Is AlphaGo really such a big deal

In some ways yes as described in this article in Quanta with the same title as this post. But not mentioned often enough is this:

For the last 20 years, we’ve had exponential growth, and for the last 20 years, people have said it can’t continue. It just continues. But there are other considerations we haven’t thought of before. If you look at AlphaGo, I’m not sure of the fine details of the amount of power it was using, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was using hundreds of kilowatts of power to do the computation. Lee Sedong was probably using about 30 watts, that’s about what the brain takes, it’s comparable to a light bulb.

This is from Geoff Hinton. Also interesting is this article on Demis Hassabis one of the founders of Deepmind on what the future might be:

Most AI systems are “narrow”, training pre-programmed agents to master a particular task and not much else. So IBM’s Deep Blue could beat Gary Kasparov at chess, but would struggle against a three-year-old in a round of noughts and crosses. Hassabis, on the other hand, is taking his inspiration from the human brain and attempting to build the first “general-purpose learning machine”: a single set of flexible, adaptive algorithms that can learn – in the same way biological systems do – how to master any task from scratch, using nothing more than raw data.

Netflix = Cable

Signed up for Netflix and the first thing I did was to see what movies were available:
Edge of Tomorrow? Nope.
Matrix? Nope.
Whiplash? Nope.
Snow White and the Huntsman? Nope.

It feels like cable TV - a whole lot of nothing except old reruns. I wanted movies on demand and all I got was cable.

Technology advances in stutter steps

I wanted a holodeck and all I got was a pair of goggles?

Remotely from Penang, again

I had been surprised that there was a list that indicated that Bangkok and Penang had great Internet speeds which was not something I had experienced. This time round I tried it again and it is only slightly better and the experience was fairly uneven. In Bangkok I wasn't able to stream Coursera videos without significant lag and buffering. YouTube videos seemed to be fine. Downloading a 80 MB file took about 15-20 minutes. In Penang, this was much the same. Most likely it depends on the telco as well as the amount of traffic at the time. I'm thinking that the list is pretty much meaningless.

Is it time to return to print ads

There is something about print ads that isn't captured by electronic screens. Even more so now that it is entirely possible that:

Robot fraudsters account for nearly a quarter of “people” watching online video ads and more than one in 10 display ads, according to the largest investigation to date into the digital advertising industry.
...
Bot fraudsters infect unsuspecting computer users with malware – malicious software. Sophisticated botnets mimic the behaviour of online consumers, pausing at ads, watching videos, switching websites and even putting items in shopping carts. This fake traffic is often bought by publishers who are unaware their audience is fake.

Despite all the advances that the Internet has brought us - the business model remains selling ads - and this is the domain of the great technology giant of our time - Google whose ads are about as eye-catching as ... er, well nothing. It is also the domain of the same technology behemoth's video ads via You Tube which are as good as, er, TV ads?

So should businesses continue to advertise online via Google or any kind of broad ad generating system such as Amazon? Or should they focus on narrow channels as is already happening - via Facebook, Hulu, etc.? Does this spell the beginning of the end for Google's business model?

Remotely from Penang

I saw on NomadList the best places to live and work remotely (HT: MR) and was surprised that Penang was in the Top 20. The Telegraph also reproduced the list.

The Internet experience I had when I was there last year was disappointing to say the least. Wifi was spotty in our residence - the signal kept getting dropped. Okay - it might have been an equipment issue. When it worked however, there was a significant slowdown in Internet speeds around 5 pm and after. I'm not sure if it was due to the pipe in our neighborhood or not but I suspect that people got home from work and went on the Internet and overwhelmed the network.

We're going again and perhaps we'll experience something different this time - hopefully.

Paying with your finger

HT: Marginal Revolution. Wrong finger unfortunately.

Teksi sapu meets the 21st century

Teksi sapu + Internet = UberX

I had been looking forward to this service coming to Malaysia especially Penang since public transportation there is virtually non-existent if you live in the Green Lane area. Even worse is the traffic which is comparable to being on the DC Beltway at rush hour except that in Penang it is everywhere during rush hour.

Unfortunately, like some jurisdictions in the US this is seen more as a threat to taxi companies than a way to alleviate congestion and perhaps even decrease pollution.

