second of all, some verbs may have restriction on them regarding some or all of their np's when used in an actual sentence.

do is the other multivalent verb.

I am doing myself a favor.

Again trivalent, however in this case covariant np's are not required.

I am doing him a favor.

I am doing her a favor.

I am doing them a favor.

etc.

In fact, not to be vulgar but these are the things that came to mind as I think about this:

I am shitting myself a bucket of golden coins.

I am making myself a bucket of golden coins.

I am shaking myself a headache.

I am driving him nuts.

I am driving him home.

ahha, so we have a pattern. These are still transitive verbs, but their third np parameterizes the content of the action or indicate a byproduct of the action.

I can shit you a bucket of gold.

To me, you the object of the action, the receiver and gold is the content of the action. I am straining but not seeing my doing anything to gold using you. similar pattern apply to the other of the previous sentences.

I'd like to include these trivalent verbs in the transitive action space by adding the additional noun phrase into the verb forming verb-np super-verbs that can be applied to the parameters of previously defined Transitive Action Space (i.e. you and me).

(shitting gold)

(making gold coin)

(shaking (out) a headache)

(driving nuts)

(driving home)

are included as trivalent transitive actions.

IG AND THE QUANTIFICATION OF PRIVACY

2013-04-02T22:10:00.002-07:00

A while back, I talked about computing IG–information gain–by clandestine methods via an otherwise secret(personal) email. I will point to some other prior blogs entries about what can we reasonably consider private and some reasons why I think it’s bad (Because it removes competition….

)

I realize in retrospect that IG may not make sense to most people based on the formulation I laid out. Let’s review. IG is the change in entropy from a state without additional knowledge to a state with knowledge

IG = H(secret) – H(secret | private email)

This measurement seem to be of a quite abstract concept of entropy–a unitless measurement. Why would I think this useful for any reason other than that it is called “Information Gain?” Well truth be told, what I had in mind was more of the IG from machine learning literature: Class purity after conditioning on some private information. It is actually used more as a measurement of correctness of predicting discrete output than abstract change in entropy of distribution after conditioning. I will refer reader to these excellent introductory books regarding “classification” algorithms.

… Some days passes and the books will hopefully have arrived on your desks…

So the example is if my secret is the probability that I will have Chinese food tonight. Let’s throw in several more classes, say Italian, Mexican cover 99.9% of all possibilities. This probability may be internal to me. Or it may be an externalizable model like I will toss a three-sided die and figure out what I will eat tonight.

Actually, this system forces us to think of a new class. I will call this new class the innovation class. It covers all cases where something new might happen, such as tonight when I went off on a tangent and forgot to eat dinner completely. Or I might be abducted by Aliens for demandingprivacy, Japanese paramilitary for blogging, or God for thinking all these awful things. The fact is, I do not know what will happen, but what I do know is that things I don’t know will happen. So the class is called IC, Innovation Class–now we have a 4 sided die: Chinese, Mexican, Italian, IC; Let’s write naively that the probability for each class is:

Chinese	Mexican	Italian	IC
33%	33%	33%	1%

The formula for the entropy of these classes is written as:

-H(Dinner)= p(Chinese) * log(p(Chinese)) + p(Mexican) * log(p(Mexican)) + p(Italian) * log(p(Italian)) + p(IC)*log(p(IC))

the above evaluates to almost the maximum possible entropy in three-class situation: H(Dinner)= 1.6499060116098556

that’s it. that’s the formula for calculating entropy that we will use repeatedly. Now, suppose that you have read my email to my wife saying “oh man, look at this great deal on groupon, 50% off on Indian food right near our home” What is the right thing to think about the distribution of my dinner?

P(IC)=99%

Indian food is not Chinese or Mexican or Italian, but we have thought of that and put in IC to account for it.

Chinese	Mexican	Italian	IC
10%	10%	10%	70%

gives us the conditional entropy of probability of dinner after reading my private email. This entropy H(Dinner|private email to wife)=0.09596342477405478

IG(Dinner; private email to wife) = H(Dinner) – H(Dinner|private email to wife) = 1.6499060116098556-0.09596342477405478=1.5539425868358008. This corresponds to an IGR of 1619.31%, that is, 15X more information after you saw the email than before.

Great! so now we know how much information is gained by reading that one private email of mine. This number, I think quantifies my loss of privacy.

If you understand this computation above, then it will be easy for you to understand the continuous version. Let dinner be a continuous variable, we can still write the same expression

IG(Dinner; private email to wife) = H(Dinner) – H(Dinner|private email to wife)

and it would have the same meaning. How far are we from the truth. This idea, btw, is indeed partially inspired by the name Information Gain, which also goes by Kullback-Leibler divergence when computed over distributions. The above formation exactly with the exception that “private email to wife” is a distribution, say, perhaps, my emails are generated randomly.

KL( Dinner|private email || Dinner )

But KL divergence does point us to some other interesting characterizations. Divergence–distance without some properties of distance. Namely that it is not a metric distance:

* Nonnegative dl(x,y)>=0: yes

* Indiscernability: dl(x,y)=0 iff x==y: yes

* Symmetric dl(x,y)==dl(y,x): NO

* Triangle inequality dl(x,y)+dl(y,z) >= dl(x,z): NO

This has some serious implications regarding this formulation of privacy. Somethings that we naturally think should make sense do not.

Let’s say I have two emails, e1 and e2, and let’s say dinner is still the subject of intense TLA investigation:

KL(d;e1) + KL(d;e2) != KL(d;e1,e2)

All private information must be considered together, because considering them separately would yield inconsistent measurement of privacy loss

Let’s say there’re two secrets, d1 is my dinner choose and d2 is my wife’s dinner choose

KL(d1;e1,e2) + KL(d2;e1,e2) != KL(d1,d2; e1,e2)

All secrets must be computed together, because computing IG separately and adding is not equal to the total information gain.

Let’s say we have an intermediate decision called Mode of Transportation (mt), and it is a secret just like my dinner choice.

KL(mt;e1,e2) + KL(d ; mt) != KL(d; e1,e 2)

The intermediate secret can be calculated, but again, it must be calculated carefully and not by additive increase of IG.

Should the whole data be analyzed all at once?
or should we only allow each individual’s data be processed all at once?
or should we only allow daily data of everyone to be processed together?
or should we only allow daily data of each individual to be processed separately?

Each of these choice (and many other) impact the private information loss due to clandestine activities.

FOR RICHER AND FOR POORER

2013-04-02T22:09:00.001-07:00

The title makes no reference to marriage, per say. Bear with me here for a sec…

A certain strange set of circumstances inspires this thought. Some time ago, some entrepreneurial friends recommends a series of books to me, How to Win Friends and Influence people and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Saying that these are must read for a young person planning to have a good life.

