September 15th, 2008
In Ottawa now. I Began my teaching of Classical Guitar at Carleton University and working at an Advertising Agency McMillan and Associates.
Enjoying Ottawa, my favourite thing about it is meeting people working in the foreign service DFAIT.
June 7th, 2008
The best speech i have heard in a while. Bill Gates - 2007 Harvard Commencement Speech
Bill Gates Speech at Harvard (part 2).
Was in Harvard Square
playing chess not more than 100 yards away when he was giving this speech, but only saw it on youtube many months later.
Bill Gates has been the world's richest man for many years. The fact that he can speak (and act) as such a humanitarian, should be a guiding light for all of us.
All Parts Here
Bill Gates Speech at Harvard (part 1)
Bill Gates Speech at Harvard (part 2)
Bill Gates Speech at Harvard (part 3)
Bill Gates Speech at Harvard (part 4)
Bill Gates Speech at Harvard (part 5)
May 30th , 2008
Will we run into an Art Library Problem,, ?? .. where content creators will be competing against an ever-growing catalogue of items from the past. For eg. when one listens to music, they can choose a classic say "beatles", or listening to the most recent thing. As recorded history goes on, the modern day has to compete with more and more content from the past. It happens already in things such as textbook material. Will this decelerate the production of content when the libraries get so large?
Dec 3rd, 2007
Started www.isotope3.com and also doing www.powderbug.com
Am out of Cambridge now and had been on the go for about a month from nov5-30. i took a trip to Miami, moved to NYC and moved out of NYC to settle in Montreal for the long haul.
Montreal: perhaps a fav town, cell phones work in the subways, and wifi is abundant. Mtl feels like a time machine in many ways. still learning and seeing...
Moving blog over to facebook right now. Very much enjoying reading Alan Greenspan's autobiography right now tooo.
Here's some loose ideas on art and the prisoner's dilemna forya:
one view of art may be as the bedbug of society. in altering social expectations. invisible but essential. as implicit norms of society; we assume that cars at a red light will stop for us, pieces of paper can be changed for things etc. etc. and one only needs to experience culture shock to see how those social norms work when they are turned around.
one role of the artist then might be seen as either functioning as a model of humanity, among many models, or as a sacrificial lamb, the virtuous glue to it. This is important because, if one were to purely look at human behaviour on its own terms, self-interested behaviour is at work in many things. that is an ugly truth, certainly not in everything but i would assume in many things.
the problem then is why act outside of that agenda if others are not going to do the same? best seen in the prisoner's dilemna - the positive sum game, where the best single move for each party is to defect, to not cooperate. That is the expectation in many places in the world - all of which being not-so- hot tourist destinations making the nightly news.
It is only when expectations change, for eg. when it is a repeated game that expectations change, and a higher level of utility can be reached. Loans and mortgages are made, people open doors for one another, parents leave kids at school, people entrust the institutions around them. Thus the key to a healthy society is the management of the civil expectations of that society, and the utopian function of art can be seen as a fuel in propping/managing that expectation.
June 29th, 2007
The analogy of culture as software seems to hold.. so far for examples i can think of. A person can be genetically from one country - say - India, or Malawi etc. but if they are born here, they will be 'running' u.s. software and vice versa. A person of any culture can learn as their first and mother tongue the language of any other culture without bias. That is 100% platform independence. There is an abstraction layer there. Conceptualizing the power of 'invisible things' like both software and culture, in this light, it's easier to appreciate the power of it, i believe..
If you work in Art as a painter let's say, and you don't have kids but make great art, your cultural legacy can live on in other people in this way. It changes the idea of procreation from which you may live through other means. You do not necessarily have to make hardware, right?...
June 7th, 2007
Teaching at the Tennis Camps at Harvard until July 1st. Trying to keep up with Penpal correspondence. Enjoying Cambridge.
April 30th, 2007
- A Pareto Efficient improvment is one in which no parties lose,, it is a win-win. It seems that could increase public spending through public acts and not necessarily through taxation, if high visibility awards are given for such acts and recognized by the press and government. Recognition fuels the donor/act-giver and is the visible fuel of many things like music and science (the nobel is monetary but largely symbolic more than anything else). The government and the press can create recognition mechanisms 'out of thin air', it seems the most economical way of receiving private donations above tax breaks purposes. Good examples is the JFK Profiles in Courage award, given to public servants at any level, who've acted in the public interest, despite personal consequences. It's a reward for such deeds, and is Pareto efficient.
December 13th, 2006
Bought a new mic and put ideas to harddisk in an audio blog about the paper that I wanted to write: Mozart's Child:
http://alwinian.net/personalwritingphilosophymozartschild/mozartschild.htm
September 28th, 2006
-Leaving for Barcelona very soon!!
