Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released the 2005 US census data. The median household income — the point at which half of residents earn more and half earn less — in the US rose sightly faster than inflation in 2005. However, more people are without health insurance — 16% of the US population. Nationwide, one in every 10 people over 25 years old have completed either a master’s or doctorate degree.

The news about more people not able to get adequate health care really bothers me. Health care is one of the most fundamental needs of a human being in a modern society. It kills me to think that it’s a fact that Paris Hilton’s dog gets more health care than some kids living in a poor neighborhood. Who’s fault this is? If people can’t receive health care because they are financially poor, the Government is the one to blame.

I’m quite surprised to see 1 out of 10 people in this country have completed an advanced degree. Not sure what are companies’ expectation these days when hiring new employees. Do they all expect candidates to have at least a master’s degree?
News Source: Independent Record

US Census Bureau Reports:

• Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005 [PDF]
• Income, Earnings, and Poverty Data From the 2005 American Community Survey [PDF]
• Current Industrial Reports, Advance Report for Fourth Quarter 2005, Manufacturers’ Utilization of Plant Capacity: 2005 [PDF]

Recently China’s parliament enacted an updated bankruptcy law that better protects commercial creditors. The new law requires troubling firms to pay their creditors first instead of their workers.

This is a major news. In the past, the communist Chinese government typically gave a higher status to workers and farmers, as oppose to commercial businesses. In this new bankruptcy law, it does exactly the opposite. Creditors first, workers second. The new law brings China more in line with market-based countries such as the US and Japan. In additional, the bill will also permit firms that are struggling financially to request reorganization.

Source: BusinessWeek, BBC News.

BusinessWeek reports that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has yanked Wikipedia from the digital toolbox its examiners use to help determine a patent application’s validity.

“The problem with Wikipedia is that it’s constantly changing,” Patents Commissioner John Doll said. “We’ve taken Wikipedia off our list of accepted sources of information.”

I’m not too surprised to see this decision. Given that any person can add and modify Wikipeida content, it would be too easy for a patent applicant to add false facts that are in favor of a particular patent application and too difficult for an examiners to detect such misbehavior. While I believe Wikipedia is a valuable source of information, but it definitely shouldn’t be used to as a reliable source of information for examining patent applications.

It’s clear that AOL is trying to boost its business by aggressively expand its web search and advertising market. Instead of fighting head-to-head with Google and Yahoo! in general web search, AOL attempts to break into the market with a niche application that neither companies have yet considered — educational search.

AOL’s new weapon is StudyBuddy.com. According to the BusinessWeek Online:

StudyBuddy.com relies on technology from search engine Blinkx to retrieve query text and multimedia results from a database of 350,000 online journals, encyclopedias, and other sites that have been vetted for accuracy and age-appropriateness for children. StudyBuddy’s creators see it as a virtual library that brings the best of the Web’s educational and homework resources under one roof.

An AOL executive argues that this idea will work.

“Before there was WebMD, there were hundreds of health sites on the Internet and no one destination to go to for information. Prior to StudyBuddy, there was no one space either. StudyBuddy is to be an aggregation of all the educational sites,” says June Herold, vice-president and general manager for AOL Consumer and Education Services.

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For those who are interested in entrepreneur stories and the key people behind the most successful start-ups, consider the following:

• The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (vidoe and audio podcasts)
• Interviews with entrepreneurs and CEOs by nPost.com

The information presented in the above pages are not only useful to people who want to start their owns companies but also to those who simply curious about the less-known stories behind those companies. Behind every successful start-up, there are pain, joy and adventure.

A little known business in China is modern mummification. In this business, workers, typically medical school students, are hired to clean, cut, dissect, preserve and re-engineer human corpses, preparing them for the international museum exhibition market.

In this New York Times report, the story of a modern mummification business is a controversial one. Western businesses are setting up these shops in China because of little government regulations.
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Many home owners pay close attention to property values, but not too many pay attention to property taxes. This can be dangerous. The New York Times reports that property taxes has grown two to three times faster than personal income from 2000 to 2004, and many home owners are running into financial troubles despite tremendous property value increases.

Here is a real life testimony from a N.J. resident:

“In 1997, my taxes were $2,600; now they’re $8,000,” said Dan Mackey, 42, a credit manager who lives in Somerset, N.J. “My salary certainly hasn’t’t tripled in the last nine years, and I don’t know anyone’s that has.”

There are couple different ways to think about this problem.

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It seems like AOL is undergoing a major business change. While it plans to cut 5000 jobs, it’s quietly boosting its scientific research investment. In a recent announcement sent to a research mailing list, AOL states that it’s new business direction is “making its content and products freely available to all consumers”, and it’s inviting researchers in academia and industry to participate.

AOL Research, AOL’s research body, is making available large amount web search data to the research community.

• 20,000 hand labeled, classified queries
• 3.5 million web question/answer queries (who, what, where, when, etc.)
• Query streams for 500,000 users over 3 months (20 million queries)
• Query arrival rates for queuing analysis
• 2 million queries against US Government domains

Additional data that it plans to make available in the future includes “random samples of query time”, “concurrent query sets from Web, News and Audio/Video”.

update: Not too long after AOL’s announcement, on Aug. 3, 2006, Google announced that it will made available of 6 DVDs of search data used for public research and development. This set of data is the result of processing one trillion words from the Web.

update (2006-08-07): There seems to be some privacy concerns over the search data that AOL has released. The site linked in the above has been taken down. More discussions can be found here.

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