And I’ve never read either, btw, I’m guessing it really shows, huh?

Okay, okay, please stay calm when I say this, and hopefully you find it funny and non-offensive, as I don’t want my tires punctured again by a nail gun.

Has anybody thought about the psychology of Rich Dad and Poor Dad? I mean com’on, isn’t it obvious that the Japanese author wrote this subconsciously thinking of two real entities?

well? do you see it? The Japanese American author, what did he think while he wrote this? What is the driving thought?

Okay, okay, here it is. America is the Rich dad to Japan and China is the Poor dad.

oh fuck, I can hear all four tires exploding on my car…

okay, yes, yes, I am of Chinese lineage, it’s probably not PC for me to think like this, but if I were Japanese, or had Japanese wife, or if I was dating a Japanese women, it would make it all better, right?. ugh, I promise, when I am rich enough I will adopt a Japanese child, to try to make up for this trespass.

ehem, okay, so I am Chinese ethnically. And I am taught and think that Japan’s language, religion, gene pool, etc, that they in noticeable part come from China some time long long ago. I hope most reasonable people with a bit of rational unbiased inquiry will not object to my thinking this: that China can be considered a dad.

America the rich dad. Right, what makes it the rich daddy?

Here is the reasoning: I see two very large Japanese companies, Toyota, Honda,Mazda, Nissan, dominates the US automobile industry by selling to US consumers more than 50% of cars that they buy. So, that number, fifty-some percent, is more than US and European makers’ sales added up together. Certainly I will not be the first to say that “Japanese cars last longer than American cars” is common wisdom among value car shoppers.

Now, I’d like to consider myself a hard-working American. I am American, born in China but naturalized. I feel that my upbringing, growing up in the China of 1980s, and America of 1990′s that I deeply believe in the values that America was built upon. I feel that it is right that I should support this country by working hard, contributing to its production. I recently begun to drive to work everyday and have begun to appreciate the importance of a reliable car when work demands that I get there everyday.

As a hard-working American needing a reliable car, I can tell you that in large investments such as a car for a hard-working American, reliability is important. And if it is Japanese car company that we need to go to find reliability, then we will do that, because we want to work and getting to work is important.

BUT, would you not agree that you’d rather be driving an American car to work than a Japanese car? As a person working and producing in America, would you not feel happier if you heard somebody say: “American cars are Better than Japanese cars” ? More reliable, better fuel mileage, higher safety standards. Would that not bring a grin to your face like it would to mine? I will not belabor this point, but I fear that many Americans have not had a chance to stop and think this thought… no no, feel that thought:

“American cars are better than Japanese cars.”

Do not let the media brain wash you into thinking that Japanese cars is always better than American cars, or that it is necessary for another reason. You, American, you can dance, you can sing, you can build a better car than the Japanese.

Why is this so important? Because I feel that sometimes, people here do not get the freedom of mind to think these thoughts. It is not racist to want to build a better American car. It is not politically incorrect. In fact, it really should be less politically incorrect than for the mass media to try to steal the shirts off of those poor Chinese children’s back as they try to make wage to feed themselves and perhaps their family.

Let me repeat! This is not racist! This is national competition. When an honest working American hands out the cash that he honestly made to a Toyota dealer for a car, and I don’t care of the sleazy sales guy is American and his boss is American and his boss is American and the whole company falls under an American registered corporation. The owner of that company (stock owners, board, etc.) are Japanese people. Check on Google or Yahoo or Bing finance, the board of these American companies are completely occupied by people with Japanese names. Yes, some of them may be American citizens, but they all have Japanese names, they are all Japanese people. I don’t need to perform a statistical test to say that that’s not a representative sample of American business man. The companies are completely controlled by Japan.

When you hand over your hard-earned greenbacks to Toyota or Honda, or Nissan or Mazda for a “higher quality car” you are putting that money in the hands of a Japanese person. He is not an American Citizen, he is not concerned about the perpetuation and propagation of the American way. He is a Japanese person who has his own national and racial interests and agendas that differ, perhaps greatly, from those of American interest and values. When you hand your money to him, he has free will to use that money in ways that do not align with American values.

God!! Japan couldn’t send a single radio-activity resistant robot into their power plant to fix the leaks and had to wait for American robots to check out the power plant? I do not believe this, and you shouldn’t either. For all we know, (and we do know at least Honda is doing significant research in non-automotive robotics) that the robot that kills you in World War III is being designed right now! Using your hard-earned money! right now! in Japan! Right at this moment!

This really needn’t be said, but for some reason I feel this needed to be pointed out: when you buy a Japanese car, you implicitly support Japanese value system and if their values are racist or imperialistic, you have no say over if he can spend money-making weapons or take over the world. You have no say in their attempt to sabotage a great American company like Boeing with their defective batteries. (And making it look like America cannot engineer a good plane.)

When you hand the money over, it is theirs and they can spend it how they want.

True, when you buy from England, Germany, France, Russia, Brazil, India or Chinese, you hand them money so they can spend it the way they want, but I find it very hard to believe that we find Japanese culture and policies, in the long-term, to be more American than all of America, German, Europa, Asia, etc, combined.

In Capitalist world, money speaks, and the money is speaking Japanese right now.

America, the rich sugar daddy, and China the poor chopstick daddy.

America, the rich sugar daddy at cost to it’s lower/middle class people who have to have dependable cars to go to work. They are being forced to hand money to Japanese company due to the lack of dependable American cars.

I might sound like a protectionist here, but realistically speaking, all this hollering about Chinese stealing American jobs not only echos the same from more than two centuries ago in the 1800′s:

The Japanese doesn’t even bother stealing American’s Jobs, they just put a plant in America, make Americans work to build the cars and then take the money. I mean, Capitalist or not, as a sane person, that economical enslavement and thorough humiliation hurts more than a fucking Chinese kid working for a mouthful of food. Those fat Japanese (economic) imperialists pigs haven’t changed a bit in their ways since the last time they tried to take over the world through racial and ethnic cleansing of Asia. AND they are doing it from right under our eyes under the guise of being a better race: The advertised facts seem to say that only under Japanese management can cars be made with high quality in America. Are you going to take this crap sitting down?

Somewhat racist comments aside. I will bet you one thousand 2013 dollars that America will be richer and will have higher quality of life if we made our own cars and keep the money instead of giving it to a Japanese.

America will be richer and have better quality of life if all of China was to sink into the ocean, but the improvement will not be any where nearly as drastic as having one–just one–god damned car maker do a good job. Think of the morale boost it will give us. Who cares about the stinking iPad when I can drive, without polluting the environment, and safely and have the money go to a fellow American’s hand.