From the above link:

The Maryland Public Service Commission has labeled Uber a common carrier. It’s a move the company says could make it impossible for them to operate here in Maryland.

And from Malaysia:

Private vehicles offering a taxi-like service through the Uber mobile app are doing so illegally. 

They would face the full brunt of the law during a nationwide crackdown by the autho­rities from Oct 1, Road Transport Department (JPJ) director-general Datuk Seri Ismail Ahmad said yesterday. 

He said the service was akin to teksi sapu or kereta sapu as the vehicles were not licensed to carry fare-paying passengers.

Glitch

From the NYT opinion page on the failure of the Obamacare website on October 22, 2013 - the title of the piece was:

How to Fix the Glitches

The launch was reported on October 12 as follows (emphasis mine):

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal

...

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low. 

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.' ”

 

The NSA's spectacular success

A reminder why what the NSA has been able to achieve is so amazing - compare it to the roll out of Obamacare:

The rocky launch of the Department of Health and Human Services' HealthCare.gov is the most visible evidence at the moment of how hard it is for the federal government to execute major technology projects. ... Despite efforts to make government IT systems more modern and efficient, many agencies are stuck in a technology time warp that affects how projects like the healthcare exchange portal are built. Long procurement cycles for even minor government technology projects, the slow speed of approval to operate new technologies, and the vast installed base of systems that government IT managers have to deal with all contribute to the glacial adoption of new technology. With the faces at the top of agency IT organizations changing every few years, each bringing some marquee project to burnish their résumés, it can take a decade to effect changes that last.

That was in the movie

But not in the book. I remember those college days when instead of doing the assigned reading, some of us would watch the movie instead. Unfortunately, sometimes the movies would deviate from the book.

I also remember the days in college where we would blow off the assigned reading since the professor was only going to cover it in class anyway and we were POSITIVE we would be able to follow the lecture. After all, there was always going to be some one who would eventually stop the lecture to ask anyway.

Have MOOCs changed anything? Instead of reading the book, now one can actually watch the movie instead!

Here's a concept that some have advocated based on the success of MOOCs - a hybrid of online and in-class instruction:

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

...

No school has taken flipping as far as Clintondale. It began because Greg Green, the principal, had been recording videos on baseball techniques and posting them on YouTube for his 11-year-old son’s team. Recording the content allowed kids to watch the videos repeatedly to grasp the ideas, and left more time for hands-on work at practices.

It gave him an idea, and in the spring of 2010, he set up an experiment: He had a social studies teacher, Andy Scheel, run two classes with identical material and assignments, but one was flipped. The flipped class had many students who had already failed the class — some multiple times.

After 20 weeks, Green said, Scheel’s flipped students, despite their disadvantages, were outperforming the students in the traditional classroom. No student in the flipped class received a grade lower than a C+. The previous semester 13 percent had failed. This semester, none did. In the traditional classroom, there was no change in achievement.

But will watching videos go the way of assigned reading? (emphasis mine)

Especially in low-income communities, some students don’t have access to the tech they need to watch videos. Students I talked to said that about 10 percent don’t — but they easily watch at school. Just because students can watch, of course, doesn’t mean they do watch. (See the discussion page here for teachers’ advice on getting students to do homework.)

...

Salman Khan, founder of the Khan academy, makes a good point in his book, “The One World Schoolhouse”: If students are going to skip homework, it’s far better to miss watching a video than to miss doing the problem sets.

This is the second and far more important shift that comes with flipped classrooms: it frees up class time for hands-on work. Students learn by doing and asking questions — school shouldn’t be a spectator sport. ”A lot of people think it just has to do with technology,” said Kim Spriggs, who teaches business and marketing. “It’s actually more time for kids to do higher-order thinking and hands-on projects. Instead of presenting the information in class and having students work on projects at home, where they don’t necessarily have support, here in class, one-on-one or in small groups, I can help them immediately.” Students can also help each other, a process that benefits both the advanced and less advanced learners.

Lastly, this was the most interesting bit:

The flipped classroom is a new experience for students — but also for teachers, who are going from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” as many education writers put it. For good teachers, that’s liberating. “I have a YouTube video on subject-verb agreement that has 54,000 views,” said Dameron. “I don’t want to give that lecture every year.”

