All We Want Is …

Good morning everyone! Today, in the afternoon my mum and sister will arrive in Singapore! Whoaaa.. soo exciting!
For them, it is the first time here.. I stayed over at my girlfriends place last night.. as is was soooo late.
I reinstalled their computer due to a unmountable boot volume error.. very nice.
Tried everything (recovery console, ASR, Windows Setup) but I guess a new installation was the only option in the end.

I woke up with a very strange feeling.. a different feeling of happiness. I thought back at the time Ron and I went all the way to Ireland to see a Sarah McLachlan concert. I guess I woke up in the same fresh air I did then when I was there. I slept with my window open.. and even on the ninth floor it is quite refreshing.

Ron is a good friend of mine, when I first joint the housing company before Sun Microsystems, he was a manager there. Just by accident I found out that he was a huge fan of Sarah Mclachlan. That was a big surprise as she wasn’t that popular in Holland.
Anyway.. we are still very good friends and I hope to see him again soon. We have a lot in common.

Next to song choice, our love for good food and Singapore are just a few of them. I would like to share one song (Fear) that is one of the most beautiful and memorable songs during my trip to Ireland. It is the “live” version I recorded from her DVD. Amazing how she sounds like live.
Just to share a bit more.. Ron and I had superB seats first row right in the middle in The Point Ireland, Ireland’s premiere music venue in Dublin.

I construe the song to be one about not believing in yourself and being scared at the beginning of each new relationship, be it a friendship or a romantic involvement. The opening lines of the song say to me that because this person has entered your life, you wake up each morning with a new found craving for life, that you feel so at home and at peace when you’re around this person, yet there is something that is holding you back. I make it out to say “Yes, I would love to dive head-first into a relationship with you but I’m so scared that I will somehow manage to screw it up and/or get my heart broken.” It’s almost as if you can see yourself falling under this person’s spell so to speak and half of you wants to say “Yes” and the other half of you doesn’t know what to do because you don’t think you have anything to offer them.

Everyone is vulnerable in the start of each new relationship. You are in essence that flower trembling on the vine. You have the potential to bloom, but the wind, like relationships can be harsh and may prevent you from blossoming into what you really are. I know that I personally have feelings of being scared that I won’t be everything that my girlfriend or my friends want or need. This song describes for me that feeling of “What if I don’t live up to their expectations? What if I give my heart innocently and it gets trampled on?”

Despite all of that, I think we could all learn a thing or two from this song. When you fall in love, submerse yourself in it. Finding and keeping friends that you can count on and trust 100 percent are few and far between, but when you do find them, love them with your whole heart. Just don’t forget that you can’t take on the world alone. You’re going to need some support and try not to be afraid when it comes along. When you find yourself in a new relationship, just lay back and enjoy the ride. Focus on what you want with your relationship instead of fearing it might not work out.

8:32.. better get ready.. get back to my place and ready up the room for my mum and my lovely sis.

Bye all and blog you soon!

~ His ramblings

The Death of Expertise

Sep 13th 2007
From The Economist print edition

EVERY time a world-class chess player loses to a computer, humans die a little. In this book Ian Ayres, a professor of law and management at Yale University, explains how in many less high-profile endeavours, human intuition and flair are more easily beaten. The sheer quantity of data and the computer power now available make it possible for automated processes to surpass human experts in fields as diverse as rating wines, writing film dialogue and choosing titles for books.

The author originally intended to call his book “The end of intuition”. He changed his mind after a Google AdWords campaign which randomly chose which of two advertisements for the book to display: “Super Crunchers” garnered 63% more clicks than his original choice. He tells of credit card companies that are using similar randomised trials to see which combination of offers and advertising make for the most successful mailshots.

Even the occasional government is accepting that properly analysed data trump ideological conviction. Mr Ayres sings the praises of Mexico’s Progresa/Oportunidades programme, which gave assistance to poor people only if their children attended health clinics and schools. It was tried out on 506 randomly selected villages. The results were so convincing that the programme was expanded 100-fold despite a change of government.

Mr Ayres predicts that automated decision-making will soon see other professional jobs going the same way as that of the bank-loan officer, once well-paid and responsible and now a mere call-centre operative, paid peanuts to parrot the words a computer prompts. Doctors will have to face up to the fact that computers can diagnose illnesses better than they can, and teachers will find that although their presence is needed to engage their pupils, their professional judgment often is not. When teaching small children to read, for example, tightly scripted lessons, their exact content and timing honed by randomised trials, do best.

This book does not touch on what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “Black Swans”: rare events that are unpredictable with or without crunching numbers. But it presents a convincing and disturbing vision of a future in which everyday decision-making is increasingly automated, and the role of human judgment restricted to providing input to formulae.

~ His ramblings