Money Money Making Money!!!

I very appreciate the fact that Uncle Sam is never shy of speaking what is going on in his mind. And, after ignoring my confession little tree (this blogspot that you are reading) after all the changes discoveries that I have been experienced during the past months, I finally got a moment to sit down on a comfortable sofa with my ThinkPad sitting on top of my leg in an sunny afternoon in northern California.

What I've been up to? Studying hard at Emory and doing a summer intern at Google Mountain View campus for the 2010 summer. There has been great free food (I'm not using fantastic cuz the food does not differ too significantly from Emory/Yale dinning hall that I have been to) and decent pay (I'm not using fantastic again cuz Facebook is paying more, and Microsoft is giving interns free Windows 7 Phone while Google interns do not go home with any Android).

But the people there is simply AMAZING. As a intern in the economics team I got free access to a group of super-smart people, including the chief economist Hal Varian (who cost you ~$30 to have group breakfast/lunch with in Joint Statistical Meeting 2010). And reading industry news every evening, both inside and outside of the company, talking about them over lunch with the people, and going back inspired is just a very pleasant schedule embedded in the laid-back Californian work life.

Another thing I found is that internally Google is never shy of talking about making money. Just consider the $23B dollar advertisement business revenue in 2009 (if I remember the number correctly), and the mammoth size of searches going through the big big data centers ... hoho ... just now I re-visited my blogger controller panel and found it very convenient to set up the AdSense account to put advertisement on my Blog Spot. haha, I'm gonna post more blogs in the future to make money from my posts :)

Some random evil thoughts

Assuming that the artificial intelligence like Wolfram Alpha continues to evolve, and that the goal of Google is to provide information for the people around the world, there should be one day that arbitrary question can get answered by search query from Google. Then this will signify the extinction of consulting firms like BCG or McKinsey.

However, the consulting firms are providing information for money, big big big money. So should Google provide all kinds of information for free? And is charging money for information evil? Or is giving part of information for free and charging money for some higher-level information evil? Hmmmm

Mass Production: Happiness

Li Lei finishes dinner with his wife, Han Meimei.

They look out of their dinning room. It's the sky rocketing theme of
terraced residential buildings in suburban area of an ordinary Chinese
city, a major sign of middle class youth of their generation. The
couple, both of whom starred in the country's early edition of English
textbooks, are now working for a state news agency with nice pay check
and fabulous bonus. Now they have it all: job, family, and house.

The state media has been successfully imbuing them with the ultimate
goal of pursuing "good". They say that when GDP shoots up, and the
firework of Olympic game goes out, it's the exemplification of
happiness. They say that when you have a better-off life compared with
the past in WWII, you should be, and should naturally be, happy.
However, they do not specify what happiness is. They also hide away
the price tag of the current happiness, just like what they did to
Sichuan earth quake and tainted milk report in 2008.

On the other side, the down payment to the Li couple's RMB 1,600,000
(approx. USD 200,000) condo was covered by both parties of their
parents. The economists in Beijing are busy comparing the real estate
price with Fifth Avenue at downtown New York, even if the residents
are half an earth, geographically and economically, away from Wall
Street. Deprived of any form of material enjoyment during the Cultural
Revolution, their parents are determined to maximumly ensure the
happiness of their children. Thus contributing their life-long saving
to a condo where their children live, is absolutely justified.

Meanwhile, their children are having children. Li Lei holds his son Li
Maidou while Han Meimei pushes the baby cart into elevator. Downstairs
they are greeted by tens of other children of similar age who are also
born and grown up in the community. Carefully watching the children
and gently talking with each other are their parents, who either hold
high position in Fortune 500 firms or local governments. Yes, they
believe that every investment in their life comes with a return, just
like every product comes with a profit. They plan to give the best
toys manufactured in Wenzhou, send them to the best local schools,
later Ivy Leagues in the US, and guarantee the happiness of their
children, like their parents did, in a mass production way.

Why Chinese house price is (and is going to be) rising -- A trader's perspective

It dawned on me that the Chinese stock market together with real
estates are 100% insider market these days after I invested a little
bit of my money in the US stock market. While the globe is suffering
from economic setback these days, the Chinese house price is
continuing its rocketing process and shot up another couple of miles
in the sky. Prohibition of shorting stocks, from my point of view, is
one of the major reason that Chinese house price keeps its ridiculous
price.

The math is simple. In the United States people can short stocks whose
prospective trend is pessimistic. This gives outsiders an opportunity
to speak their mind inside of the market. For example, when the
majority of people think of the house price as too high, they can
short sell the stocks of the real estate companies. The companies,
with their stock prices down and debt holders asserting pressure on
the management, thus have to lower their prices in order to gain cash
to pay the debt back.

