Tuesday, June 21, 2011

A Listing of some of my favorate Startup/Business/Tech Books

A few of my friends from the Business Society at UCM asked what books I have enjoyed. Enjoy the list. If you decide to buy them from Amazon.com-please use my links as I get a referral fee and you get the same price.

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside
A great book on Microsoft-it gives a great background on Bill Gates decisions. From how Paul Allen and Bill Gates how to write a Basic interceptor and an emulator for the Altair. To when management changed at Altair and sued Microsoft for the source code rights to Basic-how Bill Gates had to hid under the apartment staircase to avoid being served notice by the officer who eventually taped it to his door. (By the way Apple loaned MS the money because Steve Wonzaick lost the source code for AppleBasic so they licensed Bill's Basic which had the distinction of handling floating points.) To Bill Gates decision to lock half of Microsoft down so the Word and Excel developers could develop on the yet to be released Macintosh OS while the Windows team was being left in the dust-yet it came off that the two teams shared knowledge that was the basis for Apple's later lawsuit. One of the best stories was how Microsoft turned against IBM. Windows was a failure because no one wanted to write applications for the bloated OS-they liked DOS. IBM was pressuring MS to give it up and they agreed to discontinue it in favor of IBM's OS/2 and be regulated to an application developer. However, one lone MS developer got the idea to take advantage of a new feature of Intel's 80386 processors to emulate (set up instances of) DOS on Windows. He worked all weekend with a colleague and demoed it-Microsoft decided to challenge IBM and you know the rest.

In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
An amazing book on Google insides. Besides Google the book details the evolution of their search algorithm from the simple PageRank to more natural language queries then to universal search. It actually talks about the technical details of the startup (Page actually wasn't much of a programmer and had someone else write PageRank who decided on Python). Additional small tech details was spanning the servers out to multiple machines, having an accessible log system and setting up their own data centers after being left unsatisfied with the poor service of current vendors. You learn quite a bit about Google's data driven culture-how Google used data to decide to drop short tail (my term-catered, large national advertising) in favor of the long tail (small vendors across the nation). In addition to the more human details of Google's entry into China, the Google Book Publisher deal and the Obama administration.
By the way, yes he was told as noted in the book. :-)
Obama CS Question

I will add more later. :-)

Ciao

Friday, June 10, 2011

Big Projects, lets tear down the old toll roads

I just finished reading "In the Plex", a book about Google's mission to disrupt the world and I found it very inspiring. So many entities justify their existence in the world by paving a road and sitting on it for ten, twenty, a hundred years collecting a toll for what they did (more like what the founders did) so long ago. Naturally when hovercars are invented they whine and scream and go to Congress demanding that hovercars be outlawed because it would destroy their business.

I feel inspired but I also feel at cross roads with my Free Software ideology-Sergey Brin had read Telsa's biography-Telsa, like Franklin gave away all his technology but he died in obscurity-Sergey felt that if Telsa had more resources he could carry out his ambitious plans. Google is pumping the billions that they make through advertising into efficient data centers, speech to text translation and self driving cars. (Hint: they drive better then Californians.) Redhat's own CEO gave a insight into why Redhat will never be like Microsoft: for every dollar Redhat makes, it replaces 100 dollars in proprietary software. However Redhat contributions back to GNU, GNOME and Linux allowed Google to scale to the large heights that allowed it's algorithms to work effectively. (A Google employee gave a demonstration at CITRIS on AI. He demonstrated on an accuracy over 'dataset size' graph that a simple, unoptimized algorithm can deliver more accurate results once the dataset as reached a certain size-it followed exponential growth.) I wonder what advanced could be made if Google released their wonderful AI based search engine for the community to develop off of. Do we need to keep a portion of our advances secret to fund the next generation? Is there a way to make obscene profits off of the Free Software movement so we can have the scale, the weight to make change in society?

With that in mind here are some projects that I think society should take on:

State wide community broadband
http://gigaom.com/2010/08/05/how-to-finance-a-community-broadband-network-when-incumbents-fight-back/

Neurofeedback for criminal rehabilitation
-Alot of people who commit crimes have poor impulse control-NF can help with that alleving prisons of repeat offenders.

Web 2.0 for Governments
-all forms that we fill out should have an easy web 2.0 interface and a manager where we can check on the status on the form. Same with tickets or fines.

Rechargeable Batteries that last FOREVER!
-We need immortal rechargeable batteries if we plan to move to renewable energy. We need to scale them to a certain size to replace coal and natural gas power plants. Utilities will like this even if there is no renewable component-to handle fluctuations in demand that are not predicted, they will bring a natural gas powerplant online or increase output. A coal powerplant takes much longer to increase output but is much cheaper while a natural gas one is much more expensive but faster. Replacing it with a giant battery charged by the surplus wind and solar energy will be very welcome.
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?language=english&type=&article_id=218392803
http://www.doityourself.com/stry/why-a-rechargeable-battery-does-not-last-forever

Ciao

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Do not Believe what you read about Neurofeedback on the web!!!

