Preface: Of the parables and other tales that have informed your style of interpersonal dealings, the way that you manage your relationships, which have had a prominent impact? For many, of course, there are the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing and the Analects of Confucius, the Bible or the Qur'an. For interpretation and anecdotal commentary, there are the Talmud, the Mencius, and the Hadith. Better scholars of philosophy than I have produced many ages' worth of analysis, annotation, and metacommentary on these work, though, so rather than attempt another Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, I'm going to promote another book that conveys some messages about leadership, but that you may not have thought of very much as a good model: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

( The Sons of Feanor and the Union of Maedhros )
( Maedhros: humility in strength, coalition leadership, building to last )
( Maglor: mentorship and mercy )
( Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin: do-it-yourself, enemies of enemies, and the power of oratory )
( Amrod and Amras: survivor type )
( Final assessment )

This is the first part of a seven-part series.

--
Banazir

Well, I'm back.
Ephemeral: You know that Doctor Who S3 episode "Blink"? The one where people keep getting pulled back in time and cross paths with a stranded Doctor, and have to live their way back towards the latter days from which they were pulled?
Yeah... you get the idea.

This article on the Chinese Wikipedia in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye.

Just who was Mao Zedong?

According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political leader who founded China's modern Communist state. He was also a man many saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese."

Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong's reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history.

Andrew Lih comments here on a blow-by-blow comparison done by New York Times correspondent Howard French. For that, make no mistake about it, is what this is: an information war. Fought not with bullets but with electrons, granting history not to the physical victors but those who operate the Wikipedia server that your browser goes to by default, the Chinese Wikipedia stakes a claim for the 99% of Chinese users who don't bother to tunnel out from behind the Great Firewall using a proxy.

On 10 Jun 2006, I brought up a photo of Tank Man in the heart of Beijing, courtesy of English Wikipedia and the timely assistance of taiji_jian and his desktop Linux box. What did this accomplish, other than the thrill of the illicit? Well, to hear tell of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' first attempts to get a foothold in China, it was really an all-or-nothing proposition. The whole (English) site, as some of you may know, is domain-level IP-blocked in China. The People's Republic of China (PRC) wanted Wales to voluntarily self-censor about 1% of Wikipedia's content, as Yahoo and Microsoft (and to a lesser, albeit more notorious extent, Google) already do. Wales said "nothing doing", and so the status quo of the Golden Shield (jing₁ dun₁, the PRC's propagandistic euphemism for Internet censorship) stayed in place. Replace "Shield" with "Curtain" and you get the idea.

Fast-forward ahead a few months: there is now a growing awareness of the dichotomy between the Chinese and English Wikipedias. Is it censorship? A Potemkin village kind of syndrome? Yes and yes, but only for that pesky 1%. You see, there are just a few articles, such as those concerning dissidents such as Wang Dan and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, that are touchy for the PRC. 1% of the content for 1% of the readership - the proxy users - doesn't pose an issue. The PRC government knows that there are people who tunnel out of curiosity or just to buck the trends. They know that there are closet dissidents who tunnel, and you can be sure that the subversives they view as more dangerous than the casual college student wanting a taste of free information are surveilled. If, however, the readership expanded to, say, 10%, it might be a problem. You see, the PRC pulls down news articles about every would-be coup - every strike against a state-run facility, from an aircraft factory to a provincial university. The government knows that the information has been seen by that 1% already; it doesn't mind that it circulates within the infosphere of people who have self-selected out of the complacent infoproletariat. It is what happens to the 99% that the PRC government cares about, because when the information that it is possible to overthrow the state becomes common, then the state will be overthrown.

Napoleon Bonaparte said: "The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see." That, too, is the art of the modern Chinese internet user... for the moment. Happily, we are reminded that Albert Einstein said: "Politics is for the moment; an equation is for eternity." The equation we are looking at is perhaps a limit theorem, counting the days to a convergence that cannot be willed, or edited, away.

--
Banazir

We had two final project presentations today for CIS 730 (Artificial Intelligence). Both were among the five who worked on the Roguelike game Angband. Our goal was to look at specific behaviors and improve them.

The first student, Dave Lupo, wanted to improve the tendency of the BenBorg (by Ben Harrison) to be a shopaholic. He trained a feedforward artificial neural net (ANN) using backpropagation to compute a better "dive motivator". This lowered the ratio of time in town vs. dungeon, and he found that increasing the ratio of "time in the dungeon" to "time in town" increased survivability.

