Ben Reyes

Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering @TED...

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 04:24:08 -0400

Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering @TED [video]

Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 8 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.
Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.

"Oddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled ones. If you know you have a..."

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:38:00 -0400

“Oddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled ones. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don’t even start working on something hard.”

- Paul Graham

Ruby Programming: A good breakdown of Ruby Mixins

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:29:49 -0400

Ruby Programming: A good breakdown of Ruby Mixins

Given full access to tools, some create, others don't

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 14:57:00 -0400

JJ Abrams (Director & Producer - Super 8, Star Trek, Cloverfield) talks about the freedom and accessibility to high end tools that technology brings.

Canvas and brushes and paint have been available for a long time to a lot of people. Ultimately, some people create artwork that is of note, that has emotion and meaning, and that is full of ideas, while some people don’t. [Quora]

(Unrelated Photo by Zach Klein)

The Canadian Olympic Team has been rebranded and I must say, I...

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 21:45:47 -0400

The Canadian Olympic Team has been rebranded and I must say, I do like it.

Human Behaviour: Social Cues and Anonymity

Tue, 24 May 2011 10:00:06 -0400

“Typically when social context cues are strong behaviour tends to be relatively other-focused, differentiated, and controlled.

When social context cues are weak, people’s feelings of anonymity tend to produce relatively self-centered and unregulated behavior.”

Sproull and Kiesler (1986, p.1495)

My family's association to secretive groups

Mon, 23 May 2011 19:31:00 -0400

My mother just recently asked me a question in all seriousness, in the same tone a voice as if she was asking me what I had for breakfast or how my day was.

She asked me if I had affiliation to the freemasonry or something similar… Now here’s where my interesting family history begins.

My grandfather and grandmother was fairly well off in the Republic of the Philippines. They owned a big house and had several servants. Fairly influential within the local economy. Until of course, my grandfather died of a mysterious death.

Apparently according to my mother and my grandmother my grandfather had been an influential member of he freemasons within the Philippines dealing with the accounting of the group. He died under suspicious circumstance. Apparently having accidentally shot himself whilst cleaning he’s own gun. With this there was suspicion of foul play. A framing of suicide perhaps.

I will never know the truth to this story. Nor will I most likely ever. Though to this day the masonry and other secretive groups still exist and influence society as we all know it.

"“In fact history does not belong to us, but we belong to it. Long before we understand..."

Mon, 23 May 2011 10:00:06 -0400

“

“In fact history does not belong to us, but we belong to it.

Long before we understand ourselves through a process of self examination, we understand ourselves in a self evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.

That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgements, constitute
the historical reality of his being.”

”

- Gadamer (1975)

Get Used To It: Technology Changes Social Norms

Sat, 21 May 2011 22:00:00 -0400

“It’s appalling,” said an elderly aunt, “to see how they use

telephones nowadays. Last night Mary, who was dressing,

answered the telephone in her room. And it was a man

calling her up. The two of them stood talking to one

another just as if they were entirely dressed and had

stopped for a little chat on the street! I tell you this

generation is too much for me.”

Telephony magazine (1903)

———————————————-

“Writing is inhuman, artificial and destroys the mind”

Plato (“Phaedrus”, 360 BCE)

Probabilistic methods of revising for exams

Fri, 20 May 2011 22:47:00 -0400

First off I’m an academic failure (what I like to believe, was part by choice). I didn’t submit my final year dissertation for my Computer Science degree at Queen Mary, University. Nor did I sit my exams.

I later learn that obtaining a US visa for a Highly Skilled Worker is not contingent on your academic performance, but the fact that you obtained a certificate. Definitely the way in if you want to startup in the US, it’s a real bitch to deal with visas otherwise. So I’m sitting my exams which counts as ‘re-takes’ even though I didn’t physically sit them. Which means they are capped at 40% pass rate, no higher.

So there’s absolutely no point in learning the whole course material for the 2 exams that I pass in order to graduate. So here’s my method of revision which is designed for a reduction of effort.