Townsend said he feels like an “educational artist” who doesn’t just talk and hand out sheets. “I can create interactive lessons and exciting content. There’s so much more time to educate!”

Flipped classrooms require more creativity and energy from the teacher. “You are off your chair the entire hour and walking around,” said Dameron. “Lots of teachers who aren’t really good teachers are resistant to this — they like to build time into the day when kids are working to do their taxes or catch up on email.”.

Too clever?

First from WaPo (which I thought was way cool - emphasis mine because of coolness):

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers. 

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

...

Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.

Taken together, the data would enable the NSA, if permitted, to draw detailed maps of a person’s life, as told by personal, professional, political and religious connections. The picture can also be misleading, creating false “associations” with ex-spouses or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years.

...

In practice, data from Americans is collected in large volumes — in part because they live and work overseas, but also because data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home. Large technology companies, including Google and Facebook, maintain data centers around the world to balance loads on their servers and work around outages.  

But:

Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.”
The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Australian intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf.

After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.”

Second from Cyclone Phailin:

A catastrophe seemed inevitable as monstrous cyclone Phailin lumbered towards the northeast coast of India. Less than 15 years before, a similar storm, named Odisha, devastated a nearby part of the country, leading to over 10,000 casualties.

It will be days if not weeks before Phailin’s full toll on life and property is known, but from early accounts, there are no signs of a disaster on the scale of 1999 Odisha cyclone. CNN reports a comparatively low 21 deaths from Phailin.

There are several factors which, together, help explain why disastrous consequences were avoided from Phailin.

...

5) The storm’s intensity may have been overestimated  (by some sources, including some we cited): While the Joint Typhoon Warning Center and other U.S. forecasters estimated the storm’s peak intensity reached category 5 levels, the Indian Meteorological Department did not. While the Indian Meteorological Department predicted a serious storm (and its predictions motivated the massive preparation efforts), its forecasts were not as dire as some others. Assessing the intensity of a tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean (and Bay on Bengal) is different from other ocean basins, and the regional expertise of the Indian Meteorological Department may have proven superior.

“They have been issuing warnings, and we have been contradicting them,” said L.S. Rathore, director-general of the Indian Meteorological Department. “That is all that I want to say.”
“As a scientist, we have our own opinion and we stuck to that. We told them that is what is required as a national weather service — to keep people informed with the reality without being influenced by over-warning,” Rathore added, according to the Associated Press.

Memo to NSA

Dudes, this is so cool! Awesome, man!

The head of the National Security Agency has admitted to secret pilot programs to monitor the precise location of Americans through their cellphones, saying the highly intrusive tracking data "may be something that is a future requirement for the country".

And I thought that all this technology was made up for "24" and "Person of Interest".

In light of the ACLU, the do-nothing congress, and the mainstream media being so hard on your case because of all this hogwash about our privacy, I thought I'd send a note of congratulations on coming this far. Perhaps in order to appease the public - and I for one would definitely be on board - you could offer to pay for our voice and data plans for the rest of our lives in exchange for the ability to track us.

Thanks for your kind attention.

NSA bleh

For lack of a proper blog title.

Details of the NSA surveillance project in the Guardian on XKeyscore and installation of back doors on encryption software left me breathless. Part of me was impressed - especially with XKeyscore. The first thought was "Is this is the same government whose computer upgrades at the FBI and IRS years ago was plagued by cost overruns and failure?" (For instance, see this and this.) The next thought was: "Hey I want to be in on that!"

The next series of articles that I read left me uncertain.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

• Laura Poitras
• David Miranda 
• Destruction of hard drives at the Guardian
• Blog takedown at Johns Hopkins
• Loveint

are all signs of an (over?) zealous government working to protect its "territory" rather than the spirit of the program which is to save lives.

