Programmer Search!

One of my side projects, The Phoenix Institute, is looking for volunteer programmers to program an open source game.

If you're interested, visit this page where you can submit your resume and qualifications.

Support This Website!

Instead of begging and pleading for your generosity this holiday season, I'm going to offer you some of the greatest deals of the season by offering you a link to the Black Friday deals of Amazon.com. In addition to some very, very cool things, you'll be helping me, this blog, and my website.

From Amazon:

Amazon.com Black Friday Deals

Next week is Thanksgiving, and Friday November 23rd is the biggest shopping day of the year - Black Friday. This represents a tremendous opportunity for you to earn referral fees by sending your site visitors to the deals and events available on Amazon.com. Your visitors are sure to find some great deals, and we have just released a brand new interactive Deals widget that will help you showcase the latest deals on your site in real time.

Black Friday Deals

On Black Friday Amazon.com won’t have a cold, dark parking lot to line up in, but we will have a bunch of great deals to help you and your site visitors get holiday shopping done for less. This year we’ve created a Black Friday page for holiday shoppers at www.amazon.com/blackfriday. Amazon.com will be offering hourly deals from 6am to 6pm PST along with thousands of products on sale for a limited time. Also, customers will get gift wrapping for $.99 per item. So, let your site visitors know that this year they shouldn’t fight the crowds when they can shop online at Amazon.com from the comfort of their own homes.

New Associates Deals Widget

We have launched a new interactive Amazon Deals Widget. Show your visitors exactly what the best deals on Amazon are at any and every time they visit your site. This widget lets you showcase Amazon.com's Gold Box Deals including Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals, and Our Best Deals in real-time on your site. We are offering Sidebar and Banner formats in a range of sizes to give you flexibility in placing this widget on your site.

On Black Friday the Amazon Deals Widget will pull in the hourly Lightning deals. But be sure to add this to your site as soon as possible to capitalize on the wave of shopping excitement that begins next week and runs through the rest of the holiday season.

Customers Vote - 6 rounds. 18 ridiculous deals.

Amazon Customers Vote is back for 2007. Each round of Customers Vote lets you and your site visitors vote for the deal you’d most like to have. Voting begins on Thursday, November 15th and continues through Monday, November 26th. There will be six rounds of voting this year with three products in each round. Beginning Thursday, November 22nd, each day the new winning product will be announced, and randomly selected customers will have the opportunity to purchase the item for which they voted at a great discount. Products this year will include:

• 1,000 Nintendo Wii Game Systems (see prices on Customers Vote page)
• 500 Panasonic 7.5MP Digital SLR Cameras, $499 (*normally $1,149.95)
• 1,000 Razor E100 Electric Scooters for $29 (*normally $89.99)
• 500 TiVo HD Digital Video Recorders, $89 (*normally $253.48)
• 500 Magellan Maestro 3140 Portable Auto GPS Systems, $99 (*normally $247.00)
• 200 Samsung 46” 1080p LCD HDTVs, $719 (*normally $1,899.98)

* “Normal” prices quoted above are accurate on release date but are otherwise subject to change at any time.

The other 12 products can be viewed on the Customers Vote page. To link directly to Amazon Customers Vote and earn referral fees on any subsequent qualifying purchases, use the following link, substituting your Associates ID:

We look forward to working with you to make this holiday shopping season a success. Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Associates Program

Just Give Up

Monkey Mondays: Clone the Monkey

For the first time, scientists have created dozens of cloned embryos from adult primates. But what are the implications of this technical breakthrough for the future of mankind?

A great breakthrough in cloning with monkeys!

I Will Hug It and Pet It and Call It Fuzzy Logic

We live in the era of the Fuzzy Logic Generation.

Throughout our educations in school we learned the mechanics of Boolean Algebra. It is the easiest of algebra to teach because it is linear: That is, with a few simple rules, one can logically see progressions that can easily be spotted and built upon: Two comes after one, positive numbers are greater in value than negative numbers, and odd numbers and even numbers are two completely separate things. Things generally make sense and the world is in order.

While Boolean Algebra is pretty great and wonderful, the real world can often not be described in such linear, or even binary terms. Enter fuzzy logic. In the real world where values don’t necessarily have a binary range of “true” or “false,” or “one” or “zero,” This form of Non-Boolean algebra can help in decision making with imprecise data.

With the background of a computer programmer, I can look at the world and give it a vast series of conditional formulas and craft it into a working model. However, the amount of formulas grows increasingly complex; while this isn’t impossible, the mandate of the wise engineer is to simply things as thoroughly as possible. When such a system hits the “real world,” unnecessary complexity tends to make things, well, more complex than they need to be. Fuzzy logic is great for being able to eliminate much of that complexity, solving problems with expert and realtime systems reacting in an imperfect environment that can be highly variable, unpredictable, and volatile.

