links of the day

Sheryl Sandberg and the Silicon Valley Culture

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In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes a detailed profile of Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook. She was previously at Google, and Auletta goes in depth describing how Mark Zuckerberg wooed her to join him at Facebook. The entire piece is meticulously researched (I’d say about three months of work went into it), and worth reading in entirety. Much of the piece deals with how women are perceived in the workplace (Sandberg “blamed them [women] more for their insecurities than she blamed men for their insensitivity or their sexism”) and the challenges Sandberg faced when coming over from Google to Facebook.

Sandberg’s familiar history is particularly fascinating:

Sandberg was born in 1969, in Washington, D.C. Her family moved to North Miami Beach when she was two. Her mother, Adele, gave up studying for a Ph.D. and teaching college French in order to raise Sheryl and her two younger siblings, David and Michelle. Her father, Joel, is an ophthalmologist. After a rabbi at their synagogue asked for volunteers, Adele and Joel helped found the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry. “Adele did most of the work,” Joel says, but he was the president. Their home became an unofficial headquarters for Soviet Jews wanting to escape anti-Semitism, and a temporary hotel for many who had finally won the right to emigrate. On weekends, Adele says, “we schlepped the kids to rallies.”

The Sandberg children attended public school, and Sheryl was always at the top of her class. “In public schools, for a girl to be smart was not good for your social life,” Adele says. She describes her daughter as “a mother’s helper,” aiding David in tying his shoes and Michelle in taking a bath. The only time she ever rebelled, Adele recalls, was when she was in junior high school. “One day she came home from school and said, ‘Mom, we have a problem. You’re not ready to let me grow up.’ ”

“I said, ‘You’re right.’ The minute she said it, I knew she was right.”

One point raised in the piece is the relationship between work and raising a family. Sandberg is a mother, and spoke with Auletta about the challenge:

One day this spring, I spoke with Sandberg about these issues. She had rushed to the office from her son’s school wearing sweatpants, a zippered sweatshirt, and white sneakers, with her hair jammed into a ponytail. She sat under a framed photograph of her holding her baby and pulled out a Baggie containing sugar-snap peas, which she began munching as we talked. She said, “The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home. . . . Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way—not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.” The second impediment is guilt, she said. “I feel guilty working because of my kids. I do. I feel guilty. In my TED talk, I’m talking to myself, too. I’m not just talking to other people. I have faced every one of those things myself.” Later, I asked her directly about Hewlett’s critique, and she simply said, “I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.”

Finally, I enjoyed the part about where Sandberg was to give a graduation speech at Bard College and said the following:

She described a poster on the wall at Facebook: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” She said that it echoed something the writer Anna Quindlen once said, which was that “she majored in unafraid” at Barnard. Sandberg went on, “Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold. I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try. You’re going to walk off this stage today and you’re going to start your adult life. Start out by aiming high. . . . Go home tonight and ask yourselves, What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it! Congratulations.”

So, what would you do if you weren’t afraid? It’s such an important question in how we guide ourselves in life: fear tends to brings us back down to Earth…

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Related: The Face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg 

Readings: Beyond the Breathalyzer, Guerrilla Girls, Greek Default, Like Culture

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Some interesting reads from across the web:

(1) “Beyond the Breathalyzer” [New York Times] – I thought that science was progressing in tracking genetic markings via blood samples, but there’s this:

Scientists are building sophisticated electronic and chemical sniffers that examine the puffs of exhaled air for telltale signs of cancer, tuberculosis, asthma and other maladies, as well as for radiation exposure.

Amazing.

(2) “Guerrilla Girls: Feminist Masked Avengers” [Washington Post] I had no idea about this guerrilla group, and how under-represented women are in the Metropolitan Museum.

Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 3% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women,” the sign continues, “but 83% of the nudes are female.

(3) “Once Greece Goes…” [London Review of Books] – the piece begins with this heavy sentence and picks up from there:

The economic crisis in Greece is the most consequential thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars.

Notably:

I speak of the Greek default as a sure thing because it is: the markets are pricing Greek government debt as if it has already defaulted. This in itself is a huge deal, because the euro was built on the assumption that no country in it would ever default, and as a result there is no precedent and, more important still, no mechanism for what is about to happen.

The situation in Greece looks grim indeed.

