Possible prior work

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My ISDE work may not be original. In fact, Weinberger himself appears to have derived an incremental extension to it. However, for some reason this work was never published.

I’m not completely sure whether this is truly an incremental algorithm, however. The code’s very messy and it’s difficult to untangle what’s going on, but it seems that the algorithm relies on information about the whole dataset, which must be passed to the function.

If that is the case, I may continue with my work. If not, I may have to cease working on it, or at least attempt to show that mine is somehow better (which it might not be).

There's life, and then there's grad. school…

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Another one of those “I’m so glad I know where I’m going” posts. No, I’m not manic depressive. Really – it’s just the emotional roller-coaster that is grad. school, combined with my strong drive for independence and the heady realization that just contemplating such things as lecturing on my own means I’m again in control of my life 🙂

I was an idiot to suspend what I was doing pending completion of my Ph. D. That I could manage my time so well as an undergrad. and then drop it all to retreat inwards in the horror of being suppressed at every turn as a graduate student is my own great error during this tumultuous period. I fought being consumed by the Ph. D., but in the wrong ways.

The idea to lecture – and the fact that I am coming up with so many productive ways to spend my time again in general – indicates to me that I’m finally getting my life back on the track it never should have left. I’m no longer considering what I can’t do or don’t have time to do… now I’m back to considering what I can. I know I can lecture on my own time because I have so much of it. I know I can work during my third year because I didn’t need a third in the first place. I know that my duty lies not in my research, but in my overall vision of how the world should be. Ultimately, the Ph. D. is just a tool to pursue it, not an end in itself.

It was stupid to forget who I was, to accept a bitter and painful existence as a tolerable norm, to forego the exaltation of making my own decisions based on my own values in exchange for servitude to the less competent; an anchor to a preordained track leading only to mediocrity. The choice was mine from the beginning; I am a fellow, not a research assistant.

I won’t allow this to happen a second time. I’ll do the research required to gain my degree and I’ll do the research that interests me… but I will not drop my entire life in the name of a degree.

The Polymath Lectures

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I know how I can kick off the fundraising for the Polymath Foundation once it’s incorporated.

I’ll give online lectures on IT and programming topics. The fee to attend will be modest, with suggested donations possible based on how good a job students think I did. All of the proceeds will go to the Polymath Foundation. Considering that I already have an MS in Computer Science and I’m well on the way to a Ph. D., I should have little trouble convincing people I’m qualified.

I’m not going to ask the other board members to do the same, but they’re welcome to if they find it fun.

Fine, 3 years it is.

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It doesn’t matter how much progress I make on my dissertation; Temple won’t fund me to finish in two years, which is why they only allowed me to register for 4 credits this semester. Three it is, then. I’ll be done in May 2009, which is still a unprecedented length of time at Temple.

Since I’m going to have way more time than I need to complete my dissertation, I’m going to start a full-time job in the summer, after my second year of the fellowship runs out and my support switches from school to departmental. I’ll be almost done by then anyway, so there’s no point in sitting home bored for the entire year.

As for now, since I’m only getting half the credits I signed up for, I’m strongly considering doing only half of the work. I have some other research questions of my own to pursue.

Electrostatic Attraction in Society

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I’ve been thinking about how many issues I’m perceiving in academia vs. my friend, whom I have always thought was much more suited to an academic lifestyle than I was despite us having similar ability (and indeed, he’s having a better reception than I did thus far, although he’s had his share of troubles too), and it made me realize that it could very easily be described in terms of a force. I originally thought gravity, but on second thought, the electrostatic force seems much more appropriate:

People in any particular niche of society (academia, industry, the arts, etc.) have views of any particular person based on what type of person they perceive him to be. This may have little to do with the person’s actual character; just how it is perceived (think of how all of chemistry is founded on the reactions of the valence shell rather than the nucleus). This can cause an attractive or repulsive force between a person and the niche. The person’s own views and choices also influence this force; so it is, in a way, symmetric.

These are charges. The composition of these charges determines one’s entire reaction in society, and to a large extent, what path an individual takes.

For example, no matter how much I try to learn, I think I must acknowledge that there is a repulsion between myself and academia. I cannot tolerate the nonsense, the bureaucracy, and the intolerance to new ideas, and perhaps they cannot tolerate my propensity for choosing fields that are not “hot”, my wish to devise and stick to a plan with a strict timetable, and what they probably perceive as a lack of flexibility. No matter what I do, I am forced into unpleasant scenarios in academia because of this conflict.

