Ian On The Red Dot

Rich lawyers bullying people is not unique to Singapore.

Recently, there is a case about a lady who died due to overwork.

And that got me thinking about my own state of health. I have always suspected there might be something wrong with my health, but I am unsure of where to start. I have tried going to GPs, but all they tell me is I need more rest, live healthier, drink more water and exercise more.

But seriously, that can’t possibly explain the random sharp pains I feel at the back of my head like someone has jabbed a needle into it, the sudden onset of chest pains when I’m not doing any strenuous activity, the cramps I feel at various parts of my body especially the legs. There are more things that are happening which scares me and I have been recording them down in my journal.

I would like to go for a comprehensive test, but where do you start? Seriously, I’ve been looking at the health websites, and I honestly don’t know where to start. I go to my GP and I get the look which says I’m just being paranoid. But I know my own body, and I know what I’m feeling.

And the cost. Part of me feels bad about going for all the tests because of the cost especially since we won’t know which tests is necessary or sufficient to understand what is happening to me. And they are expensive. I know that some people might think I’m being foolish for placing money over health. I’m not. I just don’t believe the doctors will be able to administer the correct tests even with all the money paid so a part of me is unwilling to pay until I’m sure the doctors know what they are doing especially after hearing coffee-shop talk about how people get shuffled from specialists to specialists like cash cows.

Also, never doubt the power of a disapproving father who gives you the ‘I told you so’ look when the tests come back and nothing seems to be wrong. And that will definitely happen as I got that look when the GP gave the same advice as my father.

Maybe it is nothing. Like what everyone says. The more you worry, the worse it becomes.

Maybe.

Anyway, I read about the case of that lady and I thought about my NS days. I was in Armour, more specifically I was in armour infantry. That meant needing to sit inside a moving vehicle, cramped with 5 other people (at minimum) and not being able to move for hours. If the training was in Singapore, it wasn’t that bad, but in Australia, I remember times when we couldn’t get out of the vehicle for periods longer than 8 hours (i got the number 8 hours because that is around the typical length of time needed to travel from one point to another during our night missions) . There wasn’t much place to stretch our legs, and now I’m reading about stuff about blood clots and DVT…

I also remember having to train with a sprained ankle with the effect of my left ankle being seriously damaged – it sprains real easy now. I can’t even play a casual game of soccer without fear that I would sprain it.

Anyway, I mention all this because I’m wondering how many of the males in Singapore had their health damaged during their NS days. Somehow, I get the feeling I’m not the exception.

And then there is IPPT. I do want to pass. Actually, I want to get Gold, but everytime I go for a run to train, my chest tightens up. And I know this is a different reaction from what I used to get when I wasn’t fit during my NS period. That is why I have been putting off the start of a training regime but I know I got to train and push myself. So the solution would be to try to get a temporary downgrade until the health issues are all sorted out but that is a tedious and costly process especially since I for one don’t really know what the fuck is actually wrong. Also, and I think this is a matter of pure stupid male pride, I don’t actually want to give up my combat status, even for a temp period.  Plus, I’ve been brought up with the mentality that it isn’t appropriate to make a mountain out of a molehill except that now, I don’t know if it is a molehill, mountain, anthill or just a pile of sand…oh well…
Oh well…like how I morbidly told my mom, if I die, I want it to be put on my tombstone…

“I told you so.“

Chapter 4 for the online graphic novel “The Life Of Mann” is finally out. Been waiting for this chapter for sometime. This chapter is a bit of a let down though. Charon the taxi driver doesn’t play much of a part in this chapter which is a real waste – I was hoping he would have developed into a more sinister character. Also, the drawing style of this chapter is different from the one used in chapter 3 but I guess that is the nature of these sort of collaborative works.

Josef Lee who is the creator of the site also shared with me another of his project: startdrawing.org. It is a site that showcases the work of Asian artists. The work on the site are drawn with a wide range of styles, but every one of them is a work of beauty. Take a look at this series of cards drawn by a Singaporean. Totally awesome. These sort of layered work is the kind that I enjoy the most. The other kind is these sort of drawings. It seems to me that asian artists really know how to draw beautiful people.

