Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste

60 Minutes Follows America's Toxic Electronic Waste As It Is Illegally Shipped To Become China's Dirty Secret



Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste

Life & Risk

Risk is What Makes Life Memorable

-Emmanuel Sotelo

Aristotle - On Sleep & Sleeplessness - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Aristotle - On Sleep & Sleeplessness

Google App Engine

Google just unveiled Google App Engine (GAE), an integrated hosting solution for web application developers to host their applications. As a developer, this looks promising. By taking care of the infrastructure, GAE will allow developers to quickly get an application up and running and to exclusively focus on developing the application.

For now, account registrations are limited to the first 10,000 developers, and applications are restricted to the free account limits.

I happen to be one of the few 10,000 that got an account. So in the next couple of days, I will begin to experiment with GAE and see what it is capable of. Since one can currently only develop for GAE with Python, I now have an excuse to go and learn some Python.

Check and Validate Form Data with PHP

I want to share the following link:
http://www.phphacks.com/content/view/31/33/

I found the information on that site very useful today and thus the reason why I want to share it.

Fighter Jets in Los Angeles

Intro to Parallel Programming with Visual Studio 2005

I use more than one internet browser.

On my desktop, which is my primary computer, I mainly use Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7) and Opera. However, I also have Firefox and Safari installed on that machine.

On my laptop, I use IE7 and Firefox. No other browsers are currently installed on that machine.

At school, I use a portable version of Firefox that runs directly from my USB drive. The (Windows) computers at school have IE6 installed. However, I choose to use portable Firefox instead for security reasons.

And Another Domain

11. www.programmerstalk.net

Don't get it?
Click Here

Happy 4th of July

10 Worst Domain Names

1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
http://www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at
http://www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
http://www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
http://www.therapistfinder.com

5. Then of course, there’s the Italian Power Generator company…
http://www.powergenitalia.com

6. And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
http://www.molestationnursery.com

7. If you’re looking for computer software, there’s always
http://www.ipanywhere.com

8. Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is
http://www.cummingfirst.com

9. Then, of course, there’s these brainless art designers, and their whacky website:
http://www.speedofart.com

10. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at
http://www.gotahoe.com

Taking Notes Horizontally

I recently started taking notes horizontally. By horizontally, I mean turning the paper sideways so that I have more room to write from left to right.

I got this idea a couple of days ago, while in class taking notes.

Aside from being more space efficient, taking notes horizontally, allows one to concentrate more on the instructor as he/she is writing notes on the wide chalkboard(or whiteboard) from left to right. Most instructors don't format whatever they put on the board for vertical efficiency. No, they expect they the student to just stack up information. While there is nothing wrong with just staking information, I say that it makes more sense in the format in which it was presented. In many cases in landscape format.

Note : For taking notes horizontally, I recommend using plain white paper as opposed to lined paper (the one meant for vertical use).

Hello 2007!

Well, It is now 2007.

I hope to make this a very productive year.

Good Bye 2006

Its 12:59pm PST.
My last post of the year.

Girls Gone Wild Advertisement on MySpace!

See for yourself:





They don't allow users to post adult content, but yet they make money advertising adult content.

Checkout CSULA

My university (CSULA) recently put up a live webcam.
It's a nice way to checkout the university if you have never visited.

Kudos to whoever thought of this idea.

Check it out it: CSULA Webcam

The camera moves around during daytime hours, so if you see it during nightime, you are only going to see the Golden Eagle Book store.

AOL Search Logs

Here are some links to where the AOL search logs may be downloaded from.

By providing these links, I am helping spread this data which can be very useful in many areas of research. Some fields include Marketing, Economics, Sociology, Psychology, and Data Mining.

Also, here is the text of the readme.txt file in the package to get an idea of what this contains:

500k User Session Collection
----------------------------------------------
This collection is distributed for NON-COMMERCIAL RESEARCH USE ONLY.
Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

Brief description:

This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months.
The data is sorted by anonymous user ID and sequentially arranged.

