How was it with Less in Geneva?

Less made my weekend from 21-st to 23-rd  of September. I borrowed the Audi A4 2.8 quattro and went to the Gare de Cornavin in Geneva. I was a bit late but found Less easily - he had been waiting there for me a few minutes. He was lucky, Richrad and Charlie were in Crozet and Less was the only friend of mine who met both my housemates. We fell asleep after a tasty French supper and long discussion. Next day, we woke up in the morning, ate fast breakfast and went to CERN. At the beginning I was an unofficial CERN guide and thought my teachable student a few things about CERN. The learning was fruitful and during an official CERN tour round ATLAS experiment my student answered our guide's question. The question was: "Why there are two experiments which want to find a Higgs boson?" The answer is: "if we prove the same thing twice using different methods we can be more confident about the result". Then we visited computer centre and Less could see our PC farm. Just after that, we went to Geneva, so we visited cathedral and hung out the rest of our day in this marvellous city. "The Intouchables" movie was a key to a pleasant evening. On Sunday morning we attended English mass with Charlie. Salev mountain, called a balcony of Geneva, was our day's aim. This was an amazing adventure! First we veered off course to the top of the mountain, then chose a path for a downhill. In the end, we had to pass an abandoned tunnel - it was funny and a bit strange. There was a fog in Geneva's valley, but when we reached the top of the mountain  we were above the fog and clouds and could see Mont Blanc. We took a Téléphérique down and had to hurry up to be on time at the airport. Less recommended me a book "Rich dad, poor dad" - I've just read it and highly recommend as well! 

Bonbon and French Halloween

Charlie has moved out on Halloween. Meanwhile, many ghosts, spirits, esprits, spooks, wraiths and vistations visited our house in Crozet. Fortunately, I still had some emergency supplies from Poland in form of chocolates and bonbons :) 

rainy morning

We usually meet in the morning, read bible and discuss the passages, make comments. This morning was really rainy and cold. The sentence of the day is: if your life is like a beautiful song then everybody wants to get to know the lyrics and at least a few notes.

Business Relationships

Connect people

I was attending a networking workshop before TEDx Warsaw 2012. The teacher was outstanding and the main lesson I learned was that you need to connect people. It produces more connections for you and people want to connect with you, because you're a connector. The rule is simple - give more, connect people and you'll receive more. The teacher came to Poland a few years ago and she didn't speak Polish at all. Anyway, after three months she had more clients than the other sellers. She knew how to build relationships with clients.

Listen More Than You Talk

I was eating lunch with my friend and  just after that we joined his Spanish friends for coffee break. The conversations were mainly in Spanish, but I chose a guy on my right hand side and got to know him. I asked him a lot. Then some of the people had to be back at work, including my new friend. The rest of the group was talking about their business. I said nothing, but strived to listen carefully. Don't know why they were so pleased to meet me ... a bit funny.

Be honest

If you have no experience in a field, then don't pretend to be an expert, but admit to have no knowledge about it. People really appreciate the honesty and that lays the foundation for a great relationship.

Humility and good listening practices build leadership and respect.

What is API key for?

There are three parts of security for API-s:

• Identity - who is making an API request?

• Authentication - are they really are who they say they are?

• Authorization – are they allowed to do what they are trying to do?

I always wasn't sure where to place API key in theses security issues and found this explenation. I reckon it's clear and informative.

Take Yahoo and Google maps – they are fairly open.  They want to know who you are but they aren’t concerned what address you are looking up. So they use an API key to establish identity, but don’t authenticate or authorize. So if you use someone else’s API key, it’s not good but not a serious security breach. The API key lets them identify (most likely) who is making an API call so they can limit on the number of requests you can make. Identity is important here to keep service volume under control.

http://blog.apigee.com/detail/do_you_need_api_keys_api_identity_vs._authorization

Analogy of public key

I like this analogy of the public key very much. The analogy is that of a locked store front door with a mail slot. The mail slot is exposed and accessible to the public; its location (the street address) is in essence the public key. Anyone knowing the street address can go to the door and drop a written message through the slot. However, only the person who possesses the matching  private key, the store owner in this case, can open the door and read the message.

WWW initial idea of hyperlinks vanish as we rely more and more on google page rank

Page rank is an intuitive algorithm and the more we rely on it, the accuracy of page rank gets worse. What is the reason of that situation? Page rank relies on hyperlinks, but now it is just easier to Google anything than remember a hyperlink. So newer pages have fewer hyperlinks, which is very bad for page rank. A CERN worker - Tim Berners-Lee is an inventor of WWW whose initial idea was based on scientific documents having links to other documents. This was an inspiration for hyperlinks. Now, instead of giving an exact hyperlink we say 'google for these words and for sure you'll find what you're looking for'. We got rid of hyperlinks in favour of more intuitive Google search engine. We find it hard to remember facts, so we increasingly use Google, but there is a dangerous consequence. If our supposedly associative memories rely on building associations, which are strengthened when traversed during recall, the more we use Google the less we can remember! The conclusion is to use Google when it's absolutely needed and be more precise by including links to the information according to all Tim Berners-Lee commended. Probably, it's not viable and practical to follow these rules, so we have to improve the existing algorithm every which way. Probably, in the end we'll have to come up with another idea of indexing documents. Fortunately, not all hope is lost. Mere indexing is poor at capturing deeper associations between documents, words and concepts. However, as we search and retrieve we also divulge on the relative relevance of search results. Google is exploiting such relevance feedback and, for example, analyse how many seconds we stay on a page. If only for a few seconds, it means that the page wasn't relevant for us, but if we opened a link and didn't repeat the search, it means that this was a relevant result. Ok, but what about us? Exercising recall abilities is not the only time connections are built. We create fresh connections when reasoning which on the other hand is based on lots of facts. Google provides these abundantly and easily, encouraging more reasoning, so building more, probably deeper associations!