I've decided to post a brief summarized update to what happened to me so you don't need to read my small bursts of tweets for my whereabouts.
A much longer post will be meticulously crafted after my return to home.
I am writing this blog post standing in in the hallway of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, on one of the computer stations that I technically should not use, but since I am not one of the cool folks with an iPhone, I will have to make do, and you will have to make stand.
I have not been feeling all that well since Tuesday last week. I thought that it was just a stomachache and I didn't think much about it. Since I was on a rather time-sensitive project, I didn't want to 'drop the ball' as a certain "K" personality might like to put it, and go for some check-up. This stomachache got a whole bit worse and by the time Friday hits, I could barely walked. I was having diarrhea all day long til eventually I sent a panic email to a very closed friend Gregory Hull (Flickr / SML Wiki) who received my email at on 2007-12-08 10am in the morning in LES and rushed over to my RAMBO (Right After the Manhattan Bridge) residence (see www.seeminglee.com/map for exact location) to help me to the nearest emergency room.
We originally got to a rather shabby hosptial, but upon which I realize that surgery is necessary, I decided to switch to the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, also known as the Weill Cornell Medical College.
I had a CT scan and was determined that I had a ruptured appendicitis. Surgery commenced on Sunday around 1am. Detail on the surgery to follow on a follow up post. But the design of the OR is AMAZING! Looks even better than any movie sets I've seen.
I'm currently staying at
Rm 8-224, 8 Central
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
525 E. 68th St.
New York, NY 10065
My direct line at the hospital is +1 212 585 7433.
My cell as you all know is +1 646 373 9008.
SML Thank You
I would like to thank the fantastic phonecalls and lots and lots of love from people at IconNicholson, including Susie Rust, Michele Lomas, Scott Heydt, Kip Voytek (via Susie), and the millions of you who are not allowed to call me because of an effective IconSpam halted by Travis Barr of Sunday Morning Mimosa
I would like to thank IconNicholson for the red flower arrangement.
I would like to thank John Frazier for the really gorgeous hand-picked flower arrangement and the oh so lovely darling phone call.
I would like to thank Jingle Blues for tracking me down on my Twitter post and navigitating his way to come see me with books in hand!
I would like to thank Susie Rust for dropping by with the orange rose bouquet last night. They bloomed today and are soooo pretty!
I would like to thank Kip Voytek for the chess strategy book for study.. though my mom accidentally transported it back home today... :(
I would like to thank Yale Alumni Magazine for featuring SML Universe on the November / December 2007 issue. I saw that blurb during my miserable stay at the hospital and it *really* made my day.
I would like to thank my mom for flying over from Hong Kong to see me. My dad is coming on December 18 I think.
I would of course like to thank Gregory Hull and my sister for medical assitance throughout the episode, which is not yet finished!
Lastly I would like to thank all the doctors, nurses and nursing aids who have been supportive and making me feel so at home here (what is particularly crazy about hospitals, as I have learned, is that farting and having gas will get a huge congratulating hug... details to come on next post.. no space no) too much verbal diarrhea here anyhow as I haven't taken any ADD meds for a week -- nor any other food for that matter..
More will be thanked as I gain more consciousness... not much moleskine'ing has been done during my adverse morphine'ing.
Will be pausing here.
Look for me again next week!
Cheers,
SML
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Still in hospital, feeling energetic
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Human Calendar / Inspirations Are Everywhere
The Human Calendar™ is a calendar created by Craig Giffen where portraits of everyday people and puts them into a calendar, where everyone is looking at the current date.
In addition to the main calendar, there are also portable versions, i.e. widgets for Google Homepage, your blogs, MySpace, etc. Very neat. Here's the blog widget. I will look forward to seeing it change for tomorrow:
"
SML Thank You
I found this on the Facebook posted items from Tom Ajello (SML Wiki). Thanks!
Related SML Universe
+ Inspirations Are Everywhere
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
365 Special Days = Celebration of Life and Humanity
Fernando Luis Lara is a brazillian artist living and working in the US. He draws the 365 days of the year based on stories submitted by people around the world. Each day will only be drawn once. For $182.50 USD, you get an original drawing (9 x 12 inches = 23 x 31 cm) by mail, and your story and drawing will also be shown on the site. The idea is that over time the site will become a collection of special days around the world, thus serving as a reminder of how special each and every day can be.
It's a genius marketing idea for an artist, and it utilizes the mechanisms of the collaborative theme seen today in the rise of Web 2.0. Very inspiring. Check it out!
