Month: August 2016

Milton Friedman Learnings 2

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I believe we need to trust the will of individuals seeking their own legitimate self-interests instead of looking for a governmental deity to save us from each other, from ourselves, and from the bogeyman de jour – whether the bogeyman is North Korea, Russia, ISIS, immigration, drugs, teen sex, Zika, inflation/deflation, or our own lack of perceived morality. 

I think the following three quotes from Milton Friedman tie together concepts that can create the next great society.

01) ‘Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it… gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.’ – Milton Friedman

(02) ‘Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.’ – Milton Friedman

(03) ‘The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.’ – Milton Friedman


Mike

Milton Friedman Learnings 1

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Besides the study of my faith and some important lessons taught to me by my immediate family Milton Friedman is the single biggest influencer on my life, on my value system, on my understanding of human nature and my understanding of motivations (both good and bad). 

This may sound funny considering Milton Friedman is a Nobel Price winning economist and not a philosopher or psychologist, a government or business leader. Stranger still is that I would admire the inventor of the modern payroll withholding tax or someone that worked as an economist supporting Franklin Roosevelt with New Deal price and wage-fixing policies. 

With all that said, reading ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ which was first published in 1962 was a pivotal moment for me. I first read Capitalism and Freedom during High School and have since read it cover-to-cover over a dozen times and referred back to it hundreds of times. I would recommend to every parent that they provide strong rewards to their children for reading and comprehending this awesome piece of literature. Like Friedman may have said, people work best when they work for their own legitimate self- interest. Find a way to incentivize the kids to grasp this. I am so grateful my dad did it for me. It will be worth it!

Although Friedman is known for many fiscal viewpoints that we generally call conservative now but people frequently forget his early and vocal support for gay rights and same-sex marriage, abolishing conscription, legalizing marijuana, negative income tax, and many more including be a strong voice opposing the Gulf War and the Iran War. He was also lovingly married to his wife and co-author Rose for 68 years.

I am going to take this topic, Milton Friedman Learnings and expand on it over time on my site explaining how I interpret Friedman’s views on religion, family, government, society, economics, capitalism and freedom.
Mike

My Vision Quest

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Whether you call them vision quest, walkabout, or pilgrimage for thousands of years, spiritual seekers have ventured into the wilderness to find their greater purpose, define their goals, gain wisdom, have a spiritual encounter and to connect with what is truly important in life. 

These seekers include spiritual leaders like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, along with Australian aborigines, Native Americans and countless others people throughout history. 

I figure if it helped great people like them, a vision quest could help me. 

Maribeth and I are going on a vision quest of our own to redefine our purpose. So we are taking a vision quest trip to connect more deeply with nature, heal, overcome fears along with all the other important things mentioned above.

I am excited! We hope to someday go on the famous religious walks in India where I can walk in the footsteps of so many, like Trimbakeshwar Shiva Temple, or walk El Camino de Santiago and run with the Bulls in Pamplona.

These pilgrimages are going to be an annual part of the way I manage my life. 

Mike

Life Pilgrim

Microsoft Cognitive Services Text Analysis Services

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Can you believe that you can just ‘tap into’ Text Analysis Services like this with an API? I was looking through Microsoft’s Cognitive Services website and was admiring just how Microsoft is making it much easier for people to do great things with services like this. 

Description

Understanding and analyzing unstructured text is an increasingly popular field and includes a wide spectrum of problems such as sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, topic modeling/extraction, aspect extraction and more.

Text Analytics API is a suite of text analytics services built with Azure Machine Learning. We currently offer APIs for sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and topic detection for English text, as well as language detection for 120 languages.In this initial preview release, we offer APIs for sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction of English text. No labeled or training data is needed to use the service – just bring your text data. This service is based on research and engineering that originated in Microsoft Research and which has been battle-tested and improved over the past few years by product teams such as Bing and Office.

Sentiment Analysis

Let’s say you run a website to sell handicrafts. Your users submit feedback on your site, and you’d like to find out what users think of your brand, and how that changes over time as you release new products and features to your site. Sentiment analysis can help here – given a piece of text, the Azure ML Text Analytics service returns a score between 0 and 1 denoting overall sentiment in the input text. Scores close to 1 indicate positive sentiment, while scores close to 0 indicate negative sentiment.

Sentiment score is generated using classification techniques. The input features to the classifier include n-grams, features generated from part-of-speech tags, and embedded words. The classifier was trained in part using Sentiment140 data.

Key Phrase Extraction

This service can also extract key phrases, which denote the main talking points in the text. We employ techniques from Microsoft Office’s sophisticated Natural Language Processing toolkit.

For example, for the input text ‘The manual transmission is a bit twitchy. Also, the vehicle is old-school’, the service would return the main talking points: ‘manual transmission’, ‘vehicle’ and ‘old-school’

Topic Detection

This is a new service which returns the topics which have been detected in multiple text articles. The service is designed to work well for short, human written text such as reviews and user feedback, and can help you to understand the main issues or suggestions that customers are mentioning.

Language Detection

The service can be used to detect which language the input text is written in.
All of this as a service. All of this available at low volume for no cost. This makes the impossible possible.

Mike

My first blog post (ever)

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Really excited to publish my first-ever blog posting. I don’t mean my first as the editor/blogger but my first ever of any kind. 

This is really my pilot or test site with wordpress. This will be my first DIY effort in the new long-page and infographic era. I am looking forward to it. I have a lot to share. I am thinking that my production site will be called either ‘Iteration365’ or ‘life bok’ for life body-of-knowledge or ‘who is in your canoe?’

I would like to have the top of the site (the part you will see when you land) as the primary product/service offering and below that we will have three to four columns (think editorial sections) each a continuing dialogue on a focus area we are passionate about.

For example, I think I will do an ongoing column on ‘Conversations-as-a-Service’. Greg may do one on Managing Enterprise Application Sales Teams. Maribeth may do one on developing and maintaining administrative service culture. I may want to do another one on all the things that I learned in business and team building, both good and bad. 

First though, I am really passionate about how recent advances in computing power, big data, and machine learning are actually making expert systems, artificial intelligence, and enhanced intelligence a practical reality. I can see how that will quickly transcend into intelligent, interesting, and meaningful machine-to-human conversations that will take place through messaging applications. Both chat and voice. 

I think Microsoft has a big advantage when it comes to voice recognition because of the massive volumes of voice communication content they have with Skype. That content/data provides tremendous context for how people communicate. That helps.

Thanks for absorbing my first blog post

Mike