Artificial Errors

Errors

Errors during human computer interface can take many forms. The most common one is the “typo”. A “typo” or typographic error is one where the intended word, phrase, expression, or command is issued into the computer with minor error such that it is not exactly what the user wanted to enter.

Most of the time, these errors are do not have grammatical meaning. But other times, the changing of one character could cause the entire sentence or program to change in meaning.

Typos can occur in many places. The names of files for instance often may be mistyped or miscapitalized.

Missing punctuations is another type of typo that causes a great deal of headache for programmers and writers alike.

Other changes include altering file structure within the folder hierarchy that is now the norm on computers.

The errors can roughly be categorized by size and effect.

1.) Deletion of a punctuation.

2.) Errors that are less than 3 character edits away from the original input.

3.) Whole word replacements. two words adjacent to each other being swapped.

4.) Scrambling meaning of entire sentence or programming blocks.

5.) Systematic changes: renaming a variable will make it difficult to detect other changes because it will have changed many lines and spacing.

6.) Rewrites: Rewriting an existing system that has the exact same requirements facilitates the introduction of malicious code. Since it is a rewrite, it will be difficult to detect subtle changes.

Effects include:

a.) Completely useless error: Does not cause any misunderstanding or program compilation or run time error.

b.) Immediately detectable: Compilation errors. Spelling mistakes detected by spell checkers. detection by inspection.

c.) Eventually detectable: Changing a “>” to “>=” will be detected during unit testing, for example. Changing “will” to “will not” in a feature spec.

d.) Malicious and difficult to detect. These are bugs that cannot be caught by normal unit testing, integration testing, code review, or editorial process.

e.) Malicious and impossible to detect. These are bugs that are introduced publicly as features. The reason behind its introduction is explained and may be widely scrutinized. However, the true intent of the feature is eventually materialized causing massive or specific systematic failure. After failure, the original person or group that caused this feature to be implemented will not be faulted for introducing the bug.

These forms of sabotage occur everyday. More often than not, they are detected and then dismissed as a true error, and silently corrected so that the fact of a natural error is hidden when in fact the error is not nature and the concealment of its existence has conceals its true cause and prevents true remedy.

Respond to my blog entry if you feel that you have been the target of an artificial bug insemination.

Let the truth out so that humanity can move on!!

Why do high tech companies employ internal facing hackers?

Why is it that American high tech companies intentionally employ and tolerate employees who’s job is to alter other employee’s work on the computer?
To be explicit, the effect of the employees who directly or indirectly through insertion of viruses on other employee’s computers so that their output into the computer, including emails, documents, programs, and any other production that theoretically belong to the company since it is produced and stored on company computer. The corruption range from simple typos to very serious bugs and errors introduced in vital files stored on the computers.
Mechanism:
Monitoring real time over the network and deliberately making changes to documents on the fly.
Changing data at the end of the day or during lunch hours or during mandatory company wide meetings
Changing data stored on servers.

Effect and Intent and Cause:
(inhibition of some people to work may lead to better overall success)

