Jason's Log

YouMail.com is listening to your voice mail

I have been using the free version of the YouMail.com voice mail service for a while now, and have been happy with it. It offers much better web-based access and customizable responses than what my mobile service provider (Verizon) offers. So far, so good.

Early last week I received an email from their marketing folks encouraging me to enable the free version of their voicemail -> text translation service. The first 7 transcribed voicemail messages are free each week. It sounded like a good offer - I don't get too many voicemails anyways. The service comes with two quality level settings - good and super-mega-good. They do warn you that the super-mega-good quality option does incur a slight delay in message delivery.

I went ahead and opted for the 'super-mega-good' option, wanting to see how far computer translation technology had come recently.

When I started receiving the messages, the quality level seemed too good to be true. I was completely amazed by the detail. For example, a donation solicitation from my alma mater was transcribed as:

"Hi, my name is Laura and I'm a sofmore at Illinois Wesleyan. I'm one of more than 1,800 students who recieve financial aid so I know first hand the importance of support from alumni and friends. I see you've made donations to the university in the past and I was hoping you might give a gift again this year. Now more than ever a gift of any amount is greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and thanks in advance for your support. Have a good night."

The two things errors in the above message immediately tipped me off - the spelling of 'sophomore' as 'sofmore' and 'receive' as 'recieve'. A computerized transcription engine would be unlikely to make phonetic errors like that, I thought.

Then, after a few more, the clincher:

"Hey, Jason. It's Cathy. We just left. We are on our way to the Freeway. So, we'll probably there in about 20-25 minutes. It's about 9:40 right now. So let us know where you wanna meet. Bye"

The capitalization of the word Freeway was the give-away this time. It just smacks of an error only a human transcriptionist would make. Perhaps someone out there can prove me wrong, but as far as I can tell, YouMail.com must be using a pool of humans to listen to and then manually transcribe voicemail messages when you choose the 'super-mega-good' quality option.

Can you say 'privacy concern'? I can't wait for the voicemail from my doctor asking me about scheduling a rectal exam!

Too much negativity from Sunnyvale City Council candidate Pat Meyering

In my email inbox this morning was a message sent by Sunnyvale City Council candidate (Seat #1, currently held by Tony Spitaleri) addressing the plight of the Sunnyvale downtown redevelopment project. The project is now fully mired in turmoil due to the economic state of affairs, and progress on the project is crawling along at a snails pace. The set of problems facing the project are fairly well known and have been documented in the local paper, the Sunnyvale Sun, in detail. See here for more information on the race in question. 

The Email from Mr. Meyering reads like a grade-school playground taunt of his predecessor's failure to keep the project on track. The language Meyering uses is, in my opinion, excessively negative, childish and sarcastic. A few examples:

"Learn about the financially-shaky foreign lender the current City Council agreed to partner with on the development project"

"Stroll Mathilda Ave, and see the 15-foot rust stains on the new Retail spaces, completed just before the current Council's developer walked away from the project earlier this year"

"Watch as the setting sun casts a gentle glow on your Downtown's diverse types of open beams and steel girders"

I understand that this is a competitive election, despite being non-partisan. And I appreciate the need of each candidate to differentiate themselves from the competition. But what disappointed me most about this email was the fact that it included not a single statement about what Mr. Meyering would do to make things better.

But then again, politics are politics. Right?

The full text of the email can be downloaded here: Download Email

Feeling conflicted about Net Neutrality

The news is out that the FCC plans to take a more formal stand and formulate specific rules related to Net Neutrality. This is one of Obama's campaign promises, so this turn of events is not particularly surprising. My first reaction to the news was along the lines of 'That sounds like a good thing.'

But now that the reports have begun to trickle in about what this might really mean in practice, I'm starting to get more and more worried about the implications.