And the hidden agenda here, btw, if you are wondering about this rambling Chinese American, is to perpetuate the American way of life–life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Why don’t we build a better car! Build a better car and show the world that we can do it. All of that negativity: corruption in government, large corporations, wall street… All those foreclosures, broken credit reports and all those mass killings… We will have lifted ourselves out of this freaking rut and resume our dreams of prosperity marching towards the great manifest destiny of the American way.

That would be so great!

Disclaimers: I work for a Japanese owned company. My statements here do not reflect my company’s policies. I suspect but do not know for a fact that Japan is building military robots using your hard-earned cash. I am not saying that America treat Chinese people the way they treat us in the 1800′s. I do not know the author of either books and have never read them.

Activities of a Clandestine Nature (4 of…

2013-01-22T23:41:00.004-08:00

Recently I heard a really great argument against clandestine activities: It perpetuates the practice, the habits, the policies, and the systems that facilitate clandestine activities. Being something that we don't want, systematic clandestine activities should be pointed out, certainly be strictly live-audited by unbiased third parties.

Why is clandestine activities bad? The truth of the matter is that knowledge begotten of clandestine activities are inherently out of context and incomplete information. Why spy on my computer, when you can walk up to me and ask? When you take a small slice of what happens, you will surely miss the whole as the whole is not represented by some of the things that you are able to see as a clandestine agent.

Previously suggested problem that those taking part in clandestine activities will as all things in nature fall into the path of least resistance. Some day, we will just water board every person we suspect, I mean why not? I'm sure there's an email I sent once that says "I hate you" or "I'm gonna kill you" or "I hope you die". And my constant opposition of clandestine activities is surely sign that I plan something and desire that no one sees it.

What is the difference between these series acts: passing a secret law that permits some person unknown to me at a time unknown to me read my emails, gather all my past school and employment records, find copies of all emails I've ever sent by USPS, and analyze all information about all my past employment and my family and friends, and these second series of acts: passing a secret law that permits some person unknown to me at a time unknown to me knock me out (perhaps it's already happening in my sleep ? or even on flights, god knows how often I fall asleep quite inexplicably moments before push-off, with two air jets blowing cold air at me and two reading lights shining down! and only to come to quite suddenly for no reason), and torture me and get that information?

Well, you say, there is collateral damage, you feel pain when you are tortured but you do not feel pain when your email is being scanned. This ought to be the most humane way of getting the information from you. Why are you not on your knees thanking all the people whose hard work went into making it so that you are not water boarded? (rightfully or not)

Aha, thank you President Obama! The constitution should save us… Let's see, according to wiki it implicitly presumes innocent for US citizens until proven guilty, but it provides wide leeway for authorities to investigate when suspicion is arouse.

We cannot pursue it through cruel and unusual punishments(8th amendment) as reading my email can hardly be construed as cruel and unusual… even in my interpretation. Although I can imagine some feel it is cruel.

It appears in the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It also fall under Fifth Amendment of due process:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

There should be a Grand Jury of my peers selected uniformly at random who when presented with evidence agree to the search and seizure of my information. I should not be deprived of my liberty and (privacy) property without due process of law. And of course the Ninth Amendment says that we may have rights beyond those listed

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

I should cover my behind and say, you guys in law enforcement are doing a heck of a job, which is much appreciated by present author. And I really hate all those other people who invade my privacy. It's just that I might have a small chance by conventional means (law suite, legal protests, policies, etc.) of changing those things you do that I don't like, and I do not have methods to affect those others.

Everyone who do take part in clandestine activities all feel absolute righteousness as they proceed in invasion of privacy that I do not want them to. Their feeling and their intention absolutely annoys me in addition to their act of invasion. Perhaps we should define invasion of privacy more formally so that these feelings about their feelings are processed rationally. If they can define information theoretic brain death, why can we not define more precisely what invasion of privacy is? What is personal privacy beyond those facts(bits, characters, words, sentences…) whose association with me is information that may cause me harm? regardless of harm, can we take the entropy of those bits and say that is the quantity of privacy lost? Actually, we should take information gain from a representative population and that is the information I lose--those that you gain. The privacy loss as defined (the negative of your information gain by reading my email from knowledge of all emails) actually only qualifies the privacy. It actually does not quantify it sufficiently.

Sadly, this very truthful and fundamental definition takes us a short ways. If you were an English major trying to find new phrasing of something, or if you are a VC looking for new cute company names, this will definitely find information detrimental to those trying to keep it private. But if I am someone plotting next Taliban attack, or someone discussing 21st century is a Marxist century, then the naïve information loss does not help as much as you would like it to (Certainly my email would give away less information under this definition than XYXYXZZZ.com inc) If everyone writes emails using words representing their true meaning equally and every one has same amount of total information(private+public) associated with them then reading your email and reading my email decreases our privacy equally. So we have parameters I_pr for private information, I_pu for public information.

We should compute using Bayes' rule to compute

P(I_pr|my emails, others' emails, I_pu) =

P(my emails | I_pr,I_pu, others' emails)*P(I_pr,I_pu, others' emails)/P(my emails, others' emails, I_pu)

and

P(my emails|Others' emails, I_pu)

and we can then calculate the information

IG(I_pr; my emails|others' emails, I_pu)

based on these distributions, pending specification of relevant linking functions or mechanisms. But the problem with this much more convincing information gain is that you will never convince anyone that the link functions is representative of you. Too complicated for constitutional purposes for sure, and the courts will surely not be empathetic enough to follow the math... Maybe next century when everyone's played with IG and done some modeling in grammar school.

For another example the number $54,102,299.14 and the number $14,541,022.99 relieves me of the same character-wise entropy privacy, however are quantitatively different. We need to rely on some oracle magic. Suppose there is a most concise way to describe the entirety of my privacy, say H containing a series of bits an oracle produced. Your knowledge of H would be your complete knowledge about me. ergmum, we should have a vocabulary of engrams, minimal cognitive elements… H is a series of engrams that is the complete knowledge about me--it's finiteness is not specified. Let's also suppose that my emails (the thing that you use to access my privacy) is encoded by the same oracle using the same engram language producing E the complete knowledge about my emails. |H| is the theoretic maximum privacy I can lose, H*E is the information that I actually lost (inner product like operation for vector space, TBD for strings, perhaps LCS for a special oracle). It remains only to calculate distance(such as edit_distance(H,E) for strings and euclidian_distance(H,E) for euclidian spaces) which is disinformation you gained by reading my email. H*E/|H| is the ratio of my privacy lost, H*E/|E| is the truthfulness of my emails.

It remains to be seen how to find an oracle, the definition of the engram language, operations over it, campaign to enact law to account and compensate us for the privacy lost, etc. However, I am really really wishing that all these clandestine activities are like zits in the face of growing humanity reaching adulthood and will blow away as our vitalities settle into their respective places.