I finally put up on adsense on this blog and woe do what I see as my first ads. The're based on the Superforcus Procedure so they link to 3rd rate shops that I never heard that advocate doing Neurofeedback on yourself without providing information-these are horrible. Right now I can't block by keyword, only the domain. I have signed up for a new ad screening process which should allow me to filter them much more easily by next week.

So buying your own neurofeedback machine-you can learn how to hack your own brain, sounds pretty safe right? You read that training T3 or T4 can improve memory so you think you should buy a machine to do that following the procedures.

NO! First, your hooking up a semi-direct line that transmits electricity (in this case from YOUR head TO the machine) to a wall socket. THIS IS VERY BAD IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING!!!!! Certified machines like from Brainmaster are connected to the wall socket when off that charges a battery. When switched on they draw power from the battery instead of the wall socket to protect your head from being shocked by a power surge. Imagine yourself spazzing out on your own with no one to help you.

Second, most people have never heard of neurofeedback so they may have no idea on how to use it. They just make assumptions based on what they have read in books or on the internet. Like if there feeling sluggish they need more beta for energy. Guess what? The brain is not that simple-yeah I know, you really needed to be told that. Did you know that there is 'low beta' and 'high beta'? Did you also know that Neurofeedback training is very site specific (the region you train on your brain)? If you train high beta on sensory-motor strip (C3, Cz C4) you will go off the wall. Did you also know that neurofeedback is training your brain and in that process you can get migraines, low energy or hyper energy? Did you know that simply adjusting the frequency by 0.5 hrz can make all that go away? As if the neurofeedback provider flipped the headache switch off. Trust me-it's happened to me.

Third, even the most experienced nf providers will admit that nf is more of an art then a science. Every human brain is different and responds to nf in different ways. My brain for example, being autistic likes the frequency very low-sub delta-and it gives me energy. Some brains need it very high to function in the reverse. Other issues can complicate treatment-such as injury to the head. My nf provider told me the story of this one prison guard who was hit to the side of his head with a bag of rocks in a breakout. He became very socially withdrawn after that-becoming a different person. His wife brought him to another nf provider who trained him by the book (canned procedures) and he would become very violent whenever the damaged side of his head was trained. He was brought eventually by his wife to my nf provider who only trained on the other side of his head thinking that the other side must have taken over the damaged sides operations. A year later of training he made such excellent progress that his wife told my nf provider that "you gave me my old husband back".Your working with the lower internals of your brain-whatever quirks that exist in your brain will be exposed by nf and you will discover alot more then you ever knew about yourself (an undiagnosed medical condition, enhanced intelligence, certain problems or cravings all your life going away).

The gotchas are many in nf. What you know about your own brain is (probably) not enough to use nf in a safe manner. What you read about on the internet are canned procedures that make certain assumptions . Every brain is different so if you don't know what your doing you will mess yourself up. This site is all about overcoming the obstacles so you know what your doing. So where do you start?

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First I would recommend that you actually goto a nf provider. Everyone is required to have medical insurance so there is no excuse for that. The first part of nf training is the hardest-once you get used to how your brain operates being trained then you might be able to do it on your own.

Finding a good nf provider is a different story. Here are questions to ask your provider.First your provider should have several years of experience (or practice under someone who does). Second your provider should actually do the training themselves-this sounds obvious but quite a few just follow the canned procedures and tell a clerk to train you at this frequency for this long-despite my earlier claim that headaches and other problems can come up that can be solved by shifting the frequency by 0.5hrz. (In my opinion practices like this should be banned-many brains often need to be trained at different frequencies for little things like the weather.). Third if you can't see crediation that the provider has accomplished some sort of class or they say no to any of the past two questions-leave.

If you can't find a good provider or you want to know more because it is your brain (and it can be messed up if the provider is an idiot). You can go to these sites to learn more.

To find a provider (of eeg based neurofeedback, there are other types such as heg)
http://eeginfo.com
Brainmaster's youtube site, contains training videos from operating the equipment to the science behind nf.
http://www.youtube.com/user/brainmastereeg
A intro guide to setting up a neurofeedback practice. ISBN: 978-0393704501
Getting Started with Neurofeedback
A more academic overview, covering many different technologies and treatment procedures for bipolar disorder, anxiety, autism and others. ISBN: 978-0123745347
Introduction to Quantitative EEG and Neurofeedback, Second Edition: Advanced Theory and Applications

Ciao