(4) “The Insidious Evils of ‘Like’ Culture” [Wall Street Journal] – this piece is a bit confusing. Does the author want us to like it or not? The author’s conclusions are stuffy: we want to be liked in person, not just online. Still, this contrarian stance is something to think about:

Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

Your thoughts?

Derek Miller’s (@PenMachine) Last Blog Post

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If you knew you were dying tomorrow, what would you do? And if you had a blog, would you compose a final entry?

Derek Miller, blogger at penmachine.com, published his final post just before his death. It begins:

Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

That includes my family and friends, and my parents Hilkka and Juergen Karl. My daughters Lauren, age 11, and Marina, who’s 13, have known as much as we could tell them since I first found I had cancer. It’s become part of their lives, alas.

Was Derek afraid of dying?

So I was unafraid of death—of the moment itself—and of what came afterwards, which was (and is) nothing. As I did all along, I remained somewhat afraid of the process of dying, of increasing weakness and fatigue, of pain, of becoming less and less of myself as I got there. I was lucky that my mental faculties were mostly unaffected over the months and years before the end, and there was no sign of cancer in my brain—as far as I or anyone else knew.

If you do decide to read the full post, do have a tissue nearby. It’s heartbreaking. Yet so, so courageous to go out like this:

The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out. I don’t look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.

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Related: regrets of the dying.

Readings: Sleepless Elite, Montessori Mafia, AirTran, Online Cremations

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A few good reads from this week. I’ll post some longer reads later this week.

1) “The Sleepless Elite” [Wall Street Journal] – why do some people function so well on little sleep? This article explores (albeit marginally) the “sleep elite,” those of us that can survive on two to four hours of sleep per night:

Here’s an interesting tidbit to remember: most of us actually need at least seven hours of sleep per night. Some of us, sadly, think we can get by on less:

Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Also fascinating is determining the biological basis for these “sleep elite.” Ying-Hui Fu at University of California-San Franscisco with the research:

Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.

Read the rest of the article here. The most fascinating thing to me about sleep (ever since I found out about this fact in ninth grade in high school): despite decades of research, we still don’t have conclusive evidence of why we need to sleep.

2) “The Montessori Mafia” [Wall Street Journal] – interesting blog post briefly profiling Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos:

The Montessori Mafia showed up in an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think. Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products.

A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity…To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).

The inclusion of this line (which is sadly true) makes me wonder how we can change things in our schools to at least make the Montessori method more accessible to others.

We are given very little opportunity, for instance, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes.  We are judged primarily on getting answers right.  There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own.

3) “AirTran Tops Annual Airline Ranking” [Atlanta Journal-Constitution] – can someone explain this one to me?

4) “Basic Funerals Bets Baby Boomers Will Arrange Cremations Online” [Bloomberg] – proof that there’s a market for (almost) everything online. Kudos for outside-the-box thinking here, even if the thought/idea is, well, morbid.


Readings: Silicon Valley, Twitter Influence, Mark Armstrong on Reading, Cosmonaut Crash

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A few good reads from this week:

1) “Silicon Valley Hiring Perks: Meals, iPads and a Cubicle for Spot” [New York Times] – a good piece reflecting the current state of Silicon Valley. I was surprised by how well Google is paying:

Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a few months ago. That is so far above the industry average of $80,000 that start-ups cannot match Google salaries.

Perhaps the most telling line, representing the culture shift in Silicon Valley (how long has it been in the making?):

And there has been a psychological shift; many of the most talented engineers want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg not work for him.

2) “A Better Way to Measure Twitter Influence” [New York Times] – Do you think the most influential Twitter user is Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga? I agree with the premise of this post, that follower counts on Twitter mean less for influence than actual engagement (replies, retweets):

But it turns out that counting followers is a seriously flawed way to measure a person’s impact on Twitter. Even one of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams, made the point to me recently: someone with millions of followers may no longer post messages frequently, while someone followed by mere tens of thousands may be a prolific poster whose messages are amplified by others.

According to research by Twitalyzer, the most influential Twitter user is Rafinha Bastos from Brazil. Yes, this is a surprise to me too.

3) “Mark Armstrong: What I Read” [The Atlantic] – Mark Armstrong, founder of long reads (one of my favorite sites on the Web), reveals his daily media/reading diet:

Most weekday mornings, the first thing I’m reading is my iPhone. I’ll start with a quick check of the Twitter app, dipping into the real-time stream and checking the latest stories that readers have shared using the #longreads hashtag. (It’s for sharing any outstanding story between 1,500 and 30,000 words.)

