Monthly Archives: January 2017

Want to send a fax without a fax machine? Now you can!

How? By using: Free Fax • Free Internet Faxing. I haven’t used it, but you can send free faxes to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada, apparently.

If you are dealing with organizations that refuse email as a valid way to receive information and insist on a fax, this could save your day.

 

Looking to run a marathon or half-marathon? Then you need my race schedule spreadsheets to plan out your training runs

If you are planning to run a marathon or half-marathon this year, then one of the first questions you will ask yourself is: do I have enough time to train for it? Two things that can help you answer this question are here: blm849/Bernie-s-Race-Scheduling-Spreadsheets: My Race Schedule Spreadsheets to plan out my training runs.

With my spreadsheets, you enter a date, and it will give you a 16-20 week schedule you need to follow to get ready for a marathon or a half-marathon (or a 21K, as I like to call it).

Since they are spreadsheets, you can adjust them in any way you see fit. Add weeks, change the mileage, etc. If you have any other changes you would like to see, let me know.

If you need book recommendations this summer…

…then what you need is a good list to go through. Here's one List I highly recommend: Every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency. There's a wide range of books here, and quite a few to chose from. Regardless of what you pick from it, I think you'll be rewarded with a good read.

The Women’s March and the Triumph of the Won’t

The Women’s March on Washington overshadowed Trump’s inauguration.

Source: The Women’s March and the Triumph of the Won’t

It’s not because most developers are white that AI has hard time with non-white faces. It’s this….

An example of a neural net topology
This piece, Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode, implies that AI software doesn’t do a good job recognizing non-white faces because most engineers (i.e. software developers) are white. I’d argue that the AI does a poor job because of this: the developers aren’t very good.

Good software developers, in particular the lead developers, take an active role in ensuring they have good test data. The success of their software when it goes live is dependent on it. Anyone using training data  (i.e. using test data) in AI projects that is not using a broad set of faces is doing a poor job. Period. Regardless of whether or not they are white.

If the AI is supposed to do something (i.e. recognize all faces) and it does not, then the AI sucks. Don’t blame it on anything but technical abilities.

 

 

Is ‘Blue Monday’ a thing


According to Snopes (snopes.com), it is not. As in, there is not a specific day that is the most depressing day of the year.

That said, if you read carefully, you can see why people accept this notion. January can be a difficult month for many reasons. You might feel that the entire month is filled with Blue Mondays. Take it easy on yourself, especially if you have challenging resolutions you are trying to complete.

Good luck. Stay healthy.

(Image, via The Sun, shows the so called formula for calculating Blue Monday)

Instragram = advertising

Each social media has an implicit purpose. The stronger ones have a purpose that is clear. Facebook: stay connected to family and friends; LinkedIn: connect with employees/employers. For Instagram, the purpose is advertising. For most people, it is advertising your life. For certain people, with many many followers, it is advertising products.

To get a sense of how much Instagram is about advertising, see this: Confessions of an Instagram Influencer – Bloomberg. While many of us are amateurs at advertising on Instagram, this article will show you how the pros go about it.

I have often looked at people Instagram proposes I follow and I have wondered why people take the photos they do. This article helps explain that. It also helps one understand why some people’s photos look nothing like yours.

Facebook shows why we need augmented intelligence (Artificial and Human Intelligence)

Because if you don’t have augmented intelligence, and if you solely depend on AI like software, you get problems like this, whereby automated software triggers an event that a trained human might have picked up on.

AI and ML (machine learning) can be highly probabilistic and limited to the information it is trained on. Having a human involved makes up for those limits. Just like AI can process much more information quicker than a limited human can.

See the link to the New York Times story to see what I mean.

Eric Holder has a new role – defending California against the Trump Regime

The State of California has a new lawyer to represent it: Eric Holder. The New York Times has the details, here. A good piece, showcasing what we can expect from that State while Trump occupies the White House.

As an aside, I found it fascinating to see how Americans perceived Holder. For a number of Americans, they saw him and his Justice Department as inhibitor of liberty due to how his department cracked down on leaks, among other things. For African Americans, they likely saw him as a provider of liberty, as his DOJ went after those looking to restrict their voting rights.

I think both those activities reflected the wishes of his boss, as well as his own goals.

I think he will be formidable in the next four years as he and his law firm defends the interests of California. It will be interesting, for certain.

A good new year’s resolution: unsubscribing to mailing lists

Unsubscribing to mailing lists you no longer read or want is a good resolution to make and keep. Here’s why it’s a good idea:

  1. It doesn’t take long.
  2. It’s not something you have to do every day.
  3. It let’s you put off getting deep into work on your first day/week back from vacation. (Assuming this is you.)
  4. It will save you much more time than you think over the next month, season, year. If you spend 5 minutes a day deleting such email, over the year, that’s over 2 days of meaningless activity.
  5. It will help you get your inbox under control. It won’t get you to Inbox Zero, but it helps.

By the way, if you’ve been wanting to do a New Year’s resolution but haven’t come up with any, this one is easy.