Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

Down the street, the cheapest gas at my local gas station is $3.07 per gallon. This is expensive comparing to $1.50 per gallon that I was paying few year backs. Given the ongoing geopolitical uncertainty in many oil production countries, I don’t expect the price of gasoline is going to fall anytime soon.

Meanwhile, I ask myself what can I do to reduce my spending on gasoline? And, what can I do as a consumer to help to drive the down the high gas price?
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I wrote about the reasons why I support legal immigration but not illegal immigration. A reader asks whether it’s a crime for employers to hire illegal immigrates?

What about people who employ illegals? The landscaping homedepoting homeowners, business owners et al? Why should they not be made felons for employing illegals? It seems to me that employing illegals should be at least as big a crime as being one.

Another reader informs me that it’s a crime to bring in illegal immigrates into this country.

“On March 20, 1952, the United State Congress amended the Immigration Act of 1917, making it a felony to bring in or willfully induce an alien unlawfully to enter or reside in the United States. It also further define the powers of the Border Patrol, giving the to access to private lands, within 25 miles of an external boundary for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens.”

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The best way to make money is not to lose money. Two things that everyone can do to not lose money — keep healthy yourself and your credit history.

As the health care cost increases, keeping yourself healthy is an effective way to save money. Even if you have health insurance, keeping yourself healthy is still important. Taking a sick day off will cause you to lose productivity, and will cause you extra gas to drive from home to the doctor’s office. Not needing to see doctors means you can save those co-pay money for something else (such as few more cups of Starbucks coffee). BTW, your health is worth $84,000.

In the US, how good the credit history of a person is usually more valuable than how much saving the person has in the bank. It pays to check your credit history every year. Details on building healthy credit history can be found here.

I’m a supporter of public policies that encourage legal immigration and not illegal immigration. While I believe immigration is one of the best means to encourage culture exchanges, however, there is a key difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration.

One group enters a country while obeying the laws of the country, and the other group enters a country while breaking the laws of the country. Regardless of the original intent of an illegal immigrate, entering a country without the proper documents is something that I don’t support.

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FOAF is an ontology for publishing and discovering social network information on the Web. Though many people have published their FOAF profiles on the Web, but that number is still quite small — in comparison to the number of published MySpace profiles.

While tools like FOAF-a-matic has made easy for the average web users to generate FOAF profiles, but they still require some manual effort to get the profiles published (e.g., a user must complete the form and upload the machine generated RDF document onto a web server). I suspect these overheads are discourage factors that had prevented many users to publish their FOAF profiles.

If FOAF profiles are valuable to the understanding of social network on the Web, we should look for new ways to discover FOAF semantics in the existing web applications, and not depend on the manual publishing of FOAF profiles by the users.

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Speak the truth is the responsibility of all scientists. To be able to speak the truth is the basic right of all scientists. According to New York Times, “scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming.”

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

Since I don’t have full knowledge about these incidents, it’s difficult to say how much truth is in the story. However, it’s certain that if the story was truth, it’s a “crime” for the White House to prevent scientists from publicly discussing global warming issues.

This subject reminds me of an OnPoint podcast show that I have listened.

1. NASA and Global Warming, OnPoint, NPR, February 03, 2006