Depending on the source, 'Net Neutrality' has been used to mean one or more of the following:

• Definition #1: No internet service provider may restrict or in any way throttle traffic passing through their network based on the origin or destination of that traffic.
• • Example: AT&T would not be allowed to throttle traffic between my home PC and YouTube, even if I stream way too many videos. 
  • Example: EarthLink would not be allowed to give preference to traffic between my home PC and Google.com because they have a search revenue sharing agreement with Google.com (and not with Microsoft's Bing.com).
• Definition #2: No internet service provider may restrict or in any way throttle traffic passing through their network based on the type or class of traffic.
• • Example: Comcast would not be allowed to throttle the Skype-protocol traffic flowing over its network, regardless of where that traffic originated or terminated.
  • Example: PacBell would not be allowed to throttle the BitTorrent-protocol traffic flowing over its network as it transits between my home PC and some other network or host.

These both seem like very noble goals and intentions. There is always the straight forward libertarian argument against any such governmental intervention in the operations of a private business - but I am going to ignore that one for now (despite the fact that I mostly agree with it).

I then put myself in the shoes of an ISP owner and operator, and think about scenarios such as:

"If one of my user/customers was using such large amounts of bandwidth to download fully legal BitTorrent files (Linux CD images, for instance) that the experience of my other customers was negatively affected, would I be allowed to throttle the traffic of that one excessive user?"

"If I were approached by Hulu.com with the following offer: Please give preferential treatment to traffic you transfer to/from our website so that our users can watch movies in high-def without interruptions. In exchange for this preferential traffic handling, we will give you $$$ per month. Would I be legally permitted to sign such a contract?"

Complicating issues like this lead me to believe that there will be no fair or just rule by which to judge the legality of scenarios like these. And they only get more complicated - especially in the case of cellular networks that are severely bandwidth limited - the more you ask.

In the end, I fear we're getting our FCC into a black hole of unintended consequences that will be very hard to escape from.

A discovery about my circadian rhythms

With a solid month of sleep data now captured (using my Zeo Sleep Coach), I've been able to tease out an important contributor to how rested I feel when I wake up in the morning.

I had initially assumed that my body would allow me to sleep enough hours each night in order for it to fully recuperate. In other words, if I go to bed late I figured that my body would just sleep in a bit longer and wake me up a bit later. But based on the recordings from my Zeo, this turned out to not be the case at all. In fact, no matter how late I went to bed, my body would just 'wake up' at right around 6am the next morning. 

So even if I went to bed very late - 2am for example - I would still wake up around 6am. Of course, I didn't feel well rested, but I was never able to go back to sleep. Once the eyes were open, they stayed that way.

That told me that if I wanted to feel more rested in the mornings, that my only realistic option was to go to bed earlier. So that is what I did - adjusted by bedtime to 10pm, no exceptions. Sure enough, I still woke up just about 6am, but I felt much better rested. 

The results of adjusting my bed time to 10pm are shown in the chart below. I made the shift on Thursday, 8/27. Notice how my total sleep time jumped by over an hour? I could definitely feel the difference:

A bit of research into why this might be the case lead me to this article: Differential rescue of light- and food-entrainable circadian rhythms. In the study, the scientists show how circadian rhythms are strongly influenced by feeding/meal times. As it turns out, I eat dinner very consistently at 6pm each night. So my speculation is that my circadian clock says "Jason - you will wake up 12 hours after your last meal, no matter how much time you spent sleeping." 

Although I'm not sure meal time dictates my wakeup time completely, it sure does seem to be a strongly contributing factor.

Three Rules For Choosing Your Battles Wisely

Inspired by the FB status update of a friend, I was somehow inspired to write up a set of rules for how to choose which battles one should enter into. My three rules for choosing your battles wisely are: 

1. First, choose only those battles you are likely to win.
2. Choose only those battles that afford you a high degree of plausible deniability, just in case all hell breaks loose. 
3. Choose only those battles which, if lost, will still leave you with a large dose of emotional satisfaction at the trail of destruction you leave behind.

Sleep Stats: Plenty of REM, too little Z

I've now collected nearly two weeks of sleep data with the Zeo, and the results so far are mildly encouraging. During this entire period I did not consume any caffeine after 3pm, and I ate nothing after 7pm each day. That seems to help. In addition, I only go to bed when I feel sleepy - eyes drooping, yawning - instead of trying to force an artificial sleep schedule on my brain stem.

