About Kevin

I am extremely interested in both current events and the ever evolving world of technology. Business and finance have exceedingly become important areas to me, as well. Over the next few years, I hope to log many interesting personal views and opinions concerning important aspects of the world in which we live. Keep in mind that all content posted by me on this web site reflects only my personal views and opinions and not those of anyone else.

Groundswell

book coverThere is a wonderful book I’ve read entitled “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies”.

This is a book primarily about traditional old-school business marketing tactics in the 1950’s-80’s. Of course these were times way before e-mail, social media and cell phones. The main theme of the book was how corporations could portray an image, dictate a message or influence an agenda because they could send a broadcast message to many people. This was the philosophy of a one-to-many broadcast message. There was no opposition or feedback to the message because there was no means to opine.

one to manyHowever, it was more than a business message that was important in this book. The message is also implies how in our everyday lives, that Groundswell among common people can truly have a voice. It was a message about the Groundswell of an average person’s voice, and listening carefully, that can be so powerful. It was about the voice of real people’s feedback and the importance there-of.

This was an era where advertising to consumers was somewhat new. This was an era in which large corporations could influence public opinion because there were no means for the average-person to express a voice, get organized easily or opine at all.

Boy, have times changed; and for the better.

feedback loopWe; meaning you and I, and nearly everyone with an internet connection is empowered to have a voice and be part of a Groundswell.

As everyone reading this message will surely know, you are empowered as never before to express an opinion, share a thought and communicate freely with others like never before.

Technology affords us this incredible opportunity. Let me provide a few specific examples of Personal Groundswell.

 

Examples of Personal Groundswell’s:

News Message Boards:

message boardI absolutely love reading the comments sections, especially the political commentaries recently, on certain news message boards. In particular when I read an article that has so much biased towards a particular cause or purpose. The Groundswell of people that can read right thru such garbage is very refreshing to me. It’s a testament to the fact that the American public isn’t as stupid as the establishment might think propecia canada.

Social Media:

social mediaI won’t even write much here because I’m certain that everyone reading this article is aware of the powerful nature of social media, for right or wrong. Whether you think social media is good or bad, we certainly must agree that even if used for bad purposes, the Groundswell to instantly communicate an opinion is powerful. Then, in contrary, a positive message can also be easily shared.

In summary, the point is that, like never before, little people have a huge voice. Express your opinion, be yourself and participate in Groundswell’s because your individual voice is more important than any amount of corporate marketing.

Dad becomes an Angel

dad_bridge

God welcomed one of his Angel’s into his graces on 4/21/16. My beloved, wonderful and terrific father, Floyd Neal, went to the Lord and be in Heaven with his brothers (Jewell, Gene and Carl). parents and son (Robert). This grand reunion is something I’m sure Dad greatly enjoyed, and I’m so happy for him (and a bit jealous actually). Brandee and I recently had the awesome pleasure to celebrate his 93rd birthday together at his home on April 13th, 2016. While I’m certainly missing his physical-presence, I am SO glad to know that he is out of misery and now in the presence of decent people. Dad is a decent person, with serious positive influence, on many people whom he met in his 93 terrific years and being a Decent person.

 

Floyd Neal’s family

 

familyDad had four sons. Mike, myself, John and Robert. He was such a perfect father and always provided each one of us with the support to do whatever it is that we choose to do with our lives. Dad always provided the soundest advice, whether you wanted to hear it or not; he spoke from experience. We have created a website to share his legacy, and hopefully inspire others, at FloydNeal.com. I encourage you to be make some comment on his guestbook page.

 

 

Dad’s Celebration of Life

crossword
Dad’s Celebration of Life was held on Saturday, May 21st, 2016 in Woodland, California. Brandee prepared an absolutely beautiful self-running PowerPoint presentation which chronicled Dad’s entire life. It included photos and stories when Dad was a young child, through his business career and, of course, much of his family life. It was gorgeous and people really enjoyed the presentation. I would like to share with you below so you can enjoy for yourself:

 

Also, I provided a talk on my Dad’s Legacy with some supporting slides. My talk obviously had a narrative so let me please briefly explain the contexts that might be lost if you are viewing only the presentation. Dad loved crossword puzzles. Therefore, I had my talk in the theme of a crossword puzzle where I provided a brief story for each letter in his name F L O Y D N E A L.

