Random Thoughts

My previous post on saving paper and ink/toner using the Aardvark Add-on on Firefox has inspired me to seek other topics on efficiency. This post advocates the client-side blocking of ads on the web as a way of being less wasteful with internet bandwidth. I feel slightly guilty about this because a lot of the free content on the internet is supported by ad revenues, and users blocking those ads might deny access to those revenues for the providers of the free content. However, if you are like me and you almost never pay attention to or click on any ads, then you are probably doing no damage. How do I know what to block? I looked through my Firefox cookies and did a search for 'ad'. I would then selectively block those domains. You can block the ad servers locally on your computer, for example suing 'iptables' in Linux or Network Magic in Windows, or for your whole network through whatever interface you have. In my case, the easiest thing was to configure my...

I am sure you are tired of printing garbage like ads and someone else's colorful artwork while all you wanted was have a hard-copy of some clean text and graphics. If you are a Mozilla Firefox user, there is a solution that can save you lot of paper and ink/toner. It is a Firefox add-on called Aardvark , and it allows you to selectively remove sections of a web page before sending it to a printer. Here is a little synopsis : Powerful and user-friendly utility for selecting elements and doing various actions on them. It can be used for cleaning up a page prior to printing it (by removing and isolating elements), for making the page more readable, and (most appreciated by web developers), for analyzing the structure of a page. To use Aardvark , just right-click on the page and select from the popup menu. As you move the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle around the current block element, along with a label showing its type, and if they exist, its id, class, and styl...

Not too many stories resonate with me as much as the plight of legitimate asylum seekers whose desperate plea to find refuge in the US is ultimately decided by the questionable preference, judgment and mood of a single asylum officer (with some oversight from a regional asylum director) on one fateful day. That decision, according to numerous credible and through studies, depends largely on the location of the regional asylum center, the legal representation of the the applicant, the gender of the asylum officer just as much as the merit of the asylum case, while in fact the legitimacy of the asylum case should be the only relevant factor. This phenomenon has become so real that researchers at the Georgetown University law school have dubbed it the Refugee Roulette . Why am I so sensitive about this subject? My most devastating tragedy of late has been the denial of my legitimate and honest application for political asylum at the Chicago Asylum Office. When I applied believing the ...

These days, a lot of content on the internet as well as other media is being provided for free with the belief/understanding that revenues from advertising will cover the cost for producing and disseminating the content. That led me to wonder about how much money is really in advertising to sustain the media industry. As usual, I did a quick search on " advertising cost " and " advertising GDP " ... etc and came up with a wealth of information. Let me start by answering question "how much money is there in online advertising?" According to the all-knowing Wikipedia , advertising as a % of GDP is about 2.2% (~$250-$300 billion) in 2007. The number we are most interested in is online advertising revenue which was about $21 billion in 2007, according to a TD Pricewaterhouse report. Google by itself claims to have generated $10.5 billion from advertising in 2006. So, does the other $11-15 billion pay for producing and distributing much of the free cont...

I never had much appreciation for The New York Times in the past because I didn't subscribe to their online or printed material. Now that they are providing all their content online for free , I can't say enough about how much I love and respect their work. Their articles are well-written; their content is presented in a clean format without too many ads; their servers work smoothly. The New York Times embodies journalism and presentation at its finest. I particularly enjoy their op-ed material from full-time columnists like Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman, as well as regulars like economst/journalists like Steve/Stephen Levitt/Dubner, and Austan Goolsbee. My discovery and appreciation for The New York Times is still in its infancy, but it will definitely grow as I stuff myself with all their free and rich content.

As an avid supporter of Barack Obama, I have been offended by suggestions that Obama would not have had this much success had he not been black. Even though I can't deny my bias and affinity towards him because of his race (and mine), many people as well as myself have a conviction that he is a man of great vision and intelligence who can usher this nation to greatness and credibility. The main subject of this blog is to provide some statistical basis to debunk (or support) the notion that being black is the main reason Barack Obama is the frontrunner in the 2008 democratic primaries. So, how much has race helped Obama? For that, I went looking for data about the racial constitution of the democratic electorate. I find just what I wanted here . RACE: In 2004, 70 percent of Democratic voters in these states were white, 17 percent black and 8 percent Hispanic. This year 63 percent have been white, 19 percent black and 13 percent Hispanic . Clinton has led in contests so far amon...

I have always wondered if the taxes people pay correlate with the availability of social and economic programs and safety nets, not to mention the military programs that protect them. This idea comes in light of the notion that Europeans are highly taxed compared to their American counterparts, but they seem to have access to free (or almost free) education and health care while the US provides neither. The Europeans live and work at a more leisurely pace than Americans and they have the comfort of knowing that their government has put safety nets in case a disaster. The Europeans do a lot to ensure that all their citizens have comparable opportunities, and thus you are less likely to see a huge gap between the poor and the rich. Perhaps the lack of incentive to excel has stifled entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe to some extent. In fact, Europe has historically high unemployment rates than the US and the size of government there is significantly larger than that of the US....

The detest for Bill Gates amongst elite IT workers and computer scientists in the US is quite immense and people who frequent the tech hot spots like Slashdot and Arstechnica on the Internet know of it all too well. For a real pioneer who can be credited for making the computer an integral part of our lives, such disdain is almost seems unjustified. For someone who has been one of the most magnanimous philanthropist in recent memory, his reputation as a greedy and monopolistic corporate figure is somewhat surprising. Why would people in the US dislike Bill Gates who is supposedly the person most Chinese students aspire to become ahead of Newton, Einstein ...? Why is his reputation stateside is much less glamorous? Why is he such a polarizing character? There are many reasons, including a recent realization I have come to in regards to his insistence on immigration reform to open the US up for more skilled labor from overseas. The Good: He pioneered personal computing th...