Amazing 11 year old girl singing

The voice is unbelieveable!

Amazing 11 year old girl singing
Or download it straight from here.

You think you're thinking by yourself?!

I read an article recommended by an old friend titled
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION: WHY AMERICANS WILL BELIEVE ALMOST ANYTHING by Tim O'Shea.
It's quite a long article but I learnt a lot from it. It discusses about how the mass media and our everyday life perception are largely products of PR-industry to create a public perception about some idea or product. I include some parts of the article that I found worth thinking seriously about:

The father of Spin -- Edward Bernays who described

the public is a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people "susceptible to leadership." Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to "control the masses without their knowing it." The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.

In Bernays' Propaganda:

"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

A tad different from Thomas Jefferson's view on the subject:

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

It also talks about how scientific research are controlled by big corporations.

JUNK SCIENCE

In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The book was Galileo's Revenge and the term was junk science . Huber's shallow thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress. Anything else was suddenly junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber's book was supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.

Huber's book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because they do not yet know what the truth is.

True scientific method goes like this:

1. form a hypothesis
2. make predictions for that hypothesis
3. test the predictions
4. reject or revise the hypothesis based on the research findings

THE REAL JUNK SCIENCE

Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science. Corporate sponsored research, whether it's in the area of drugs, GM foods, or chemistry begins with predetermined conclusions. It is the job of the scientists then to prove that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit. If a drug company is spending 10 million dollars on a research project to prove the viability of some new drug, and the preliminary results start coming back about the dangers of that drug, what happens? Right. No more funding. The well dries up. What is being promoted under such a system? Science? Or rather Entrenched Medical Error?"

THE TWO MAIN TARGETS OF "SOUND SCIENCE"
It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR today opposes any research that seeks to protect
* public health
* the environment

A lot of the claims are cited on
Stauber & Rampton, "Trust Us, We're Experts", Tarcher/Putnam 2001

It shall be a good enlightening read too.

Bloody Zone Alarm!!

Last night, when I turned on my computer, there was a little reminder that a new version of Zone Alarm is available and asked if I wanted to update it. So I did the usual thing, no problem, update it since ZA has been a great firewall for me.

But it turned out to be a disaster that took me 4 hours to revert and still didn't know why!

The update didn't work, and somehow I have no permission to either run it or kill it! And it blocked out my internet!!! Then it's a long series of search on internet after uninstalling it.

Then re-downloaded it, re-installed it, reboot, didn't work, clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-installed it, reboot, still didn't work, tried again re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still bloody didn't work, re-re-clean-uninstalled it, found more detail information, follow some lengthy instructions, cleaned registry, deleted files, reboot into safe mode, deleted more files, reboot into normal mode, re-re-downloaded it, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still freaking didn't work!!!

At my despair, I decided to not use it any more. So I re-re-re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, and with the guts feeling of having messed around with the I decided to do a system restore back to before all these mess.

So I did a system restore back to Thursday, another reboot and to my astonishment, the little [Z|A] icon showed up on my system tray! So back to square one, with 4 hours of hope and frustration well rewarded...

What firewall do you use? Is there an alternative to the free and yet powerful ZoneAlarm? Hope it doesn't give me problem anymore....


Oh, a side story. When I was panicking about the firewall being turned off for update and eventually malfunction, I was simultaneously checking on other things on the net. And one of them was the online Chinese radio from Malaysia - WAONLINE, and somehow their frontpage got hacked (http://www.waonline.com.my) see hacked screenshot here. But I wasn't sure and thought could it be my firefox got hijacked!! And had a good paranoid!


I'm glad that the disaster is over. :```)

Super Deformed on Planet OneTwenty

Yesterday, I blogged about Onetwenty picked up the Horatio feed, today, there's a new look on
Planet OneTwenty with the super deformed cartoon shape of the bloggers. Haha! Those cute avatars I made for the 60Hz home made game GOMM are just so funny! Thanks for the cooperation from everyone who posed for it. :D

Planet onetwenty is fast!

Soon after I blogged about Horatio's hilarious blog, planet onetwenty picked it up and it's now included in their feeds. Good job Jim!

Another nice combination

I missed this one today. Well, take the pm off, there's another chance soon.

07:06:07 06/07/06

Another fun date will come in 3 days

This time it's better for those who don't wake up early.

11:10:09 08/07/06

But it's not as elegent as several beautiful date-time combination that happened in the past couple of months.

01:02:03   04/05/06
06:06:06   06/06/06
  20:06   20/06/2006

Horatio invades the virtual space

The super Horatio figure that used to fly around CS in my early years here is invading the virtual space now. Of course, it's from its original creator, the almighty Danno!