(producing paranoia in the workforce may lead to better overall productivity)
(giving a few people “god” power improves their productivity to “god” level)
(complete random errors/surprises promotes/stimulates the human brain to be more creative and less bored of really stupid shit)(cite paper about it)
(frustration, fatigue, desperation, paranoia, lethargy, hoplessness, indifference extended concern for self and family, hatred, and other psychological conditions produced by random errors causes, on average, better performance.)
/s/on average/best
…..
Systematic or individual racial discrimination
to maintain political control
to create reason to fire people. (one time… we had an employ who’s employment followed by files being removed from everyone’s computers. then he was let go with “not the skill set we were looking for.” What are the chances an african american who talks about playing beer pong at lunch has “the skill set” to wipe files off of my desktop???
 I’ve been wondering about this for a long time. I’ve hypothesized that
only management does this.
only people who can do this are part of management
This is done to preserve company secrecy
Personal gains: there are lots of unethical americans out there.
wide spread of psychological disorder: There may be a large number of computer employees who have developed psychological disorders from working on computers and highly competitive  environment. It may very well be that half of the people that I work with are psychopaths and would be deemed clinically insane. These people also exhibit signs of obsessive compulsive disorder. Their obsession with what other people are typing, and their compulsion to mess with it.
It could also be because the employers themselves are 
Maintaining control over the technical progress of the company: For one reason or another, it might be advantageous to executives of the company for some products to fail and others to be delayed. (set short development cycles, fail often, so they don’t have to give bonus. Greed is the virtue of Capitalism)
Why do high tech companies employ (or does not fire) people who spend their day introducing typos and intelligent errors into other peoples’ work?
Initially, I had thought that this is done with prejudice  (link), also I had once thought it was for personal gains (link), and I also hypothesized that it is a psychological problem developed from working in high tech companies (link) or a developmental problem in some people who grew up in environments that I cannot fathom (link). However, recently, I am beginning to realize that perhaps there is great wisdom behind the way these companies in the United States operate.
The United States is not a world dominant power house for no reason. There must be many things that are done intentionally on a macroscopic scale (through the setting of policies, directives, and guidelines), and also many microscopic actions that work in unison to create the synergy that is America.
Types of artificial error and intent
To be concrete, I am discussing two specific types of artificial errors that are created:
A.) typos. I type with very high rate of error at work. In important documents, this is especially problematic.
B.) Bugs. My programs will often contain a very difficult to find bug that results from a one-line change. one-liners are bigger than typo’s but small enough to evade a casual scan of the diff.
A.)
The frequent introduction of typos forces the writer to read what he wrote. My CEO here has once commented to us that he writes Emails without recipients so as to force himself to re-read the email before sending it. My problem with this explanation is that often the typo’s are introduced later on. For instance a wiki/confluence page at work will change, and there would bee obvious potatoes like this. Let us name these different typos for discussion sake.
A1) Typos introduced in realtime. These typos are introduced as I type so that if I send email immediately it would be sent out to servers that the typo-introducing-mechanism(man, software) will not have control over.
A2) Typos introduced during the development process, but maybe while the author is sleeping between multi-day writing projects.
A3) Typos introduced after the completion of a piece of writing. This is possibly why we find some really obvious typos in printed books. The editorial process is very thorough but still we often seen typos in large captions of graphs.
Typos are further categorizable into effects of the typo (without respect to the original intent)
T1) Completely random: if a z is added to wordz at random, its impact is minimal and largely forgettable. It does not affect the ability of the original writing to communicate.
T2) Not random, but not misleading: If a changes is made that may cause the reader to suspect the specific meaning of the sentence, then it belongs to this type
T3) Random or not, definitely misleading: This type of typo happens never. (obviously the word ‘never’ has replaced a word that conotes higher frequency)
My ultimate goal here is not to completely solve the mystery of America’s irrational success, however I hope to shed light on my lack of success and hopefully lead to increased quality of my own life.
A1T1-> probably a real mistake
A1T2-> malicious
A1T3-> malicious
A2T1-> possibly because a temporary episode author’s hallucination, but if it happens too often then definitely see a doctor. Also, regular backups and md5 hashes with comments might help to alleviate the author’s paranoia.
A2T2 -> Serious personality disorder, possibly multiple personality disorder (cite America Psychiatry Diagnostic Manual)
A2T3 -> If you have hashed prove and alibis (like an editor or code-reviewer), then investigate into computer security, otherwise call it A1 and shut up about it before you ruin your reputation.
A3T1 -> whatever
A3T2 -> Whoever did it, it could have been made worse, thank god he’s not experienced  and invest in more security systems.
A3T3 -> recall book/software; issue errata/point release, invest in more security system.
B.)…….
Ultimately, America continues to operate and recover from economic crisis, and companies IPO and life goes on–More so than many European and Asian countries…. How does these typos contribute to that?

What if you worked for Madoff

What would you do, if suddenly one day you stumble upon that extra floor in your office building where your company has been faking data all these years to create the appearance of profitability ?

The better question is, I suppose, how do I maintain my personal safety, my professional integrity, and my networth all at the same time?

Personal safety is important because often, your co-workers WILL HURT YOU if they think you are about to expose the company!

Professional integrity is important. This actually will give this whole blog it’s meaning. Because without professional integrity, it’s actually pretty easy to just keep an eye closed.

And finally maintaining networth will make this whole endeavour challenging. Because it’s very easy to just quit and not get the payoff. It is also easy to expose the company and not get any payoff.

So, what can a person do???

For my self, I want to actually start taking lawyer classes to learn the laws governing corporations and fraud. The Ponzi scheme apparently is illegal for reasons in addition to it’s structure: Fraud, Money laundaring, perjury, etc.

Each of these have specific meaning and is associated with actions. So by learning about the punishments for each count of illegality, I would be able to assess my risk and weighing the trade-offs.

For instance, would I be willing to trade 5% chance of 20 years in prison for a payoff of $10,000,000 in 5 years ?