The Ethics Hierarchy and More Diagramming

2013-01-14T01:41:00.001-08:00

I recently learned of the Chomsky hierarchy(aka the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy). It would appear to me that what I have discovered also forms a hierarchy of various ethical maxims. Also, I should mention we have added Laozi's 无为 advocating minimized interference both in governance as well as personal improvements. At first glance, it seems very nice that the transitive action space for these maxims fall into proper subset relationships. But as we shall see, this naïve hierarchy only begin to illustrate the relative situation of these maxims in the world.

We have not considered the possibility that I am not able to do some things to others and others may not be able to do some things to me. Let us redraw the Ethics Hierarchy but introduce additional capability regions in the transitive action space. Oh, and we have also introduced color to enhance readability of the picture.

Why is this interesting? Well for one thing we are at a stage where Venn diagram can actually separate all the regions that we are interested in. A second reason is that it makes us realized that the containment relationship visualization using grammar school Venn diagrams that my dad pointed me to was only just the beginning of our exploration. We can draw more circles and see that our world have distinctive sections with different shades of meaning, benefit and possibilities.

For instance, one thing this graph points out is that there are things that Confucius or Jesus recommends us to do that we cannot actually do to others.It also shows us that there are things that we desire that in reality we cannot receive, however we can perform the act onto others. The graph also points out that there are the region of actions space within our desires that others can never give to us.

Lastly from looking at this picture, it seems that actions within realm of possibility that are not recommended by the Jesus action set is small. On the other hand, the actions that Confucius recommend that are not possible is also small. From freehand drawing it would appear that the completely impossible actions inside the Confucius action set is small relative to all Confucius's recommendations, and similarly the completely possible actions outside of the Jesus set is small compared to the whole Jesus set.

Fascinating!!!

The Ninja Innovation, Golden Globe, CES, etc.

2013-01-13T21:57:00.002-08:00

Just returned from CES and I've been reading Ninja Innovation written and autographed by Gary Shapiro who heads CEA which runs CES which is where I found out about the book. The book goes down like a good scotch. Which is to say it is well aged, taste great, and a little intoxicating.

Also, reading the book I found out about German strategist Carl von Clausewitz. Hehe, I couldn't help but giggle a little regarding the "dialectic thesis and antithesis of war"… Recalling times long ago, in a land far away, where I first heard of the words "dialectics", "thesis", "antithesis" and the "resolution".

UGH, on second thought, should I post about this? It will surely arouse suspicion of multiple agencies from who knows how many countries monitoring the online postings that mentions these terms. I probably just signed the United States "Wire-tap" Warrant to endlessly monitor and analyze my blog and email and all other personal things, and to retroactively obtain all records of all my private things since birth, by writing about this. Want to give a quick shout out to Jodi Foster(Congrats on being recognized for lifetime achievement at 2013 Golden Globe), I am your fan! I know I'm not a big star since age of three, but still Go Privacy!!! :-)

hehe, okay, but do let me say, I find that today I am not so attracted to this idea of Hegel's.

But Clausewitz's work seem much more interesting. The expression "fog of war" started there. These things that are so obvious today, but probably rarely fully understood, very difficult to clarify in author's own head, and much more difficult to write in language at that time: Obviously the leadership of military has personalities, and obviously those personalities greatly affect what battles are fought and who wins wars. Obviously war includes clearly distinguishable elements (in fact physically separate aspects) of "force" and "uncertainty" and that their "resolution" would rely on the "creative spirit" of those involved, (aka fascinating trinity, die wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit). It sounds so obvious and so right and needless to write--Obviously, now, that I read it's summary in Wikipedia after more than two centuries of people reading and summarizing it) But at that time, perhaps nobody has yet fully grasped all these insights and put them together--except for Clausewitz, of course.

The same goes for Ninja Innovation, what's said seem completely obvious: Of course you need a team of highly specialized people who wants to, are able to, and are willing to work together to, and are willing to wait until the timing is right to accomplish a common goal. But the salience with which this is pointed out through personal experience of highly complex success stories is absolutely critical for the book to be of value to readers, and Shapiro accomplishes that.

Oh, I also want to plug my own blog having similar title called "The Good Business -- Ninja's approach." I must admit, in I originally used the word Ninja slightly derogatorily--This blog documents many of the business practices the "business ninjas" used successfully, or attempted without negative consequences, on me that are perhaps violate professional ethics. The good thing is that the blog did morph to include various devious ways for me to become a business Ninja. Great minds think alike, and we have both landed on Ninja.

I want to quote a line describing the Ninjas from Shapiro's book, that they excel at "the art of espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination" OMG, my heart stopped when I read this. This is the kind of people that the above fine print speak of. Those that spies and sabotages in complete secrecy! they infiltrate my work, hack my accounts, befriend my friends, family, and they kill. Powerful! very powerful, very insightful! exhilarating passage!

Link to the book on Amazon: Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses.

Additional links on Clauswitz's work:

Gutenberg copy of English version of On War is here by incorporated by reference. ;-)
Side-by-side translation English from original German.
Also, apparently there are famous French Military Strategist despite popular jokes about their lack of military success by the name of Antoine Henri Jomini.

p.s. note for self: center-of-gravity in these context is center of target of attack.

p.p.s. Next time I visit Vegas for fun, I'd like it to be riding California's new high speed rails...

Golden V. Silver Round II.I

2012-12-22T16:10:00.001-08:00

Holiday season 2012, wishing everyone a happy new year. Merry Christmas.

I had a frank conversation with my father and asked him to read Round II. He felt my explanations were unclear. Instead, he drew the following picture to illustrate from my conditionalization of the ethical imperatives. It stems from his ever present grammar school math basics which says that in a set theoretic axiomatic logic system the statement

if P then Q has the following Venn Diagram:

Because Q is true exceeds the situations when P is true, but not vice versa, therefore the containment relationship. After some quick calculation, due to the inversion and making sure the relationship still matches, the golden and silver rule when put into the same "action space" produces the following Venn Diagram:

It takes a moment to convince one's self that the smallest set "Confucius wants" fits inside what "I want". But if you image the outside of "Confucius wants" is Q above in the negative space and outside of "I want" is P in negative space and is therefore superset to Q.

This is now indeed very clear. By visualizing the action space over which both ethical imperatives
reside--those things within my ability to do to other and to be done onto--suddenly we find that these sets of actions: things I can do, things jesus wants me to do, things Confucius wants me to do, and things I want to do, have a superset relationship. The large sets are always proper super set of smaller sets unless I want done to me include all possible things or nothing.