Probabilistic calculation of exams questions

Gather past papers
Summarise the topic category of each question
List each topic category
Calculate the frequency of each topic category
Mark weighting: If marks are not evenly distributed across each question apply a multiplier on mark weighting to give mark heavy topics more prominence.
Order list based on frequency

And there you have your revision list. It’s not the same as memorising past exam questions (another revision technique but can fail) because the key here is to prioritise topic revision.

Here is an example of one of my list:

Where can Probabilistic calculation of exams questions fail?

Lecturer writing the exam changes
Exam formart is altered
Exam lecturer varies questions each time
(Although you can often tell by previous exams the lecturer has written, if there is large amounts of variation between each exams, perhaps you should cover the wider topic. Some examiners re-use questions more or less than others)

To be honest if someone memorises every single bit of course content for an exam from start to finish without prioritisation they’re probably not making effective use of their time.

The Revision Lecture

The one other thing I must recommend is definitely attending the revision lectures. Often lecturers often highlight what areas you should study. Even certain nuances in speech and body language that will draw attention to certain areas.

One lecturer provided us with a question by question breakdown of the topics covered. Even going as far as mentioning one of the code answers is covered as an example in the lecture slides.

—————————————

The key is to gather data on patterns that tend to occur for the course and exams based on the lecturer’s structure and style. Thus prioritising your revision strategy around statistical probability.

So is this an effective way to study for exams? Perhaps, we’ll see if it works out for me.

Guidelines on optimising SQL Quires

Tue, 17 May 2011 18:24:00 -0400

SQL Workload reduced by

Efficient structuring of the data (indexes, clusters, keys
Efficient structuring of queries
Providing more information to the DBMS query optimiser

Avoid the use of *, count(*) (the system needs to work out at run time what needs to be substituted for the *)

Avoid very long table names (they take longer to parse)
Do use brief table aliases in joins
Do specify table.columns in joins (avoids the optimiser having to work out which one is intended).
Be Aware of the assumptions the optimiser in your system is making. Indexes etc. will give it more choice, check with and without processing times.

Summary

JOIN generally faster than nested subquery
Indexed columns generally faster than non-indexed columns for queries with a hit rate < 20%
Unique index faster than non-unique
!= Does not use an index unlike other operators
Non-compressed indexes faster than compressed indexes

From revision notes on an Advance Database System and Technology module at Queen Mary, University of London.

We are seriously near to a future where a lot of high end...

Tue, 17 May 2011 10:41:51 -0400

We are seriously near to a future where a lot of high end packaging has digital screens (smart packaging).

Original ‘HackADay’ Source (http://hackaday.com/2011/01/28/wireless-electricity-enables-next-generation-of-annoying-packaging/) via DanW

Jeff Bezos (Amazon) on customer feedback

Mon, 16 May 2011 13:30:00 -0400

A lot of people often misunderstand how they should utilise customer feedback. People often cry ‘design by committee’ or the opposite.

Jeff Bazos has a good point on this.

Think Long Term - On feedback and being misunderstood: If we think we are right, then we continue.
If we are criticized for something we think we’re wrong on, we change it, we fix it.

It’s really important to think about this things, but never to buckle to standard kind of pressure that forces really short term kind of thinking. It’s a competitive advantage to think long term.

- Jeff Bezos

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA&t=3m55s (3 mins 5 secs)

When And Where To Use Database Indexes

Sun, 15 May 2011 22:28:00 -0400

Don’t setup indexes on small tables which can be loaded in memory.
There is a certain cost benefit which won’t be achieved in smaller tables
Do Index Primary Keys
The majority of the time
Do Index Secondary Keys
The majority of the time. But the Database Administrator may complain about the space allocation if there are many secondary key indexes.
Do Index Attributes that often is queried in WHERE clauses
Avoid indexing attributes that are regularly updated
This has a performance penalty on updates and deletes when the database has to also update the index.
Industry Standard to index queries that are returning less than 15-20% of rows in a table. Indexing works best on single point queries that return a single row. Anything more than 20% may be overall more efficient to just query the tables directly.
Avoid Indexing Long Character Strings
This takes up memory

From my revision notes for an Advance Database System and Technology module. Thought I should add it to my scrap book as it’s pretty solid guidelines on where and when to use indexes.