Read that carefully: Ten Million Dollars for an expected prison time of 1 year (expected value)

For most people, the answer is no. But for some people, the answer might be yes…

map reduce is so repigged

okay, so here’s a problem I ran into today. In PigLatin, I needed to calculate the following:

A = group TABLE by (f1,f2,f3);
B = foreach A generate group, SUM(f4), MIN(f5), MAX(f6), (f7 is null)?1:0;

My problem is that for the data that I have (about 100gb) there are actually only about a dozzen combinations of (f1,f2,f3), so the consequence is that the execution crashes with the reducer running out of memory.

The question is, is it possible to make this calculation even with sparse keys?

Jessica!!

I’ve been watching true blood on HBO. One of the movements I think fans can do is to start a blog about Jessica, Bill Compton’s progeny…

Man, every time Bill yelps at her:

“Jessica!!”

and she snickers

“heheeehee”

and I think, damn! I wanna be Bill.

In fact, I like her so much, I wana start a fantasy campaign titled “Jessica for Queen”….. I mean, if the vamp’s are a democracy.

“Jessica!!!”

National Discrimination

I don’t pretend to understand international politics, but when I look at statistics table like the one below from The DHS:

But how do we justify that the ratio of Asian Indian naturalized into the US is somewhere between 1.7 and 1.3 times the number of Chinese from PRC naturalized into the US?

1.7 times is almost twice the number. Consider a simple calculation. suppose that X is the percentage of world’s population that the US would like to have as it’s citizens. Would X * 1.1e9 be less than X * 1.3e9? Instead of being almost twice as much?

What the heck am I missing here? As dutiful citizen of the US, I’d like to point out that we might be making a serious mistake here not sampling fairly from the world’s population!!

Take a look at this stats table:

Note that the ratio goes the other way. The legal immigration of Chinese Permanent Residents exceeds that of India to the ratio of 1.4 times as much. So why is it that only 40% of PR of Chinese origin choose to become Americans and as much as 77% of Indian origin choose to be come Americans?

Dare I suggest that Chinese are not as competitive? Less adaptive to the Culture of the United States? Too loyal to their indoctrination from Communist upbringing?

What could possibly be the reason why this is  happening? Well, perhaps this may shed more light on the subject. The number of newly issued visas by country breaks down as follows:

So, according to this table, the US actually imports 3 times as many Chinese people to work in the US as the number of Indians recruited. However, Indians were more able to bring their relatives into the US by Immediate or family preference Visa’s. So it would appear that Chinese people are being brought over as labor for the American economy and the Indians are just bringing their families over to live.

It seems that China contribute more to the American Economy than India, but India contribute more to the USA by way of culture (Slumdog), population, and of course consumers.

Overall, I think Indians have a better strategy than Chinese. Slaves and Laborers  are really not part of the population until they rebel and live up to human level of quality in life. Then they can even begin to be part of the society.

Sigh, the ever suffering Chinese…

Short sales as call and put options

I made an interesting observation with a co-worker today. It would seem that the “short sale” in real estate world can be viewed as a call option for the buyer and a put option for the lender. Short sale takes place when the owner (and eventually seller) does not pay mortgage for 6 months, and bank that loaned him the money to buy this house(the lender) agrees for him to try to sell the house at a price below his loan amount to minimize the bank’s loss (which would have been the entirety of the remaining loan principle minus whatever the house is worth) The missing amount between short sale price and the remaining loan principle is either forgiven or put into a separate payment program which the owner/seller would have to pay over the next few years.

This situation, though somewhat painful for the owner, creates a great investment opportunity to a buyer. The conventional wisdom is that short sales are some percentage below market value of the house. So for instance, if the house that is for short sale is worth $100,000 at market value, then it is likely that the lender will allow me to buy it at $80,000, or $75,000, or even $50,000 depending on the market and the house.

A buyer, may put in an offer at a price slightly higher than 20% discount (after inspecting the house, of course), say 10% below market. This gives him the advantage over all other buyers who will have made offer assuming 20% to 25% mark down.

If all goes well, he will receive an approval from the lender of the short selling owner, typically three months after the offer is accepted by the seller and submitted to the lenders.

At that point. the buyer has the option of continuing with the purchase at 15% discount, or making an offer on a different, and presumably better, house at the same price.

So, by being involved in a short sale, he creates a call option for himself on an opportunity that may or may not be a good deal. But this choice is almost entirely free. (The offer, cost only fees to a realtor).