Also, Long Reads wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for the community, as Mark attests:

Twitter is also my main source for new stories that get featured on Longreads. The community is incredible when it comes to finding and sharing great stories using the #longreads hashtag: @hriefs, @michellelegro, @jaredbkeller, @sherlyholmes, @legalnomads, @katesilver, @nxthompson, @weegee, @eugenephoto, @petersm_th, all recommend excellent links—from magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic to regional publications doing outstanding journalism like Texas Monthly, 5280 Magazine, Atlanta Magazine, and alt-weeklies like Minneapolis City Pages and The Stranger.

I’ve bookmarked Mark’s post because I need to go through the links he has included in there more than a few times. Related: my most popular post on this blog is from last year, where I rounded up The Top Five Long Reads of 2010.

4) “Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth Crying in Rage” [NPR] – probably the most fascinating story I’ve read all week. If you’ve ever doubted that the space race wasn’t risky, read this story. If you click through the link, there is a disturbing photo at the top of the page. This is an incredible account of Vladimir Komarov, friend of the Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin (the first man to enter space). The background:

In 1967, both men [Komarov and Gagarin] were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn’t back out because he didn’t want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.

But as detailed in the new book Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, Gagarin and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems. Gagarin even wrote a 10-page memo on his findings, gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command (to Brezhnev). So both Komarov and Gagarin knew of the dangers…but what would have happened if Komarov refused to go?

“If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead.” That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn’t do that to his friend. “That’s Yura,” the book quotes him saying, “and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears.

An absolutely harrowing account. A must-read.

Earthquake in Japan: Readings, Photos, Videos, Resources

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You’ve probably heard by now that a massive 8.9 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck Japan on March 11, 2011. I’ve been digesting a lot of news regarding this event, and wanted to highlight the best resources I’ve found so far. I’ll update this post throughout the week. If you have any suggestions to add, feel free to comment below.

Starter

I didn’t find out about the quake until about twelve hours after it happened. And my first resource to check, as I usually do when major world events occur, was Wikipedia. The article on the 2011 Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami is constantly being revised by the devout Wikipedia editors, and as of this writing, there have been more than 2,300 revisions. The article is quite comprehensive, and even has links to other full-grown articles on the Fukushima nuclear reactor accidents.

Reading

Here are the best reads on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami:

1) “Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives” [New York Times] – Make no mistake about it: had an earthquake of this magnitude happened anywhere else in the world, the death toll would be in the tens of thousands. While many in the blogosphere deemed this piece polemic, it serves as a crucial reminder:

After the Kobe earthquake [also known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake] in 1995, which killed about 6,000 people and injured 26,000, Japan also put enormous resources into new research on protecting structures, as well as retrofitting the country’s older and more vulnerable structures. Japan has spent billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against earthquakes and tsunamis.

2) “Nuclear Energy 101” [Boing Boing] – very illuminating post from Maggie Koerth-Baker explaining the basics of nuclear energy, and what can go wrong. Because you don’t want to be the guy who explains that “the extent of my knowledge on nuclear power plants is pretty much limited to what I’ve seen on The Simpsons”. (link via @stevesilberman, @edyong209)

3) “Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima Power Plant” [Scientific American] – a good, if somewhat depressing, read:

The type of accident that is occurring in Japan is known as a station blackout. It means loss of offsite AC power—power lines are down—and then a subsequent failure of emergency power on site—the diesel generators. It is considered to be extremely unlikely, but the station blackout has been one of the great concerns for decades.

4) “Japan Earthquake Factbox” [Vancouver Sun] – a great quick-hits list of trivia of the effects of this earthquake. A few of my favorites:

  • There were more than 100 aftershocks (rated 5.0+ in magnitude) since the initial quake. You can verify on the USGS site (so many occurrences of “NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN”)
  • The Earth’s axis has reportedly shifted ten inches as a result of the quake, and Japan’s coast is said to have permanently shifted 2.4 METERS.
  • The quake was 900 times stronger than the quake that hammered San Francisco in 1989.