The installation of back doors to encryption technology reminded me that in  "Person of Interest". Here's the Wiki on the character Nathan Ingram:

Ingram came to realize that the people who were to receive the Machine were not entirely trustworthy. During a meeting with Alicia Corwin, he accidentally let slip that eight people knew about the Machine rather than seven. Later, he tried to convince Finch to make a back door into the machine, only for Finch to refuse. Just prior to shipping the Machine, Ingram used his administrative access to install a new function named "contingency". After creating the back door, the Machine was relocated to its new home. ("No Good Deed")
 
After the Machine is shipped out on a freight train, Ingram meets with Finch in their now empty laboratory. Finch tells him that he has been thinking about Ingram's desire to help people, and proposes they use their wealth to invest in new projects, such as clean water initiatives and sustainable farming. Ingram retorts that they built the "single most powerful technology known to man, a machine that knows when someone needs help, and you just gave it away." He tells him that they had their chance to help people and they missed it. Finch replies that "we built it, and it saves lives." Ingram argues that it doesn't save enough lives, and Finch responds that the machine is gone. Ingram implies he built a back door into it, which angers Finch as they had agreed not to. He tells Ingram that they agreed not to play God, but Ingram reveals that he isn't proud of that agreement. Finch argues that they did what they set out to do, and that "either we move onto the next thing together, or we don't." ("One Percent")

(Emphasis added)
 

Mobile blogging

Am trying out the Andoid app. If anything it might get me to blog a little more than in the past year.

Pros: Convenience
Cons: No spellcheck! Which is a necessity with a smaller keyboard.

PS: Never understood why there isn't an option for a Dvorak keyboard for mobile devices. With a smaller than usual screen/keyboard it seems more efficient to just lay everything out alphabetically.

Coursera certificates

At some time Coursera used to call them certificates but now they have changed them to “statement of accomplishment”. But whatever they are calling them I find them to be incredibly distracting. Unfortunately I seem to be unable to rise above them (as others can) and work on my own pace (in "archive" mode) and say “Begone with you Coursera certificate”.

I’m feeling some angst about this because I have hit a slew of courses that seem intent on using quizzes and homeworks not to teach but to test. These are the courses that only give you one attempt at getting the answers and this one attempt is the only one that counts as credit toward the certificate. A lot of times it also tests facts and recall rather than interpretationThis is of course the typical traditional college approach. While this doesn’t prevent me from multiple attempts it feels as though my efforts are diluted.

Irrational? You bet. So I try to say to myself, "the statement of accomplishment is meaningless". (And if one reads the fine print that comes with the statement it is readily apparent how meaningless it is.) Part of me wants to protest against these courses. Is unenrolling a better form of protest or a remaining a non participant until the course goes into archive?

Most interesting sentence today on Japanese electronics firms

From the BBC:

Sony makes far more money today out of selling life insurance than it does out of making electronics. Panasonic and Sharp have less to fall back on.

From the above link:

Japan's electronic giants once ruled the world. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp were household names. Now those same companies are in deep trouble, losing billions of dollars a year.

...

According to Tokyo-based economist Gerhard Fasol, the Japanese giants were overtaken by the digital revolution.

The Japanese giants, he says, actually built their empires on making complex electrical machines - colour televisions, radios, cassette players, refrigerators, washing machines.

Yes, they contained electronic components, but they were basically mechanical devices.

But then came the digital revolution, and the world changed.

...

"So it's hard to become rich today on the scale of a Panasonic just by manufacturing - you have to do a lot more."

Working from home boosts productivity?

Here’s an argument from the Economist which suggests that productivity increases by letting employees work from home (emphasis mine):

But tethering the Yahoos to their stalls in the company’s offices does not seem like the right way to go about boosting their output. Plenty of evidence suggests that letting employees work from home is good for productivity.

The premises seem to be:
1. Letting employees work from home boost productivity
2. If one worker works from and productivity increases then as more workers work from then productivity will increase more
Conclusion: All workers should work from home.

More coverage here - my read is that while working from can have productivity gains these gains are not monotonic. At some point there will be negative returns and Yahoo may have gone well past those gains into negative territory. The reason for the ban is perhaps to have a clean slate. Let’s start all over and then begin doling out work from home perks as time progresses. After all if the Economist is correct, Yahoo should be swimming in profits.

A defense of MOOC

I felt that I had to respond to this negative comment on online learning:

Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn’t matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.