Super duper tired today.

Over the weekend, from Saturday 5pm to Sunday 1pm, I was involved in an island wide puzzle-solving game. For some of the clues, we needed the internet, so we tried to use our laptops to connect to the net. Looking for a place that had wireless@sg coverage was hard. Finding one with decent connection speeds was even harder. In the end, we gave up and just used a mobile phone to connect to the net. Fortunately, Google had decent mobile search and we managed to find all the information we needed.

My team came in third because we didn’t manage to solve the bonus clue which would have given us a time reduction of two hours. The team that included one of my JC classmates came in second. That classmate of mine is like the smartest guy around so I guess I don’t feel that bad losing to his team. His team got the answer for the clue at this station which we were stuck at for like 2 hours in a matter of minutes.

We had to get the name of a location from this set of 15 words:

1.Jackie Chan

2.Ronan Keating

3.Christina Aguilera

4.Mulan

5.Traffic

6.Notting Hill

7.Hamburger Hill

8.Lessons Learnt

9.Hall of mirrors

10.Opium War

11.Incident Angle

12.Hallucigination

13.Plate Tectonics

14.Chengdu

15.Bishan

How many of you know about this place “Reflections @ Bukit Chandu”? Well, that is the answer. We didn’t see the connection. My classmate’s team did. In like 1/8 of the time we did. Sigh.

Anyway, that place is damn nice. There is a canopy walk to that place from Kent Ridge Park and I’m definitely going back there once I have the time.

After the game, my classmate was trying to explain how his team solved the bonus clue.  I was too tired to register everything he said, but it did feel sucky not to be able to see the pattern in the numbers for the clue.  Patterns.  Problem solving has a lot to do with being  able to observe patterns and applying them.  And instinct is important too.  A couple of times, we had a hunch about how to solve the clue but didn’t pursue the initial hunch and over thought the problem.  In the end, we realised more often than not, the inital hunch was more than just that – it was a brief flash of insight that we failed to seize because we didn’t realise its worth.

Haven’t blogged for sometime. Been busy wrestling with jBPM at work. I’ve realised how important an active (and nice) community is for any open-source project’s success or failure; well written code libraries isn’t enough. Documentation is also really important. I’ve also started learning how to use Google’s GWT and the learning curve has really been much faster than compared to jBPM. While the difference in the complexity and the use of the two libraries might be significant enough to make any comparision unfair, I do feel that GWT’s learning curve was much kinder to me because of the documentation and the community that is engaging each other in the forum. Having said that, it isn’t that jBPM has been impossible to learn, just that I’m reminded of what Nathan (one of the panelists for Nexus) shared about the success of open source and creating the necessary culture and structure for collaboration and contribution.

I also learnt about Comet through one of the posts in the forum for GWT. Apparently, it was already news at eTech 2006. Comet is life after Ajax and is knowledge that should be added to the arsenal of any web developer.

Don Corleone: I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life – I don’t apologize – to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those bigshots. I don’t apologize – that’s my life – but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string. Senator Corleone; Governor Corleone. Well, it wasn’t enough time, Michael. It wasn’t enough time.

Michael: We’ll get there, pop. We’ll get there.

People don’t learn. People follow.

And the example has been set.

How does one get information?

After Nexus 2007, I started thinking about this question which was triggered by the presentation Andreas gave where he talked about discovery and when the guy from Yahoo talked about the success of Yahoo Answers.

With regards to the Internet, I think there have been four main ways to get information:

1. Search

2. Discovery

3. Ask

4. Oasis

Search

Search started out with content analysis. When Google improved search with the use of structural analysis, search really took off. The success of Google has changed the way we look for information online. Google has become the de facto start page of the Internet.

The success of Google built on its search product has sparked a race to develop the next generation search technology. Read/WriteWeb has an excellent series of posts on Search 2.0.

Discovery

Discovery is the serendipitous learning of new information. It is what happens when you’re kinda looking for something, but not sure what exactly. It happens when you’re exploring some space or heading in the correct general direction but with no specific destination. When you are at sites like Amazon, Netflix and Pandora you are probably looking for a good book to read, movie to watch or music to hear or at least something that suits your preferences. Such sites have recommendation engines to help you discover new books, movies and music respectively that you would probably like but never knew existed.