It's kind of surprising that Confucius silver rule recommends doing fewer things than Jesus's golden rule--But then again, it may make sense, Confucius speaks much of humbleness, about learning from teachers, he puts greater value on meta-knowledge about one's own knowledge than the knowledge themselves. Perhaps this conservative valuation of self prevents him from doing as much.

Jesus on the other hand, son of god, savior of the world asks follower to do more in pursuit of heaven. Let's celebrate his birth...

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Golden V. Silver Round II

2012-11-27T08:13:00.003-08:00

I want to revisit the Golden Rule and Silver Rule of ethics comparison.

Recall that Golden Rule, is most commonly stated as "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", where the silver rule is the negated form that most frequently appears as:"己所不欲，勿施于人"

In my previous posts(here, and again here), it would appear that we have written about a result concerning two person one following the golden rule and one following the silver rule benefitting differently based on his or her likes and dislikes.

I should think a second analysis is in order on this Thanksgiving eve of 2012. We begin with the observation that both the golden rule and silver rule appear to be stated for sentences who's verb is transitive.

A Verb B

Golden rule says if you want to be B of a sentence, then you should always be A of that sentence.

Silver rule says if you do not want to be B of that sentence, then you should never be A of that sentence.

These imperatives are translated into logical conditionals as follows:

Golden: if "I want to be B" then "(Jesus says) always be A" of the action "A verb B".

Silver: if "I do not want to be B" then "(Confucius says) never be A" of the action "A verb B".

I want, ->O, Gold, Silver

Y, Y, T, T

Y, N, F, T

N, Y, T, F

N ,N, T,T

So this means under golden rule, the following can take place :

I want, do to O (*)

I don't want to be done onto, do to O

I don't want to be done onto, don't do to O.

under silver rule, the following can take place:

I want, do to O

I want, don't do to O

I don't want to be done onto, don't do to O. (*)

In reality, when there are two outcomes to the same antecedent, we usually cannot both do and do not do Verb onto O. So, a easy simplification, without biasing towards either rule is to take a maximum entropy approach. For the strategic ethicists, here are the strategies for this game of ethics:

Golden rule:

I want, do to O 100%

I don't want, 50% do to O 50% don't do to O.

Silver rule:

I don't want, do not do to O 100%

I do want, 50% do to O, 50% don't do to O.

With these relaxation in mind we shall commence analysis in a world where there are only two people, one strictly following the golden rule and one strictly following the silver rule. Given any want/don't want combinations there are several possibilities in the utility a person may take from a situation.

A verb Me and I want to be verbed: 1

A verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: 0

A does not verb Me and I want to be verbed: 0

A does not verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: 0

To person G or S, the utility of A Verb B taking place under these circumstances are

S1: G wants B, S wants B

S2: G wants B, S doesn't wants B

S3: G doesn't wants B, S wants B

S4: G doesn't wants B, S doesn't wants B

S1: G 0.5, S 1

S2: G 0, S 0

S3: G: 0, S 0.5

S4: G: 0, S 0

Summing everything up, G gets 0.5, s gets 1.5

Here, we will also consider the concept of a winner if in this world, under these rules and these strategies applied according to the rules that the rule's follower gains higher utility. In this case Silver rule follower wins, by 200%. This is quite interesting, because the golden rule is setup as if one is only rewarded by action when the same is desired, therefore, when Silver rule follower enters, the Golden rule follower suffers. This inspires us to reverse this and create a world where Silver rule follower is disadvantaged:

A verb Me and I want to be verbed: 0

A verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: 0

A does not verb Me and I want to be verbed: 0

A does not verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: 1

That is, if the world really is such a way that would cause one to create the silver rule, then what are each party's utility?

S1: G 0, S 0

S2: G 0, S 0

S3: G: 0.5, S 0

S4: G: 1, S 0.5

Totals G:1.5, S: 0.5

Aha, when the world is such that one would want to create the silver rule, silver rule follower benefits less when interacting with a golden rule follower, again by 200%. These two worlds seem to have produced very intuitive results: in the prior case, our world is one where one is only rewarded when actions on taken onto him only when he himself desires it; in this case silver rule following wins when in presence of gold rule follower, even tho he himself does not act with certainty when he desires it. In the latter case, our world is one where one is only rewarded when he is not done onto when he does not desire it. But in this case Golden rule wins. The conclusion one is tempted to draw from this is that rules are made in a world/society under its reward system to gain the most utility, but when interacting with members following rules from different world with different reward structure, then members of the foreign rule tend to benefit more from world/society than the natives.

Suppose our world is where inaction never create any disutility. And suppose also that doing the opposite thing is only half the damage as reward of doing the right thing:

A verb Me and I want to be verbed: 1

A verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: -.5

A does not verb Me and I want to be verbed: 0

A does not verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: 0

Totals G: 0.25, S: 0.75

So, in this world where inaction does no damage and wrong action is somewhat forgivable then Silver rule follower is 200% better off than Golden rule follower.

Another interesting case is the inaction world is where one is rewarded for wanting. Even when one doesn't get what one wants, he is still rewarded, though not as much as getting what he wants.

A verb Me and I want to be verbed: 1

A verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: 0

A does not verb Me and I want to be verbed: 0.5

A does not verb Me and I don't want to be verbed: 0

Totals: G: 1.25, S:1.75

In this case, Golden rule follower actually loses by 20% to silver rule. Similarly if we are slightly rewarded for not wanting even if we get something, the winner is reversed and Silver rule follower loses by 20%. As in the first two cases, the losing rule in a situation tend to be the rule inspired by that world, and that rule will lose when interacting a rule that would have been inspired by the opposite world. It seem to suggest that the society/world that inspired the silver rule would have rewarded members for not wanting where as the opposite is true of the society that inspired the golden rule.

These two widely known rules of moral and ethics known as Golden rule and ethics and Silver rule of ethics arise from different places in the world of different language and culture. Upon closer inspection, we discover that the logical interpretation of their meaning yields an extremely interesting problem regarding what to do in the situation when the rule gives no prescription for what to do. In this analysis we have taken a maximum entropy approach and created a mixed strategy profile for two persons one using golden rule and one using silver rule. In both cases when no prescription is given the follower will do one of two possible actions with 50% probability.

Under this relaxation of both rule, we put two people, one following each rule, together in an artificial world where utilities are assigned for four combination of one wanting to be B of "A verb B" and whether "A verb B" happens. It is found that the world with utility seeming to inspire a rule tend to favor the other rule's follower, follower of rules inspired by the world seem to suffer and gain less utility in the process of interacting with the other rule's follower. This would make sense in two ways: when the world rewards for some kind of action, the follower of the rule suffers when he does positive things to others but does not receive the same action in return. And secondly when the world punishes some action, the person coming from a world where there is no such punishment and does not know (from his rules) that he should not avoid it, and is therefore does bad things the native and hurts him.

