American Idol & Self-Delusion

I’ll be transparent: the above tweet had been ratting around in my head for a few weeks and I think it’s pretty damn clever (yes, I know that’s egotistical, but there it is). I’ve been watching American Idol this season thinking as a parent…wondering how the parents of some of those tone-deaf, completely awful singers could live with themselves as they lied to their kids and told them to “Just go for it!”. Does loving your kids mean lying to them? I don’t think it does. It’s definitely something I want to write more about in the future…in fact, I’ve adding parenting as a new category for this blog, and this is the inaugural post.

Avenue Commercial Communicates About Concrete Equities

Since I still get emails every week or two asking for information about what happened to the Concrete Equities investments, I thought I’d share this piece of communication that came out in October of 2010. In a nutshell, Avenue Commercial has taken over as property managers for the five Calgary properties (Millrise Deer Valley, Castleridge, MEG Place, CEP, Lavalin). If you have an investment in something other than those five properties, you should contact Ernst & Young’s Calgary office at 403-290-4100 to inquire about the status of your investment.

The PDF below has some of the background information, but as of mid-February, no specifics have been given out about where each property is at in terms of financials and revenue. I’m not aware of any payments having been sent out to any investors yet; when I inquired earlier this month about the status of things, I was told there would be an AGM in the first week of March. No date, no location as of yet.

“To Our Valued Investors; For those of you I have yet to meet, I would like to introduce myself.  I am Steven Butt, the President and Founder of Avenue Commercial and feel honored to be the person for whom nearly 100% of you voted in favor for as the new General Partner. Over the past 18 months, I have had the pleasure of meeting, speaking and hearing the concerns of many investors as we together have fought through many significant challenges to salvage your valued investments. Now, after many emotional town hall meetings, court sessions, receivers meetings and countless hours of work on the part of our in house team, our legal team and your steering committee, we have exited many of the court proceedings and the future of your investment at last appears much brighter. As most of you know, we suffered through extensive damage from a cash flow perspective as the court process initiated by Concrete Equities cost the Limited Partners in excess of 3 million dollars and we are coming out of restructuring with numerous smaller creditors and over 3 million dollars in debt  payable to the Strategic group.  These are not paltry obligations and it will take some time to retire our trailing debts but with hard work and a structured payment plan, we can and will shed these obligations over time.”

Avenue Commercial Investors Update Oct 2010

Avenue Commercial’s contact information: 403-802-6766 / www.avenuecommercial.com

Man versus Machine: IBM’s Watson Supercomputer on Jeopardy

Image from Wired.com

Today I watched something that completely and totally captured my attention: IBM’s supercomputer, dubbed Watson, took on two Jeopardy champions (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter). Watson is packing some serious hardware:

“The 360 Power7 chips that make up Watson’s brain represent IBM’s best and brightest processor technology. Each Power7 is capable of over 500 GB/second of aggregate bandwidth, making it particularly adept at manipulating data at high speeds. FLOPS-wise, a 3.55 GHz Power7 delivers 218 Linpack gigaflops. For comparison, the POWER2 SC processor, which was the chip that powered cyber-chessmaster Deep Blue, managed a paltry 0.48 gigaflops, with the whole machine delivering a mere 11.4 Linpack gigaflops.”via HPCwire

So how did it go? In short, Watson got off to a commanding lead and was crushing it early on…until the humans adapted. You see, Watson is extremely accurate when it comes to coming up with the right question to fit the answer to the clue. There were a couple of flubs, but for the most part I’d say Watson was as good or better than the human champions. Where Watson truly shone though was reaction time. You could just tell watching the humans madly pressing the buzzer that Watson had them beat when it came to triggering the buzzer when it knew the answer. I noticed something though about halfway through: I think that the humans started buzzing in without knowing the answer.

This is pure speculation, but to me it looked like the two human champs switched to triggering the buzzer before the clue was even partly finished – I think they both realized that if they waited until they heard the full clue, Watson would continue to beat them. By the end of the game Rutter was at $5000, Watson was at $5000, and Jennings was at $2000. This is a far cry from the first 5 minutes where Watson was snagging all the questions.

I don’t know the mechanics of Jeopardy very well, but it looks like the contestant can buzz in at any time after the clue has started to be read aloud. It’s a risk buzzing in on something that you might not know the answer to, but it’s a call that a human can make on the fly – and one that a machine would be hard-pressed to make.

One of the things they didn’t explain fully was how Watson go the clue: they said it was “delivered as a text file”, but what does that mean exactly? Is there someone pressing a SUBMIT key on a keyboard as Alex Trebek finishes the clue? No, there would be too much latency with that approach. Does Watson get permission to read a text file as Trebek finished the question? That seems equally problematic – it would have to be machine driven somehow. Voice recognition would seem to be the only fair way to tackle this problem, but if Watson mis-recognized a word, it would throw the whole game off. This is something I hope they explain more about later on.

This was some fascinating TV! I’m looking forward to watching the next two episodes.

UPDATE: This article says that Watson is “fed the answer in text form at the same time the answer panel appears to the two human players.” That explains Watson’s edge in buzzing in – it can parse the text file faster than a human being can read the clue. The only way for the humans to win then is to buzz in before they read the clue. Gutsy!