The process of discovery is enabled by the use of collaborative filtering which is a data mining process of discovering meaningful new correlations, patterns and trends by sifting through large amounts of data stored in repositories, using pattern recognition techniques as well as statistical and mathematical techniques. The data is obtained by studying the behaviour of users and from users’s contributions to the system in the form of content like reviews and ratings.

The success of discovery engines such as Stumbleupon depend heavily on the contributions of their users. What then are the incentives for users to contribute? That was a question posed by Andreas. Is it the intangibles? Is it a sense of contribution? Is it the sense of making a difference? Is it about helping? It was questioned if benevolence was really the key.

Andreas had offered some of the possible tangible incentives for users to contribute to the system:

1. System action to depend on user’s actions
2. Showing off
3. Pat on shoulders
4. Gaining levels (i.e. getting into the top 10 contributors list)

With regards to the last point from the list above, it was noted during the panel discussion that such systems wanting to use the gaining of levels as an incentive for contribution could learn from games and apply the lessons to the web because games are especially addictive. Why do people participate in games? Is it the sense of connection with other players? The challenges? The ability to use the game as a means to construct a meaningful narrative? Is it satisfaction from being able to go to another level like being able to get into the Top 500 amazon reviewers. To understand a bit about games, here is a transcript of the talk given by Will Wright (creator of SimCity) at South By Southwest.

Nathan shared that a possible incentive is the chance for revenge – that is why people write reviews which is an example of the power of the thumbs down.

While not just relevant to websites implementing recommendation engines, the advice was clear: it has to be communicated to the contributor that his or her actions will have consequences for them and what that consequences are have to be clear to them – if you pay attention now, you will get positive returns in the future.

Ask

Yahoo Answers is the largest Q&A site on the net. It has been so successful, that companies are now sponsoring staff to answer questions on it. But Yahoo Answers is not the only implementation of a way to get information by Q&A. Besides centralized sites like Yahoo Answers which has tried to aggregate all the possible questions and answers in the world, there is also newsgroups and forums.

Boardtracker (a vertical search engine for forums) and Klostu (an OpenId for forums) are working to provide a better way for us to use forums to get and share information.

An observation about the culture of forums is that the culture isn’t uniform across all the forums. Two manifestations of the possible difference in culture:

1. The number of people who are willing to actively contribute meaningful answers.

2. The way the ‘experts’ interact with the noobs.

Number 2 is something which you see often in tech boards. How many times have you seen an ‘expert’ tell a new participant to the board to go ’search for the answer and not be lazy’. How many times have you seen answers that are dismissive of the beginner’s question.

The problem is that a good number (if not the majority) of forums haven’t implemented a structure for collaboration and sharing. There are no incentives for participants to play ‘nice’. Sometimes it seems that the only incentive is for the so-called experts to display smugness.

The problem of forums not having the appropriate structure and incentives is one reason why a centralized site like Yahoo Answers has become successful. From the beginning, it worked on software and social systems to manage it. I think it was Nathan who pointed out that you don’t get constructive group production unless there is structure and that open source succeeds because there are such software and social systems to manage it.

One issue with Q&A systems for getting information is that it is dependent on search to find past questions and answers. The dependence on effective search technology becomes even more important as such system becomes bigger and the amount of information that the group produces increases. However, I would like to say that this dependence is probably the fault of the success of Google. Google has actually changed the behaviour on how we perceive we should get information.

I remember when I was younger, pre-1999 when i started using Google, I would actually think of asking someone first before actually going to the library or online to look for information. Now, I go to Google and try to search for the information. Even when I am at a forum, the first thing I do is search for past questions that might be similar to mine. And if I can’t find what I need, I search for another forum that might be relevant and then look within that forum for the answer I need and the iterative process continues until I find a forum with the question and answer I need. It is only until I have exhausted all the possible forums that I would choose the one with the best chance of getting a good answer and then post the question there.