In 1964 Lofti Zadeh, a former chairman of the electrical engineering and computer science department over at the University of California at Berkeley, was programming software to solve the handwriting recognition issue. Since traditional set theory didn’t work for him with the binary approach—“off or on—“that it applies, Dr. Zadeh needed something that applied more a “matter of degree” approach rather than the alternative.

From a page that describes Fuzzy Logic:

“Fuzzy logic manipulates such vague concepts as "warm" or "still dirty" and so helps engineers to build air conditioners, washing machines and other devices that judge how fast they should operate or shift from one setting to another even when the criteria for making those changes are hard to define. When mathematicians lack specific algorithms that dictate how a system should respond to inputs, fuzzy logic can control or describe the system by using "commonsense" rules that refer to indefinite quantities. No known mathematical model can back up a truck-and-trailer rig from a parking lot to a loading dock when the vehicle starts from a random spot. Both humans and fuzzy systems can perform this nonlinear guidance task by using practical but imprecise rules such as "If the trailer turns a little to the left, then turn it a little to the right." Fuzzy systems often glean their rules from experts. When no expert gives the rules, adaptive fuzzy systems learn the rules by observing how people regulate real systems.”

Short of being a mathematician, what is the point of Fuzzy Logic?

Try having a conversation with anyone under the age of 30; certainly anyone under the age of 20: They have grammars and use sentence structures which are laced with “like,” “kinda,” and “sorta.” How difficult is it to get someone to give you a straight, firm answer about anything?

Fuzzy logic doesn’t dictate a world that belongs or doesn’t belong; in other words, it doesn’t dictate bivalent sets: Cannot belong to both a set and its complement set or to neither of the sets—preserving logic to avoid any contradiction that a number can and cannot simultaneously be a part of multiple sets. Instead, the multivalent sets of fuzzy logic break these laws to some degree. According to fuzzy logic, the number 5 (for instance) can belong to both “odd” and “even” number sets. Imagine an air conditioner: While you may consider the air coming from it to feel “cool,” another person might consider it “just right.” The air coming out of the air conditioner can be measured as belonging to multiple sets. The boundaries of standard sets, those able to be manipulated by classic algebra, are exact while those of fuzzy logic, Non-Boolean Algebra are curved and can taper off, creating partial contradictions: The air coming from that air conditioner can be 25 percent cool and 75 percent not cool at the same time.

I’ve long held to this belief: While many, many things in the world can be described in black and white, it is things like human emotion that add color to our worlds. If you can cut past all of that, you might very well be able to simplify the situation.

“We’d rather miss a good one than hire a bad one.”

It's tough to find good help these days. That is why these companies are changing their tactics for finding good workers in a national economy with less-than-natural unemployment.

Do you play well with others?

Effective Habit Change: Five Things to Know

The title says it all.

Read about it here.

Get Rid of "Brain Drain"

Here are some of the signs you might be suffering from brain drain.

1. Mental exhaustion.
2. Irritation or drowsiness when thinking about what you have to do.
3. Putting off certain tasks because they are "too hard to think about."
4. Snipping at others who are not moving fast enough.
5. Feeling as if the harder you work, the farther behind you get.
6. Feeling depressed, stressed out, or as if you can't keep up mentally with your task list.

Have these symptoms? Learn tools to get past them here!

College?

While I'm a very big proponent of a higher education, it should be kept in mind that a higher education, namely college, isn't necessary for success. What is in you, rather, is the key to success.

15 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Didn't Need College

(Belated) Monkey Monday: A Babysitter for Bananas a Day!

A babysitter...for bananas a day!

The Ineffectiveness of Labor Unions

Remember a few weeks ago when the United Auto Workers had their strike fiasco with Chrysler?

Now, just weeks after that, Chrysler is cutting 12,000 jobs and models from their inventory.

This is the effectiveness of irrational greed in the marketplace, or lack thereof.

10 Debunked Myths on Cognitive Science

A fairly quick read that describes...exactly what the title says it does!

Read the article.

Today’s Gamer, Tomorrow’s Strategic Leader

An interesting article caught my eye through one of my news aggregators over at myadsl.co.za. From the article:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure.”

Certainly a first line that intrigues and piques one’s curiosity, let alone the affect the headline has on someone. Reading on:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure. In today's fast and rapidly-changing business environment, the strategic skills they teach are more important than ever.”

The article goes on to debate, through the perspective of the two authors of the book Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. The authors state that instead of being like television where people are the bystander, gaming offers a suspension of disbelief and includes the gamer into the world of the game—they become a willing participant.

As such, the gamer must think strategically in interacting with their environment, propelled to win.

These skills, the article states, are indispensible to the business world. These traits are even more accentuated in multi-player online environments—the MMOGs like World of Warcraft—such that small team leaders need to leverage the abilities of their teammates in the execution of success.

