Friday, May 27, 2005

NYC: Day 6

A funny thing happened when I got to New York; I ran into someone that I worked with during my summer internship at Goldman Sachs, over five years ago. Coincidentally, she started as an engineer in our New York office on Monday.

Yesterday after work, we went to a sushi place somewhere on Bleeker for dinner, and caught up a bit. The food was yummy, but I promptly forgot the name of the restaurant after leaving.

After that, a bunch of us walked around the West Village, had coffee, and checked out the Magnolia Bakery, which is supposed to have famously good cupcakes.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

NYC: Day 5

Well, the plan for yesterday failed. We did cook at home, but then we got stuck watching the Spurs and the Suns, and never made it to Small's. Maybe we'll go this weekend.

Today, we got bagels at Murray's Bagels on the way to the subway. I was a little stunned by the sheer variety of bagels and spreads. I ended up getting a sun-dried tomato bagel with plain cream cheese. I'll try and be more adventurous next time.

I gave a tech talk at work, which went surprisingly well in light of my lack of preparation, even finishing exactly on time. I was pretty busy last week, so I just wrote up some slides and figured I'd wing it. Luckily, I had found a "makeslides" script floating around on our intranet. It takes in a text file and outputs an HTML slide deck, complete with "next" and "prev" links. Consequently, writing the slides took about as much time as presenting them.

Now that that's over, I can enjoy the rest of my week in peace. I have tickets for Wicked tonight, so I guess I'll be grabbing a quick dinner and then heading over to Times Square for the show.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

NYC: Days 3 & 4

Yesterday was the first workday of this New York trip. It took some time for my Linux box to arrive, so I spent most of the day working off of my laptop, and was surprisingly productive doing so.

After work, we headed to Scruffy Duffy's to watch the Pistons steal one from the Heat, and then to Rocco's, an Italian bakery on Bleeker, for some excellent dessert.

Today the plan is to cook at home, and then check out Small's, a jazz club not too far from our apartment.

I find I walk a lot more in New York, but I also drink more coffee and alcohol, so I guess from a health perspective it's a wash.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

NYC: Day 2

Day 2 was slightly more relaxed than Day 1. We started off the day at a cute little Thai place called Spice, on 8th and 21st. I think I paid $8 for a curry dish and a dumpling appetizer, which includes tax and tip. The food and service were both quite good.

Afterwards, we set out to see the United Nations headquarters, over by the East River. We walked around the main floor gallery and gift shop for awhile, but we were too cheap to pay for the guided tour, so we couldn't see much more.

We were planning to go to the Guggenheim next, but discovered it closed at 5:45pm, so we'd only have two hours to explore it, so we walked up Madison Avenue instead, window shopping at Barney's, Bloomingdales, and various smaller shops.

Finally, we headed out to Flushing to visit a friend, who took us to Joe's Shanghai restaurant. I've taken note of the midtown location, and will likely drop by during the week sometime for more yummy dumplings.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

NYC: Day 1

My strategy for successfully completing a redeye journey includes a "no sleeping between 10am and 10pm" rule. Arriving early in the morning does you no good if you sleep until 3pm when you get to your destination.

To that end, we embarked on a whirlwind tour of lower Manhattan today, guaranteed to keep us awake. First, dim sum in Chinatown, followed by a bit of wandering around Central Park, a window shopping excursion down Fifth Avenue, coffee and dessert at the Rink Bar (Rockefeller Center) and a photo op in Times Square. Next, we took a short break in Union Square, and then had Korean BBQ for dinner in Koreatown before dodging a sudden downpour for three blocks on our way home.

Good morning, New York

I arrived in New York City bright and early this morning, and will be here for the next week and a half. It seems my sleeping-on-the-redeye skills are still intact. Now, to make a list of non-shopping things to do this week.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

movies on airplanes

Why don't airlines install widescreen (16:9) monitors instead of standard (4:3) ones, nowadays? Most of the content they screen consists of movies, anyways.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

gender and science

From edge.org (May 16th, 2005): a debate between Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke about gender and science. It's basically a nature vs. nurture argument, but they both have some fascinating insights. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

Pinker, addressing those who refuse to consider that there might be biological gender differences at all:
But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable.

Men and women show no differences in general intelligence or g — on average, they are exactly the same, right on the money. Also, when it comes to the basic categories of cognition — how we negotiate the world and live our lives; our concept of objects, of numbers, of people, of living things, and so on — there are no differences. [...] Indeed, in cases where there are differences, there are as many instances in which women do slightly better than men as ones in which men do slightly better than women. For example, men are better at throwing, but women are more dexterous. Men are better at mentally rotating shapes; women are better at visual memory. Men are better at mathematical problem-solving; women are better at mathematical calculation.

