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I enjoy working on real data mining problems. I am fascinated by how the whole world is connected by the internet now. |
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Some interesting discovery about facebook users
You may find the following news/article interesting if you are interested in social networking sites such as facebook and myspace.
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Student Facebook Use Predicted by Race, Ethnicity, Education
Northwestern University (11/19/07) Leopold, Wendy A new study from Northwestern University found that college students' choice of social networking sites is often related to their race, ethnicity, and parental education. The study found that white students generally chose Facebook, Hispanic students prefer MySpace, and Asian and Asian-American students are least likely to use MySpace. African American students did not show a statistically significant preference toward a particular social networking site. Asian and Asian-American students were most likely to use Xanga, though a significant amount do use Facebook. The education level of the students' parents also correlates with social networking choices. Students with parents who finished college are significantly more likely to use Facebook, while MySpace users are more likely to have parents that have less than a high school education. Students who live at home with their parents are less likely to use a social networking site than students who live by themselves, with a roommate, or at school. Additionally, women were found more likely to engage in person-to-person online communication than men. The findings of the study contradict the common belief that social networking sites are being used to expand students social and cultural experiences and suggest social networking sites actually create a two-tier social system. "In a two-tier system, some college students cultivate lots of networks and social capital while others benefit considerably less from this important part of the college experience," says author of the study Eszter Hargittai. The study appears in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
Click Here to View Full Article
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A bad car moving experience
I recently moved from Santa Clara, CA to Austin, TX. I had a car mover to transport my car. This was the second time I use a car moving service - the first time was when I move from south Florida to the Bay Area. The first experience was quite good - no damage to my car and some manager at the destination even picked me up at the San Jose airport and took me to where my car was delivered (some car storage place, I didn't have an address in CA when the car was picked up).
The second time, however, wasn't a pleasant experience. The car was delivered before I came to Austin and my wife signed off the delivery. She didn't notice a damage on the car body and, most surprisingly, as I found out later, the driver modified the original bill of lading by adding the new damage to it, and had my wife signed off on it! I would never imagine the driver would do that because he looked really nice when he picked up the car. It is not a big dent damage but the rear-right body (just above the taillight) was knocked down a bit and is now mis-aligned with the trunk lid.
I'm currently filing a claim with the car mover. The lady at the car mover's office was not nice, either. She didn't believe her driver would have done that even after I told her the dent damage was not on the initial bill of lading. She thought I was lying because she has the final bill of lading signed off by my wife, showing the dent damage right at the location I described to her on the phone. I hope their claim department is nicer to deal with. In any case, I would never use their service again
Also this experience suggests that you should always have your orginal bill of lading with you at delivery time. For my case, I could have faxed a copy to my wife before she got the delivery. I don't really want to be in a bad mood because of this - I'm writing it down in hope of forgetting about it ...
KDD 2007
I attended this year's ACM KDD conference from 8/12-8/16. This is the first time I went to the conference even though I've been working on data mining for years. I attended IEEE ICDM and SIAM ICDM before.
I like it this year in general. However, like in other similar conferences, I only found several interesting presentations and the rest kind of boring. On sunday I found Pedro Domingos's tutorial on Markov Logic Netowrks to be interesting and informative. I like the invited talks given by Usama Fayyad and Chris Anderson. The video recordings of many of these talks are actually available on videolectures.net. In terms of technical papers, I found the best paper award winners (and runners-up) to be very good. The industry track was in parallel and arranged in a room that is on a differen floor as the other sessions. I didn't find time to go any of the industrial track sessions. The best thing I like is, of course, to meet with lots of friends, colleagues, and renowned data mining researchers from all over the world.
As usual, a lot of companies were there making a presence and hiring people. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, SAS, Oracle, SPSS, Fair Isaac, etc.
A cancellation experience with TrendTradingCoaching
I had a really bad experience when trying to cancel my enrollment in TrendTradingCoaching classes yesterday. I signed up their classes on Saturday and was told there is a 3-day cancellation period. I thought about it over the weekend and decided to cancel on Monday. The phone conversations I had on Monday turned really ugly when these guys tried and failed to change my mind about cancelation. They lost their cool and tried to make me feel bad by calling me a quitter, a lier, a person not able to keep my word, a person wasting their time - oh, how pathetic these guys are - on one hand, they claim they don't care about my tuition because they are a multi-million-dollar company; on the other hand, they are doing everything they can trying to keep my commitment. The way I think about it: I bought your product. You have a three-day return policy. I decided to return it within three days. It is ok that they advise me not to return but nothing justifies their using bad words when I didn't take their advice.
I don't necessarily claim that their classes are bad because I haven't taken any. I do feel they sounded very unprofessional and a little desperate when trying to get me to change my mind about the cancellation.
The sign-up on Saturday was also quite an experience for me. In case you are curious, trendtradingcoaching.com offers classes to teach/coach you on trading stocks/options/etc. Their salesman called me first - I have to say that he did a fantastic job because for a long time I didn't realize he is trying to sell me something. For a long time, I was under the impression that he is playing some kind of a talent acquisition role, helping the company to identify smart and dedicated people to be trained by their trading strategies with the sole purpose of generating success stories for their company. Of course I wanted to show that I am smart and very competent - I never thought I needed to pay tuition if they are looking for talents to help them :). I was too excited to get out of that even though later on he mentioned tuition - he used a different word "investment", of course it takes investment to make money - it made so much sense to me on Saturday. And he said they guarantee I would gain at least twice the investment amount. I should have noticed that it is too good to be true; but I was too excited to examine the guarantee, which turned out to be a cheating way of stating their real performance guarantee (they will continue teaching and coaching you until you gain twice the amount of your investment/tuition :) I'm sure I will get that as long as I have enough time.
Now I feel fortunate I got out of it, especially after these guys giving me a very hard time on the phone during the cancelation process. I know I was a little stupid on Saturday. I learned a lession and I would be happy if this story is of any help to anyone who happens to be reading my ramble here. Finally, I can't help wondering why the cancellation process can't be made a lot easier - like returning a product to a supermarket?
Smart Google Search
Recently I observed that when I search for my Chinese name "钟湜" on Google, the first search result returned is my English home page http://shi-zhong.com. On my home page, "钟湜" never appears anywhere. I wonder how Google search engine made such a connection. It is amazing to me if it is automatically discovered. Or am I missing something obvious here?
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