Author Archives: kevin

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links for 2011-02-16

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  • Survey of consumer media piracy
    people just want things for free, they're not out to get the movie industry by pirating. concern about viruses. don't care about physical DVD, prefer streaming to downloading
  • Most venture capital funds lose money - The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blog
    Cambridge reports that 10-year returns fell from a miserable -4.2% to a downright horrid -4.64% over the relevant period. Five-year returns fell from 4.3% to 4.25%.
  • Sixty Years after the Magic Carpet Ride: The Long-Run Effect of the Early Childhood Environment on Social and Economic Outcomes | The Review of Economic Studies
    we exploit variation in the living conditions experienced by Yemenite children after being airlifted to Israel in 1949. We find that children who were placed in a more modern environment (i.e. with better sanitary and infrastructure conditions) were more likely to obtain higher education, marry at an older age, have fewer children, and work at age 55. They were also more likely to be assimilated into Israeli society, to be less religious, and have more worldly tastes in music and food. However, these effects are found mainly for women, and not for men. We also find an effect on the next generation – children who lived in a better environment grew up to have children with more education.
  • Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
    Really interesting. Don't use unvetted third party software, definitely don't use any short passwords, be sure to update your software to patch security vulnerabilities.

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Watson and Jeopardy

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My roommates and I usually catch Jeopardy at least once a week, so we were of course excited to watch Watson, the IBM machine, take on Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy. So far, Watson's done extremely well, getting 13 straight answers right last night, and finishing way ahead of the competition at the end of the game yesterday. In particular I was intrigued by a few things:
  • In case you haven't watched football with me, I generally annoy everyone else in the room the entire game by urging the team with the ball to be more aggressive: pass more, go for it on 4th down, and stop kicking field goals. The data backs me up. Similarly when I watch Jeopardy, I get upset when players land on the Daily Double - the one chance they have to win a ton of money very quickly - and bet very conservatively, throwing away their chance to leave their competition in the dust. So I was intrigued by this comment from Ken Jennings on Watson's performance:
    Daily Doubles aren't distributed randomly...basically, it had thousands of old Jeopardy games in its head and knew where to look. And got very lucky. Most players go top-down, but some hunt for Daily Doubles like Watson. Brad Rutter calls this an arms race: if one player does it, you have to join in to keep up.
    Clearly Watson, as a computer that can compute expected value and forecast his expected winning percentage, has figured out that the Daily Doubles are valuable - he routinely picks questions in the $800 and $1000 row to start the game, and bets big - $6000 at one point - on the question. This play is forcing the other players in the game to improve their strategies. Hopefully this trend will extend to normal games of Jeopardy, as it increases the variance and makes the game more fun to watch. However, Jeopardy's normally a one-off game so it's possible player strategy won't improve.
  • Lots of people make the mistake of assuming a person is "smart" because they are good at Jeopardy. I don't think Jeopardy is a very good measure of intelligence; it measures your knowledge of obscure trivia, as well as your ability to recall it, but there's more to intelligence than an encyclopedia. It's possible this skill is correlated with intelligence (maybe intelligent people read widely, or have better recall), but Jeopardy skill doesn't prove intelligence per se. It's good to see people realizing Watson knows a lot but isn't "smart" - it can't recognize when another contestant gave the same answer, for example.
  • Watson's buzzer pressing mechanism is lightning fast, so it wins the buzzer on every question where it computes the answer by the time Trebek finishes reading the question. I thought this was unfair, but then realized putting an artificial damper on Watson's reaction time would be stupid - if it's a better Jeopardy player under the current rules, then great, and if it's unfair, they should change the rules so everyone gets an equal shot at the question, or use some other mechanism to award first crack at an answer.

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links for 2011-02-15

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links for 2011-02-14

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links for 2011-02-13

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links for 2011-02-10

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Things I’ve learned, past month or so

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The most ambiguous time for me is between 6 and 9 on Thursday through Saturday nights. If I'm around people, I'll go out. However if I'm in my apartment and haven't made plans it's really hard to leave. It's better to say yes to people right away, and turn them down later, than to be accurate about your future plans. I'm trying Rejection Therapy and currently on a 6-day streak. Keeping the streak alive is difficult and so is thinking of creative ways to get rejected. In the moment I usually don't recognize situations either, like the other night when I walked in to Subway at 10:05 even though it closed at 10 and they told me they were closed. Wrinkle free shirts are awesome, especially the non-iron ones from Brooks Brothers. (H/T Andy McKenzie's Delicious feed) I can't remember where I read it but I read that it only takes one bad impression for someone to judge you harshly, so instead of trying to excel, or stand out, you should focus simply on not making an ass of yourself. I've thought a lot about that lately. I have lots of opinions, but I especially enjoy sharing the ones that go against conventional wisdom. Most of my posts for the CMC Forum follow this trend. I've stopped writing for the CMC Forum in part because I'm not that interested in making people angry or impressing people through writing anymore. For all that I talk about the importance of practice, even though it can make you look like an idiot, I sometimes fail to practice enough myself, for fear of looking like an idiot. Practicing is especially important in the face of evidence that testing is the most effective way to learn, and most forms of practice are tests for how well you actually know the material. This is partly why I'm trying to stick with rejection therapy.

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