However, the Chinese administrators (I'm not pointing to either
government or any regulators, since I'm not quite familiar with the
administration structure) do not allow shorting of the stocks in the
Chinese stock market, saying that this will "prevent irregular market
movement and preserve the stability of social order". This Mao era
ideology thus prevented the outsiders from interfering with the real
estate market, simply because those who hold possession of houses or
real estate stocks are the ones who hold optimistic view about the
market's future.

With the dissidents deprived of their possibility to speak their mind
within the market, they are exiled to the Internet to express their
opinion. However, tightened censorship and governmental interference
on the media is further stiffening the voice from ordinary people.
It's really sad for me to think of my friends working hard for their
life to pay a pigeon hole in Shanghai. They have to pray for a good
health and stable family income for the whole lifetime. That's sad,
really sad.

Some reminiscence about graduate school admission

I received admissions notification without financial support from
biostat at UNC Chapel Hill in the middle of January, 2008. And one
month later on Valentines' Day I got admissions offer with very
attractive financial support from Emory biostatistics. It took me a
long time to agonize the choice between Emory and UNC (Here I
intentionally forget biostatistics at Ann Arbor, which did not gave me
financial support until April 15).

The bios department of the state university at North Carolina seems to
have higher rank, broader alumni network, and huger size compared with
Emory biostat, a mid-size department in a private university at
Atlanta. However, while my resume was competent enough even among
master students to receive admission from both institutions, the PIs
of the poor state university seemed quite reluctant to provide any
form of financial support to me, an international student who was
about to get his bachelor's degree. I wrote passionate letters to the
professors at Chapel Hill in search of any forms of financial support.
But the replies, if any, where nothing more than cold. "I have no
funding for you" (and that's all) was one of the replies. And the
staff in charge of admission never replied my email or picked up the
phone. Emory, in contrast, gave me responsive replies whenever I shot
an email. I could clearly see from the interviews that both faculty
members and staff of the Atlanta based private school showed very
strong consideration for their students.

Finally I made up the idea that I should be going to a place where
people care about each other. And then here I am, happy, active, and
passionate at Emory. I fulfilled my dream of owning a car just a
couple of weeks ago, when my public school friends at UNC bios are
wondering how they are going to pay the state tuition at their forth
year of graduate study. It surprised me a lot when I discovered today
that a current classmate of mine had similar experience. We both came
to Emory, sound and happy.

In retrospect I recalled how aggressive I used to be as an undergrad.
I was determined to go to the top universities and publish on the most
influential journals. However, I've changed during the whole process.
I realized my need for care, respect, and interaction with community.
We the graduate students, finally, are human. We deserve the
attention, respect, and enjoyment of life as ordinary people.

Not so much increase in parallel performance

A few days ago I was celebrating the dramatic improvement of computing
performance using "snow" package in R.
(http://somerandomwalksofmind.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-first-parallel-program.html).
But later when I posted the question on R mailing list
(http://www.r-project.org/mail.html), some people pointed out that in
fact I did not such more-than-doubling improvement in performance.

The trick, according to Stefan Evert
(http://www.nabble.com/More-than-doubling-performance-with-snow-td20654005.html),
is to look at the elapsed time in the system.time() output. In that
case the boost in speed is not so large. For example:

> library(snow)
>
> cc <- makePVMcluster(2)
>
> n.size <- 1000
>
> temp <- NULL
> for(i in 1:10){
+ x <- list(matrix(rnorm(n.size^2),n.size))
+ temp <- c(temp,x)
+ }
>
> system.time(t.1 <- clusterApply(cc,temp,"solve"))
user system elapsed
2.980 0.548 21.909
> system.time(t.2 <- lapply(temp,"solve"))
user system elapsed
24.290 0.636 25.058

So to further gain increase in execution in speed using snow I may
have to have a computer with many cores (much more than my current duo
core laptop).

My first parallel program

My new laptop computer is a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 with Intel Core 2 Duo
processor. And I'm naturally seduced to do some experiment on parallel
programming. The result is far more than exciting. I tried the
following program:

library(snow)
cc <- makePVMcluster(2)
n.loop <- 10
n.size <- 1000
temp <- NULL
for(i in 1:n.loop){
x <- list(matrix(rnorm(n.size^2),n.size))
temp <- c(temp,x)
}

system.time(t.1 <- clusterApply(cc,temp,"solve"))
system.time(t.2 <- sapply(temp,"solve"))

The serial program took 23.9 seconds while the parallel one took only
3.0 seconds. That's more than double the performance!

Then I n.loop to 100 and n.size to 100. This time serial processing
outperformed parallel processing.

I guess this is a result of the trade-off between parallel
communication and computational time. When computational task is
relatively heavy, the time spent on communicating between processing
units are relatively insignificant. Thus the parallel method works
better. When the computational task is light, more time is wasted
sending messages. And the parallel way takes more time.