While I appreciate the fact that human progress has benefited greatly from the ability to build on the work done by other people and better recording, organization and access of information has benefited us as a race, I wonder whether it would be possible to build a system where the cost of asking and answering a question becomes so low that it would be more effective for us just to ask the question and answer it as opposed to searching the past for the possible answer or redirecting the individual asking the question to another source where the answer might be found especially if I already know the answer and could just type it out or know a link to the answer.

I envision a day where this pre-1999 scenario would play out online: I ask a friend how to fix my bike and my friend doesn’t tell me I’m a noob, doesn’t tell me noobs shouldn’t own a bike, doesn’t tell me he actually told me how to do it before and I’m an idiot to have forgotten, doesn’t tell me to go look for Jane who he told yesterday how to fix a bike, doesn’t in some vague way tell me that the answer is somewhere out there and I should look for it when he knows the exact spot and doesn’t go ‘LOL’ but instead shares with me what I need to know.

I guess I’m wondering if there is a better way to ask and answer. With what seems to be a big rush to develop Search 2.0, I wonder whether there might be potential to start working on Q&A 2.0.

Oasis

Oasis is the term I coined for the final way people get information by continually returning to a source (i.e. website) which they have found to be relevant and useful.

Before RSS, users would have to return to each of the sources individually to see if the site had made any updates. Bookmarks were a way for the user to keep track of all the sources he or she had found. With RSS, it is now possible to pull the information from all the sources to one central location like Google Reader for the users to consume.

With the (?exponential) increase in the amount of information available and the number of people expressing their opinions, the need to be able to separate the noise from the signals has become crucial. With so much information, attention has become the scarce resource. One of the solutions to deal with this scarcity of attention is to rely on an aggregator to help us decide what is important.

Take Techmeme for example. It has established itself as a source to find out about the latest technology related news. IntelligentSingaporean which aggregates articles and blog posts on Singapore is another example. These aggregators are an evolution of what was the portal strategy which was popular at the beginning of the first Internet boom. Besides recommending to us what are the important news and articles, such aggregators also help us discover new sites. These aggregators have becomes like super oases to quench our never-ending thirst for information. FranticIndustries has a great post on the class of automated aggregators which a site like Techmeme is part of.

As mentioned in the post over at franticindustries, one of the problems with aggregators is that the user is only going to be getting information from the sites in the aggregator’s radar. This leaves a lot of room for help to manage our attention with regards to the remaining sources of information we have subscribed to. Google Reader has integrated a tool to monitor and understand your own reading habits as well as that of your friends, but doesn’t help solve the problem of helping you decide on how to allocate your attention – given 100 feeds, with 100 new posts a day, how do you decide which of the posts to focus your attention on?

One of the issues with regards to allocating attention is the metric used to determine what is worthy of attention. The memetrackers analyzed by franticindustries rely on inbound links to help determine what is noteworthy. The use of links to help measure relevance was one of the keys that Google used to unlock the search problem and in a way, that line of thinking has stuck when trying to solve the attention allocation problem.

So what will the next important metric be when it comes to attention?
Finally…
The “Future of the Web” panel provided a lot of fodder for thought, terms to google and this post was heavily inspired by a lot of the things that were being said by the panelists as well as the live chat. There is a lot more I hope to write down to be able to crystallize my understanding of what was said that day.

Fearfully Opinionated has written a great post that really adds to the discussion on the proposed pay increase for civil servants and ministers.

To hopefully add something about his discussion on consequentialism and deontological ethics, I would like to share a quote from Gandhi,

“The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree: and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.”

When I first read this quote, my thinking changed and while one can argue the ends would justify the means, I believe that eventually, the end would not be the one we envisioned because of the very means we took.

Anyway, go and read the post by him.  It is good.

Pssssttt… risking my life bringing this report from behind enemy lines.  I was talking to one of my Indian colleagues, sharing with him about my difficulty in convincing our boss to take a certain direction for one of the projects I am doing when he said, “Sell the idea to him.  You Singaporeans are supposed to be good at Marketing.”

Now I know what we are supposed to be good at…..