5) “The Internet Kept Me Company” [New York Times] – a beautiful personal post from Sandra Barron, who lives in Japan. She reflects how internet (but especially Twitter, where she goes by @sandrajapandra) has kept her company:

Then I turned to Twitter. When there’s a quake, everyone who uses Twitter tends to tweet about it. (The United States Geological Survey has even announced that it will start monitoring these reports as part of its surveillance.) This time I waited until the first round of shaking had died down. Then I wrote: “That rearranged my kitchen.” It had. Drawers were open. Bottles had hit the floor.

6) “Fukushima Nuclear Accident” [Brave New Climate] – hands down, the BEST explanation of the disaster unfolding in Fukushima. If there is one source you read to learn (from the very beginning, in layman’s terms) about the Fukushima nuclear reactors and what has gone wrong so far, make it this. The post was published March 12, but there are continuous updates on the blog (March 14 update is here; March 15 update is here). A must-read source.

Photography

1) The In Focus blog at The Atlantic has two incredible galleries.

2) ABC News (AU) has the best use of Google images I’ve seen relating to this quake. The before/after images are astounding. If there is one link you click through in this post, make it this one.

3) New York Times has a similar gallery, but it’s a bit more awkward to use that slider.

Videos

AP has perhaps the most viewed video over the last few days:

Helicopter footage of giant tsunami waves approaching the Japanese coast:

CCTV footage from Sendai Airport showing the incoming tsunami:

Astounding footage showing the size of the tsunami waves as they devour a ship:

Building swaying during the earthquake:

And finally, amazing amateur video showing the earthquake alert system in Japan:

This MSNBC post explains (link via @pourmecoffee):

Japan has spent well more than $1 billion on earthquake prediction systems, including a network of more than 1,000 GPS-based sensors scattered around the country — and the payoff came today when Tokyo’s residents were given up to a minute’s warning that a Big One was on the way.

The early warning system isn’t that useful for those who are close to the epicenter, because the S-waves come quickly behind the P-waves. But because Tokyo is about 230 miles away, that city’s residents could have taken action as much as 80 seconds before the serious shaking began. As noted in this Technology Review report, that amount of time can give people a chance to stop a train, lower a crane, pull a car over to the side of the road, stop performing surgery in a hospital or get off an elevator in an office building.

Other Resources

1) The Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis has launched an excellent web portal for the earthquake. Don’t miss the webmaps page and for the data-loving nerds, this page.

2) Great infographic in the New York Times showing how the shifting plates off the coast of Japan caused the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Also, don’t miss this interactive map showing the damage across Japan (link via @lexinyt, @palafo)

3) Jodi Ettenberg has an excellent Twitter list of journalists and others reporting from Japan.

4) There is superb live coverage of the Japan earthquake on Al Jazeera and continuous updates on the New York Times lede blog (via Open Culture).

5) Google has a dedicated resource page relating to the earthquake, including a people finder.

6) Ushahidi (in Japanese). Includes a live crisis map of Japan.

How to Help

Here are some ways to help victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan:

  • American Red Cross — U.S. mobile phone users can text REDCROSS to 90999 to add $10 automatically to your phone bill. Or visit http://www.redcross.org or call 1-800-RED-CROSS.
  • International Medical Corps — Sending relief teams and supplies to the area. Call 1-800-481-4462, or visit http://internationalmedicalcorps.org .
  • Save the Children — The relief effort providing food, medical care and education to children is accepting donations through mobile phones by texting JAPAN to 20222 to donate $10. People can also call 1-800-728-3843 during business hours or visit www.savethechildren.org/japanquake to donate online.
  • Global Giving — The non-profit which works through grassroots efforts says Americans can text JAPAN to 50555 to give $10 through their phone bill. Or visit http://www.globalgiving.org .
  • Interaction — The group is the largest alliance of U.S.-based international nongovernmental organizations and lists many ways to help on its site, http://www.interaction.org .
  • Network for Good — The aggregator of charities has a list of programs and ways to donate to relief efforts. Visit http://www.networkforgood.org.
  • Doctors without Borders — this is the organization I personally support (I supported them last year after the Haiti earthquake). Visit the site and donate directly at http://doctorswithoutborders.org .

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As I mentioned at the top, if you have found excellent resources relating to this earthquake, feel free to comment below. I will update this post several times.