He's also trying to confuse my possible internet fans with this very similar URL:
http://tzu-yen.blogspot.com/

I took a screenshot of that page at 15:00WST 04/07/2006 for archiving purpose.


I like this joke. Good one Danno!

Hoax and untrue forwarded emails

Some of my friends like to forward emails they received and found interesting or alarming or attractive or fun, etc. to me, like many of you who has an email address and some friends. :P

Some of those emails are alarming health advices like "you eat prawn and vitamin C together, YOU DIE!";
some really touches me to help like "For each email forwarded, some companies or foundation will donate 2cents to this very cute and nice but badly ill kid";
or very attractive one which I'd want to get like "Send this email out to this email address and 20 people to receive a free PSP!!";
some require immediate action to avoid disastrous consequences like
"Yahoo will close your account if you don't send this to 20 people to let them know you're an active user.".

There are many other variations. I used to struggle to whether believe it, believe my friend on it to avoid missing out or being a cold hearted deadwood. But thanks to the search engine, and Google is my friend on this. Recently I'd just copy a big chunk of the text in the email and search it on google, when I verified that it's not true in less than 5 minutes, I'd email back the person who forwarded that to me and let him/her know about it as well.

The followings are what I wrote on several different cases. I just copy and paste them here. Save me typing them and paraphrasing them again. Reading back these email I sent out, I think I was rather frustrated at times and was not very courteous on my words. Hope it doesn't offend you. :P

Hi there,
Good to hear from you. And I enjoy some good email attachments from time to time. However, I shall let you know that a lot of the email floating around internet are purely rubbish created by jokers, like this one unfortunately. So I copy a paragraph from a page I get after google about some text from this email:

source:
http://www.joewein.net/hoax/hoax-make-a-wish.htm

Whenever you receive an email that urges you to immediately forward that mail to everyone you know, there is a very good chance the email is a hoax. Please take the time to verify the message by doing a Google search before you send it on to anyone else. In most cases when you take an arbitrary sentence from the message and google for it you'll end up with many hoax warning pages as the result.

The following email is one such hoax. It says the Make A Wish Foundation will donate seven cents toward the medical bills of a child dying from cancer for every address you forward this email to. This is completely fake. Amy Bruce does not exist. Please forward the URL of this page to teh person who sent you this email.

The Foundation has made no promise of donating money for forwarded emails because it has no way of knowing if or how many times anyone forwards any email. Whoever came up with this sick joke is taking advantage of the good will of helpful people. The story pushes all the right buttons: A sick, innocent child, the double victim of abuse and cancer. Yet it's all a lie. This hoax has been around since 1999 and is documented as a hoax on several websites.

More details on:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/medical/cancer.asp

Make a wish foundation denying that they had anything to do with this e-mail:
http://www.wish.org/home/chainletters.htm


Please send this to the people you send this email to, and get this email from. Let's stop rubbish on internet/email and keep the good ones alive.

Take care.

Hi, K,

Google and snopes.com is your friend for this one.

Just copy a big chunk of the original text into google and search for it. And chances are you'll get something in snopes.com telling you whether it's true or false with sensible reasonings.

This is what I did, I copy this whole chunk of text
"Dear YAHOO User, Because of the sudden rush of people signing up to YAHOO, it has come to our attention that we are vastly running out of resources. So, within a month's time,anyone" and put it into google.

Google link

Then the first one come out to be from snopes.com :
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/overload.asp

Read it and be happy for becoming wiser over internet hoaxes. :)

Thanks for sharing the alert, I did a search in Google for "prawn" and "Vitamin C", and these are the top hits:

http://www.snopes.com/toxins/shrimp.htm
http://breakthechain.org/exclusives/prawns.html
http://www.bighoaxes.com/hoaxe_6_380.html
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/v/vitaminshrimp.htm


Who do I trust? To eat or not to eat?
A responsible 'broadcaster' of important information should really includes his/her contact for careful/skeptical readers to verify the source.

Hi guys,

I personally think Sony will not do such unbounded giveaways. But I still wish it to be true, so I did a search on google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sonyworld+free+psp

And unfortunately, my guess was right. See the links:
http://www.playstation.com.au/news/pspemailhoax.jhtml
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/sonypsp.asp

I guess the dangerous part of this kind of emails is that the pspgiveaway@sonyworld.com email address you have to send to to get the goodies might be a spammer's fishing net. So when people forward to their friends hoping to get the goodies and hoping their friends can get the goodies too, the real "goodies" can turn out to be more spams, as the spammers now have your email address!!

Anyway, keep the email flowings. At least this hoax keeps us in touch. Haha! Have a wonderful day!