 

Bella terrorizes, Jack trembles
bellaBella, our 13-year old orange tabby cat, for whatever reason has decided to take her reign-of-terror within the house to a new level. She’s always been the strong personality-type but her recent activities are border-line assault. Our poor black Labrador retriever, Jack, has been a near constant target for Bella for nearly the past year. We honestly think that it’s Feline Dementia.

 

There is no cure other than to be patient and understanding with her aggression. We will give her even extra loving and protect Jack as much as we can. She is in no obvious pain but her personality certainly has changed over the past year.

 

jackJack, our 8-year old Lab, continues to be Jack. He loves to go for walks. He loves to ride in the car. He enjoys cuddling with Mommy and Daddy. He is very patient with his sister. He likes to fart a lot too. Brandee fed him some nori (a.k.a. seaweed) the other day and he farted something awful for 3 days! Never again!

 

As much as I like to make fun of Jack’s awkwardness, the truth is that he is very special to Brandee and myself. He might look big and vicious but he has a really genuine spirit that is so loving. Jack is such a kind fellow to young children especially. He has an uncanny ability to take great care and is very protective of children.

 

A comfortable ride
carLittle did we realize it at the time but the car that Brandee and I purchased in late 2014 would provide immediate benefits. Unfortunately, Dad first got seriously sick in January 2015 and after that time we made many 360-mile round-trips, which we were glad to do of course, but I could not have imagined the misery traveling these miles in one of our older vehicles.

 

Dad was always curious to ask about the car. “How’s the car running?”, he would ask. “How’s the car treating you?”, he would inquire. Dad is that type of person that is always interested in others activities instead of himself.

 

Brandee’s support
Brandee and Kevin at John's weddingWhen major life-changing events happen, there isn’t much to do other than be supportive and work thru them and it’s great to do it as a team. Brandee is my teammate. She is not a cuddly, huggy-type person; and that’s something I most admire about her. She is, however, a great listener and highly sympathetic.

 

Brandee has been an amazing supporter through these days and I can’t be more appreciative. In spite of a lot of challenges, she is typically reasonable and a great person to discuss difficult topics with.

 

Her fantastic presentation about Dad’s Celebration of Life is something I am most grateful for. It was really a heartfelt expression of her Love for my Father. They really became close over the 18-years of knowing each other and she told a beautiful story in pictures and stories. It was really awesome and I hope you enjoy it as much as I, and Dad would.

 

Dad’s amazing legacy
dad and kevinDad is an accomplished man of 93-years. He established a loving family, successful business and influenced others positively through his great spirit. His friendly attitude will live on through others. One word that continually is shared about Dad’s legacy is “Decent”. Everyone agrees that Dad is a Decent person with great Integrity and high morality.

So, I wanted to provide this update on my personal life but I want to challenge you right-now, right this minute, in this moment of time…….to do something positive in honor of my wonderful father. For example, if you are reading this on social media, e-mail or whatever; just say a simple thank you to someone that deserves it – right now. Or if you are more ambitious do something such a volunteer at a homeless facility. Then, of course, something that would be super-extra special is to do something nice for our needy-military veterans. You choose your means to give and it doesn’t need to be monetary. In fact, just the contrary, just do something nice. Floyd Neal would love that and he’s watching over you as an Angel from the Heaven’s above.

last slide

Love,
Kevin

Natural Language – Computer Understanding

Apple Siri, Amazon Echo, Google Voice, Microsoft Clippy or whatever you call them, the fact of the matter is that voice-control and virtual assistants are coming – and in a big way!

voice collage

  • Why? To make the user experience better to interact with computers just like you would with humans.
  • So what’s the big deal? Having a computer understand human language is extremely difficult.

Every single major IT company including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Apple (and many others) have invested significant efforts in the area of ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI), Neural Networks or Natural Language Processing (NLP)’. I will group these terms together of the purpose of this article, and I provide some specific definition below, but please know the essence is of machine-learning, where a computer thinks (and reacts) with logic and not an algorithm.

