Thursday, April 3, 2003
Leading by example. Stefan Smalla points to a video stream of nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huan's presentation at Stanford on innovation and success in business. I have to agree with Stefan - this is one very impressive guy. I found especially interesting how he explained that he found that a leader's ways of doing things very often naturally rubs onto the rest of his team, so that through his own actions he can nurture a successful culture within the organization. [Seb's Open Research]
A lot that Jen-Hsun Huan says is right on. The CEO can provide the culture but the people at the bottom provide the creativity. Nice points. 10:31:06 PM
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Nice dicussion of the Times photos with a good link to Poynter Online discussing the incident. 12:37:24 PM
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Finally, a decent technical critique of TIA. DM Review: “TIAin’t.” Herb Edelstein points out four major problems with the TIA strategy from a technical point of view:
- Data integration and data quality: How much time and money will the TIA folks spend just on trying to match disparate records from fifty state drivers’ license bureaus, hundreds of utility bill providers and credit application sources, and all the different banks, credit card providers, and so forth?
- Too much data, too few examples: With only a handful of domestic terrorists and a US adult population of about 220 million, Edelstein points out, there’s way too low a signal to noise ratio: “Let’s assume there are 1,000 active terrorists in the U.S. (a number that likely overstates the case by an order of magnitude) out of a population (age 16 and up) of approximately 220 million. An algorithm could be 99.999995 percent accurate by saying no one is a terrorist. Even were we to look only at non-citizens (an arguable tactic), we would still have an accuracy rate of 99.99995 percent by declaring no one a terrorist.”
- Lack of sufficient examples to create good signatures (identifying patterns). This is a technical refinement of the previous point, but basically the sample size of terrorists is so small that it’s hard to build patterns from them that can reliably be used to predict future terrorist activity. Further, Edelstein points out, terrorists exhibit adaptive behavior, learning from what gets other terrorists caught.
- False positives. Edelstein summarizes this point as a kind of Hobson’s choice: you don’t want to falsely accuse anyone but you don’t want to miss any terrorists. And if you have a failure rate of your algorithms of 0.1%—an overwhelming success in most data mining applications—that’s still over 220,000 potential false positives!
Edelstein concludes that the right answer is to improve the technology and use it to answer fixed questions rather than look for patterns in all possible available data—to use the system for decision support rather than rely on it to make the decisions.
My question: given the large amount of money to be spent, and the large likely consequences of arresting and incarcerating innocent people, how big a disaster do we have to be able to predict and eliminate before a system like this justifies its cost? [Jarrett House North]
This system will be abused. The temptation is too great. If credit reports are full of bad information, what sorts of contamination will these databases have. At least with a bad CR you can now file to get it corrected. TIA does not seem to have any such feedback system. 12:27:35 PM
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I didn’t know you could do that with a floppy.... In the Stupic Geek Tricks department, USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under Mac OS X. His five floppies RAIDed together have a combined size of 4.22 MB (!) and seem to work faster together than a single floppy would separately: “I was able to transfer ‘DEVO Uncontrolable Urge.mp3’ which is 3.6 MB in 32 seconds. Which is pretty good I think.”
(Now I’ve done it. I’m going to get a lot of traffic from Google of people looking for mp3, devo mp3 (maybe not), and Wil Wheaton naked mp3 (shudder).
Anyway, this guy has also RAIDed five Sony Memory Sticks together... I think he needs help. [Jarrett House North]
This really demonstrates the creativity present in society. It may only look like some guy with too much time coming up with a useless demonstration but it shows the ease that the Mac provides for "I Wonder" sorts of things. It could lead to something very useful. 12:11:35 PM
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Here are all the photos, demonstrating how they were put together to create the final montage. What is interesting is that not only does he change the composition but he seems to have made the US soldier larger. I guess this guy never got the word on what photojournalism is. He probaly won't get hired by the Mirror like Peter Arnett. Luckily the photographer was inept enough and naive enough to leave lots of signs that the photo had been altered. Someone with darker motives may have been much harder to catch. 12:04:34 PM
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SARs - How Tipping Points work in Epidemics. 
Why should we worry? After all only a thousand or so cases and less than 100 deaths. I have posted this chart before. It shows how a system tips. If the infected hit a threshold around 5% on the bell curve, the rate of infection will accelerate on the non linear curve.This is why the Health authorities are sweating blood now.
Here is the point. If SARS gets to the threshold on the bell curve, it breaks out and the system tips. What does that mean for you and me? A 4% death rate doesn't sound like much but that's 40,000 deaths a million Say there are 5 million in the Greater Toronto Area. Breakout into the whole community would mean the maximum likelihood of 200,000 deaths. Beyond the loss of life, the real issue will be our own societal immune reaction. We will panic into paralysis.
We are already seeing the city begin to shut down for all business and all forms of meeting such as schools. Hong Kong is closed already. If we get breakout, we will not only have a tragedy in loss of life but a breakdown of life as we know it as we panic to protect ourselves. Intercity travel will be halted let alone international travel. Most of our manufacturing is now Just in Time - what risk there? Air Canada will not be the only airline to fold.
It's ironic, we are often killed by an overreaction of our own immune system. We risk being killed economically by our social immune system as we attempt to protect ourselves from SARS.
If we go down this path - what tips next? The stock market for sure. Then what? With the war and SARS we stand at the edge of a scale of social uncertainty not known in historic times.
SARS Round-up April 3 JST.
Some more SARS stuff.
- A web page dedicated to SARS
- CNet - April 2, 2003, 5:25 PM PT - Disease scare crashes Intel events - The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak has caused Intel to cancel two conferences in Asia and postpone a trip to the region by CEO Craig Barrett.
- AP - 4:32 AM EST Wednesday, Apr. 2, 2003 - WHO issues travel warning over SARS outbreak - Geneva â?? The United Nations health agency issued a rare travel warning Wednesday, advising against trips to Hong Kong and the Chinese province of Guangdong because of a deadly outbreak of a mystery disease.
- CNNfn April 2, 2003: 1:11 PM EST - Economist predicts world recession - Morgan Stanley economist cites SARS, war uncertainties as the main causes for pending recession.
- Time Online Edition - Wednesday, Apr. 02, 2003 - Making Sense of SARS - The outbreak in Asia has spread to at least 13 other countries. How to stay safe â?? and calm â?? in the face of this mystery disease
- BBC - Thursday, 3 April, 2003, 10:00 GMT 11:00 UK - Worldwide bug pandemic warning - Efforts to stop a deadly pneumonia may not prevent a global explosion in cases, a world-leading infectious disease expert has warned.
Earlier, I praised the WHO on their handling of SARS, but as the news starts to unfold, I guess it's not that simple. The tendency for the web to amplify fluctuation is probably hurting our ability to get a good sense of the actual risk of the situation. I think we should be focusing on what we should do to minimize risk rather than freaking out about it. On the other hand, it still appears we know so little about it. The question is whether the damage from freaking out exceeds the risk that SARS poses...
[Joi Ito's Web] [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
I have the feeling that fears of SARS may actually bemore damaging than the illness itself. But if it does break out in a large fashion, it could easily overwhelm public health system. Having a high rate of infectivity coupled with the number that need hospitalization, along with the high rate of the disease in health care givers yields a frightening possibility. Let's see - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. I guess I really need to get a job. Then I might have a better attitude ;-) 11:55:39 AM
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Some of my recent writing at Livingcode: - A Tale of Two Viruses
- Paper Plants
- Shrinking Fossils Digitally
- Stem Cells In ALS
- With A Little Help From My Friends
11:30:14 AM
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