-Reading a very very interesting book: Emperor's New Mind, by Sir Roger Penrose. what a great book. I can't wait to read Road to Reality by him as well. They are sometimes way above my head, but the narrative is so good and so interesting. Like nectar from a tree, for the half artsy/half science-type.
-On September 9th, volunteered for a project called dropping knowledge (http://www.droppingknowledge.org/) which took place at Bebelplatz, Humboldt University in Berlin.
-All this blabbing garnered an invite to join as a blogger on www.hedgestop.com, though thinking about dropping it, as people are looking for answers and stock tips, and feeling that ppl are not understanding what i am writing, but persist..
-Ok,,, and now for the Financial Engineering stuff that everyone has eagerly been waiting for!!:
ZZzzzzz....I believe the future of technical analysis to be in here somewhere:
For eg. If market action represents the aggregate action of bids and asks, can Fourier Spectral Analysis of the wave reveal harmonic frequencies, and magnitudes, which may shed light on the market players involved, particularly if the order book entries are all anonymous. ZZzzzzz....
In 1966, the physicists Mark Kac posed the question - can you hear the shape of a drum? and what about multivariate modelling; Minkowski space, Topology; other tools of spectral analysis; meteorology; Argand plane; quantum computing; string theory, can any of it be used to this end?
ZZzzzzz....This I believe is the future of technical analysis. I have to think about it more -- but already neural networks have been used successfully in trading systems.
-MMMMatters of the physical world: relished likely last chocolate croissant at Kollwitzplatz Park today.... what a croissant mmm .... i am writing about it, it was that goood.
Bye for now'
September 8th, 2006
-I keep a travel blog, of travels in Europe - it's at - http://.alwinian.blogspot.com
-It is an interesting thing to ponder the shape of a book, It's evolution and function....
The written word is linear after all, stories occur in a stream, in what i think of as 1 dimenion.
1 dimension, (1 string if you will) and time.
but there we have a page, which "coils" the 1 dimension into 2, and then the 2 dimensional pages are stacked coiling them again, now into 3 dimension to form books.
DNA is also coiled, it is also a string. I find it easier to think of text as a long string now, instead of pages, i believe because the implication of the "higher dimension" of saying pages, changes the view of what a story or proof is. A stream and time, that is all that is needed...
This shows the importance of the temporal dimension in some things. A story or a proof, or experiment, is meaningless without the sorting of the temporal dimension.
"From above" media, such as a map, a decision tree, a timetable are not.....And then what is the best strategy to describe one of these things using the 'chain-like' temporal forms of communication?
I wonder what else in daily life is coiled,,, maybe calendars, days, other things, etc. etc.. Food for thought at least..
August 10th, 2006
-A Musical Form, (kinda...) Start with a segment, say 20 sec long, and free improvise from there until an ending.
Back up and start from the theme again, but with an alternate ending.
Continue 5 or 6 times to follow the various branches which present themselves from a single theme.
Alternately - make the theme a continual return, making it a rondo form. Both have their advantages and disadvantage... [continued mulling on this idea. to be continued].
July 24th, 2006
-Someone has to ask... so I might as well...
When you/your uncle/the rest of the world pledge money "for cancer". Where and how is that money really spent??
I imagine Cancer Research as a cause gets more money than most... Is it required that non-profits disclose their budget to anyone, and how/what and under what scrutiny?
So often public scrutiny ends there? Are there fat cats sitting behind them. When we throw a dollar into a jar that says cancer research (or anything), what really happens. Seeing how much Africa money has really made it to Africa is disheartening... no idea about cancer.
If public disclosure is required by NPOrganizations, no average donor in their right mind would wade through the data to find it, but yet public donation makes a significant portion of contributions to these places.
Thus: a market for rating agencies is created through the public. In finance where investors must also wade through "it", a market for rating services is created, such as moody's or standard and poor's. Other examples are equifax (personal credit) or Maclean's magazine (Universities), People (50 most beautiful ppl), MTV (500 most influential videos of all-time) etc.... The government and society would best be served to foster such a rating.. a one-stop shop to find out how effective your charity is at what it is doing. This would create market pressures for charities to work better.
-reading today about cancer. The embryonic fluid of a baby, has properties which can revert/repair (unknown as yet) cancerous activity.
-if you take 2 mice and chop off their sides in half and sew them back together to create a siamese twin mice, and then if you chop off 1/3 the liver of one of the mice, it regenerates (as in humans too). If the mice by virtue of the previous operation share the same blood supply with each other, the healthy and untouched mouse's liver will also grow by about the same amount. This experiment was performed by Nancy Bucher.
June 30, 2006
-Raffi and Mireille get married in Toronto at Knox College and Royal Canadian Yacht Club
-MMModel: Humans and Computers, genetics and environment in humans is analogous to the situation of computer hardware and software.