  • Artificial Intelligence definition: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
  • Neural Network definition: a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system.
  • Natural Language Processing definition: is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction.

ai_nlp_nn

As I mentioned earlier there has been a lot of investment and research in the areas of AI and NLP, so the question begs why are we seeing such a big push in the consumer market of voice-control technology all of a sudden?

That is a reasonable question and I think it’s easily answered by two words: ‘The Cloud’! First, you need unimaginable amounts of data to ‘train’ a computer. For example, IBM Watson, at its core only knows two things which are binary (or 1’s and 0’s, yes or no, true or false). To make IBM Watson, Jeopardy-worthy it had to be pumped with years and years of library data for it to ‘learn’. My point is that without this very specific training, a computer system as powerful as Watson still cannot communicate like humans do naturally every day. Secondly, massive compute-power is required. ‘The Cloud’ offers both access to unimaginable amounts of data plus massive compute-power where, finally, computer systems an achieve machine-learning capabilities in earnest.

I was fortunate enough to work at a company called ABBYY for the past 4+ years. ABBYY is known in the industry as a leader in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is true and one of the reasons I decided to join the company, however and what I was pleasantly surprised to quickly learn, was that high-quality OCR was a result of a much bigger vision. This bigger vision was from David Yang, ABBYY founder, and his passion to help people understand each other. It might sound simple but with so many different languages, interpretations of language and structure of language it is impossible to apply scientific logic to understand meaning or intention that a computer might understand.

Eugene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPlV9mzqeFQ

  • Introduction of ABBYY Machine Translation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gb9cgzxPWk (click here to see some great use case examples for NLP)

Eugene describes the use cases for NLP technology including:

  • Keyword vs. Semantic Search
  • Syntactic language parsing
  • Semantic indexing
  • Contextual understanding
  • Document classification
  • Similar documents

It was my great honor to work with some serious Linguistic scientists and learn a little bit about the complications of NLP, and true language understanding. Previously I had thought, probably like most of us reading this article, ‘why can’t Apple Siri understand what I’m saying?’. ‘Why is she so dumb about her answers?’. I do recall those reactions and it still happens to-this-day. The magic of Siri is not the voice recognition itself of word-for-word conversion, but rather the understanding of the complete question or command in a full sentence. I learned that to understand human language, meaning and intent is nearly impossible, even with the greatest scientific-minds and compute-power completely focused on such realization.

 

In summary, and probably in the not so distant future, I can imagine the reality of our everyday lives being controlled by voice-command. It is an undeniable trend. The domain names of NLPIsAFad.com, AIisAFad.com and ArtificialIntellingenceIsAFad.com will become hot comities as collectors gobble-up such forward-thinking treasures. A day where you walk in your front door and say something such as ‘summer-time’ and your stereo immediately starts summer-time music, then the shades automatically turn to a sandy-location and then your television instantly clicks on-to a refreshing beach sunset! Ahhhhh, so tropical. This is all within our grasp now and will soon be a realization for you.

vr living roon

Black Sabbath – SAP Center, February 9, 2016

Note: All credit for this article is attributed to Jim Harrington  jharrington@bayareanewsgroup.com

Review: Black Sabbath delivers powerful farewell

Ozzy Osbourne stalked the stage with manic delight. Tony Iommi burned through one face-melting guitar lead after another. And Geezer Butler’s basslines were as heavy as heavy can be.

It was a thing of thundering beauty, made all that more poignant by the knowledge that there won’t be many more opportunities to experience it again.

It was the beginning of a long goodbye for local fans, as the legendary heavy metal band Black Sabbath brought its farewell tour to the SAP Center in San Jose on Tuesday. The other shoe is scheduled to drop when Ozzy and crew return to the Bay Area to perform on Sept. 15 at Oracle Arena in Oakland.

The British band managed to underscore all the reasons why it will be so dearly missed during Tuesday’s show. Indeed, Sabbath sounded so strong that, at times, it seemed like an absolutely ludicrous idea for these guys to even be thinking about hanging it up. Yet, if the goal is to go out on top — in peak fighting form — then Sabbath is right on track.

