Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

News from the Hong Kong Cable TV reports that an Air China pilot was unable to communicate with the control tower in English minutes before landing at the JFK airport. Watch this YouTube video (in Cantonese).

In the interview, an Air China spokesperson blames the incident on the air traffic control agent accusing the agent failed to use the standard language. Some readers of the Virtual China blog believe that it’s the fault of the pilot. I’m actually sympathetic for the pilot but very angry at the officials.

First, I believe the pilot was doing the best he can. Learning English for the Chinese is not easy. The same is true for Americans learning Chinese. When American pilots flying into China, I doubt too many of them can communicate with the air traffic control agents in Chinese. Should Chinese force all American pilots to learn Chinese? For that said, I suggest serious English language training courses for the Air China pilots. Because English is a widely used language in the world today, which is something we can’t change overnight, it’s necessary for pilots to be fluent in English, especially for those who flying into the US.

Second, pilots unable to communicate the US control tower in English is the fault of the Air China officials and the pilot training agencies. They failed to set tough standards and provide adequate education. When serious incidents occurred, like the one reported in the news, not only they don’t admit fault, but also they blame the fault on other people. This is extremely irresponsible.

Third, meanwhile, American agencies, e.g., JFK control towers, should provide adequate language translation support in case foreign pilots do not speak fluent English. This is not a matter of national pride that everyone must speak English, it’s a matter of passenger’s life. If pilots failed to follow instructions this time, an accident may have happened and people may have died.

Let’s not putting people’s lives in danger because some people are “lost in translation”.

CNN video teaches a few words and phrases used by teens today.

• Break your crayons: making someone upset
• Agnorant: someone who is arrogant and ignorant at the same time
• Kraft singles: $1 bills

Watch this video and also learn the meaning of “Leave Britney alone”…

The price of New York City apartments skyrocketed in the past decade. Not only people are paying millions for apartments, they also spend millions to renovate and remodel them. While money may get people expensive apartments, but it can’t eliminate the mental stress of home renovation.

Julia Kim rapped her spiked Gucci heels along the floor of a Midtown furniture showroom earlier this year as she approached a $30,000 custom wraparound couch that will be the centerpiece of the Manhattan co-op apartment she plans to share with her fiancé, Stephen Rushmore.

This purchase was just one of many steps in the journey that began more than a year ago when Rushmore [and] Kim decided to buy a duplex just off Park Avenue for $6 million.

Indeed, even after paying top dollar for a luxury apartment, most buyers see the need for more work. Like Rushmore and Kim, they often embark on costly and lengthy renovations intended to reflect not only their own taste but also their ambitions to find a perch in the social and economic swirl of today’s Gilded Age.

In fact, it’s more stressful to own expensive homes because you have to do extra works in order to live up to the social expectation.

Read the rest of this entry »

We can teach students geography using Nintendo Wii — at least that’s what Mr. David Brantley at the Cumberland Elementary School believes.

Gathered in front of the white board in David Brantley’s class, his first-graders vie to show off geography skills using the Nintendo Wii.

“We’ve seen North America, South America, Africa and Asia,” Brantley says, as he flips the wand controller and spins the projected weather globe to an unknown location. “How about Europe or Australia?”

Though they have individual maps of the U.S. and the world at hand, the students are not waving their arms to point at the map with their fingers the way children have traditionally learned geography. They want a chance to wield the controller to find and click on U.S. states and continents.

It gets better…

From making math problems out of bowling scores to playing Scrabble-like Flash games, available free on the Internet, he sees unlimited potential for educational use.

Source: Game system lowers learning curve at Cumberland

BusinessWeek reports Microsoft research scientists are using technology similar to spam blockers to attack HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. This approach came about when Microsoft scientist David Heckerman discovered similarities exist between spam messages and HIV.

From Heckerman’s perspective, HIV is like a cagey spammer. After attacking a cell, it injects its own genetic material and proceeds (much like a spam jockey who has commandeered an unprotected computer) to manufacture thousands of copies of the virus. It’s a notoriously sloppy copier, but that adds to its vigor. Each mistake launches mutant viruses into the system. Many fail. Some, though, survive–and resist the drugs.

… the connections between spam and HIV boil down to mathematics. He analyzes both scourges by studying statistical relationships among their ever-changing features. Consider the word “Viagra.” Sometimes it shows up in legitimate e-mails. Often it appears in spam. If researchers study thousands of e-mails, they can calculate the percentage of e-mails with that word that are spam. That’s one clue. But the spam-filtering machine needs to know more than that. What other features in an e-mail signal that it’s spam? Are certain fonts particularly spammy? What about e-mail addresses or types of punctuation? The trick is to figure out which combinations of these features identify an e-mail as spam. Each decision can involve thousands of variables and millions of different calculations.

When he brought his plan to Bill Gates, the company chairman “got really excited,” Heckerman says. Well versed on HIV from his philanthropy work, Gates lined up Heckerman with AIDS researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Washington, and elsewhere.

This is a classic example of technology cross-fertilization. Many hard to solve natural science problems involve statistical analysis. Since computers are extremely capable of performing this type of tasks, advanced computer science technology like spam blockers can be exploited to solve non-technology problems like detecting HIV. I think we see more of this kind of innovations in the near future.

Original Story: Using Spam Blocker To Target HIV, Too