Readings: Natalie Portman, China’s Museum, Madoff Tapes

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A few reads from the last couple of days:

1) “From Lab to Red Carpet” [New York Times] – Natalie Portman won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role (for her performance as Nina, a ballerina in Black Swan) last night. But did you know that in her younger days, she was a brilliant student?

Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

The piece also discusses the academic endeavors of other actors as well.

2) “China Debuts World’s Largest Museum” [Art Info] — the largest museum in the world is now in China. Located on the east side of Tiananmen Square, the National Museum of China measures 2.07 million square feet and thus surpassing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which previously reigned as the largest museum at 2.05 million square feet. The third largest museum in the world is now The Hermitage in St. Petersburg (which I visited in 2007). (via)

3) “The Madoff Tapes” [New York Magazine] – an incredible piece by Steve Fishman. A different profile of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, in which we hear from Madoff himself. Absolutely astounding that he called the people who trusted and invested with him as greedy.

“Everyone was greedy,” he [Madoff] continues. “I just went along. It’s not an excuse.” In his mind, the hedge funds and the banks were little more than marketers, skimming their 1 to 2 percent off the top, a fee for their supposed “due diligence,” though they exercised little oversight. “Look, there was complicity, in my view…”

Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter vs. IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy!

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Jeopardy! is one of my all-time favorite shows on Television. When I was in high school, I used to watch every show (it was a nightly ritual). These days, I watch Jeopardy! less than I used to in my younger days, but I’ll be certainly tuning in next week to see Ken Jennings (winner of 74 consecutive games on the show, with a total loot of over $3 million in prize money) and Brad Rutter (the biggest all-time money winner on the show) take on IBM’s artificial intelligence software, Watson.

Perhaps I am downplaying my enthusiasm. I’m really, really looking forward to this Jeopardy! contest, which will take place over three days on February 14, 15, and 16. Watson doesn’t just represent a machine force-fed a bunch of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauri (although that’s certainly a major component of it); no, the machine is also facing the arduous task of deciphering the natural (English) language and everything it entails: nuances, hyperboles, puns, dialects, slang, metaphor, and so much more. In other words, Jeopardy! is a perfect test-drive for Watson: the questions on the show aren’t meant for a computer to answer. And this is why this Watson is such a huge deal:

Watson is a powerful machine. Its setup is called “Massively Parallel Probabilistic Evidence-Based Architecture,” and it runs on 2,800 Power7 processing cores. If all that computer and interpreting power presents an answer that satisfies Watson’s confidence interval, it “rings in” with the answer:

Concerning Watson, Richard Powers made a superb op-ed contribution to the New York Times. In “What is Artificial Intelligence?” (link via @openculture) he elaborates on Watson’s challenge:

Open-domain question answering has long been one of the great holy grails of artificial intelligence. It is considerably harder to formalize than chess. It goes well beyond what search engines like Google do when they comb data for keywords. Google can give you 300,000 page matches for a search of the terms “greyhound,” “origin” and “African country,” which you can then comb through at your leisure to find what you need.

Asked in what African country the greyhound originated, Watson can tell you in a couple of seconds that the authoritative consensus favors Egypt. But to stand a chance of defeating Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter, Watson will have to be able to beat them to the buzzer at least half the time and answer with something like 90 percent accuracy.

So the task is two-fold: first arrive at the correct answer and then “buzz in” before Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter. From my observation, Ken Jennings is one of the best players to have mastered the art of the buzz-in (I suspect that for many questions that his competitors knew that he knew as well, his ability to buzz-in before them contributed to at least 30% of his daily winnings on the show). However, I believe the IBM engineers designed Watson for maximum efficiency: as soon as the last syllable escapes Alex Trebek’s lips, Watson will ring in with the answer.

Actually, Watson already competed in a practice round against humans–and beat them, badly. The most interesting tidbit comes from this Discover Magazine piece:

The questions were fed in plain text to Watson, but it had to wait the same amount of time to ring in as the human players did. To make the game fair, it also had to trigger a mechanical signaling button. Watson spoke in a stilted computerized voice–and was almost never wrong.