The goal of this collection is to provide real query log data that is based on real users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation or other types of search research.

The data set includes {AnonID, Query, QueryTime, ItemRank, ClickURL}.
AnonID - an anonymous user ID number.
Query - the query issued by the user, case shifted with
most punctuation removed.
QueryTime - the time at which the query was submitted for search.
ItemRank - if the user clicked on a search result, the rank of the
item on which they clicked is listed.
ClickURL - if the user clicked on a search result, the domain portion of
the URL in the clicked result is listed.

Each line in the data represents one of two types of events:
1. A query that was NOT followed by the user clicking on a result item.
2. A click through on an item in the result list returned from a query.
In the first case (query only) there is data in only the first three columns/fields -- namely AnonID, Query, and QueryTime (see above).
In the second case (click through), there is data in all five columns. For click through events, the query that preceded the click through is included. Note that if a user clicked on more than one result in the list returned from a single query, there will be TWO lines in the data to represent the two events. Also note that if the user requested the next "page" or results for some query, this appears as a subsequent identical query with a later time stamp.

CAVEAT EMPTOR -- SEXUALLY EXPLICIT DATA! Please be aware that these queries are not filtered to remove any content. Pornography is prevalent on the Web and unfiltered search engine logs contain queries by users who are looking for pornographic material. There are queries in this collection that use SEXUALLY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE. This collection of data is intended for use by mature adults who are not easily offended by the use of pornographic search terms. If you are offended by sexually explicit language you should not read through this data. Also be aware that in some states it may be illegal to expose a minor to this data. Please understand that the data represents REAL WORLD USERS, un-edited and randomly sampled, and that AOL is not the author of this data.

Basic Collection Statistics
Dates:
01 March, 2006 - 31 May, 2006

Normalized queries:
36,389,567 lines of data
21,011,340 instances of new queries (w/ or w/o click-through)
7,887,022 requests for "next page" of results
19,442,629 user click-through events
16,946,938 queries w/o user click-through
10,154,742 unique (normalized) queries
657,426 unique user ID's


Please reference the following publication when using this collection:

G. Pass, A. Chowdhury, C. Torgeson, "A Picture of Search" The First
International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, Hong Kong, June,
2006.

Copyright (2006) AOL



---------------------------------
Here is the data in 10 seperate parts for easier downloading.
Except for the README.txt file, each download is approximately 45 megabytes.

http://rapidshare.de/files/28599549/U500k_README.txt.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28601198/user-ct-test-collection-01.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28603114/user-ct-test-collection-02.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28605176/user-ct-test-collection-03.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28608579/user-ct-test-collection-04.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28648494/user-ct-test-collection-05.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28726720/user-ct-test-collection-06.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28728144/user-ct-test-collection-07.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28729746/user-ct-test-collection-08.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28731713/user-ct-test-collection-09.txt.gz.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/28733399/user-ct-test-collection-10.txt.gz.html

---------------------------------
Here is a link to site that provides mirrors the data as one big file.
The download is about 440 megabytes.

http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/

---------------------------------
Here are some newstories related to this data:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/08cnd-aol.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=da6c9f5c4b484908&hp&ex=1155096000&partner=homepage

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/08/08/aol-internet-update-cx_po_0808privacy.html

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7BF872D3DA-D635-42F3-ACB2-2C696746A567%7D&keyword=

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education"

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." - Albert Einstein

There are many times when I feel this way.
Instead of concentrating on learning something practical or insightful, I find myself just trying memorize a fact or two just to pass a test.

Google is fast

Yesterday I noticed how Google had already indexed my website www.EmmanuelSotelo.net. Based on what I have read on Google it is supposed to take a couple of months.

Also a search for my name, results with my website as the first listing.

However, MSN and Yahoo have yet to discover and index my site.

Happy 4th of July.

As the title indicates, Happy 4th of July!
:)