Memory Express Calgary South East Grand Opening

Minh Ngo, co-founder of Memory Express is one of the smartest, gutsiest, and most hard working entrepreneurs that I have come across (see my 2008 Dec video interview with Minh). There aren’t that many entrepreneurs have the courage and financial strength to expand in a recession.

Here is Minh working hard in the new Calgary South East Store (grand opening tomorrow, Saturday, May 30th, 2009) and I asked him to pose in front of a wall of big screen HDTVs.

I wish Minh and Memory Express all the best and have a great day of wonderful sales on the grand opening. Here is their online front page ad. (I am making an exception in reposting this ad as I don’t usually put any ads on my site.)

May 30 Update:

Free Angus beef burger, hot dog, cake and drinks at grand opening.

Conference Board of Canada Recalls Plagiarized IP Reports

After Michael Geist flagged the problem on Monday (May 25), and a few days of this and that, Conference Board of Canada has finally (May 28) recalled three plagiarized IP reports.

Thanks Michael for flagging the problem with the Conference Board “researches”.

Shakespeare & Company, Paris

What a lovely quote,

BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS
LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE

[HT: Shirley & the lovely movie Before Sunset]

Wikipedia-bio of George Whitman here. More photos here.

Sonia Sotomayor – US Supreme Court nominee

- Who is Sonia Sotomayor? (CNN)

- WSJ Law Blog on Sonia Sotomayor

- In profile: U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (CBC)

- Obama, Sotomayor live (USA Today)

P.S. Thanks Joe for being you and telling Sotomayor, “I told you – piece of cake!”

Attack Ads

“The prime minister of Canada has only one job, and that is to unite Canadians and never divide them, and that, Mr. Harper does not understand.“

- Michael Ignatieff

Like millions of immigrant Canadians, I am a proud Canadian. Is it a sin to be born outside of Canada? It is wrong for Stephen Harper and the Conservative to air attack ads branding Michael Ignatieff, Leader of the Official Opposition, as a lesser Canadian and leader simply because Ignatieff worked outside of Canada for many years. How does Harper think his attack ads are doing to Canadians born outside of Canada like me?

Michael defended himself and posted this YouTube reply.

Obama vs. Cheney: Battle of the speeches

From the wise Henry Champ “Obama versus Cheney: battle of the heavyweights“,

Long time coming

This was the national security debate that was not engaged during last year’s presidential campaign, since Republican nominee John McCain and Obama generally agreed on most security issues, with the exception of a timetable for American withdrawal from Iraq.

Unlike McCain, however, Cheney has anointed himself the saviour of the George W. Bush legacy, defending the former administration’s record and slamming the current White House.

Over these last weeks, Cheney has pretty much had the field to himself, which may help explain how Obama has lost some of his footing on the big issue of national security.

Data.gov – Democratizing Data

An interesting transparency experiment started in United Sates yesterday. I don’t know if the Canadian Conservative government will try to be as open and as transparent? If history is any indication, how the Conservative had acted in the past re Freedom of Information accesses was not encouraging.

“… Federal CIO Council is launching Data.gov. Created as part of the President’s commitment to open government and democratizing information, Data.gov will open up the workings of government by making economic, healthcare, environmental, and other government information available on a single website, allowing the public to access raw data and transform it in innovative ways.”

“Democratizing government data will help change how government operates—and give citizens the ability to participate in making government services more effective, accessible, and transparent.”

[via White House]

Creativity – Elizabeth Gilbert @ TED

Elizabeth Gilbert: A new way to think about creativity @ TED

[HT: Kerri, my friend and soon to be mom]

Search Engine – Restarted!

The wonderful online podcast/show Search Engine has moved to TVO. Have a listen and subscribe if you enjoy it. It is free to subscribe and listen.

White House photos on Flickr

Check out the cool White House photos on Flickr. You can even use the photos under this rule.

Here are some photos from the First 100 Days set. (click to zoom in)

Obama at Notre Dame – In Praise of Fair-Minded Words

Obama gave a commencement address at Notre Dame talking about abortion and stem cell research.

“Open hearts.  Open minds.  Fair-minded words.”

Some Obama Mistakes

My free-market economist friends (thanks Wallace & Zhaofeng) keep reminding (in a friendly way) me that I should be more careful and don’t sound too much like an uncritical cheerleader of President Obama.

While I admire President Obama deeply, I assure my friends that I will not blindly support all things Obama. So, for the record, here are some samples of President Obama mistakes discussed/illustrated by news articles.