Following the opening set by Rival Sons, the main attraction took the stage and slowly uncurled its namesake song, the epic title track to the 1970 debut “Black Sabbath.” Osbourne’s vocals, which have ranged greatly in quality over the years, sounded comparatively strong on this night — powerful, confident and (mostly) clear. The 67-year-old former reality TV star also showed a goodly amount of energy, running about and clapping his hands.

The group then charged through “Fairies Wear Boots,” from the 1970 quadruple-platinum effort “Paranoid.” Iommi starred in this song, like he did in so many others. The supremely talented guitarist, who has battled cancer in recent years, was a regular volcano of riffs, firing off leads so hot they should’ve come with warning labels.

The sold-out crowd, numbering some 13,000 strong, reacted with great enthusiasm to the heavy metal onslaught. The fans, many of whom were old enough to possibly remember buying “Paranoid” on eight-track tape, sang along at top volume and pumped their firsts in air for much of the approximately two-hour show.

The set list drew almost exclusively from the band’s first three albums. Unfortunately, Sabbath only played one track (“Snowblind”) from what is, by far, its best album — 1972’s “Vol. 4” — and it entirely skipped over 1973’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.” Hearing the title track to the later, after all, should be required at all Sabbath shows.

Sabbath did find time for “Dirty Women,” a tune that stands as one of the few reasons for listening to the band’s seventh studio album, 1976’s “Technical Ecstasy.” It also remembered “God Is Dead?” from “13,” the band’s 19th — and supposedly final — album.

Supporting Iommi, Osbourne and Ward — three founding members of the band — was Tommy Clufetos, a powerhouse drummer who has worked with Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie and others. Clufetos was handling the beats and rhythms originally made famous by Bill Ward, who left the fold in 2013.

The band closed the main set with an epic run through “Children of the Grave,” which featured more fireworks from Iommi, and then returned for an encore of “Paranoid.”

Fans who missed this show — or simply want more — should think about attending the Black Sabbath show on Sept. 15 at Oracle Arena. Tickets are $45-$150, www.ticketmaster.com

Follow Jim Harrington at http://twitter.com/jimthecritic and www.facebook.com/jim.bayareanews.

Roadtrip(s) – Q1’16

What a crazy past few weeks this has been!  It’s been an interesting time of change that has encompassed a full-range of emotions from professional enthusiasm to personal reflection.

First of all I would like to thank my wonderful wife for her terrific support and patience. Our life this past month has consisted of lots of car travel, hotel rooms and many other impromptu activities. From a personal reflection standpoint it’s truly amazing how karma treats us all.

charger_sideAs I mentioned previously much of our time has been in the car traveling to-and-from various locations all over the state of California. Fortunately, Brandee had strongly encouraged me to purchase a new car last year and, in retrospect, was this never a better decision. I could not have imagined the horror of having to travel such distances in our other vehicle(s) without air conditioning, heating or other comforts (not that this travel is luxurious in any way, but it’s less suffering indeed). Having a reliable automobile for the insane travel we’ve experienced recently is refreshing so that we can focus on other more important priorities.

nationsOne of the fringe benefits for all this road travel is that you start to notice particular road-show landmarks. A significant landmark that we noticed recently was the NATIONS Giant Hamburgers in Tracy. I had been to a NATIONS long-ago but couldn’t recall anything notable about the experience so Brandee and I tempted-fate with a visit on the road home recently. Brandee ordered a cheeseburger, I ordered a bacon-cheeseburger with a side of onion rings and drinks. Something for sure is that you better bring your appetite when going to NATIONS because they certainly bring quantity. After a delicious breakfast of burgers, ‘rings and drinks we were back on the road home.

floyd oklahoma 2007Above all else, and most importantly, it’s the love of family that is what truly matters in life. Floyd Neal, is my wonderful Dad and the proud father of four sons. His amazing mentorship, encouragement and support is a son’s life-dream. I am so grateful to spend some quality time recently with my eldest brother. His amazing spirit and awesome inspiration is truly infectious. Mike, you are a terrific person; thanks! John, you are an excellent role-model for your son and we look forward to your exciting near-future! And Robert, Dad loves you more than anything and you surely must know that. Dad has been so good to everyone in his life that I nominate him for the Best Dad Ever Award!

Family First,

Kevin