Searching - Recommendation Systems

When I want to look up information on a product I want to eventually buy, I want to know, and I image most people in the world do as well, if the product is any good. The main tool I use is Amazon's vast customer review database. Amazon carries and distributes thousands of products ranging from college text books to girls gone wild video tapes. Go to Amazon.com and perform a simple search for a water bottle.

You should see a returned list of all items relevant to your search. If a product has ever been purchased before on Amazon, chances are a review or two will be written about that product. Amazon takes all its reviews and displays the average customer review by the means of gold stars. Once you click on the stars, you may begin to read the reviews. You may read some of the best reviews or the worse ones. What I typically like to do is make sure the span of customer reviews is large enough and if there is clearly a dominating review of it being really good or horrible, that's enough for me to make a purchasing decision. In the example below, a water bottle has 461 reviews and 3/4 of all votes ranked it at five stars. There is a very good chance that you won't be disappointed with this product if you were to buy it.

 There are critics everywhere so if I find a product with only a couple reviews and one is either really positive and/or negative, I can't really rely on that being very accurate. It could very well be that vendors rival is simply trying to get a competitive edge on the internet by playing dirty.

The effects of the printing press

One of the most significant events in the early 1400s was the creation of the Johannes Gutenberg printing press.  Why was this such a significant event?  It was the means of publishing and distributing books to common people so they could learn truth for themselves.  A civilization ruled by a church manipulating what and how you thought became a place where people could learn truth for themselves.  This became quickly evident after the mass production of the Bible.

Like my previous posts, I like to have a small video to better explain these topics.  Enjoy.

Humanism

One of the topics we're covering in my Civilization class is humansim.  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, or practice that focuses on human values and concerns.  As I was performing my various research I was getting somewhat confused because the information I was finding wasn't always consistent.  Humanism may mean several things. Wikipedia breaks it down into the following four categories:
1. A historical movement associated especially with the Italian Renaissance
2. An approach to education that uses literary means or a focus on the humanities to inform students
3.  A variety of perspectives in philosophy and social science which affirm some notion of human nature.
4.  A secular ideology which espouses reason, ethics, and justice, whilst specifically rejecting supernatural and religious dogma as a basis of morality and decision-making.

To attempt to better understand a humanistic way of thinking I found a video of Humanists expressing their views on the subject.      
                                                                


This video came across as slightly confusing and contradictory to my own personal beliefs.  As one woman put it in the video, humanists don't need to be "forced" or have a reason to do good things.  I don't feel as though people of a religious background that do positive things are doing them always out of duty.  To simply put it, I believe people act in a manner similar to their parents and since God is our Eternal Father, we have it in our blood (soul/spirit) to do/act/think as He does.

After watching the video above, humanism seemed to sound a lot like atheism.  I was able to find a video of an individual who views himself as a strong atheist address this subject.



A follow-up comment was posted to the video defending Secular Humanism and it reads:

   "No, we don't shift the same values from Christianity into secular humanism because we don't believe that we are inherently bad and need to be constantly apologizing for our existence. Just the opposite; we put authority of thought into ourselves and we celebrate the existence of human kind. We value our existence and we do believe in SECULAR science as the only real science, in the art and humanities and WE BELIEVE WE CAN DECIDE ON OUR MORALS - that's a huge difference."


After reading the posted comment, I better understand where Secular Humanists stand.  I can also understand where the guy in the video is coming from, although some of his statements are a bit biased

Syncfriend.com

Syncfriend.com is essentially a central tool a cell phone user may use to synchronize and backup their mobile phone's (and Outlook) contacts and calendar for free over the internet. 

 

One thing Syncfriend offers consumers that no other site or service does is its ability to deliver other people's contact information (with their permission) to your phone.  Both you and your friends may share each other's contacts in an equally effortless way and not have to worry about losing your contacts because they're stored securely online.  Proper programming has been taken into consideration so common contacts will not be duplicated in your phone.

 

You may edit the information on each of your contacts on a provided user interface with Syncfriend.  Information such as email, home addresses, business title, and more may be entered quickly with ease. 

 

Cell phone users in the United States have increased from 34 million a decade ago to more than 203 million[1].  As a nation, approximately two out of three individuals owns a cell phone.  With this widespread use of a common device, there will always be emerging needs that will change along with the technology improvements of the cell phone. 

Getting down to the basics, the one thing all phones have in common are contacts.  Names and numbers need to be entered manually for each phone.  I realize that there are tools which exist on Apple Macs such as iSync which will (via Bluetooth) allow you to sync your contacts on certain phones with your computer.  If you aren't a Mac user or happen to own a phone that isn't compatible with iSync, you're out of luck.  The average cell phone user has approximately 60 contacts[2], and manually entering in the names and numbers of each contact is tedious and time consuming. 

When a cell phone user switches to a new provider or simply upgrades to a new phone, switching contacts is typically performed at the provider's location and often includes a $10-$20 fee.  People pay because spending 1-2 hours entering in contact information with small cell phone buttons is neither fun nor enjoyable.  Syncfriend is a free service and is available to everyone. 

The entire idea behind Syncfriend is that users only have to maintain their own personal profile.  When you make a change to your profile, all your friends' phonebooks will be automatically self-updated and vice versa.  As Black Eyed Peas put it, "We are the now generation" and we want things immediately.  Anything that saves us time is valuable and will be (if it isn't already) in high demand.  Let's take a look at just a few items: 

• Cars replaced bikes which replaced walking/running to get from place to place
• Wikipedia replaced the need to pull out one of the dozens of encyclopedia (sometimes outdated) books
• Microwaves replaced the need to manually heat/prepare food and meals
• Digital music is replacing physical CDs
• Online ordering is slowly replacing the need to physically shop at stores

There are very few people in the US who haven't driven a car, searched Wikipedia, used a microwave, listed to music digitally, or ordered something online.  That's because those items all had one thing in common.  They were created with the purpose to expedite a former slow process. 

