Daily Stuff--8/28/2012

Languages--Chinese

I watched episode 42 of Travel in Chinese. This episode dealt with scenarios like losing your wallet on the subway, someplace that makes it much harder to track down.

Articles:

I read several newspaper articles today, one from Yahoo! News, two from informationweek.com, and one from the Washington Post.

The one from the Washington Post was another one about the use of Time Banks in Spain during the financial crisis. There are several different forms of this alternate currency depending on the region in Spain, and some transactions are done entirely through the internet, but essentially it all boils down to people trading services for other services. People are going back to the time when everything was bartered, and not bought with paper cash. The underground economy means these people aren't paying taxes, which could end up hurting the economy in the long-run but at the same time the government can't very well stop it. I don't think it will do too much lasting damage, since this sort of thing has happened before.

The Yahoo! News article was about IBM's plan to put Watson into smartphones. The problem right now is getting Watson small enough to be put into smartphones but with all the same capabilities it has as a full-size computer. The other problem is that Watson takes too long when learning things even though when the information is learned, it's quite efficient at getting answers.

One of the Information Week articles was about sentiment analysis and it's applications. Right now, it's extremely difficult to get computers to understand natural language, simply because it's so ambiguous and we have things like metaphors and symbolism. How do you get a computer to understand concepts like that? As a result, computers can't tell the meaning behind sentiments even if they can interpret the literal meaning of a sentence. But they can't tell if sarcasm is being utilized or if the writer is making a joke or not. This is the kind of thing that sentiment analysis hopes to one day be able to teach computers to understand, which I find extremely fascinating.

The last article was about the possibility of smartphones becoming smart enough to predict exactly what you're doing to do or say. Your smartphones accumulate data over time that says a lot about who you are and it's very possible that eventually they'll be able to take this data and analyze it, and that data will then be used by companies to get a feel for what to change or keep about their products or which ones to sell to you.

Philosophy:

I read about the concept of "means and ends" in Dewey's moral philosophy. He believed that the values of the end depend on the benefits of the mean. And as we're confronted with new obstacles, we immediately start to think of the consequences of our actions. This allows us to determine the benefits of the mean.

Internships:

I took a look at some jobs at Intel. I didn't find any in San Diego but I did find one for a software engineering position in Oregon.