So if that is the case, Watson isn’t truly “listening” to the questions posed by Trebek; rather, it is reading the plain text. This is important for a reason: if there’s a clue where Alex Trebek accentuates certain part of the answer or perhaps changes his intonation or even his accent, this will be a help for the human contestants. The discrepancy between how the humans are processing the answers vs. Watson cannot be overlooked. For those unfamiliar with Jeopardy!’s buzzer system, the way it is designed is to lock-out the buzzer until Alex Trebek has finished reading the question, and the lock-out period is determined by a human producer (who sits off-camera, and has a button of his/her own which enables the buzzers). If a contestant were to buzz in before the producer pushes that button, the contestant’s buzzer is automatically locked out for three seconds, and any attempt to buzz in before that “penalty” period expires locks the contestant’s buzzer for another three seconds. So this raises an important question: how does Watson know when it can buzz in (i.e., how does it receive notification that the lock-out period has passed?). Will the human players have the advantage here, or will Watson?

Another important question to ponder is this one raised by Richard Powers:

Answers, for Watson, are a statistical thing, a matter of frequency and likelihood. If, after a couple of seconds, the countless possibilities produced by the 100-some algorithms converge on a solution whose chances pass Watson’s threshold of confidence, it buzzes in.

This raises the question of whether Watson is really answering questions at all or is just noticing statistical correlations in vast amounts of data.

In a sense, Watson is like a machine trained in quantum mechanics: it can never be certain about any of the answers, but if it can break the confidence threshold (whatever that may be) for the answer (err, question), it will surely try to buzz in with the response.

I like Powers’s conclusion:

It does not matter who will win this $1 million Valentine’s Day contest. We all know who will be champion, eventually. The real showdown is between us and our own future. Information is growing many times faster than anyone’s ability to manage it, and Watson may prove crucial in helping to turn all that noise into knowledge.

I finish this post with a prediction: I believe Ken Jennings will be the champion of this Jeopardy! contest. I have high hopes for Watson, and I believe it will do quite well, but I am sticking with the all-time champion. Ken is just too good with the buzzer and an absolute whiz for me to bet against him.

What about you? Who do you think will win?

Readings: J.D. Salinger, Free Writing, Charles Darwin

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Three things I’ve read today, all worth twenty minutes of your time:

1) “An Evening with J.D. Salinger” [Paris Review] – Blair Fuller recounts a very interesting evening with one of his favorite writers, J.D. Salinger. In attendance are Blair’s younger sister, Jill and her husband, Joe:

He [J.D. Salinger] asked us to call him Jerry, then asked some routine questions about what we were doing and why, but with a pleasing sympathetic intensity. He made several comments that put him on our side, the side of people starting out rather than the people settled in to lifelong careers. The conversation warmed, and we found that we could make each other laugh.

But as the evening progresses, things turn for the worse. The narrative in this piece is wonderful — you have to read the entire thing.

2) “No One is Forced to Write for Free” [Anna Tarkov’s blog] — the day after the huge AOL purchase of Huffington Post, Anna Tarkov writes an excellent piece about why Huffington Post writers continue to write for free (and why it’s not as bad as some people make it out to be). Great argument:

No, the reality as we all know is that people chose to write on Huffington Post for free. They chose to do it because HuffPo gave them a platform where a lot of eyeballs would potentially see what they wrote. Most people can’t get that kind of visibility on their own blog. Maybe Dan Gillmor can, but I can’t. So if I decide to write on HuffPo for nothing more than attention, then I’m getting paid in a sense, just not in dollars. How is this different than a business buying a billboard on a busy expressway?

I’m curious whether people in other professions feel similarly about exposing their work for free: photographers, artists, etc.

3) “Charles Darwin’s Little Known Psychology Experiment” [Scientific American] – Darwin wasn’t just well-known for advancing his theory of evolution. This is a great read:

In 1872, Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he argued that all humans, and even other animals, show emotion through remarkably similar behaviors. For Darwin, emotion had an evolutionary history that could be traced across cultures and species—an unpopular view at the time. Today, many psychologists agree that certain emotions are universal to all humans, regardless of culture: anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness and sadness.

(Hat tip: @matthiasrascher)

The Top Five Long Reads of 2010

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In 2010, I have saved over 500 articles to my Instapaper account, and I’ve read the majority of them. In early January, I decided that in addition to reporting the books I read, I would also highlight interesting articles I’ve read throughout the year. I ended up focusing a lot more time reading long form articles, which meant that I could no longer achieve my book reading goal. However, I believe that by diversifying my reading, I’ve learned a lot more than I otherwise could have.