In conclusion, Syncfriend is a free tool designed to synchronize and backup your contacts as well as the contact information of your friends.  It replaces the tedious task of re-entering in contact information or paying a provider to give that service to you.  With cell phones rapidly increasing in popularity and demand, consumers will be looking for simple ways to enter in their contact information and back it up.  Syncfriend.com takes the tedious cell phone functionality of saving contact information, and simplifies it in a more efficient and effective way.  For those reasons, I believe Syncfriend.com is one of the best startup businesses on the internet.

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[1] http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06075/671034-294.stm

[2] http://www.chacha.com/question/what-is-the-average-number-of-contacts-saved-on-a-person's-cell-phone

I was able to find this map while doing some additional research of the various voyages taken during the early years of discovery.  This incorporates extensive new geographical information based on four series of voyages: Columbus to the Caribbean, Pedro Alvarez Cabral to Brazil, Vasco de Gama followed by Cabral to eastern Africa and India, and the brothers Corte-Real to Greenland and Newfoundland.

The efforts of the early voyages helped us to eventually create a civilization which created computers and eventually developed the internet with its multiple uses.  Now we have satellites which enable us to view any section of the earth we desire. Google has taken it an extra step and is generating "street views" of places everywhere in the earth.  Within a couple years, Google has mapped out essentially the entire US.  Even the town I'm from (population < 3000) has the main street mapped out.  Google has been fighting legal disputes with other countries regarding privacy concerns with their street view.  A few years ago you could  browse down the streets of Russia and other countries, but now only the countries shown in blue below are accessible to users.  The individual blue dots you see scattered everywhere are images of that location.

Street View (below)

I included an example of what a street view looks like and I literally found our building on campus.  The semi-transparent white line on the road is the line you may follow with the virtual camera and view the scenery of all the surrounding areas (a complete 360 degree view).  If you're not familiar with this, go to maps.google.com and click and drag the little orange guy on top of a blue road.  The street map will automatically appear and you can control where you want to go by simply clicking the arrows shown on the road or double clicking on a visible path further down on the road.

Galileo Sun-Centered System

I was able to find this video on YouTube which helps to explain the old Ptolemaic thinking and how the Copernican view came to be.  If you're a visual learner like myself, this helps illustrate a lot of the text we needed to read for this lecture.

About Me

I was born and raised in Washington State, living in a small rural city with a population of approximately 2500 people. I enjoy completing a job and doing it well. As a child (before I began to work), I was told if I wanted something, I needed to work and earn the money to buy it myself. My first boss told me his motto for work which I will never forget. “Work as fast as you can effectively and efficiently. I would do anything to keep that job. After all, earning eight bucks an hour isn’t your average job for a 14 year old high school student (this was in the year 2000). I cleaned Dial-a-Ride Buses during the school year and detailed Porsches, Hummers, Mustangs, other automobiles, RVs, boats, and private airplane jets during the summer.

Having a strong desire to achieve the highest rank in the scouting program, I worked hard at the yearly camps and activities and pushed my leaders to organize more activities which would focus on the other scouts and helping them achieve their various ranks, earning my Eagle Scout Award by age 16. Some of my favorite scouting memories are week-long hikes our scout troop took through the Washington mountains. After one awful hike filled with mosquitoes our troop inherited the nick name “The Skeeter Shouts” and our shout became “buzz OFF!” No joke, by the third day of the hike, everybody in our group had over a hundred bites on a single arm from fingertip to elbow.

I play tennis, basketball, and my favorite sport, ice hockey! Throughout elementary school and middle school, I played basketball on a team which did very well. I played singles in tennis during High School and ever since I’ve been going to college, I play ice hockey when I have a spare moment. I’m still an amateur, but I love it!

During my junior year in high school I had a choice to do a running start program (go to a nearby local community college and earn college credit), or work and receive high school credit to graduate through a Cooperative Office Education Program. I decided it would be best in the long run to get my foot in the door in a work setting so I chose the later option. My plan has so far turned out successful and I’m still working for the same organization (Pacific Northwest National Laboratories) as a technical intern student. I attended a year at BYU immediately after high school and served an honorable mission for my church in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

While I’ve been going to college, I’ve bounced around with my major. I began my schooling attempting to major in Chemical Engineering. I’ve always enjoyed math and chemistry and figured this would be an appropriate and fun major to go into. After taking two intense semesters of strictly math, chemistry, and other “G.E.” classes, I realized that it wasn’t for me. I went on my mission and came back to college with total confidence that computer science was the major for me. I have always loved solving puzzles! Rubik’s cubes, disconnect the rings, and other kinds of puzzles always fascinated me. I would work hours and hours until I solved them. Surely, trying to input algorithms into a computer to get a program to function properly would be the same thing. Well, so I thought. After one semester and one class of that major, I realized that there would be no way to get through that major and have the time to spend doing homework in my other classes. Every minute of the day was spent working on my computer science labs which for some reason, never did “click” for me. So now I’m here at the beginning of my fourth semester at college. My new major is Information Systems. The program is ranked as one of the best in the nation and I have had a lot of fun (and a few really long nights) doing 40-60 hour projects within two-week deadlines of each other for an entire semester.