Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

My memory of the last DotCom boom is fading. But, I think a new DotCom boom is about to begin. The new boom, I think, will evolve around the idea of Web 2.0 and perhaps some mix of the Semantic Web.

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From AAAI newsletter:

PBS will air “the Great Robot Race” on March 28th, 2006 at 8:00 PM (check local listings). The program chronicles the DARPA Grand Challenge last fall where driverless vehicles raced across the Mojave Desert, including those created by Carnegie Mellon University’s “Red Team,” led by Red Whittaker, and “Stanley,” the winning Stanford University entry.

An interview with Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun, as well as additional background and program information is available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/.

Here is an interesting ubiquitous computing research video from Japan. The video is kind of an anonymous production — it didn’t state the name of the project and who created it. Nevertheless, I love it.

In the video, a large touch-screen display is overlaid with a special grid system. Each square in the grid system is a mini-computing program. The behavior of each program is dynamically configurable by placing a square glass object on top of the touch-screen display. For example, when a user places a glass object that represents “weather” on the screen, the mini-computing program becomes a weather report application.

The most interesting part of the system is the square glass objects. These objects have some kind of built-in pressure sensors. Users can use special pen devices to interact with the mini-computing programs via the glass objects. In addition, the output from one glass object can be used as the control input to another connected glass object.

Honestly, because the demo is so cool, I have doubts about the authenticity of the work. If you know who did this research or where the video came from, please let me know.

In Chinese culture, there is a belief that playing Mahjong can help elderly to stay alert and prevent memory lost. In the West, experts believe that shopping may also help to prevent memory lost.

“Women not only live longer than men but possibly maintain their brain functions better than most men in part because they shop. While shopping, they are physically active, wandering through stores and carrying parcels. They are mentally active, comparing prices and making choices. And, after completing their shopping, they feel they have accomplished something.”

Source: Remember this — How to prevent and protect your memory and makes it grow, by Marshall Loeb, MarketWatch, March 4, 2006.

MarketWatch reports that Google is to be added to S&P 500 Index, replacing Burlington Resource Inc. This is a good news to those who want to invest in Google but doesn’t want to buy Google stocks directly.

Since GOOG will be part of S&P 500 Index, investors can own shares of GOOG by investing in index funds that tracks S&P 500 index (e.g., Vanguard 500 Index Fund).

I think in the near future, investors should see a minor increase in the stock price of GOOG since all mutual funds that track S&P 500 index are forced to re-balance their portfolios to include GOOG.

After reading Dan Connolly’s blog, saying that he has outsourced bookmarking to del.iciou.us, I thought I will give this service another try. I have used the service before, but didn’t really get into it.

Spent few minutes reading the HELP page, I discover few new interesting features:

• Tag Bundles: I can bundle a set of related tags. For example, I created a SemanticWeb tag bundle that includes tags such as “ontology, rdf, owl, owls, rdf, rss” etc.
• Private Saving: one reason I didn’t like del.icio.us in the past because I don’t really want to share all my bookmarks with the public. With this new “private saving” feature, I can keep my private bookmarks private.
• Firefox extension: I installed a Firefox extension that allows to quickly save and tag web pages. It works great!

Among those features, I especially like “tag bundles”. If we consider tags as ontology classes, then tag bundles can be thought as functions that define the “owl:equivalentClass” relation or the “relatedTo” relation among different tags. It could be an interesting research project to investigate if we can use software programs to automatically extract ontologies from tag bundles that are defined by users of the same community (e.g., semantic web hobbyists).

We all know iPod is for music and entertainment. Few years ago, no one would ever guess that iPod could also be used for education. There is a growing number of “iTunes U” in the US. These universities explore the use podcasts and iPods to encourage students to learn.

Here are some real uses of iPods and podcasts:

• A history professor asks students to download 39 films to their video-capable iPods so she doesn’t have to spend class time screening the movies.
• A psychology professor has found a new-age answer to office hours: a podcast of the week’s most asked questions.
• Foreign language students use iPods to immerse themselves in coursework.
• University administrators want to use podcasts to recruit high schoolers to the 3,000-student campus.

Source: Rural college push iPod use for lectures, CNN, March 20, 2006

Technology evolution is a strange thing. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to predict how a new technology will use when it gets into the hands of general population. The use of iPod is a good example.

BusinessWeek runs an article on “The Top Ten Hybrid Myths“. It talks about few interesting hybrid vehicle facts that most people don’t know about. I recommend this article not only because it’s informative, but also some reader comments are worthy of additional discussions.

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