i am an idiot

I misread the date for a symposium meeting as being one month earlier than the actual date. I then scrambled to finish a poster that isn't needed until October 29.

and I could've spent all that extra time...not doing work.

Anberlin!!!

Has a new album coming soon!!! "New Surrender" apparently comes out in 5 days...and the songs aren't bad at all. A few are up on youtube

A small excerpt from the album, a live performance of a new song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMp4D6D0qac&feature=related

Has anyone noticed something different in that video? Like...Stephen Christian's live voice has gotten a LOT more refined and controlled?

considering Wikipedia

In between learning about kernel methods and other maths, I've found the time to talk to a couple other grad students about random topics, and one that came up was Wikipedia. In the past decade of the internet explosion, a couple tools have helped the common man navigate his way around the enormous space of the www. It seems as if out of these tools, google, youtube, facebook and wikipedia have come out on top as being the tools someone cannot navigate the internet without.

So...each has its issues. facebook sells your info to advertisers, google's power is nearly limitless (kind of scary), and youtube...well, it mostly just wastes my time with its addictive distractions. I learned a little more about the structure of wikipedia, however, and it bothers me a little more.

The publicly editable encyclopedia Wikipedia is not entirely free-form - the reason it isn't chaos is due to the administrators of Wikipedia, the people in charge of rules of posting, deletion, etc. Consider now the position of these people - due to the huge popularity of Wikipedia, it's almost a first source for anyone who wants to learn about some subject. Yet, administrating Wikipedia is not an official job, there are no enforceable laws and regulations concerning the information that goes out, and most of it is done anonymously. Add to the fact that the average age of a Wikipedia admin is 17 (with estimates that go as low as 15), and you have a lot of power and influence in the hands of a few people who aren't held responsible for it (and if they were, would you really be able to press serious charges against a 17 year old?).

To put it into perspective, consider that there are roughly 1000 administrators of Wikipedia. There are about 7 million articles and 2 million subscribed viewers, so it's difficult to estimate how many people actually use Wikipedia for anything, but it's got to be approaching a hundred million at least. What they write influences the way people think, and can have serious consequences for corporations and public figures (and these are 17 year old students - implying a certain level of bias and immaturity in opinion).

Not that I'm anti-liberal or anything, but Wikipedia will definitely lean towards a more liberal view of things considering the opinion trend of the age group of Wikipedia's admins. Compound this with the fact that the internet generation's way of thinking and forming opinions (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google), and you have a dangerous combination: power to influence the way people think in the hands of a few people who don't think very deeply themselves. The most attractive meme or idea out there (regardless of how accurate or trustworthy it is) can then be easily sold to the general public. And thus bad (or at least biased) ideas enter the public sphere, and can keep people from objectively evaluating things.

Note: The information in the articles below on Slimvirgin, a Wikipedia admin, may be wrong. The article claims she wrote a forum post encouraging skewed articles in favor of animal rights. She responded to me and notified me that the post as quoted is a fake. I'll remove it from this blog post; the main idea stands without it. If it was a fake, I apologize for spreading false information.

What's worse, a CalTech grad student traced a bunch of Wikipedia changes concerning corporations or business to the same or rival corporations/businesses.

"A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations."

A silver lining: most of the science and math articles tend to be politically unbiased (if you find one that's not, tell me =P), so the admins tend to leave those alone for the mathematicians and researchers to maintain. But be careful on everything else you read - it is probably a little biased (usually away from the conservative orthodox side too) and can sometimes be outright misleading and wrong.

A few interesting articles related
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker
http://www.searchengineguide.com/ross-dunn/is-wikipedia-co.php

busy week

Grad school is getting busier, and more and more reminiscent of days when I spent late nights in Duncan at Rice. Saturday from 10AM to 11:30PM was spent at the ICES building working on Functional Analysis hw. And this is apparently how the first year goes...

Wish me luck - the first exam of the semester is coming up Monday!

I am forever damned

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell." -- St. Augustine (354-430)

(footnote - mathematicians were often astrologers in the 3rd century, so I suppose I'm half off the hook...)

Houston vs Austin

After living in Austin for a few weeks, I have a few observations to make about this city as compared to Houston.

• "Austin squirrels are idiots." During Rice, I had 2 occurrances of a squirrel running out into the path of my bike. Both times, the squirrel noticed me, even as I was going top speed, and avoided me (for the most part, anyhow - one time I just ran over its tail). The first Austin squirrel I encounter with my bike runs out into my path, and as I brake to slow down, it just kind of stands there stupidly until I run it over (it appeared to be fine, seeing that it was standing up as I was looking back at it afterwards).
  
  
• "Austin pretends to be green." I think Austin wants to be an earth-friendly city, but about half the city is really gung-ho about it. The rest (and a large part of UT administration) just say they are and continue to throw away recyclables and drive huge SUVs.
  
  
• "Autry gym is pitiful". The UT gym has everything, and its bigger. A rock climbing wall, 3 outdoor pools, an indoor track, etc. 24 hour doesn't even compare to this place.
  
  
• "Austin is small". 10 minutes away is considered a long drive here. Wait, scratch that, having to DRIVE is considered a long drive here.
  
  

Ok, a more serious post on my thoughts on post-grad life coming up later (along with more facts about Austin if I can come up with any). This is just to keep things updated =P.

did you know...

There's an art movie called "Zorn's Lemma" (streaming movie available here) and a band called the Axiom of Choice? Unfortunately, there's no media based off of the well-ordering theorem, at least from what I know.

time badly spent

I tend to be terrible at overall summaries of my life, so I'll try to harp on individual subjects that catch my attention and merit posting on. I seem to be having a lot of difficulty using my free time well. Ever since senior year, I seem to have lost interest in things, and found I have a remarkable talent for wasting time. It seems to have carried over to grad school.

Turns out, I have only 3 classes, 1 research group, and no classes Tuesday/Thursday. You'd think that with Austin's beautiful sceneries, UT's huge gym, and the people I know, I'd be doing lots of things, right? Most of the time, I've wasted my time reading manga and lounging around the house. Today, for example - I woke up, cooked breakfast, read manga, read emails, then cooked lunch, then read more manga, finally going to the office at 3PM, leaving at 6PM (to go running in an attempt to make myself feel productive physically too) I am going to fail out if I keep this up.

What's with all these unproductive and pointless choices that I'm making? Ideas have consequences, and my choices have consequences too, not only direct consequences but also consequences on my ideas, on the habits I build for myself. What are these choices going to do to me down the line? I think I was better prepared for graduate school when I was an undergraduate. I feel like I'm doing most of my maturing now, rather than at Rice when most people tend to have their "coming of age" times. I hope that's not true.

In other news, I am somehow hooked on...(don't laugh now...) romance mangas (in addition to my other mangas...). All types, too - shojo, josei, shounen (I told you not to laugh...). A few good ones I've read in the past few months...

- Ai Yori Aoshi: really good, but not scanlated to the end! =(
- Umi No Misaki: I liked this one a lot. A bit on the ecchi side, but nothing too bad in taste thankfully. By the same artist as Ai Yori Aoshi.
- High School Debut: art is only OK, but it's better than average for this genre. plus, the characters are well developed and really funny =). I liked this one a lot
- Bitter Virgin: really heavy story. A bit depressing.
- Ai Kora: haha this one is so immature, but fun.

Moving complete!

Well, that was easy. I just moved off of Xanga, and started a blogspot account (using the exact same formatting as Sam Feng and Timmy Dy...how original). Hope to have time (and more importantly, motivation) for more posts now...so stay tuned =)