365specialdays.com
Related SML Universe
+ Inspirations Are Everywhere
+ SML Fine Art
+ SML Ideas
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Wing Suit = Human + Wings
Found a video called Wingsuite on Ben Hammersley's blog today. Stunningly amazing. It's like jumpsuit with wings. Found more videos so created a playlist:
SML YouTube Playlists: Wingsuite
Related SML Universe
+ Crazy is Good
+ SML Skydive
+ SML YouTube Playlists
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Project Rebirth / 2004 / SML
(Thumbnails / Detail / Comments)
Project Rebirth (www.ProjectRebirth.org)
Chronicling the Rebirth of Ground Zero in New York City
Screens (11 Total)
+ 1. Home
+ 2. Timeline: Camera C: View Cone
+ 3. Timeline: Camera C: Information
+ 4. Timeline: Today: 2004-11-17
+ 5. Timeline: Project Journal: 2003-11-23: Event: Opening of the PATH Train: Documentary
+ 6. Timeline: Project Journal: 2003-11-23: Event: Opening of the PATH Train: Journal
+ 7. Timeline: Project Journal: 2003-11-23: Event: Opening of the PATH Train: Journal Detail
+ 8. The Film: Project Journal
+ 9. The Film: Cameras
+ 10. The Rebuild about Ground Zero
+ 11. About Us: News & Press
Awards
+ Design Interact Site of the Week: 2004-12-20
+ Graphis Interactive Annual 3, 2005
+ One Show Interactive 2005 Merit Award
+ Web Marketing Association's WebAwards 2005: Best Non-Profit Website
IconNicholson Team (IconNicholson / LBi International)
+ Claudia Chow (Google / LinkedIn)
+ Katharine English (Google / LinkedIn)
+ Larry Burks (Google / LinkedIn)
+ Leslie Freeman (Google / LinkedIn)
+ Miles Kafka (Google / LinkedIn)
+ Paul Wood (Google)
+ Robert Fisher
+ See-ming Lee (Blog / Flickr / Google / LinkedIn)
+ Tim Murtaugh (Flickr / Google / LinkedIn)
Design Interact: Web Site of the Week (www.designinteract.com/sow/122004/)
Week of December 20: Project Rebirth Web Site
Project Rebirth is an online chronicle of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. As immediate and compelling as a physical visit, this project gives people the opportunity to observe and share in the progress of the reconstruction.
Newly released at the time the team was considering technical specifications, this Project Rebirth Web site site uses the FlashMX development environment to full effect. Functioning as a portal to extensive content, the beauty of this Web site lies in its ability to be current and historical. With a visual design that appropriately takes a back seat to the content, it records ideas, images and interviews in their original context while also allowing for their evolution.
Primary content consists of a series of video images (presented in a timeline format) captured by six, 35mm time-lapse cameras positioned by Project Rebirth around the World Trade Center site. They shoot one frame every five minutes—and will continue to do so for ten years. The images enable the viewing of the rebuild as it occurs on any date; in seconds, visitors can see the footage of a single day. There are also interviews with reconstruction overseers, journals by filmmakers and video of major milestones in the redevelopment efforts.
Project Rebirth Web site
The key challenge for the developers was to create an interface that would incorporate what would ultimately be ten years of film footage, that didn’t inundate visitors and yet communicated the passage of substantial amounts of time. Their solution is an interactive, XML-driven timeline that delivers fluid viewing of time-lapse footage. It provides an appropriate time-based metaphor that also does a nice job of integrating video, audio, imagery and text-based content into a single interface. The time-based experience allows access to any moment in time and provides the ability to navigate the Web site by date and/or event. Our one complaint: The link from the home page, to this main feature, looks far too much like header art. We would have liked to see billing more in line with its importance.
This collaborative effort between Project Rebirth and IconNicholson began in the summer of 2003 and the site launched in September 2004. On average, visitors are staying on the site 19 minutes, which is significant in comparison to Internet-wide stays at sites with similar content. Interestingly, international users comprise 30% of all visitors.
Robert Fisher, creative director
Claudia Chow, art director
See-ming Lee, timeline art director/developer
Larry Burks, information architect
Miles Kafka, CGI programmer/engineer
Tim Murtaugh, HTML developer
Leslie Freeman, producer
Katharine English, Project Rebirth, general manager
Paul Wood, Project Rebirth, technical producer
IconNicholson, site design and development
Web site: www.projectrebirth.org
Web site: www.iconnicholson.com
©2004 Coyne & Blanchard, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Related SML Universe
SML Awards
SML Collection
SML Collection (Flickr Collection)
SML Information Design
SML Interaction Design
SML Projects
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee / SML Flickr / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
SML Copyright Notice
Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Human Identification Algorithm
Are you human? (Sorry, We Have to Ask). Can’t read the text? Listen to it.