I'm not a KFC supporter. And they could be using Genetically
Engineered sources as their supply, (think about it, chicken used to
take 9 months to mature, now only 21 days?!! How on earth could that
be natural!!) but I would still want people to know that this article
is another internet Hoax!

do a search on google with the words University+of+New+Hampshire+kfc
Google link

Or go straight here to Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.asp

Here's a short extract from the site:

# Links on KFC's web site (such as the About KFC page clearly
describe its product as "chicken" numerous times, something it could
hardly get away with if the government were prohibiting the company
from using that word. And the KFC web site can also be reached through
the domain name kentuckyfriedchicken.com.
.........

Send this back to those who sent to you lah. Stop all these crap, this
is not the right way to bring down KFC.

Last minute heartbroken!

The Australian Socceroo played so well vs Italian in the match. And with one red card to the Italian, Socceroo has 11 players against Italian's 10. There were many good opportunities for Australian to score especially in the second half!

At the very last minute, Italian is awarded with a penalty, which didn't really seem very justifying with what happened in my biased and ignorant opinion, and it was a goal!!!!!

What a anticlimax way to lose the match for Australia! The world cup is over for Aussies. :- (

My housemate is very upset and her MSN becomes:
"suddenly the World Cup is meaningless - WTH!! penalty shot for Italy, bloody unfair!!!"

Haha! Well, I don't think I'll stay up late to watch the soccer anymore until probably the final. Hopefully I won't dream of that disheartening penalty tonight....

Work at Home Scam

Email spams are getting rather out of control lately. I get several of those spams into my uni inbox everyday, slipped through the department spam filter.

I got another one today and since it's Saturday morning and I'm rather happy, I check it out and see what kind of crap these spammers actually offers besides viagra.

So I copy the link and paste it into my firefox browser.

Everything on that website sounds pretty sensible. Like they are offering real job for people living in Australia with a valid bank account to work for them as a payment processing manager, and get 10% commission for each transaction, not bad at all! Sounded too good to be true to me, so I googled it and found this website:

Work at Home Scam: The check or funds processing business and how to analyze a check/funds processing scam letter:

"Never, ever, EVER cash a check for a stranger.
Never, ever, EVER accept any funds on behalf of someone else. Period.
Never, ever, EVER accept funds from one party and send them off to another. That is money laundering.

By accepting funds on behalf of another party you are taking full, legal, and responsible possession of those funds. Are you sure this is the kind of business you want to engage in with a complete stranger thousands of miles away?"

A good read and have me staying alert on internet scams! By the way, I include the website from the email for your reading pleasure:
http://www.bestfast-job.com/

What is your Perfect Major?

You scored as Psychology. You should be a Psychology major! Psychology 92% Philosophy 83% Anthropology 75% Engineering 75% Sociology 75% Mathematics 67% Art 67% Theater 67% Dance 42% Biology 42% English 42% Journalism 33% Chemistry 25% Linguistics 17% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!) created with QuizFarm.com

David China holiday

My housemate David went back to China today. I sent him to airport in the morning after getting the apple struddel. In his absence for the next 30 days, these photos shall remind me of him.






Talking about these photos, they were taken using the PhotoBooth program on Apple iMac. The new Apple computers are such beautiful piece of work. It comes with a built-in camera on top of the LCD screen. Hmm... screen... it looks like a screen but it's actually the whole computer with DVD burner on the side of the 'screen' and the whole CPU in the 'screen'. The mouse and keyboard are just as elegent. Oh, it also has a remote control for music!!
And the interface on is also so cleanly beautiful.

Oh, back to the PhotoBooth program, it has real time effect built in (to the hardware I think), so all these shape change and pencil effects are rendered in real time!
If not because it costs ~$2000, I'll get one.

Morphing Out of Identity Politics: Black or White and Terminator 2

I'm going to give a demo talk to some gifted children with other CSSE people on Thursday. So I was searching for interesting demo to raise interests on the kids and I found this nice piece of article about image morphing and film making from a American literature researcher's point of view.

Bad Morphing Out of Identity Politics: Black or White and Terminator 2 by Ron Alcalay

Automatic Photo Pop-up by CMU group

Stumbled upon this press release through Engadget.

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive Three Dimensions in 2-D Images

They even have Matlab code available on their Automatic Photo Pop-up page. Sure to try it out sometimes.

The paper:
D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, "Automatic Photo Pop-up", ACM SIGGRAPH 2005.

iCalendar Plugin for Outlook

I was searching for an alexking.org: Blog > iCalendar Plugin for Outlook? so I can "subscribe" to my google calender from Outlook instead of "import" it.
Somehow Mozilla Sunbird does not work on my machine. And I was thinking ahead on getting a new mobile phone which can synchronise with my calander on PC. And more would support Outlook I thought...