With this in mind, the winners in two groups of worlds suggest that golden rule comes from a world/society where inaction never creates disutility where as silver rule come from a world where lack of desire (not wanting) is always rewarded.

Things of a Clandestine Nature (3 of...

2012-07-31T22:48:00.000-07:00

Money
There should be money value to losses of privacy. Every time an organized clandestine action is done onto me and that their actions is proven wrong, there should be consequence.

Having suspicion is a right, a duty of these law enforcement folks. But acting on an incorrect suspicion(whether justified or not) should carry consequence. Just as they are rewarded for following a hunch and catching a crook, there must be punishment for following a wrong hunch and negatively impacting a person's life.

In fact, I feel that even the access and analysis of my private information (email, files, my personal space such as my home, the airspace above my head, signals sent into my person and my possessions) these invasions of privacy must be punished when proven to be wrong.

Each violation must state hypothesis and the condition of test requiring invasion of privacy. If test proves hypothesis wrong then a punishment is assessed. If it is proven right then a reward is given.

Every kilobyte of my email you read, you should be paying me $x. If you retain the data then you will be charged $y/year.

This belittles human privacy rights, but it is one way that we can use to quantify, regulate and monitor the clandestine sector.

Things of a Clandestine Nature (2 of...)

2012-07-31T22:41:00.001-07:00

What is power? What is privacy?

I am not a very forceful thinker. I find myself thinking of every matter from multiple perspectives. More often than not I argue myself out of my own position.

The organized clandestine activities are organized for a reason. A large enough and powerful enough intelligence has recognized its necessity and has facilitated it's existence. That originator of this clandestine organization mandates that the clandestine activities be clandestine in all ways I have described in my previous post.

The consequence of this is that the clandestine organization must satisfy a certain level of service. Similar to the concept of an SLA, the clandestine organization must obtain information (in stealth) within a certain time period of it becoming known. When it masquerades, it must succeed in fooling all involved into believing that the party being masqueraded is truly doing it.

This ability is a power. And in effect it is not a power if it cannot be wielded freely. Similar to my right of speech. If I speak, and my voice is interfered with every time, or if my blog is unsearchable by some search engine trick then effectively my right of speech has been impinged upon. Conversely if here is a regulation that restrained the clandestine activity, then it decreases it's usefulness.

Let me give a simpler example to illustrate. If we are to guarantee the power of these clandestine organizations the ability to masquerade as me typing into my computer, then they can always type into my computer. If the operator (the member of clandestine organization) is have a bad day, if he is having a seizure, if he is unhappy that I oppose the existence of his job, if he made a typo and affect what I type into the computer as I work, then that is allowed.

Because if we regulate these abilities to try to prevent his foul mood or desire to keep his job in affecting my job performance then we have not given these clandestine organizations absolute power, and consequently they cannot function effectively, right? Consequently they are not liable for major failures like 911 right?

If any of the theatrical depiction of clandestine organizations are any where close to reality, it is safe to assume that all of them are insane. They are all paranoid and all able to argue for 100% absolute clandestine power!

Oh, and let me be obnoxious for once, having be target of obnoxious behavior so often... The aurora shooting, why don't the people watching my screen and analyzing my blog and causing typos in my keyboards and making my mouse fly around weirdly at work and home, why don't they go and wreck some havoc in an actual bad person's life? Why don't you go and prevent a really bad thing from happening? instead of secretly watching my activity?

The Chinese has Infected America Mentality

2012-07-31T07:45:00.002-07:00

It's Tuesday, 7/30/2012 and there is a small controversy at the Olympics. The American media (see below Google news search result, plus the TV for the past few hours) is reporting that America is complaining that a Chinese women has beat American men in swimming performance. I took a snap of results available to me right now and I cannot see why 4:05.18 gold medal performance in 400m IM by Ryan Lochte is beat by Chinese women Ye Shiwen's 4:28.43. Her's is a full 13 seconds slower!! WTF?

The world is about to end... Look at this massive disaster in India where there is more people without electricity than US and Canada population combined... and nearly all of Greenland's ice cap has melted, but all of that cannot compare to the loss of American individual propaganda free mindset.

THE CHINESE have had for the past three decades the observation that China is 阴盛阳衰: the Yin prospering and the Yang in decline, or "Weak" according to google translation today. The female Chinese athletes have in the past performed better in the international competitions than the Chinese men, things like soccer, volley ball, tennis... Chinese Men can only compete in Table Tennis and similar small-balled games.

But today! All of American media have taken this same view and said that Chinese women is faster than American man even when the results are clearly not so. The Chinese women DID NOT JUST BEAT AMERICAN MAN IN SWIMMING. OH! MY!! FUCKING!!! GOD!!!! this is so fucking offensive to me as a Man, an American, and as a Chinese man!! And as an Internet professional that our industry lets this kind of crap seep into it's mainstream.

The British authorities on the matter have declared that she won that women's competition dope-free. Yet American media has refused to report on this. Even Google's automatic algorithm is refusing to pick up the BBC headline on the matter. I mean, I even feel like suggesting that the Brits are just trying to kiss the Chinese's ass in case it needs the goodwill economically in the near future. I mean, really? Did North Korea's starving athletes just really won Gold in Judo? REALLY????

But a corrupt Olympic games, athletes and officials is not really a concern to me, as I am not an athlete and I am not uplifted by the Olympic spirit:

Citius, Altius, Fortius.

and I didn't get up at 5 this morning to watch Olympics, and I most certainly did not get up early to watch American TV and least of all to read news on the Internet.

This is the end... mark my words..., the loss of Chinese moral, American media integrity, universal symbols of progress and betterment of men.

What to do with all that $$USD ??

2012-07-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

Okay, I recently found out that the Chinese (PRC) government couldn't stop buying American debt (That is it lends money to the US government which gives it a little bit of interest regularly until sometime in the future when it gives the money back)

There are some attempts, by the Chinese to spend money in the US. Some were blocked blatantly by the US government such as 3Com and UNOCAL, while in other cases, it seemed almost certainly win-win for both sides due to Chinese expertise, manufacturing resources and unique perspective but ultimately failed: Yahoo, Maytag, etc. All this protectionism may or may not be beneficial to the American people. Here for instance is another very very specific case of preventing China from spending all this debt America owes it by way of the "country with special concern" designation which prevents lobbyist from being paid by the PRC. article. Btw, I've heard of this from a second radio source as well, but it doesn't appear to be listed on congressman Wolf's website.