-Thought experiment: take a Hutu as a small child and raise him in suburban Cinncinati. - or any other similar example - reunite him and his brother in Africa 30 years later. Subtract the similarities between them, and the leftover residual is the effect that culture has over genetics in humans. The difference will be Huge. Although it is indescript and fuzzy around the edges, the importance of culture ("software") cannot be understated.
June 22, 2006
-food for though that humanity has on hand very detailed taxation records which extend in time beyond all the current major religions.
-Bayesian Filtering
-Perpeptual CPR (if you had a heart attack - would you be able to CPR yourself) how to answer this scientifically and analytically
-Minimax and Maximini Saddle point strategies.
-Bernoulli Utility Theory - answered my previous rationalization for risk adverse behaviour.
-Bounded Rationality and Kahneman
Reading "The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici". Especially about Cosimo Medici. A Humanist and a Philosopher King in the truest sense.
It is interesting to ponder that the Renaissance may have come about because he wanted the eastern orthodox Pope's banking business.
Trying to cause a merger and acquisition of the branches of christianity, bringing many fluently Greek scholars to Florence in the process. Italic and Roman script occurred at this time as a clear and easy way to copy out and translate texts. Recommended to anyone who is ever curious about much of our current civilization.
My personal thought is that specialization is detrimental to one form of knowledge, while benefitting of practice in others. It seems that specialization should thus always be put at the end of any course of education as it represents only division of labour. To apply optimization to the ratio of general to specialist knowledge might be good. Reading about the Renaissance has taught me that.
Institutional education can surely be made more efficient, and is a far cry from its origins in Plato's Academy and the casual dialogue among interested observers.
May 10th, 2006
Fibonacci Ratios Retracement is a concept taken from technical analysis of financial markets used to predict trends in charts. I didn't believe it at first, but the concept 'magically' holds some water because of the aggregative nature of markets (Fibonacci's number represents the rate at rabbits will reproduce in a year). It would be an interesting thought experiment to chart and look for Fibonacci Retracement levels in elements of history. For example. the popularity of Communism over time; approval rating of the English Monarchy or use of Cubism in the early 20th Century etc... I believe that this predictor would shed light on a lot of "chartable" sociological phenomenom hitherto only examined through qualitative analysis. ie. using words.
May 5th, 2006
Jorge Ben Jor - Brazilian Bossa Nova Artist.
& I do mean Artist. He's been making great music in Brazil for 20 years - with the creativity and quality of the Beatles.
Discovered him 15 minutes ago....
April 24th, 2006
-One of many ways to enstate a new mp3 paradigm:
Make all file sharing legal.
Allow downloads, which each time you play (or through polls) sends a cookie to an internic server.
All License 'taxes' collected from the sale of hard drives, ipods etc. is divided according to these polls.
,,,know that they do something like this now, but to make p2p legal, would allow a fairer distribution according to popularity.... This is essentially the same thing as how roads and school/property taxes work already.
-Digital democracy is essentially the same thing too, we could instantaneously login to a government server, Vote! along with (in U.S.) Executive Branch and Senate. Maybe in a 33% split in power. We could vote on a bill as simply as we check our email....
*to put full control in a population-at-large is dangerous probably for the reasons that Plato highlighted in the Republic.
Both of these things diffuse the control of the interested powers [governments and record labels],,, hence not undertaken right?
April 19th, 2006
Usually most creative in nightime still. Thoughts for the day:
-My book proposal, new directions
-Mulling on the idea of what really happens, and what history writes.
-Took a walk. Envisioned percussion track made of glasses, pots, whisks sampled. It would work.
-Chewing the cud of assymetric positions in markets: the well-documented and considered irrational risk/loss aversion in behavioural finance makes full sense when it is seen and combined with the utility theory and payouts.
March 31st, 2006
Cell Phones Impovements they could make: If they haven't done so already, it would make a lot of sense to make ALL cell phones USB compatible.
Some RRReasons:
-USB has enough charge to recharge most cells.
-You would be able to upload and make a backup of all your contacts very quickly, say if you lost your original.
-They could each sell an overpriced cable to you which would connect your phone to your computer.
-If you're on a laptop, you could get in/out bound fax function, or 56k modem function anywhere your cell phone works by plugging into your laptop.
-Easier to play with the Mp3 function on many cells, as well as download upload pictures and video more easily, frees up memory on your phone.
seems likely that they have done it already. - but if they haven't - THEY SHOULD! - it would make a lot of sense.
Reverse Engineering Tim Horton's Marketing::: Roll up the Rim.
-#1 weird - stays in the mind
-#2 cheap - the cup has to get printed anyways. the rims are waaaay cheaper to print than adding a peel sticker.
-#3 smart - start out by having many "winning" cups in the first week. the win ratio is high, and you buy more coffee. in around the third week, the win ratio drops off a cliff, but you will continue to buy based on your early experiences. ahhh,, timmy's conspiracy theory. yes..
-added 3 new pictures {san fran, victoria bc, and fort myers florida} to photo section.
