US the lifestyle superpower

Immigration is a hot topic in the US. Some people argue that immigrants will take jobs away from the locals and bring in new cultures that destroy the core American values. On the other hand, some people argue that the US is built by immigrants and welcoming new immigrants is in the core of the US culture.

Don't matter which side you stand. The truth is that people love coming to the US. They like living here not because the country automatically brings them wealth, but because living here each person can be who they want to be. The US is a big country. There are 50 states with 50 different sets of laws. It has a wide variations of climates and seasonal weathers. And most importantly, almost every person can find their own niche of lifestyles.

No matter where an immigrant hails from, he can find a cluster of his ethnic kin somewhere in America. In fact, he is probably spoilt for choice. If he wants to live in a suburb, eat Korean food and listen to fire-and-brimstone sermons in Korean, he can do so in northern Virginia. If he prefers an urban and secular Korean lifestyle, he can try Boston or San Francisco. If he craves Ethiopian food, Amharic radio and lots of gay clubs, Washington, DC, may suit him.

You can find welcoming clusters of ethnic minorities in other rich countries, but not nearly as many. In a European country, if you want Korean food and a particular denomination of Korean church, you might find it in the capital but you will struggle in the suburbs. In America, it is easier to find just the niche you want: Polish or Vietnamese, metropolitan or exurban, gay or straight, Episcopalian or Muslim, or any combination of the above.

You have a choice of weather and landscape, from snowy Alaska to baking Texas, from the mountains of Colorado to the forests of Maine. Northern Virginia, where Mr Lee lives, has the same climate as his homeland: winter is freezing, summer is muggy, autumn is delightful and spring brings cascades of cherry blossoms.

Check out A Ponzi scheme that works on The Economist, and see if you agree.

A new war in the cloud

In this week's Economist magazine, an article talks about an ongoing technology war between Microsoft, Google and Apple, fighting to dominate the clouding computing market. The premise is that while all three companies have ample resources and niche technology to win, but the final outcome is still too early to tell -- i.e., don't bet your retirement fund in any one of the three companies. :-)

In cloud computing, there are three key elements: data centers, services and hardware periphery. Google clearly has an upper hand in building data centers. But, it's only a matter of time before the others know how to build scalable and efficient data centers. In services, Google again has a lead, but Microsoft and Apple are not too far behind. After a disastrous release of Windows Vista and a slow grasp of web-centric computing, Microsoft recently comes back with a new Windows 7, Live services and Bing search engine, bringing a new battle to Google's own turf. Unlike Google and Microsoft, Apple has always focused on selling the best designed hardware and not software. With the super successful iPhone and iTune store, Apple is the leader in mobile computing. As computing users become ever more mobile and develop an acquired taste for pervasive computing, winning this battle helps Apple to buy more time to develop its data centers and services.

The Economist article also points out other issues that could significantly alter the outcome of the ongoing battle -- antitrust issues, difference in culture and business model among the three companies and the emergence of new players, such as Amazon and Facebook.

The future of cloud computing certainly looks exciting!

Update: Oct. 12, 2009

• Google may be coming out with a new online music service
• Microsoft "owns" Twitter search and Facebook data
• Apple iPhone and iTouch's user adoption rate beats which of all popular devices
  

Mahout: Open Source machine learning library

Apache Mahout is an open source project aimed to develop a scalable machine learning library. This is an exciting project. Although machine learning technology has its roots in the field of artificial intelligence, but it has broad application in today's digital world.

In the past, developing sophisticated and scalable machine learning library is limited to academic institutions and commercial companies with a deep pocket and an army of research scientists. I think Mahout is going to change that.

Mahout reminds me of its parent project Lucene, a very successful Apache project created to develop open source library for document search.  Before Lucene, it was difficult to create an effective and scalable document search engine. These days with Lucene, developers can easily use it create a custom search engine in a few hours. I'm looking forward to see Mahout everywhere!

Check out Grant Ingersoll's introduction on Apache Mahout.

Britain grocery store explores weather prediction

Tesco, the largest grocery chain in Britain, is exploring a new kind of data-mining technology to save cost. A six-person research team developed a computer software that calculates shopping patterns based on weather prediction.

Research showed that changes in weather often affect people's shopping behavior.

Supermarkets that stocked more meat and other barbecue foods in anticipation of sunshine could be left with the food unsold because of unpredicted rain and cold weather. A 10 degree Centigrade (18 degree Fahrenheit) temperature increase generally triples sales of barbecue meat and increases demand for lettuce by 50 percent, Tesco said.

It's pretty amazing what data-mining technology can help business these days. I wonder in the near future if we will see similar software programs to help individuals to shop based on aggregated set of contextual information, such as bank account balance, weather and day of the month?

Source: Some Rain and Clouds With That Rib Eye?, NYTimes

Retirement in an aging population

Retirement planning is an important topic in personal finance. The purpose of retirement planning is to ensure a person have sufficient living incomes after leaving the work force. Recent reports in the Economist showed that the world's population is getting older. This is going to complicate retirement planning for the individuals and the governments.

Key facts reported in the articles are as the follows. First, people will live longer in coming decades. The average life expectancy for people in the developed world is 78. This number is expected to rise. Second, in both developed and developing countries, we're seeing a trend of birth rate decrease (i.e., less babies are born into new families). Third, an aging population (more old folks and less young kids) will cause problems for the existing pension systems (e.g., the Social Security system in the US). There will be less young workers to pay taxes to support an increasing number of retirees.

So as an individual what can we do to ensure that we will have sufficient incomes to retire? I think there are only two reasonable answers: (1) prepare to stay in the work force longer, and (2) maintain a sound retirement investment portfolio for living into an older age (say 85-90).

• Ageing in the rich world
• A shortage of babies
• Living longer
• Selling to older people
• Targeting pensions
• Work till you drop
• China’s ageing predicament
• Coping with global greying

BoA customers get free museum passes

If you're a Bank of America customer, you are eligible for free weekend passes to over 100 museums in the US. This is a part of the Museums on Us program.

For the rest of 2009, you can get free passes during the following weekends:

• July 4-5
• August 1-2
• September 5-6
• October 3-4
• November 7-8
• December 5-6

If you are in the Bay Area, check out the San Jose Museum of Art, the Tech Museum of Innovation and the de Young Museum.

Flock may be losing its steam to Firefox

Recently both Flock and Firefox released a new version of their browser product, namely Flock 2.5 and Firefox 3.5. While both browsers are based the Gecko engine, Firefox 3.5 is certainly beating Flock 2.5 in terms of performance.

My default browser used to be Flock, a social web browser that has built-in support for many popular web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Del.icio.us. But, when Firefox 3.5 becomes available, with its latest support for HTML 5, a faster JavaScript engine, the awesome bar and the Personas extension,  I immediately switched.

Before I had switched, I was worried that I will missed the integrated social web browsing experience provided by Flock. But, after I had installed various Firefox plugins for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Blogger, I didn't feel losing much functionality. A faster browsing experience is what I loved about Firefox.

I'm worried about the future of Flock. I wonder if it has become a bloatware.