Not long ago I watched a pre-filmed online course from Yale about the New Testament. It was a very good course. The instructor was hyper-intelligent, learned and splendidly articulate. But the course wasn’t great and could never have been. There were Yale students on hand for the filming, but the class seemed addressed to no one in particular. It had an anonymous quality. In fact there was nothing you could get from that course that you couldn’t get from a good book on the subject.        

Goodness knows, I’ve thrashed Coursera enough but this have to keep reminding myself that it is still experimental. Professors have had almost a hundred years to teach yet the number of times I have encountered a memorable professor or a memorable lecture - is, well - one or two out of maybe eight years of college and grad school. After all, aren’t most professors like … anyone, anyone?

But in 6 months of Coursera, I have already had one extremely memorable course - a course I had no previous knowledge in and yet found to be extremely challenging and the end of the course left me with a short void. In particular, this farewell email excerpt from Prof. Ronen Plesser’s Astronomy course is the most heartfelt and rewarding experience I have ever had as a student [emphasis below mine]:

You are also deserving of my deepest thanks for sticking with me through what has been a challenging course. I set some high expectations for all of us when designing the class, in terms of the level at which I wanted to present material and ask you to - as someone put it on the forums - "think around" with the concepts. To the extent that this has succeeded it is largely a result of the effort you put into it, individually as well as collectively.

This was my first experience with online education, and I have to admit I was quite surprised by the effectiveness of the discussion forums. A great deal of teaching and learning happened on these, the great majority of it involving students and not staff. All of you who contributed to this by asking great questions, sharing your insights, adding extra bits of information, or participating in the common struggle to master tough material have played a huge part in making this class a pleasure to teach and, I hope, a positive experience for students. For this, too, I thank you.

As you probably gathered, the lecture videos were produced more-or-less "live" during the class. This flies in the face of accepted wisdom on best practices in the medium, which suggests that all class materials be prepared well before launch. This had a cost to all of us - the occasional (or more than occasional) errata, the mis-statements or errors on slides or in autograder settings, even the omission of entire segments either because I forgot them or because I ran out of time. But in hindsight I think it was a wise decision. As the course developed, I found myself, somewhat to my surprise, developing an attachment to the class and the students despite never having met any of you. I think this is largely due to a real class spirit that developed through the discussion forums. This meant that while technically I was lecturing to a laptop, in my mind I could envision actual people, my class, listening. To me, this makes a huge difference. In suffering the imperfections, you allowed me to learn how to use the medium more effectively while giving me the sense of a human connection that is, I think, so vital to teaching. I had not expected this to happen in an online class, but it made it possible for me to teach with the kind of focus that only such a connection can sustain. If you compare the first weeks of the class to the last ones, I think you will see this happening.

I also have to address the following item that the author (a UVA professor) pointed out:

A few weeks ago our president, Teresa A. Sullivan, was summarily dismissed and then summarily reinstated by the university’s board of visitors. One reason for her dismissal was the perception that she was not moving forward fast enough on Internet learning. Stanford was doing it, Harvard, Yale and M.I.T. too. But Virginia, it seemed, was lagging. Just this week, in fact, it was announced that Virginia, along with a number of other universities, signed on with a company called Coursera to develop and offer online classes.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the author feels threatened and is dissing online education because he cannot get a handle on how to best use the technology. Agreed that online is not always the best medium and humanities is probably one (of numerous) areas where there is a great deal of work to be done. I would point him to Coursera’s History course taught none other by UVA’s Philip Zelikow. This is another course that I am enjoying having not taken History at all. The multiple choice format of the quizzes leaves me wanting more. But what’s interesting here is that Prof. Zelikow seems to be using the Coursera platform to supplement his UVA course. And that is a course I would like be in. (Also UVA's Louis Bloomfield's Coursera course on How Things Work is plenty fun so far!)

And that should be what every professor should aim to do - make online and face-to-face teaching enjoyable for both - the student and the teacher. For the most part I would say that most of my "live" learning experiences have been enjoyable for neither.

Can you be addicted to online learning?

There has been addiction to food, sex, TV, video games, and the list goes on. Is online learning an addiction? Since signing up for Coursera I’ve been going so busy with courses that I’ve barely had time do anything else - blog for instance.

Or is this another form of technology addiction rather than learning per se?