This, btw, is fantastic news for the people of PRC. The government won't be spending their tax money on American politicians. AND it is fantastic news for other lobby interests all of whom now have one fewer competitor and therefore has to pay much less.

But let's for the moment assume that China has too much US $$, and that most avenues of investment: equity in companies, real estate, lobbying, etc. have been ruled out as certain losers. What else can it do with it's money

Well, let's see... The one thing that we see the most in America, aside from Chinese restaurants and those evil cult protesters are poor Chinese students. They come to the US having beat everyone else in their own country in their respective arts and sciences or skills, and they often end up delivering food for those aforementioned restaurants or joining evil cults for residency and working rights in the United States. Why doesn't the Chinese government establish a scholarship for any Chinese student being normally accepted into an American institution so that they can pursue their dreams of excellence in their arts and crafts? Would that not be the most effective investment?? And let me assert that the Chinese government have enough money in the bank to pay for a decent education for all of its students accepted in the to schools in the US. This, btw, is entirely legal in America, even if the funds are managed and disbursed in an American entity.

Oh, WTF, while we are at it, why don't the PRC. government endow a general scholarship (name it the People's Republic of China Scholarship for Excellence) that is given to the best candidate of any nationality and race. Imagine some twenty years later, and the president of France, or prime minister of India, or some Nobel laureate proudly thanks American university for an education and China for it's awesome scholarship. Wouldn't that be quite an accomplishment ?!!

The money can be spent on establish libraries. They can start a Museum collecting arts of Chinese origin but that have been admired and possessed by non-Chinese. These art are true treasures that have possessed not only their originators but also many other peoples of other race and culture. Wouldn't that be an awesome museum??!!

Why don't the Chinese people take all that debt and rent a county; and on that county why don't they build a university. Build the Chinese University of America. This act not only revitalizes a whole American town, or perhaps a whole state, but also produces jobs, educates new minds, and most of all creates the most perfect nexus of the two cultures and the enlighten minds of the two people. This not only creates jobs in America, it would not only be building American infrastructure, but would also be creating a new believe, a new trust, a new friendship--a new hope for the two people.

Why don't they spend their money that way?

Things of a Clandestine Nature

2012-07-03T08:28:00.001-07:00

Back to discussion of the nature of things. Not so recently have I become interested in clandestine activities.

One could define clandestine activities as those that are undertaken with actor, actions, reason and existence concealed or obfuscated. Organized clandestine activity is one where human and other resources are pooled and organized to perform advanced massive and pervasive clandestine activities. Clandestine organizations and clandestine free agents are groups and individuals who perform organized clandestine activities. There could also be unorganized activities such as accidental activity. Clandestine activity by high technology: wire tap, ether/wifi sniff. Data mining records Clandestine activity by process:

Why the formality?
Because I find myself spending far too much time thinking about my coworkers reading my emails at work, my boss reading my personal emails, my friends, my wife, my parents reading my emails, my coworkers changing my code seconds before I check them into SVN...

So, what are all these clandestine activities and what difference does it make? Let us dissect the above paragraph into its constituencies:

Monitoring: secret collection of information: boss hires someone to read my personal email. To me, I am okay with people being aware of my personal activities. As long as it is does not materially detrimental to my quality of life. I think corporation law protecting secrecy is the minimal level of protection we have.

If I have stated that I want something private, then it should be protected as my personal privacy.
If I have taken sufficient measures to conceal it then it should be private.

For example: mail service provider instrumenting a password and my using a password on my email account demonstrates both intent and effort in hiding my personal emails. Please do not read them! It should be protected just as much as a stocker looking through my blinds which also shows desire and effort towards hiding something.

Reaction: acting on the information gathered under fake reason: boss plans to have an important meeting on the day I scheduled an interview at another company before I ask for that day off for a dentist appointment. Information asymmetry here causes employee to be at an disadvantage. Setting up a DUI check point to block bank robber's escape route.

Masquerading: acting under the identity of an actual person or entity: eg coworker changes code in my work directory with out asking me. Stealing and defaming my identity. I feel this should be against rule of law and rule of companies. This can effectively kills a person's identity and his reputation. Doing this is like putting poison in his drink just before he swallows it. This should not be allowed.

Subjects of organized clandestine activities are of two types, some are effectively forced to participate (you cannot buy a house unless you share your information with all our bank networks...), British surveillance system of cameras. Others participate amicably because they do not care or participate in the clandestine activities. And lastly, there are those that accept that they are subjects of clandestine activities without participating in it. I cannot imagine who wants that, but perhaps I can be persuaded that this is indeed an acceptable, and indeed more optimal, society like I accept the police been given the ability to legally (but completely publicly) use force and sometimes deadly force.

There are several issues that needs to be thought through.

Personal Privacy is a person's property, the loss of privacy has money (among other) value.
Personal Privacy is a person's right like speech.
Personal Privacy is a mechanism important to capitalism or other aspects of economy or society like competition is. Or is it a bad thing like prostitution?
Is complete Personal Privacy effectively impossible in a modern society?
Is @usps.com an option? snooping my email can be big an offense as stealing my physical snail mail.
What if I invested $5million of my own money in a company? Would I want the employee's personal emails be read and reread by several trusted parties?

It is nearing July 4th this 12th year into our new millennium, I am reading a blog entry of my own from 2006ish talking about this exact issue with exactly same complaints that my email is being read and my code is being messed with.

I wish I could come to terms with these thoughts! They have consumed far too much of my time...

Happy July 4th!

The 6-2-10 system, part III: The power of 6

2012-05-16T01:29:00.000-07:00

It's been more than two years since I discussed the 6-2-10 system. Since then I have become aware of some research regarding productivity in a revenue optimizing society. in 1909 Sidney Chapman apparently researched this and found that very large organizations function best with 8-hr work days.

But to be realistic, the people who service our society the most often work very very long hours. Many of them argue that working longer hours really produces bigger highs and more total results. Brilliance in human brain seem often to be inspired by fatigue, hallucination, and as Steve Jobs would have it, some LSD or other mind-altering drugs; Perhaps some products of brain or mind requires certain amount disability(Beethoven, Hawkins?), requires derangement (perhaps myself?), and perhaps requires amputation(司马迁)

Not having enough knowledge about this whole field of study on worker productivity, nor enough knowledge about the physiology of working, nor any knowledge about the psychology of productivity, I would dare only endeavor further in parameterizing the system for the masses.