Here is the overview for the month - showing that I get slightly under 6 hours of sleep, on average, each night:

Here is the breakdown, with comparisons to others in my age bracket. On the minus side, I seem to be getting less total sleep than most (by almost an hour), but I do get quite a bit more REM sleep. Does that compensate? Not sure...

Some secondary statistics here - showing that I tend to fall asleep quite quickly (6 minutes). It also shows that I am something of a night owl, going to bed after midnight on a regular basis. But at least I am consistent!

Here is the chart of my total amount of sleep:

Here is my time in REM sleep:

The data collection will continue - although I'm not yet ready to make any radical changes or look for some pathology in these results. I'm mostly just fascinated by the data.

First week of sleep results with My Zeo

It has been just over a week since the arrival of my Zeo Personal Sleep Coach device, and to be completely honest, the results were a total surprise to me.

For the longest time, I had believed and would frequently claim that it took me hours and hours to fall asleep at night. My belief was so strong that I would frequently regale listeners with tales of my sleep woes. The only problem is that I was completely wrong. My average 'Time to Onset of Sleep' this last week has been about 4 minutes.

The second Jason Sleep Myth to be busted is the claim that I never dream. I based this on the fact that I rarely if ever remember dreams of any kind. Well, if dreaming is what occurs during REM sleep. then I appear to be getting pleny of opportunity - almost 2 hours each night.

I plan to continue the experiment for a while, but below is a summary of my first week: 

A visual map of the history of western philosophy

This is a project that I have been working on for about a year now. It all began as part of my personal quest to reach an understanding of and a justification for my set of personal moral and ethical beliefs. In order to help me work out some of my own ideas, I decided to work my way through the 84-part lecture series offered by Teach 21 titled " Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 3rd Edition". The course is an amazing journey, starting with Plato and working its way through to the modern era.

Along the way, I decided to make a mind map covering each of the major thinkers that have influenced western philosophy. This is my version of a "cheat sheet of philosophy", and I decided that it might be worth sharing with others. It is by no means complete or comprehensive. It probably does infringe on the copyright of Teach 21 and the lecturers whose notes I cribbed from liberally. I can only hope that they don't send me a DMCA Take Down Request. So until then, here it is.

It goes in approximately chronological order, starting with the Greeks and working clockwise around to the modern thinkers. I try to give a summary of what I found useful or important about each thinker, and probably have overlooked, oversimplified and overstated quite a few things.

If I've made any egregious errors, please leave a comment and I'll fix what I can:

Telemarketing Hall of Shame: San Francisco Opera

In just the lat couple of months, I've been bombarded by telemarketing calls originating from the San Francisco Opera Association (415-551-6319). I received at least one call attempt on each of the following dates:

7/6/09
6/9/09
6/3/09
5/28/09
5/25/09
5/2/09
5/1/09
4/30/09
4/25/09
4/20/09
4/17/09

I've sent them an email pleading to be put onto their Do Not Call list. I sure do hope they take note of it. I just now placed a call-block on their phone number in my Verizon Wireless account settings, so at the very least they'll go right to voice mail.

Fingers crossed...

Camera Lens Calculators are back in action!

A long, long time ago I had written two on-line calculators to help photographers answer the following questions:

1. How far away from my photographic subject can I be and still fill up the frame of the photo with that subject?
   
   This question gets at how large a focal length your lens needs to be in order to photograph a distant object without it appearing the size of a pin-prick in the resulting image. If you find yourself wondering whether you need that 300mm lens in order to capture a water buffalo at 500 meters, this calculator will be very useful to you.
   
2. When doing macro photography, how much of my camera sensor area will be covered by the subject at a given distance?
   
   This is for photographers working on extreme close-ups who want to fill the entire area of the camera's image sensor with the subject of their photograph (a flower, an insect, etc.). This calculation will tell you whether or not you have to have a 'true macro' lens (one that has a macro ratio of 1:1) in order to pull it off.

The calculators are available here. Enjoy!

PS This would not have been possible (or at least as easy as it was) were it not for the Internet Archives. The old version of my calculator page had been lost when I migrated to TypePad as my new weblog platform of choice, but luckily a snapshot of my website from April of 2005 was available, allowing me to pull the original formulas out of the digital dust bin.