Spelke, going even further:
I think the big forces causing this gap are social factors. There are no differences in overall intrinsic aptitude for science and mathematics between women and men. Notice that I am not saying the genders are indistinguishable, that men and women are alike in every way, or even that men and women have identical cognitive profiles. I'm saying that when you add up all the things that men are good at, and all the things that women are good at, there is no overall advantage for men that would put them at the top of the fields of math and science.

A somewhat controversial statement about gender variability from Pinker:
One other data set meeting the gold standard is displayed in this graph, showing the entire population of Scotland, who all took an intelligence test in a single year. The X axis represents IQ, where the mean is 100, and the Yaxis represents the proportion of men versus women. As you can see these are extremely orderly data. In the middle part of the range, females predominate; at both extremes, males slightly predominate.

Spelke, on gender and perception:
...when babies do something unambiguous, reports are not affected by the baby's gender. If the baby clearly smiles, everybody says the baby is smiling or happy. Perception of children is not pure hallucination. Second, children often do things that are ambiguous, and parents face questions whose answers aren't easily readable off their child's overt behavior. In those cases, you see some interesting gender labeling effects. For example, in one study a child on a video-clip was playing with a jack-in-the-box. It suddenly popped up, and the child was startled and jumped backward. When people were asked, what's the child feeling, those who were given a female label said, "she's afraid." But the ones given a male label said, "he's angry." Same child, same reaction, different interpretation. [...] I think these perceptions matter. You, as a parent, may be completely committed to treating your male and female children equally. But no sane parents would treat a fearful child the same way they treat an angry child.

There were effects at the tenure level as well. At the tenure level, professors evaluated a very strong candidate, and almost everyone said this looked like a good case for tenure. But people were invited to express their reservations, and they came up with some very reasonable doubts. For example, "This person looks very strong, but before I agree to give her tenure I would need to know, was this her own work or the work of her adviser?" Now that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But what ought to give us pause is that those kinds of reservations were expressed four times more often when the name was female than when the name was male.

Spelke making an important distinction:
Biological sex differences are real and important. Sex is not a cultural construction that's imposed on people. [...] But the question on the table is not, Are there biological sex differences? The question is, Why are there fewer women mathematicians and scientists?

I admit I'm especially interested because I took Intro to Psych with Pinker and Developmental Psych with Spelke, while they both were still at MIT.

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Why Taiwan Matters

The May 16, 2005 edition of BusinessWeek has an article entitled Why Taiwan Matters, which discusses global IT dependence on Taiwanese technology companies.

It does a good job of illustrating three major points: the extent to which US and other Western economies depend on Taiwanese technology companies, the disastrous economic consequences of armed conflict between Taiwan and China, and the advantage that Taiwan's tech industry (currently) holds over up-and-coming rivals in other countries.

Some key observations in the article:

- Taken together, the revenues of Taiwan's 25 key tech companies should hit $122 billion this year.

- Regarding armed conflict: "It would be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off," says a top executive at a U.S. high-tech giant. Couldn't U.S. industry develop sources of IT supply that don't involve the Taiwanese? "That's like asking, 'What's the second source for Mideast oil?' says this exec. "You might find it, but it's going to cost you." Insiders estimate that it would take a year and a half to even begin to replace the vast web of design shops and mainland factories the Taiwanese have built.

- China may threaten Taiwan as No. 1 IT supplier. But for now it's Taiwanese engineers who provide ever-more-ingenious solutions to manufacturing and design conundrums. "In Taiwan, people say the U.S. understanding of outsourcing is backward," says Victor Zue, co-director of the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. "It feels more like the Taiwanese are outsourcing marketing and branding to the rest of the world."

- The Taiwanese also play a vital role for rivals on the mainland. Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Beijing computer company Lenovo Group Ltd. (LNVNG), which just completed its purchase of IBM's PC division, says Lenovo sources components from Taiwanese companies. According to THT Research, Lenovo even buys notebooks from Quanta, Compal, and MiTAC. Liu says that's not the case.

- Most important of all, the Taiwanese are the real developers of China's semiconductor industry. Chinese companies such as SMIC (SMI) depend on squads of Taiwanese executives for knowhow.

- In effect, Taiwan is hoping to control design and innovation while giving over much of its manufacturing to China.

It will be interesting to see if Taiwan's tech industry can maintain its edge over the next few years.

 

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not that of my employer.