Obviously, as alluded before, 6-2-10 can as well be a four shift work day of 6-12-18-24, or six shift work days of 4 hours each: 4-8-12-16-20-24; However, one would have to agree that too many shifts leads to too much organizational efforts to arrange all these shifts. Commuting to work for 4 hours and then commute back seems silly. The changing of guards also require some time, so a good compromise for a tightly integrated urban society is 6-12-18-24 system with a half hour break. Effectively 5.5 hour work each day and half an hour used to switch people in and out of office. For the sake of brevity I will refer to the second system as the p6 system (The boundaries are only at products of 6)

Another advantage of the p6 system is that for the most part, anybody in any shift will have an extended period of time both during day time and during night time free to do other things. the 6-2-10 system will have a shift that sees very small amount of night.

A second advantage of the p6 system is that if some one were to plan to work for 12 hours, it is built into the system. Myself I work 12 hour days regularly, and from an recent articles, it would appear that many Americans do as well. So if the prevailing desire is to do 12 hours a day, the P6 system automatically allows them to do this.

The reality of myself is that I actually prefer quiet time to work, so an effective sub-system is for 12-hour companies to buy room for 1/2 of the company for 12 and room for all of the company only for 6 hours of the day. This way, early shift comes in and works for 6 hours, quietly, without large meetings, then the meetings of the day takes place during the middle 6 hours when all of the company is at work. After the meetings the early shift goes home and the late shifts works its 6 hour of quite work time.

But to be a united company, one would probably want a one-system-company. There seem to be something weird about a 12-hour person speaking to a 6-hour person... At least my current company, people who stick around longer seem to get more say in things and is well liked by higher ups, without respect to the actual quality and benefit of their work.

Morale would be much higher, as we get more personal time to take care of our own family, do fun things, smoke weed, farm weed, or what ever.

Hmm, the demands on the general upstanding nature of citizens are higher in this system. Because having more free time doesn't mean we spend it scheming on how to over throw the government or how to take over other countries... The extra time needs to be spent on activities that improve our quality of our own lives, our family, other peoples lives, and quality of society.

While it is not absolutely necessary, nor was it the original motivation of the 6-2-10 system for the productivity per productive resource (person/office/computer/etc) to be higher, my expectation is for it to be higher. That is, I really feel that a focused 5-hour work day can and will be much more effective than a long 12-hour day.

Life is short, we should try to do more in less time to extend the effective longevity.

Superstars and Cheap Labor

2012-05-16T01:22:00.000-07:00

ugh! Feel kind of low having attempted to gracefully sent off two co-founders from evening of fairly heated discussion of our startup ideas.

There was a moment of genius though. There are two kinds of people one would want to recruit if one were to startup a company in one's spare time, while working diligently, efficiently, and full time, about hours a day (sorry, just covering ass in case you are my boss or co-worker, and these are the honest truth).

Once, I had a great boss. great guy, smart, funny, easygoing, and very handsome, impeccably dressed, hair-gelling, hybrid-driving, latte-drinking, Stanford PhD'ing, boss... He has this constant preoccupation with recruiting "superstars". At the time, I didn't really have any appreciation for this concept of what a superstar is and what he does and why my boss really really wants to recruit them. (I mean, weren't I super enough for you? ;~(....

So now come a time when I consider organizing my own thing. and suddenly it hits me. There was a second type of recruiting that he did, which was that he had a lot of cheap engineers (one of which I was, apparently... not as cheap as most, but still, not superstar pay-grade at the time). There were quite a lot of cheap labors in our group under my boss's organization. And constantly he seeks superstars.

When it come time for me to make these considerations, suddenly I feel that I have bifurcated desire. One the one hand. I really want to have a coupla people who doesn't need a lot of pampering (and salary/options, but let that be said parenthetically). You know, the guys who are experienced enough to just hunker down and type out code, and doesn't demand being praised/bonused/paraded in front of the team for all the accomplishments.

But on the other hand, I find myself unthinkingly wanting. I want a person who takes larger than deserved pride in even one line of code written. I want a guy who types

printf("hello world!");

and stands up and raises his fist and says to the team: "Hello!" as if he has lifted the world and spun it around the sun.

I am uncertain where this desire stems. Perhaps due to my own vanity. Certainly there are times when I write a recursion and feel like I am one of a thousand people in the world who can do that. And be that as it possibly may(perhaps around 50k? Interview question after solving a problem: estimate the number of people who in similar situation can write that code), the swell of pride and happiness and relief and forgetting all else, so overwhelming, so high, better than drugs, and cheaper too...

I want a person like that. Because we would agree on the same thing and s/he would shine and design things according to principles, efficiency, robustness, maintainability, marketability, big-O's, k-factors, r-naughts, and whatnots. And it would be a superstar who can make things happen when I need it and the way I need it, and most important to me: Make the world spin for us.

Thus, this leaves us with two types of recruitment, forsaking many acceptable social standards and enforcible laws: Cheap labor and Super stars!

I need Cheap Labor, and
I need Superstars!

And who amongst you think you don't, must be running a fool's errand.

Anyway, the core issue here is actually not the existence of this bifurcation but what is fair compensation. All men are created equal, and for the most part, on the average, they work as hard as one another. And I expect each to even if they are cheap or super.

And the question remaining frozen in the airspace in my living room: should they be compensated differently??

Ooops, am I Chinese?

2012-02-08T21:20:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Bay Area is a culturally very diverse place. I live here and I feel like a normal person.

Until I saw this video today about this video Ad. The CNN video news is about Pete Hoekstra running a political AD featuring a Chinese women thanking America for allowing her to be rich. Pete, resorting to this racially targeted Ad and name calling by registering a domain name called debbiespendit and petespenditnot.com. And the

Okay, so... I wasn't particularly insulted by this blatantly racist video. I mean, my quality of life is so good that I have become complacent about racial issues surrounding me and my people in the United States. In particular, I find that I don't find it insulting, that it is often said that "The Chinese are stealing American jobs!" President Obama says it, Gingrich says it, Romney says it, everybody who's any body says it.

Let's see now, why is the Chinese "stealing" American jobs? I thought the expression "stealing" is the action of not paying enough $ for product or services?!

As a Chinese I think I should at least object to this racial attack saying Chinese is doing something bad to American when no such action is taken, at least not at the scale that these people suggests.

As an American, I should object to this because the Chinese CANNOT "steal" my job! And if they can, then I can do something about it. I just cannot believe this! This is absolutely the worst thing to be saying as an American!

Let's become competative! let's beat them! let's work harder, let's make better products and design better things. Let us work better together as one people. Let us not blame the Chinese for doing that, let's blame ourselves for not doing that better!

GOD! I am so fucking insulted!!!!!

I feel so ashamed!!!!

And worst of all, it took a stupid fucking CNN news piece to point out that for so many years, with the president and all those so called "leaders of America" calling me TO MY FACE, through TV and video and all media, that as a Chinese I steal! and that as an American I allow myself to be stolen from and not realizing that I am being spoken to. As myself, I am horrified at my ability to think critically.

UGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!