Dave plotted the "time in town vs. time in dungeon" curve for 13 characters before his improved dive function, and 14 characters after, and found that they did have higher XP-to-move ratios. He speculated that they had higher survivability as a result, though these results were inconclusive. (I suggested that he look at the slope of the line to see if ' it really improved survivability.)

Now, here's the funny part. The points were all at time of character death, because he lost most of the characters at low levels, but I was sure he didn't lose them all by level 14, so I asked him what the rightmost point was. "Oh, that's time of death after 150000 turns". I asked, "what do you mean, after 150K turns?" He replied that to impose a time limit, he didn't just end the borg run at 150K; he sets "target level = 99" so that it essentially goes: "Morgoth... I'm comin' to get you!" and commences a Rambo-esque death dive!

--
Banazir

Congratulations to my cousin Connie Swenson (nee Hsu) and her intrepid archaeologist husband Ed, on the arrival of their new bundle of joy, Ellie! She is my paternal grandmother's first great-grandchild and my first "first paternal cousin, once removed".

--
Banazir

We're in the midst of reorganizing the KDD content-management system using TikiWiki, MediaWiki, and Joomla.

So far, URLs have been of the type:

http://leap-kmc.kdd.cis.ksu.edu

This is achieved using a CNAME pointing to standard canonical URL:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/leap-kmc

What Seth Galitzer has recommended, and what we're now going with, is a vhost (propagating immediately with no DNS change):

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/tikiwiki/leap-kmc

In general:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/[project]

should point to:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/tikiwiki/[project]

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/[username]

should point to:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/tikiwiki/users/[username]

and

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/[name]

are the canonical names to be given out.

--
Banazir

I finally splurged and shelled out $10 for a one-year DynDNS basic subscription.
Here's the setup I have, using port range redirection (thanks to nikolasco and taiji_jian):

System SSH Port
========================================
hirilonde.dyndns.org 50022
numerramar.dynalias.com 51022
telperion.game-server.cc 52022
mandos.homelinux.net 53022
este.selfip.biz 54022
kow.gotdns.com 55022
laurelin.homeip.net 56022
yavanna.homeunix.com 57022
tulkas.kicks-ass.net 58022
vaire.dyndns.info 59022

--
Banazir

Today, martin_samuel and I attended a K-State EcoGen tutorial on GeneMarker, a software package for fluorescent molecular marker analysis.

( About the workshop )

All in all, it was useful and informative workshop to Martin and me, if only to give us a hands-on experience with AFLP analysis and a high-level overview of SNP data and the data flow pipeline.

--
Banazir

I went to see this tonight with a friend and colleague from Modern Languages:

The Hollywood Nutcracker
The State Street Ballet of Santa Barbara, California

A funny, sophisticated, joie de vivre version of the quintessential holiday treat that is wholesome enough for three-year-olds. Choreographer Rodney Gustafson holds true to tradition and classical ballet while drawing inspiration from 1930's Hollywood — the time of Garbo and Grable, Swanson and Cagney — and brings all the elements of the beloved story to life with wit and style as a silver screen spectacular. Luxurious Art Deco dreamscapes, glamorous costumes, and Disney-esque adventures enhance the grandeur of Tchaikovsky's score without gimmicks. Quickly becoming a classic, State Street Ballet's Nutcracker is a happily-ever- after tale that dazzles.

Here is a video excerpt.

--
Banazir

GENI: Global Environment for Network Innovations

A Workshop for Great Plains Network Consortium Members

Hosted by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Kansas State University
Corporate Partner: The Ciena Corporation

---

Report: I attended the AM sessions of this and stayed until the conference call with NSF. Several presentations were given by researchers at other campuses and by Gurdip Singh, one of our network and distributed systems faculty. martin_samuel joined us during the midmorning break, and weninger came during the lunch break. We had some discussions about current research projects and opportunities, and I discussed work on human language technologies (HLT), social networks, and distributed multi-agent learning. I also talked with the small groups about our bioinformatics (especially NSF FIBR) and computational physics (especially NSF ITR) projects.

There was some interested in the distributed computing aspects of the ITR and social networks work. For some reason, the bioinformatics discussions met with less enthusiasm (from my POV, at least). Perhaps we aren't presenting a clear distributed computing angle when it comes to machine learning: I got a similar response even with the information extraction and dynamic indexing aspects of HLT.

--
Banazir

An introductory course in machine learning for development of intelligent knowledge based systems. The first half of the course will focus on basic taxonomies and theories of learning, algorithms for concept learning, statistical learning, knowledge representation, pattern recognition, and reasoning under uncertainty. The second half of the course will survey some basic topics in combining multiple models, learning from time series, learning to reason, and selected applications in knowledge discovery and data mining, especially in bioinformatics.