—Digg - Submit Item
You have seen it time and time again. That required step when you submit stories these days for human identification. It composed with letters that are salted with noise and artifacts to defer a bot's attempt to fill out the form and thus spam.
It was a smart idea, but algorithms catch up and soon they don’t work quite as well anymore. So the level has of difficulty for OCR comprehension increased bit by bit everyday. It has become so complex these days that even I cannot identify what characters they are supposed to be.
Perhaps because of the number of complaints received, now we also have the audio version of the same thing. What are they going to do when the audio recognition algorithm got better?
In my opinion, this human identification process simply does not work. Algorithms will get smarter everyday for visual or audio algorithms. A better way is to ask logic questions. For example, ask people to verbally describe the difference between a nerd and a geek. Ask them why they they are reading your blog.
Opinions are largely based on logic, but it is also largely based on creativity, and creativity is something that cannot easily be programmed yet—until the natural language algorithm catch up on it. Another difficult thing that comes natural to us but fairly difficult to do for a machine is comprehension.
I have tested this behavior with a survey which ask the question: Name the odd-man-out among the following: AOL / Google / MSN / Yahoo and state the reason supporting your answer. I get very interesting answers. They are all very inspiring and as such I know that they are not machines.
Being able to go through those answers and pick out the human responses are also most definitely a task that ought to be done by a human. I do not think that there is a computer program that can decipher how creative something is yet. However, I have fears that there are projects underway that is attempting to understand creativity using brute force.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Google Answers, and I discovered that they are no longer accepting new questions. This was a site where users submit questions and get answers responded by other users. The snippets are very interesting and no doubt allow Google to index more interesting data that is not readily available on the Web. Having the ability to train an algorithm to act like human is a very ambitious activity, but it appears that the algorithm training has paid off.
I visited Google Translate and Google Language Tools recently and I am very impressed with their English to Chinese translation capability.
Unlike English, Chinese uses a defined set of characters. Where Latin languages generally create new meanings by the use of new words, the number of Chinese characters do not change. New meanings are created through the combination of the order of these characters. As such, while Chinese children are rarely able to read newspapers until they are graduating from primary school, there will be no more new words to learn after that. It's all pattern recognition after that part. It's a bit like iconography systems, where new meanings are created out of a predefined set of modifiers.
Despite the language's complexity, I witnessed that the Google Translator is able to handle English to Chinese text relatively easily, which is light years ahead of the translation tools I have used before, and it definitely makes me wonder what else Google Research is brewing inside their labs these days.
SML Copyright Notice
Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Gay Pride New York 2007
Happiness = Pride
June 22 - 24, 2007 is officially the happiest weekend I have had in my entire life. I spent the weekend taking photographs of the most uniquely talented and creative bunch of people I have ever been with and in turn made many wonderful friends along the way.I thank you all for demonstrating the diversity and pleasure of life to me.
I took 1000+ photos over that weekend. My Gay Pride New York 2007 (Flickr Collection) consists of the following Flickr sets:
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Thumbnails / Detail / Slideshow
Here are 200 highlights (my favorites) from the complete collection:
I haven't been able to jot down every single name and email addresses. Please feel free to identify yourself or your friends in the comment area of the photograph.
Share the Gay Pride New York 2007 Collection
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SML Flickr Groups
On July 7th, 2007, I finished processing all the photographs.
I was immensely touched by the humanity, diversity and the spirit of life from my experience, and I wrote a manifesto about the celebration of life. On the same day, I started the following Flickr groups to honor the men and women who have inspired and continue to provide support to me in the past, present and future:
I invite you to join and post your photographs.
Content Syndication
You may syndicate this content for non-commercial purposes as long as you attribute credits to me. Commercial usage will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Model Credits
If you are the model of the photograph, please email me at seeminglee+gaypridenewyork2007@gmail.com so I can give you proper credits.
Copyright Notice
Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee. All rights reserved.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Life
Life celebrates differences.
Life celebrates humanity.
Regardless of age, attire, or build.
Regardless of class, color, or culture.
Regardless of education, flavor, or gender.
Regardless of hair style, income level, or interest.
Regardless of life style, location, or philosophy.
Regardless of profession, physique, or race.
Regardless of religion, role, or sexual taste.
Life is equilibriumism.
Life is everything and nothing.
Life is all of us and none of us.
-- See-ming Lee, 2007.07.07
See photographs of how life celebrates diversity.