My approach in selecting the five articles below was fairly methodical: I spent days going through my Instapaper account (as well as entries on this blog) making sure that the articles I selected truly represented the best (in terms of interestingness and compelling writing) in long form journalism that I’ve read this year. So without further ado, my top five long reads of 2010:

(1) “The Chess Master and the Computer” [New York Review of Books] – Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, reminisces about playing against computers, from the rudimentary machines of the 1980s, to Deep Blue in 1997, to modern-day super computers. I remember when I was in my high school chess club and one student posed this question: “Can chess be solved?” I’ve been fascinated with this topic ever since, and Kasparov sheds some light about solving chess:

Another group postulated that the game would be solved, i.e., a mathematically conclusive way for a computer to win from the start would be found. (Or perhaps it would prove that a game of chess played in the best possible way always ends in a draw.) Perhaps a real version of HAL 9000 would simply announce move 1.e4, with checkmate in, say, 38,484 moves. These gloomy predictions have not come true, nor will they ever come to pass. Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today.

And as I postulated previously, Mr. Kasparov is not excluding the possibility of chess being solved one day; he simply argues that it is inconceivable to solve the game of chess with the hardware we have (or can conceive in our minds) today.

This piece was published in January, and it has been on my mind all year. As I was thinking about my top five long reads of 2010, I simply could not ignore Kasparov’s brilliance. An absolute must-read, and in my mind, the best long read of the year.

(2) “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma” [New York Times] – this isn’t an article but an interview (a conversation, really) with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris and David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology. The interview revolves around this central question: are you aware of things you don’t know that you don’t know? As David Dunning put it:

It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.”  It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don’t know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don’t know that we don’t know.”

The whole thing is a total mind-bender, which I love. Here’s Morris contemplating further:

Is an “unknown unknown” beyond anything I can imagine?  Or am I confusing the “unknown unknowns” with the “unknowable unknowns?”  Are we constituted in such a way that there are things we cannot know?  Perhaps because we cannot even frame the questions we need to ask?

NOTE: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma is actually a five part series (see Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5). However, Part 1 is the most interesting, I think.

(3) “Pelé as a Comedian” [Run of Play] — When I first blogged about Phillips’ masterful essay, I wrote:

Every once in a while you come across writing so good, you can’t sit still as you’re reading it.

Phillips’s sheer eloquence and command of the English language wins my award for being the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve read this year:

Then it happens, and it’s impossible even though it’s happening, but it’s happening even though it’s impossible. Everything that’s wrong—the difficulty of controlling the ball, the interposing defenders, the fact that he can’t use his hands—suddenly seems right, because it merely provides the occasion for the astonishing thing he improvises. You laugh, because it’s exhilarating, and you laugh because the consolation it offers is not a consummate, religious consolation, but an imperfect, fragile piece of momentary happiness. It’s a consolation that was made to make you laugh.

It doesn’t matter if you like soccer. It doesn’t even matter if you like sports. You read this piece for the writing. I called it then and I call it now: an absolute must-read.

(4) “Art of the Steal” [Wired] – it’s hard to pick a favorite Wired story of the year (see ten of the best 2010 Wired articles), but I will go with this one because the story is fascinating and reads like a mini mystery. Gerald Blanchard’s career as a thief begins in childhood:

Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn’t afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor’s porch. “I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission,” he says. “And no one saw me take it.” His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. “After that,” he says, “I was hooked.”

And intensifies from there. Riveting.

(5) “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science” [The Atlantic] – there were dozens of worthy contenders in The Atlantic this year, but I am choosing David Freedman’s piece because 1) I am a skeptic and 2) This piece has been largely ignored and more people should read about Dr. John Ioannidis’s goal to elucidate the misleading, exaggerated, and even flat-out wrong conclusions medical researchers make:

[Ioannidis] charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem

A key passage:

When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

You should read the whole piece to find out the explanation. And while some may consider Ioannidis to be an extremist (not to mention a contrarian), I think it is absolutely essential that we hear out the critics (this notion ties quite well to The Anosognosic’s Dilemma above).

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Notes:

1) I will update this post with five honorable mentions.

2) If you’re interested in reading more of long form journalism, I suggest perusing the longreads website and Twitter stream.

3) You should subscribe to this blog by email using the box on the top right.