Guantanamo (and the Khadr’s case)

Obama revives Guantanamo Bay tribunals (CBC)

Photographs and Kangaroo Courts (NYT) (emphasis added)

“It was particularly distressing to hear Mr. Obama echo Mr. Bush by saying that releasing the pictures would not add “to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.” This was not the fault of a few individuals. It was widespread, and systemic, the result of policies set at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Mr. Obama was elected in part because of his promises to correct these lawless policies. He must create clear rules to deal with prisoners. And there must be a full accounting of what went so horribly wrong and how. Otherwise, Mr. Obama risks turning Mr. Bush’s mistakes into his own or, in the case of the photographs, turning Mr. Bush’s cover-up into his own. More important, he risks missing the chance to make sure the misdeeds and horrors of the Bush years are never repeated.“

Homeland Security

The no longer quite so undefended Canada-U.S. border

Canada more lax than U.S. about whom it lets in, Napolitano says

While it is sad to see Americans being so fearful and I can understand and sympathize with why Americans are still being so fearful, it is still sad to see our once undefended Canada-U.S. border needing patrolled by $10 million a piece drones. Sad.

Trade
U.S. will respect trade pacts ‘as we always have’: Obama
“Buy American” clause is wrong even Canada should not be affected because of our trade agreements.

Copyright
U.S. Congressional Hearing Blames Canada, Again

Michelle Obama Commencement Speech @ U.C. Merced

U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama gave a commencement speech at UC Merced. Here is an excerpt from a report from SFGate (emphasis added),

[Michelle] Obama reminded them that, like half of the student body at this 4-year-old campus, she was the first in her family to attend college. And she urged the 500 graduates, who constitute the first class to go from freshman to senior year at UC Merced, to seek jobs where they help disadvantaged children in particular. Help those, she said, “who never go to college … who can’t get a break … who have lost the ability to dream.”

And if not that, she said, find work innovating green technology or doing other things to kick-start the nation’s wobbling economy.

“We are going to need all of you graduates,” Obama said. “Make your legacy a lasting one. Dream big.”

Mindful that she was speaking in one of the most economically depressed cities in California, the first lady also warned the Class of 2009 that times are tough out there. Instead of a welcoming job market, she said, the graduates are likely to find low salaries, daunting loan repayment bills and “your share of setbacks.”

“But in those moments, in those inevitable moments, I urge you to think about this day,” she said. “Look around you. … Never let setbacks or fear dictate the course of your life.”

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Wolfram|Alpha Review – Part 1 – Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.

I am disappointed as my high hopes in Wolfram|Alpha were far from realized. I don’t want to say Alpha is useless because I am a computer science geek so I will give Alpha some time to try to recover and resolve the many challenges.

I intend to write a series of reviews, so this will be the first one of a few.

Alpha Test dates: May 15 – 16, 2009

(For a collection of other reviews, see this BBC link.)

Speed: Very slow. (May be “too slow”.)

I hope the speed will improve over time. But since Alpha is computing the answers on the fly, and not looking up from indexed answers, I understand it will take longer than Google. But it can’t be “too slow”. I hope Alpha will improve on this.

Stocks:

If you enter stock symbols or names of some publicly traded companies, Alpha will create a comparison for you. Generating pages of info when I asked it about RY TD [Royal Bank and TD] (try it).

Now, we can get most of the basic info from finance site like google and yahoo. I wonder if information like the following will be truly useful for investment decision making or will they be data/noise disguise as insight?

Correlation matrix
Mean-variance optimal portfolio
optimal portfolio’s expected yearly return | 6.31%
optimal portfolio’s yearly volatility | 8.37%

You see, I have trouble take the words in investment bank analysts’ reports without thinking about their implications carefully, you can imagine the trouble I have in the “black box” numbers Alpha generated.

Not understanding users’ questions.

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

May be this is the most important challenge Alpha has at the moment: its inability to understand simple English questions. The following are NOT tough questions at all.

Chinese population in Calgary?
How many words in the Bible?
How many people died in Cultural Revolution?
Numbers of lawyers in Calgary?

Seeing Alpha returns with “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” over and over and over again disappoints me to no end.

Concluding thoughts

As a computer geek (who actually had studied the Turing Test in school (smile)), I am loving what Stephen Wolfram is trying to achieve and I wish him and his team the best of luck. If I were a normal regular user, I would have to say I was very disappointed by Alpha.

Fortunately, I am a computer geek, I will come back on Monday and play with Alpha some more when it officially launches. And then some more later …

$13 Taxi Fare – Four Edmonton women

From CBC (with video clip of the incident that supports the taxi driver’s claim),

A veteran Edmonton taxi driver is speaking publicly about a civil lawsuit he filed last year against four young women who falsely accused him of sexual assault after traveling in his car three years ago.

Wolfram|Alpha – A new real-time computational knowledge engine ?

Stephen Wolfram, the super-smart man who invented/created Mathematica (a powerful computational software program) is launching Wolfram|Alpha. It looks really neat. Here is an excerpt from a Wired article (emphasis added),

“The home page is nearly blank. At the center, just below a colorful logo, you’ll find an empty data field. Type in a phrase, hit Return, and knowledge appears. [...]

The product [Wolfram|Alpha] of four years of development, Alpha is an engine for answers. Its ambition is to delve into “all the knowledge in the world,” Wolfram says, to find and calculate information. [...]

Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser.

Type in “Pluto” and Alpha calculates the dwarf planet’s distance from Earth at that very instant. Bang out a series of letters like “ACTCGTC” and Alpha recognizes it as genetic code and tells you what strand of DNA that particular gene lives on and what we know about it. Wolfram has licensed ― or created ― a whole library of databases and massaged them so the information is pliable. (To date, they include Wikipedia, the US Census, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library,” he says.) Combined with the near-­magical abilities of Mathematica, Alpha is a powerful computational engine that can effortlessly answer queries that no one has asked of a search engine before.“

If my instinct is right, Wolfram|Alpha should be a powerful tool.

If I am wrong (for fun, I say <0.1% chance), it will be a neat toy.

We can find out more starting tonight (May 15th, 2009, 7pm CST).

Two Questions I will try tonight:

How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?
How many Nobel Prize winners were taught by Milton Friedman?

[update] Other questions I’ve tried tonight:

Number of lawyers in Calgary? [Alpha didn't understand the question]

Chinese population in Calgary? [Alpha didn't understand the question]

Here is a video of Stephen Wolfram discussing Wolfram|Alpha

P.S. I laughed so hard reading this line in the article, “Wolfram has already shown Alpha to former intern Brin [yes, Brin is Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who once spent a summer interning for Wolfram] and thinks that it could make sense to have the engine running behind the scenes in Google searches.“

*******

May 15, 2009 9:07 PM MST: Finally tried a few questions. Too bad none of the questions give useful/good results yet until the system crashed. “Chinese population in Calgary” confused the system. Will try again when the system is more stable.

Inspiring America – President Obama Speaks @ Arizona State University Commencement (2009/05/13)

What a wonderful and inspiring speech by President Obama @ Arizona State University Commencement – 2009/05/13.

Note for my economist friends: I’ve some harsh and critical words saved up to write about some recent Obama policies and decision.

part 1

part 2

part 3

Here is an excerpt from NYT (emphasis added),

In his speech here to a stadium full of people who waited hours in temperatures hovering around 100 degrees, Mr. Obama said the degree controversy underscored that the nation needs “a fundamental change of perspective and attitude,” one that values substance over appearance, character over celebrity and wise investments over “get rich quick schemes.”

The country, he suggested, has lost its way. “In recent years, in many ways, we’ve become enamored with our own success, lulled into complacency by our own achievements,” he said, citing the economic crisis. “We started taking shortcuts. We started living on credit, instead of building up savings. We saw businesses focus more on rebranding and repackaging than innovating and developing new ideas that improve our lives.”

He cited Americans who ran the Underground Railroad, fought for worker rights, developed new technology and saved people caught in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. “A whole bunch of them didn’t get honorary degrees,” he said in an ad lib not in the released text, “but they changed the course of history and so can you.”

He added: “That’s what building a body of work is all about: it’s about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime, to a lasting legacy.”

Maira Kalman: The illustrated woman

After I blogged about one of Maira’s piece here, I finally found time and finished watching this wonderful TED talk “Maira Kalman: The illustrated woman” recommended by Wanni. Enjoy.

I, Ruby Dhalla, did not …

Ruby Dhalla, Member of Parliament, is fighting for her political life. See reports from CBC (with video), CP, Globe and Mail, and National Post. (more from G&M here and here)

In an age where politicians don’t get nor deserve our respect. And their (British Parliamentarians’) sorries often come too little too late. Politicians live in a tough time.

While I don’t think Ms. Dhalla will or can be held criminally or civilly responsible, as a female politician who is supposed to champion the rights of all women, Ms. Dhalla needs to do a lot more to show that Ms. Magdalene Gordo and Ms. Richelyn Tongson did not suffer harsh and ill treatment as they testified.

If Ms. Dhalla was charged in a court with a criminal offense, she should be assumed innocent until proven guilty, like any other Canadians.

As a prominent politician and after hearing what she proclaimed loudly today, I now hold her to a much higher standard. And unfortunately for her, the stories of Ms. Gordo and Ms. Tongson seem to be more likely to be true than the pieces of signed documents (signed by Gordo and Tongson) that Ms. Dhalla waved when she testified.

Finally,his comment left in the CBC site by someone nickname “Waterloo student” makes a lot of sense,

If these allegations are proven true, I hope Miss Dhalla gets what she deserves. It is not right for a MP to abuse their power like that especially a MP as powerful as Miss Dhalla.

Politicians need to act and behave in such a manner that Canadians can aspire to become. If nothing else, we Canadians need to learn how to treat other people (even if they are hired caregivers) better.

To conclude with something positive. Years ago, a church friend of my better half was working as a babysitter/caregiver. She was treated so well by her employer that she not only got sponsored to become a landed immigrant, her employer actually paid for her wedding as well. We attended the wedding banquet and it was beautiful. So there are great Canadians too.

Obama’s OPE

Obama introduces the Office of Public Engagement.