Decaying Review Scores

Wed, 11 May 2011 07:05:00 -0400

A problem (or not) with product reviews and giving them a score is that they don’t often decay (get worst/lower as time goes on).

As a product, movie, restaurant, e.t.c that was popular before in the year 2000, may no longer be popular or up to the current standards. I’m not too sure what review websites (Amazon, Yelp..) implement a decaying algorithm on scoring. But it would be interesting to find out if any do or if this would actually provide a positive impact on the results.

This was just a random thought as I’m currently working on a website to help make better informed consumer choices for makers, creators and startups. I’m exploring service/product ranking & relevancy algorithms.

Is the public internet inhibiting exploration?

Mon, 09 May 2011 04:36:00 -0400

The public internet is inhibiting exploration… Which of course is utter rubbish, but there is some feared truth in that.

That fear is down to the sticky permanent memory of the internet dampening our freedom of exploration and development, especially with teenagers and young people.

I’ve been doing some on/off ethnographic studies in this area for the 3-4 years, which has fascinated me for a while. This is just not true.

Yes there are some edge cases and there is mostly no immediate reset button if someone is actively out there to hurt and harm others or self destruct (but we still forgive & forget). But for the majority of normal young people, they just delete their YouTube, Facebook, Dailybooth, FormSpring e.t.c. and start again. And it’s pretty common.

I’m an advocate for acceptance and forgiveness of exploration/mistake making vs. punishment of open exploration.

I paraphrase Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis in This Week In Google:

We have to adapt society to a culture where we all have skeletons in the closet recognise that every human does and become more tolerant of such things. If society can’t forgive a kid for doing something dumb, we have a big problem
source

Sharing our mistakes and our process of exploration is a good thing. No one is perfect, maybe if we accept this we can all move along and progress further. (Related talk by Derek Sivers about the creative process)

Institutions, corporations and schools involved in the practice of punishing and filtering based on trivial matters on people’s online trails and history are the ones actively damaging the progress of society and acceptance.

A feature idea

Which bring me on to a feature that could be embedded into publishing/sharing platforms. Create a blogging platform or plugin to YouTube where content decays automatically moving video blogs or posts to an archive that is not publicly available (unless you add a friend or someone favorites an individual piece).

But it is archived so if you want in a few years or so, you’d still like to share your explorations then you can do so. This way there is reduced level of fear of creating and sharing which should in turn increase public explorative expression.

If no one builds this, I may do so in the future.

Written by Ben Reyes Posted to HackerNews

A request for interview by Adrian Whitfield (BBC Radio Five...

Tue, 03 May 2011 19:05:00 -0400

A request for interview by Adrian Whitfield (BBC Radio Five Live) regarding my Harry Potter parody website. 2003. Full Source PDF [2003 - BBC Request for interview.pdf]

"Most people will not pull out their credit card to pay for your book or product the first time they..."

Sun, 01 May 2011 16:03:14 -0400

“Most people will not pull out their credit card to pay for your book or product the first time they see it. They need to see it multiple times in order to seriously consider paying for it.”

- Jared Tame, Author of Startups Open Sourced [quoted blog link]

Someone (I think it was Jim Brightwell) told me about the...

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:04:00 -0400

Someone (I think it was Jim Brightwell) told me about the Hampstead Scientific Society, in London. They have some pretty interesting talks scheduled. It’s on my list of things to check out. http://hampsteadscience.ac.uk

Listening to the first ever computer speech synthesis by an...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:49:43 -0400

Listening to the first ever computer speech synthesis by an IBM 704 in 1962. And found this where the reverse happens, machines use humans to generate a rendition of the song ‘Daisy’. HAL 9000 has already started utilising human ‘slave’ labor.