Conversely, I am drawn to industry without making any effort of my own to do so. The job offers streaming in are not a coincidence, nor are they solely attributable to the position of my resume in a search (although that helps), since I’ve also received them on sites such as LinkedIn (and even Facebook and MySpace). They probably perceive intelligence, a good work ethic, and ambition – whether I truly possess these qualities or not is as irrelevant as the nucleus of an atom is to reactions of its valence shell. Since I don’t particularly have any aversion to industry (my charge is neutral?), the overall force is attractive.

The result is that when I had a strong desire to enter academia, it drifted me over to academia, though not swiftly or completely enough to counter the repulsion I met from academia itself. As that desire began to fade, I began to drift away, to be drawn in on the stronger current of industry.

In summary, it seems that my own life, at least, can be described fairly well in terms of such charges.

Credits mean nothing anymore. Then again, neither does the degree at this point.

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After completion of fixed in-class coursework, the notion of “credits” becomes meaningless. One credit or twelve, I’m still doing the same research.

I am beginning to notice artificial impediment in my progress towards the Ph. D., since I am meeting no impediment inherent in the work. I have crossed the halfway mark on my dissertation, but now I’m running into issues with the department itself. I’m not sure to what extent I’ll tolerate this, but if I’m forced to stay here for more than one additional year (through whatever means used, such as putting me on a 4 credit schedule), I’ll likely drop out of the program immediately. It would be very easy; I have about 15 recruiters waiting to hear back from me. My service was given freely in exchange for scientific training. My dissertation is being written in exchange for a degree. If the terms are changed halfway, it is not I who have reneged.

Finishing the revisions to the journal paper…

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Every time I go back to work on the journal paper, I’m struck more and more about how much the reviewers seem to miss the point. Perhaps it’s the writing; more likely they were just looking for criticism and made some incorrect conjectures by doing so, but we have reviews that ask us to explain how our methodology relates to kernel learning (it doesn’t… it’s a completely separate field), what happens if there’s a trifurcation in the trees (we already stated that we treat it as two bifurcations), to clarify what we mean when we say using a breadth-first approach is more robust (we already state it pretty clearly: “Using breadth-first labeling, a missed branch will only cause changes in the encoding at or below the level at which the branch is missed, whereas a depth-first approach could potentially change the labeling at all levels of the tree”), and finally, “It is not very clear how these precision percentage values were obtained, especially when k becomes 2 to 5. Please clarify.”, even though we state many times throughout the paper that these are cross-validated k-nearest neighbor classification accuracies.

One of the reviewers even asks us to cite a paper we’ve never referenced and don’t use any of the techniques from.

Metasquares is back (sort of)

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Some of you may know me as the author of a game client called MetaSquarer (which I’ve maintained for over a decade now! Phew!)

The client was a response to the removal of MetaSquares, the original game upon which it is based, from AOL in 1997. Approximately two years ago, I received an email from Scott Kim, the designer behind the original game (and a very interesting person to talk to) telling me the company had plans to re-create the game. They asked me to transfer the domain “metasquares.com” to them so they could use it for the re-launched game, and, because I felt indebted to them, I did so while moving the existing site to a new domain name (metasquared.com). They wanted me to remain active in the development process, and mentioned that I was to become their contact on server-related matters. They outsourced the actual development work to Russia, which I was always a bit puzzled about, considering that I had written all of the algorithms already (indeed, I wrote the whole client, network play and all, at the ripe old age of 12) and could very easily port them to any language they wanted. I did make some of these algorithms, such as my O(n) square finding algorithm, public to allow them to easily leverage the work.

Anyway, the game just re-launched, sort of. They did it in Javascript using AJAX and it currently works on Firefox, Safari, and probably some other browsers. It’s meant to be played on the iPhone. Since I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t know how that’s supposed to work, but I guess you simply browse to the site and play. Anyway, the client is at http://www.metatools.com/iphonemsq.

The client they have up there has some limitations: primarily, it only supports solo play against a rather weak computer opponent, although I was told that a version for the Mac (presumably a standalone app, although you could do multiplayer using AJAX too) that supports multiplayer games would be out soon. Still, if you’re looking for an officially endorsed client, there it is.

Once the client matches the features in MetaSquarer, I will be taking MetaSquarer offline, as there will be no further need for it. However, I will be sure to give plenty of advance notice of this, so as not to catch anyone by surprise. Maybe I’ll even opensource it.