First Site of Google

What a different feeling when I saw the raw Google! It was a coincidence when I surfed Internet Archive

This blog was just used to keep record for the first Google website!

What is relativism?

Moral relativism is the idea that moral principles have no objective standard, so states its dictionary definition. In its extreme, the view that there are no hard and fast rules on what is right and wrong, on which values are set and should be fought for. It is in contrast to absolutism, that there is one truth.

Currently relativism was being under attack in the British general election campaign. Under it, said Michael Howard, leader of the Conservative Party, traditional British values are "being trashed" as "the victims have become the agressors and the agressors have become the victims". It seems that Michael Howard is absolute not a relativism fan at all. How about British people?


[source: BBC News]

Over 200?!

I really could not find any reasons to refuse myself to go for a PowerBook for my next laptop. 200+ features in the new update to the OS X was unveiled to me. It really shocked to me. More than that, it enhanced my determinations to touch the fresh Apple and feel the real art in the science world.

Want a Powerbook!

It has been a long wish for me to have a Powerbook! That is so cool to operation on that machine and write your ideas on that beautiful machine. It seems like flying freely in the sky. Apple is a real art piece in the computer world!

All of my computer are all coming from Windows family. Windows is simple and efficient actually to our life and work. That is enough at all to our routine organizing and processing tasks, which is the real part of computing. However, Apple is more than that. It is not just limited on the computing, more about arts. Not any computer could do it. Apple bring us the enjoyments in front of cold machines.

I want to change. Only Apple could give me this opportunity. With the release of news that Tiger will turn up soon, many new features, including Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, etc, definitely will bring a new revolution to the concepts of computing.

Limited Access to the Information?

What kind of information should be accessed by the public and what is not? I believe that it should depend on the countries. Different countries have various beliefs for this problem, also have different mechanisms to control the access right. Every country has her own privacy. That means some information must be protected by the government, not be accessed by the public.

This news reported that China still retains a tight control on the public access to some sensitive information sources, such as some information describing Tiananmen Square in 1989, Dalai Lama, and even Falun Gong, as well as some world famous media, for example, BBC.

In addition, the news said the filtering technologies in China is pervasive, sophisticated, effective, and dynamic in nature, changing along a variety of axes over time.

As a child when in China, it was true that I was always eager to listen to BBC radio about the world news and keen to find out the true side of the news. I still remembered during those years I did not know whether the news from BBC is subjective or objective though I know the principles of the news reporting is truth comes first always because I occasionally found out that some news from BBC radio was different from what I heard in our radio. I felt very strange about that because I did not know which source I should trust. That attracted me to listen to BBC more. What's more, it is not very easily to receive the signals of BBC, which covered a secret mask on BBC radio for me. Later, with the involvement of Internet in the exchange and communication of information, I could easily find the answers on the WWW. With the time being, everything seemed normal to me.

From the view of the technologies, information should be independent of any media and should be available to collect and process at any time. In my point of view, what we should do is to make sure the information sources themselve right. As for how to control them, it is an artificial and external factor. In the individual view, It is not appropriate to decide whether it is right to open the access to all the information to the public. Seriously governments should have their respective rights to cover a limited amount of information related to the security, which was decided by the country's constitution. We could not measure this issue with a standard accepted by most of the countries in the world.

Can Machine Understand What You mean?

Can machine really understand what you really want to express? Currently a computer program developed at the University of Missouri could grade essay and offer students writing advices. This program cost 6 years, called Qualrus, and has been testing on the pupils. It works by scanning text for keywords, phrases and language patterns. What students need to do is to load the paper into the program via the Web, like the common web-based submitting systems, and then they will get the instant feedback.

This news described this program in details. I believe that Qualrus is not the first such program, as I know, some colleges in the State use e-rater system to give students scores. I doubt the precision of such program. As for the choice questions in the exams, such as GRE, GMAT, LSAT, we could still discuss the future of such programs further. However, as for the essay student express their personal ideas and feelings with a paper, how does a cold and electrical machine differ between unadulterated and adulterated sentences, understand affecting feeling expressed within each line, and infer a conclusion by reasoning the strong logics in the arguments, etc.? If Qualrus really could give marks based on those stuffs, then he should be able to think itself as we do.... I don't know...

But Qualrus is a truly brave breakthrough in driving computer to think!

Ontology is Overrated?

This news reported that ontology, far frome being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of his useful life. I really do not believe this view.

Ontologies, as the backbone of most of the existing and potential application, is becoming more and more important. They are mainly used to organize the fractal knowledge in our routine life by providing a structure "tree" whose branches and nodes are the knowledge points. What we have is a vast and increasing number of the information. What we do not have is the well-organized knowledge distilled from the information sources, which is the real internal energy to drive the application running. Ontology provides us an infrastructure for this internal energy. The applications built on the top of it will not only run intelligently but also collaborate seamlessly.

I don't think ontology is overrated. The truth is ontology is rated and needed badly!

The Rule is Life is not fair

Being nice is the way to the success!

1. Life is not fair, get used to it.
2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
3. You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car, until you earn both.
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to your talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try “delousing” the closet in your own room.
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Google' s Desktop Search--Beyond Search

Google has introduced a full version of its desktop-search software, with a developer's kit and support for the Firefox and Netscape browsers.

The Mountain View, Calif., company on Monday released a PC application for searching Microsoft Office documents, images, e-mail and Internet Explorer Web pages. Google Desktop, which had been in public beta for nearly five months, now includes search capabilities for video and music files, full PDFs and Web surfing history in three Web browsers, including the fast-growing Firefox.

It also includes a software developers kit, or SDK, so that outsiders can build new search plug-ins. Already, Google has built a plug-in to search conversations in the Trillian chat software.

Security plays a bigger part in the full version. Because the tool had been able to index privacy-sensitive documents--against users' wishes--the final product avoids indexing those Word and Excel files that are password-protected. It also allows people to block indexing of secure Web sites. Google previously had to update the software because of the potential for malicious hackers to capture some personal data.

More information

[Source:C|Net]

AI expert calls for e-defence for the UK

The need for the UK military to develop e-defence so that it can compete with the rest of the world will be highlighted by Professor Nigel Shadbolt next week.

His call will be made when he delivers the British Computer Society (BCS)/Royal Signals Institution (RSI) annual lecture 2005 on Web Intelligence at the National Army Museum, London on Wednesday 9 March. Professor Shadbolt, who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will focus on how Artificial Intelligence is being woven into the World Wide Web and he will review how these developments are likely to shape future military capabilities.

He will claim that the UK military is lagging behind what many of the rest of us routinely experience in terms of software and IT capabilities. Lengthy procurement processes means that from an IT perspective the equipment and software being used is often out-of-date. This is particularly acute in the area of web services.

He commented: ‘The military will have few options but to take advantage of the huge investment that the commercial and research sectors have made in web service solutions and architectures.’

Professor Shadbolt will demonstrate how the developing Semantic Web could provide web services for the military which might change how it operates.

For example, through developing information sets about locations, military units could access instant information about the geology, geography, customs and cultural and religious structures of a location before entering. Much of this content exists in various web accessible sources. Deployed military personnel often face problems when dealing with foreign languages. Web services are under development to support high quality speech and text translation. Increasingly services for diagnosis, image recognition, planning and scheduling can be delivered on the web.

Professor Shadbolt commented: ‘The UK military is starting to use this technology and indeed the concept of network enabled capability is accepted, but it lags well behind the US. The adage that information is power has always applied in military as well as business contexts. At the moment, it is hard for the military to change fast, but it needs to if it is to attain a position of information superiority.’