Co-patenting

My second patent is now official. It’s not really my patent; it’s for work I did at IRI, and IRI owns the patent.  I’m also not the only name on the patent; Romesh Wadhwani is also on the patent.  Together, our net worth is 2.1 billion dollars. Unfortunately, that’s a bit one-sided.

Romesh didn’t actually have much to do with the specific point patented, but he owned the company and sponsored this research for several years, to enable the development of a potential business which it was his idea to move forward on, so if he wanted his name on the patent I was fine with it.

Once he sold the company, the new owners weren’t interested in investing in that business, so it doesn’t seem likely the patent will be used.

Short video on aging research

Auction winner pays 2nd price?

Auctions for internet ads take place entirely by computer, due to the speed involved. The price the winner pays is interesting – they don’t pay what they bid, they pay what the 2nd highest bidder bid (plus a small amount).  The idea is that really wildly high bids don’t get penalized (unless there are two wildly high bidders).

from http://www.research-live.com/4010883.article based on Scott Patterson’s new book Dark Pools.

Here’s how real-time bidding works: A web user visits a web page. As the page loads up, a call goes out to all interested parties saying, “Here’s an ad impression”. Advertisers will be told what sort of impression is available, and what the profile of the user is, based on demographic, intent, interest or behavioural data. Then the bidding starts.

At Quantcast, Kotecha says: “We see 100,000 bids every second of every day.” Advertisers submit what they’re willing to pay and the highest bid wins. Except the winner only pays the second-highest price, plus a little bit on top. This is supposed to encourage bidders to be more aggressive, says Mathieu Gbetro, the group director of product and implementation for mobile network Orange. “They can bid very aggressively without taking too much risk of paying the price they’re bidding to.”

P.S. When I first posted this, the ad spots to the right and below were both related to UMSL; the university must have been attracted by my somewhat negative post about UMSL a few days ago.

Quote of the day: Remembering a teacher and a daughter

The family of Victoria Soto, a first-grade teacher whom [the shooter at Sandy Hook elementary] shot and killed as she tried to keep her students out of the line of fire, released a statement noting that there were some questions that could never be answered.

“While others search for the answer as to why this happened, we search for the how. How can we live without Vicki?” the statement read.

“So, yes, we have read the report. No, we cannot make sense of why it happened. We don’t know if anyone ever will. We don’t know if we will ever be whole again. We don’t know if we will go a day without pain. We don’t know if anything will ever make sense again.”

Joseph Berger and Marc Santora's article in the New York Times 

Santa versus Dracula

All the good .COM web addresses are gone. Evidently all the good webcomic premises are gone as well. 

This is a new comic on the GoComics site.

 

Leo Tolstoy vs Garrison Keillor

 

Leo Tolstoy wrote:

“All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

and so Leo tended to write about unhappy families; that quote is from Anna Karenina, certainly the story of an unhappy family.

Garrison Keillor, though, has another take:

Keillor says he understands the sense of dislocation and loneliness at the center of a lot of fiction these days, and went through his own period of alienation when he was young, it’s just that he doesn’t think those feelings make for good stories.

“Sadness, loneliness, being misunderstood, they’re sort of generic,” he said. “We all go through that, really. On the other hand, wit and enthusiasm and passion: Those are individual. What moves my friend the botanist is very different than what moves my wife.”

(That’s from the November 18, 2013 digital edition of the Chicago Tribune; it’s not on the Trib website).

Garrison Keillor is not Tolstoy, although he’s had an almost 40 year run doing weekly stories on Prairie Home Companion, so I guess this means you can become successful telling stories from either side.

A nutty fall

There are a lot of nuts in the neighborhood this fall.  The burr oaks have produced a bumper crop of acorns. There are abundant black walnuts. There are a lot of squirrels. There are ALWAYS a lot of squirrels in the neighborhood, but seem to be more than usual this year, probably due to the abundance of food.

All the good places to store nuts must have already been taken, because I am finding black walnuts in unusual places, such as this:

This could not possibly have gotten there without animal help.  The nearest black walnut tree is at least 50 yards away, and black walnuts are far too heavy to be blown far.