This culminates in an important point:

“Games teach by trial and error. Consequently, gamers learn that failure is a necessary and unequivocal part of the path to success. This is a message that is often lost in the real world, because repetitions are few and far between and therefore the stakes are too high during each attempt. In games, repetition is high and immediate feedback is provided to the gamer. While failure in the real world is disheartening, in games it serves as an encouragement to try harder. This attitude towards failure eventually permeates life outside of the game. The result is that the gaming generation is willing to take more risks and be more entrepreneurial than previous generations.”

The kicker?

“80 percent of managers in the US under the age of 35 had significant video game experience and that gamers had a more positive outlook on life than non-gamers. Gamers tended to prefer multitasking to individual assignments, to stave off boredom.”

“Time Machine,” Two Races, and Spam

Ever get a spam email? Does the below sound like promises that they throw around frequently?

“Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.”

According to an evolutionary theorist from the London School of Economics…in several thousand years, this could be you! That is, unless, you end up being part of that other race.

The Silicon Ball of Finance

Recently I posted a story here about complex algorithms being used to predict acts of terrorism and advise military and state leadership in the conduct of matters of diplomacy. An obvious extension of using such sets of mathematical formulas would be to predict how to win the lottery, as I mentioned in that post.

My view of the lottery, though, has changed since I devised my original concept on the matter: The lottery is a tax on poor people and those with a lesser amount of economic and financial knowledge.

What the lottery-winning seeking public should do, instead, is to use the stock market.

So, without further ado…who is better in the game of investments: A computer or a person?

Let’s start by defining a couple types of investing: There are those that believe in and practice the fundamentals: Observing P/E ratios and, essentially, applying a series of formulas to a company, an industry, their stock picks, etc. Fundamentals’ investing is in my opinion, just that: The fundamentals of investing.

Take a man like Warren Buffet: He is the epitome of someone who believes in behavioral finance. When I was much younger I remember a commercial for some large Wall Street Trading firm which stressed that after they looked at a stock, they would go and investigate it in-depth: Interview managers, examine infrastructure, and perform other in-depth activities which filled in the blanks that a fundamental stock pick couldn’t do.

The comparison and contrast is a simple one: Fundamental investing is a very logical, linear, rational method of investing. Behavioral investing, on the other hand, has a million shades of human emotion involved and, therefore, is open to the irrationalities which we are prone to as humans.

And that’s it: A computer program which attempted to account for the human aspect a investing would need to be exceedingly complex.

The odd part of this whole stock market thing? The irrationalities which incite risk in the system is why the stock market goes up as much as it does over time and is why any money put into the stock market as a portion of Gross Domestic Product adds to GDP by factor of 400 percent; in other words, when constructing the value of GDP if you put $100 into it as a form of investments—anything in the stock market—it is calculated to increase as a portion of GDP at a rate of 4 to 1, making that $100 investment worth $400 in terms of GDP; contrast that against the 1:1 ratio of government spending.

The Science Sensei

I'm impressed and think you will be too.

He's funny, he's informative... he's the Science Sensei!

The Misnomer of Racism

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: Why you ain’t, Where you is, What he drive, Where he stay, Where he work, Who you be… And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.”

Bill Cosby has been making waves lately amongst certain parts of the populace with how he is fed up with, for lack of a better term coming to my head, “the Black Culture.”

Let me clarify before I continue. So often people whom criticize blacks are called racists; the same term can and will likely be applied to you if you are considered Caucasian and criticize anyone of another skin tone, color, or race. “Prejudice or discrimination based on an individual's race,” is the definition of racism. I am not racist. I could care less what your skin color is; it’s merely a sequence of genes arranged in such a fashion to allow a person to adapt better to their environment.

Bill Cosby makes remarks about a culture that permeates society, trending the most in certain geographic areas, ideologies, etc. In his latest rant he stresses that black people “can’t blame the white people anymore.”

I urge you to read the short piece. To coax you further, one more paragraph:

“Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ — or men or whatever you call them now. We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs. We as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us. We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.”

This phenomenon isn’t confined to any single race or culture, either. I can walk down to my local Wal-Mart and find the same kind of people—with any color of skin.

Wisdom of the Nerds: String Theory in About 2 Minutes

This was too good not to share with you:

The fundamentals of the underlying theory of the entire universe: String Theory.

...In about 2 minutes, complete with a rubber ducky!

Watch the video here!

Consider It Similar to America's "Area 51"

Baikonur, once one of the Soviet Union's most secret cities, is still closed to outsiders and surrounded by barbed wire. Armed soldiers at checkpoints guard dozens of launch pads, five tracking control centers and a missile test range.

A bit outside the theme of this blog, this is still a fascinating article nonetheless: A write-up on Russia's Baikonur, the center of the Soviet, now the Russian, space program.

Read the article here.

Monkey Mondays: Tiny Monkey Born in Great Britain!

The Sun online was invited down for a first, exclusive look at the pint-sized Primate - who's just three inches long.

Read the article and see the pics here!