Found Remote Calendars which claims to do the job. The installation is a bit of a pain. Need to download the bulky .NET Framework 2.0 and its installation took a long time too (~10mins).

And eventually, I found out that it needs Office 2003 to run, and I have a Office XP which is 2002! Crap! Wasted my time.
There's another way that involves signing up to a third party website to read the iCal and it has a program to sync with Outlook but need to connect to their server... Too many sign up to do, I'm not that desperate yet.

EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA

Found a blog on EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA.

Lots of 06 this morning

Did you missed it this morning to see this on your digital clock?

06:06:06 06/06/06

Bob in my lab said: "Orh! I missed it, but I don't miss it."

AMWA Agung's trophy GOlf Tournament

I was flat out over the weekends helping out in the AMWA golf event. It was tiring, but it was a great success, so we were all pleased.

The golfing ground is in Mandurah, at Meadow Spring Golf and Country Club. It's about 45mins drive from Perth.

Saturday morning, we went there to put the prizes and goody bags together. Terry, Nirmaljit and Peter got a lot of sponsors. Tourism Malaysia provided the bag, inside there are AMWA cap, Gatorade drink, spring water, chocolate, nougat, pen and even curry sauce! So every golfer gets a goody bag.
Besides that every golfer gets a prize ranging from golf bag plus some dinner vouchers worth $500 for first place to toaster, umbrella, heater, wine, t-shirt, etc. for the not so pro.
The lucky draw was impressive too with MAS KL return ticket and many free hotel stays and dinner vouchers.
For me, I didn't play golf, and I didn't get the raffle tickets. But I got a beautiful tourism Malaysia writing notebook and pen, and AMWA cap and T-shirt. Happy.

The packing was quite quick as we had a more than 10 people from AMWA helping up. When that was done, we came back to Perth and was just in time to go to the Agung birthday celebration organised by the Malaysia consulate. It was at the Technopark in Curtin. Good food with some cultural performance. I met an old tassie friend Alvin there and caught up with some chat, some bad news and some good news...

Then Sunday is the actual golf day. It was scheduled to tee-off at 9am. Registration at 8am. We need to get there by 7:30am. So, I met up with Jackson, our treasurer who will drive down at 6:30am. So I had to leave home at 6am to get to the meeting place!!! It was early for me, even though I've started a healthy lifestyle change recently to sleep at 11pm every day.
Anyway, we got there in time and the event started off quite smoothly, except that we forgot to take a group photo before the golfers rushed off to teir game. I was the photographer for the day, so I guess I could have taken a more active role to make sure the group photo would happen. Note taken.
I wasn't assigned any position except for taking photos. But my two sets of batteries still failed me!! One set go flat before we even started, so I put in the other fully charged set, and took the flat set to charge. Within 30 photos, the battery light started flashing again?!! It was fully charged, about a week ago and I didn't expect it to depleted that soon. But anyway, I had to ask Jackson to drive me out to the town to get a set of normal AA battery.
It was good because he need to buy some raffle tickets too, and we had to wait for 20mins for Coles to open. So we had some free time there to grab some brekky. I had a turkish bread from Baker's Delight. It was so so delicious!! :a

When we got back, there were some rice dumplings there made by Shirley, the wife of AMWA vice president. That dumplings fed my desire for it since dragonboat festival a week ago. Then it came the interesting part of the day, we set off to the greens on an electric-powered golf buggy. I was stationed at hole 11 (par 3) where we had a $10 bull's eye competition. I was there to check if anyone's ball landed within 1.5m around the hole. If that happens the person will win the pool of money. So I was there checking, taking photos, cheering and chatting with the golfers as well as playing with the cool buggy.

That was about the exciting part of the day. Later we had lunch there and the prize giving. Lunch wasn't too fantastic, it was only ok. The guitarist/singer/amcee Scott Quak was legendary! He sings pretty well, plays the guitar and have a great sense of humour. When we were waiting for the final scoring, he was cracking jokes non-stop for more than 15mins, one followed by another! Amazing. And the crowd responded with tearful laughters.

The whole event concluded at about 5pm due to the scoring delay. I can't belief they don't have computer program to calculate the score. Anyway, I was pretty exhausted by the end of it. Jackson drove me back to our meeting place. It was dark again when I reach home.
My housemate was considerate enough to spare me from cooking dinner. So we went out to a vietnamese restaurant on Roe street for dinner. I had a raw beef Pho, and it was very satisfying. Dead tired though.

The photos of the day are up at AMWA website.
.

Google has an office in Sydney

Official Google Blog: On the map Down Under

It'd be nice to work there, wouldn't it?

However, what prompted me to blog this was the fact that the photo on that page is a .gif file!! You would expect Googler to know ".png is better than .gif", and "use jpeg for photos" rules of thumb, wouldn't you?