The course will include several written and programming assignments and a term project option for graduate students. Ancillary readings will be assigned; students will write a brief synopsis and review for one of these papers every other lecture.

This will be my sixth offering of machine learning (the first five being in 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005). This time I'm cross-listing it with my Advanced AI course (CIS 830), and am giving approximately equal time to graphical models, genetic and evolutionary computation (especially genetic programming, but with some genetic algorithms coverage), and artificial neural networks.

--
Banazir

Special Theme Issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Social Network Sites: People, Practice, and Culture

Guest Editors:

• danah boyd, University of California-Berkeley


• Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University

I first heard of this a bit too late to develop our work on data mining using the LiveJournal friends network into something that fits, but it looks to be an interesting issue.

Did anyone reading this submit something? I'd be curious to hear from those who are publishing an article in this or a similar venue.

Edit, 06:10 CST Tue 19 Dec 2006 - I did send in an abstract, but it looks as if they are looking for more the sociocultural angle rather than purely technical KDD and machine learning research.

There's a Yahoo Group, sns-researchers, that danah started for the social network community. It's just getting off the ground now.

--
Banazir

A short documentary on the phenomenon.

--
Banazir

"You are the last person who needs to be drinking one of those." -masteralida

taiji_jian has dubbed my concoction, consisting of Diet Mountain Dew mixed with Mountain Dew AMP or Sobe No Fear (aka Adrenaline Rush, either Gold or Red), a "potion of trask".

It's a fair characterization, I think.

--
Banazir
(oh, and this is what the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" tavern icon is for!)

( Computer problems update )

This week, I am trying to do the following:

( Mapping port ranges to dedicated static IPs )
( Port forwarding to a router )
( Intercepting requests on a port and translating to SSH )

I still want to go completely do-it-yourself (DIY) on hosting, so that GoDaddy.com or whoever sells me the IP is doing only that (and not renting me rack-mount server cycles and space, at least for now).

Any ideas or provider recommendations?

--
Banazir

Here's my Black Friday tradition!

If anyone would like a card, please comment here, indicating which of the Christmahanukwanzakah holidays you observe, and include your mailing address (or let me know you've sent it by private e-mail).

Cheers!

--
Banazir

Thanksgiving dinner this year promises to be a memorable affair. Ever since spending a fortnight eating nothing but turkey to reduce a 30-lb. Butterball they picked up one year, they've been chary of getting whole turkeys.

Instead, we got just 5 pounds of whole turkey breast to roast. I think we'll add stuffing and gravy to that, but the rest is all Chinese fare:

• thick green vegetable stir fried with garlic


• dried tofu stir fried with hot chili and pork


• garlic shrimp with green peppers and hot red chilies


• orange roughy in sweet tomato sauce with water chestnuts


• turnip soup with quail eggs, tofu, ham, and bamboo shoots

Edit, 05:30 CST Wed 29 Nov 2006: Add a dry Napa valley red from 2002 that a thoughtful guest brought, and it all turned out quite nicely. After dinner we sat down to a dessert of honey crisp apples, jumbo red grapes, and both pumpkin and pecan pie (the former brought by another guest), with a special Gevalia Kenyan coffee blend.

--
Banazir

The other day, the Banafolks bought some Christmas mugs at Walgreen's at $0.50 apiece ($0.66 each, two for $1). One of them had a scarved penguin on it. I thanked them for the Linux mug. ;-)

Actually, it's more of a Meep than a Tux. This guy is thin!

So, show of hands! Who's going to see Happy Feet?

Me, I haven't even seen March of the Penguins yet. Soon I will.

If you haven't seen Madagascar, BTW, it has some completely teuncy penguins in it.

And here is my dedicated "penguin" icon...

--
Banazir

(Cross-posted from statements.)

I need to maintain a mid-sized bibliography for wikis and for my research group, and I'm open to suggestions.

Edit, 04:45 CST Wed 29 Nov 2006 - Thanks to sperose for suggesting The Bedford Bibliographer. It looks useful, and I will give it a try.

--
Banazir

taiji_jian reports the astounding but intriguing news that he has the Roguelike game Angband running on a brick of a P5-120 notebook computer I sent him, with Andrew White's borg, APWborg.

I'm not sure which is funnier - the fact that he got it working in Windows 98 on a 10-year-old Pentium notebook, or the fact that barring supa-Hiro-ism, we're both going to be in our forties by the time it finishes killing Morgoth.

--
Banazir

( Perfectionism )
( Thankfulness )
( Part of Thanksgiving dinner )
( Jones Holiday Soda )
( Thanksgiving Horoscope )

--
Banazir