I’m amused by this, although frankly I’m a bit disconcerted that the squirrels seem so familiar with my electric service box.

A depressing picture from UMSL

 

I find this picture depressing, on many fronts.

1. This is my alma mater. When I went there, it was a bare-bones commuter school: 2 buildings plus an old golf course headquarters, 10,000 students, lots of parking lots, no dorms.  Construction everywhere: several buildings were completed while I was there, and the old golf course building was ready to be torn down.  When I mention I went to UMSL, I’m told “it’s not like it was when you were there”.  So I feel a sense of loss.  This isn’t unique: St. Bartholomew grade school is closed (grades 1-6). The whole parish of St. Williams is closed (7-8).  My high school closed one year after I attended.

2. Really, choosing a school on the basis of a heated pool?  I hope Adam is joking, but suspect he isn’t. As the cost of college to the student goes up, colleges increasingly feel the need to compete on amenities.

3. There is a disconcerting flip-flop for college students now.  It used to be that you lived modestly in college, and then when you graduated your standard of living went up.  Nearly all the students I knew at UMSL lived at home and had part-time jobs.  Some had full time jobs, while carrying full loads as students.  “Time management” wasn’t offered as a course, but you learned it anyway.

When we graduated, we were able to move on and move out. In my case, I got a nice grad school fellowship that meant I could go to school and have a modest apartment with a roommate (eventually my wife) and not take out any loans.

Now, the amenities at colleges are much nicer – remember, UMSL is a low end state school, not even the best state school in Missouri, and students are promised heated pools, game rooms, flat screen TVs, and health club facilities, etc.  Then you graduate and can afford few of these things; maybe you even have to move back in with Mom and Dad. You may still be working at Starbucks, only trying to live off it now and pay off student loans.

Student loans at UMSL? When I went there my tuition and fees were about $1250 – that’s not per semester, that’s the total for my entire career there. I usually took 16 or 17 hours. Now the in-state tuition is $315 per credit hour plus mandatory fees of $51.85 per credit hour; for 16 hours that’s $5869 per semester.

Quote of the day: Happiness = Usefulness

 

“The only source of anyone's true happiness is doing something useful through his or her work.”
True Christian Religion 735:5 Emanuel Swedenborg

In evaluating this quote from Swedenborg, please remember that he lived before the bicycle was invented

OK, that was a joke. Even an enjoyable activity like cycling is a recreation, not a use.  It is our uses that provide the deepest, most lasting satisfaction in our lives – raising children is probably the best example of useful work that can bring true happiness.

Writing a book

Now that I'm at least semi-retired, people ask what I plan on doing Among the activities I list are "and I want to try some of the writing projects I've never gotten around to completing."

By that, I mean some of the professional articles in technical journals I've intended to write.  But some people ask, "You're going to write a book?"

Obviously, these people have never read my previous longer works, such as "Adjusting Panel to Criterion" (2004, 115 pages), "NBD Target Group Specs" (2006, 88 pages) or "Academic Data Set: Field and File Description" (2013, 75 pages).  While providing valuable information, these would only be commercially marketable as insomnia cures.

As The Intern at GoComics said recently: "Anyone can write a book, but not everyone should have a book published. Some people ought to keep a journal, and leave it at that."   The Intern provided some nice publishing-related comics there, one of which I'll reproduce below:

From FICOLabsBlog, top 10 ways to know you're a data scientist:

10. You think … “So much data, so littl…”
9. You know what heteroscedasticity is.
8. Your best pick-up lines all include the word “moneyball.”
7. You look at your grocery bill and try to predict what you will buy next.
6. You think data scientists are cool… and you have a theorem to prove it.
5. The numbers talk back.
4. Counting sheep keeps you up at night.
3. You know where all the insights are buried.
2. You have a Kolmogorov-Smirnov hangover.
And…
1. You crunch numbers for breakfast.

I'd add some other signs:

• You've bought external hard drives in bulk.
• Your first thought about "keys" isn't that they can be used to open doors.