And often, it is an entirely legitemate reason that bank takes too long or market recovers for buyer to back out of the offer. So it is nearly zero risk and zero cost to the buyer, but the upside is possibly 10% to 20% guaranteed mark-down from market price of a house.

Now, I realize that the lender may be doing the same thing, which is that they are using the offer as a probabilistic put option, which just means that the arbitrage is shared between the buyer and the lender…

This appears to be common practice amongst professional real estate investors and contractors who flip houses. Just today, I saw two houses close within the same week, the short sale being a good 25% larger in square footage, has an additional pool, but identical lot size, right next to each other on the same street (literally xx1 and xx3 on the same side of the street), exactly same age. And the larger home with the pool that is a short sale sold for something like 7% less than the smaller house right next to it. This illustrate an expert use of this technique I describe above.

I of course also suffer from the same situation. What I paid for my house, bought a short sale that closed exactly within a week before my closing next block over(1xx vs. 2xx). And that house has twice the square-footage of my house, same lot, 10 years older than my house.

The only thing that it does put to question is the professional ethics of my realtor, my seller, my financial agent. Only these people knew of my purchase progress, and only they could have informed that short-seller (or that lender) of my purchase price. I am beginning to wonder about the professional integrity of the people in the real estate business in the San Francisco Bay Area….

到底是何方神圣?

America is such a wonderful country. It’s so vibrantly full of life and cultures. Today, somebody blanked my computer screen while I tried to work.

My initial reaction was to search on google

“Jewish Holidays in 2010”

because I know that previously, some people with advanced hacking skills will hack into my computer and blink my screen or screw with things on Jewish holidays so that I stop working and observe it with them.

Nope, nothing Jewish today, next I searched

“Indian Festivals in 2010”

For some reason, my company is gaining Indian population at an alarming rate. Nope, nothing Indian today… And plus we aren’t competing or anything, so it makes no sense for them to mess with my computer.

“Christian Holidays in 2010”

I said to google, and google said “nope”, today is not a Christian holiday either.

WTF, why would somebody be screwing with my computer on a non-holiday? And why did they screw with my computer on their holidays to start with? Is there a deity unknown to me in each of these religions and corresponding cultures that espouse slothery? Is there a god in their religion that says: “Today, you may not work!!”

Man, I feel so ignorant.

Oh, and the Muslims. That’s the people who believe in Islam a religion, as far as we’re taught in America, that is essentially an organized terrorist organization.

Oh, and Koreans, Man! America is so complicated… Has Koreans invented a saint of some kind after their separation from Chinese culture that I don’t know about?

Which of you deities have I offended today that causes my screen to blank every time I’m about to type a command into my console?

what kind of animal sacrifice must I make to appease you? Can I light some fireworks on July 4th? Does that count???

Happy July 4th everybody!!

The Psychology of Giving Fewer Options at Startup

There’s something strange about the Incentive Stock Option system at Startups in America. Suppose the founders want to make employees work harder. It is to his greatest advantage to give his employees as few stock options as possible. This is not to preserve his own stock options or reduce dilution, but to motivate the employees to work harder.

Because typically, bosses at work get somewhere from 100x to 1000x the stocks an employee has. So a founder who is comfortable with a $1Billion IPO means his employees will only get similar level of reward if the company IPO’s at $100Billion or even $1 trillion. So the employee has to aim much higher than the founders.

This may explain why often the executives at companies will make obviously irrational decisions. They already have $10million, why go to the extra leg of getting to $20million?

But the employee has only $100k, getting to $200k is a huge improvement on quality of life.

How Old is Your Computer

I came to an interesting measurement of age of computer today. Suppose we use something simple minded (such as throughput rate of Integer Arithmetics) as measurement of computing power. Let us further suppose that Moore’s law is really followed by the development of computers during it’s entire development since the very first transistor, then we can make a very interesting calculation.

Let T be the total computing power of all humanity today. (This should be estimable based on number of CPU’s Intel and AMD produces each year).

Let O be the origin where the very first transistor was invented, when the total semi-conductor based computing power of humanity is some small number like (1 integer add)/minute.

Fit an exponentially growing curve between the total computing power between time T and O, plot a graph of this curve with time on the X-axis and total computing power of humanity on the Y-axis.

Now, then, to determine the power of your computer (or computing cloud that you own), simply find on the Y-axis the power of your computer and drop down to X. At that point you can claim:

“My computing cloud is equal to all of human computing power as of February of 1981.”

Makes for great PR snippet.

Also, you can use it as a pitch to get more funding:

“Our computer cluster is still in the 1980’s !!”

“But Dad! My laptop is like so 1950!”