For half a decade, I have depended on the great open source Gallery2 project to host my photo galleries. Unfortunately, I am finding myself with less and less time to devote to maintaining the installation, and many useful social media features have yet to make it into its code base. So, I finally decided to port my entire gallery into flickr.

Much to my surprise, there are lots of scripts in the gallery database to import photos from flickr, but no functional scripts to export photos out of gallery2 into flickr. Several past attempts have been made, but I can get none of them to work properly. So I did what any good coder would do, I modified the existing scripts until it worked. I am providing the scripts I hacked at the end of this post. There are several caveats with the scripts that I’m including here:

1. It’s recommended that you run this script (export-gallery.php) using command line php, or else the script might pre-maturely end due to Apache rest times. I also have max_execution_time = 0 set in my php.ini.
2. It’s recommended that you dramatically increase resource limitations on your mysql server when attempting to run this script. I made no attempt at optimizing mysql calls at all. The script basically makes a new call whenever it wants new data. I have wait_timeout=600 set in my my.cnf.
3. I offer NO support whatsoever for these scripts. They were created to ease my own personal transitions, and reading them should be fairly easy.
4. The script utilizes PHPFlickr and is based on mindlesscode.net’s version of export-gallery. Several major upgrades to the original script have been made, including the ability to export sub-albums.
5. I recommend only using getToken.php in phpFlickr, as I personally could not get PHPFlickr’s API authentication to work in any reliable fashion.
6. You should see a line like this in export-gallery.php i.".DATABASE_COLUMN_PREFIX."ownerId=10 AND . This allows you to export galleries on a per-user basis. You can look up the userid information in the gallery2 tables.

So with that said, click here to download the script. You can run it by typing php export-gallery.php on the command line after editing a few variables at the top of export-gallery.php and setting up the API key / token combination from flickr. I used this very useful link from PHPFlickr to get my token after setting up the API key.

College campuses are increasingly turning into hubs for the spread of STDs as college students take on an increasing number of sexual partners. On average, college students now have around 3 sexual partners a year (Martens et al).

It turns out that male students in general would like to be much more promiscuous than their female counterparts. Undergraduate men expressed a desire for a significantly greater mean number of sex partners than did undergraduate women, over a 1-year period, women, on average, were interested in a single sex partner, whereas the average man expressed a desire for about seven partners (Fenigstein et al, 2007). This result did not change in a statistically significant way for those in serious relationships. What was particularly surprising to me is that males are actually successful in being more promiscious, even among the supposedly more conservative asian subgroup (Arliss 2008). As one can observe from the graph below, males have a much higher percentage of being sexually active with more than 3 partners than females.

The implications above are particularly disturbing for the spread of Human papillomavirus (HPV) infections. HPV is mostly harmless in men but might develop into cervical cancer in women. HPV is estimated to be the most commonly transmitted STD. A recent paper from Sexually Transmitted Disease: Influence of Partner’s Infection Status on Prevalent Human Papillomavirus Among Persons With a New Sex Partner included some extremely surprising statistics.

Women attending university or college in Montreal, Canada, and their male partners (N = 263 couples) were enrolled in 2005–2008. HPV was detected in 56% of women and men. 44% have a type that can lead to cancer. New relationships are when HPV transmission is most likely.

The overall prevalence rate of HPV in the US has never been firmly established, with rates ranging from 14% to 90% being published in peer-reviewed literature (Dunne et al, Revzina et al). Studies however, agree on the trend that a much higher incident rate of HPV is being reported on college campuses than in the general public.

The highest prevalence of HPV was identified among women attending sexually transmitted diseases (STD) clinics and college students, identifying them as target populations for prevention interventions. Conversely, the lowest HPV prevalence was among women in the general population. …

With the recently released and much publicized HPV vaccine, many women might be lulled into a false sense of security. For one, the vaccine is only mildly effective on a few strains of the HPV virus, and only particularly effective PRIOR to exposure to the virus (Sawaya et al, 2007).

With grade 2 or 3 cervical intraepithelial neoplasia or adenocarcinoma in situ as the outcome, the difference in risk so far appears to be modest: 219 of 6087 vaccinated women (3.6%) received this diagnosis over an average of 3 years, as compared with 266 of 6080 unvaccinated women (4.4%). The absolute risk difference of 0.8% indicates that 129 women would need to be vaccinated in order to prevent one case of grade 2 or 3 cervical intraepithelial neoplasia or adenocarcinoma in situ occurring during this period. If grade 3 cervical intraepithelial neoplasia or adenocarcinoma in situ were the most relevant outcome, evidence was insufficient to infer the effectiveness of vaccination.

This does not mean that girls should not be given the HPV vaccine, rather that they should still be careful (condoms) and should still have regular screenings, even when vaccinated.

The Human Genome project was completed at the start of the last decade, and only in the last two years have we really begun to reap the fruits of the immense undertaking. I talk about some of commercial players and legal issues surrounding the wide spread adoption of personal genomic technology in medicine at the First AMA-IEEE Conference on Individualized Healthcare blog.

Incidentally, I’m also on the organizing committee for the conference mentioned above. Consider attending the conference if you are interested in Individualized Healthcare!

First AMA-IEEE EMBS Medical Technology Conference on Individualized Health Care
23-23 March 2010, Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC

The Harvard Business Review recently published their article on the Top 100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World. It’s probably not a surprise to many that Steve Jobs is #1 on the list (Apple, Pixar) or that there is only one woman (#8 – Meg Whitman of eBay) on the top 100. I am however, surprised by which woman they picked. Meg Whitman practically ran eBay into the ground. Indra Nooyi of Pepsico would have been a much better choice.

After glancing at a few of their selections, I decided to crunch some of the numbers given to see if there are any interesting trends. First, we can clearly see that HBR has a bias towards western CEOs (specifically, the US and UK).

The industries are pretty much what one expects, with energy and financial services leading the way.

Contrary to the prevalent white knight CEO myth, most good CEOs tend to be insiders, and do not hold MBA degrees. An MBA only seems to be important IF you want to be a white knight CEO.

Though if you do want to try and be a white knight CEO, USA and UK are about the only countries that really has that type of culture.

There’s a lot more analysis that you could run on the data if you want. I’m going to save you some effort in screen scraping and just give you the excel sheet that I used here.

So this concludes my first blog entry in the new decade! As some of you might have noticed, I’ve also completely revamped the website. If you have any comments, (constructive or hateful ones), please let me know! Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

As many have noticed, I’m on a blogging break and will continue to be in one for a while. 2008 has ended rather poorly but I have some great things to look forward to in 2009. (whoever stole my car on Dec 31st 2008, please return it…)

1. The NYCIML will finish its inaugural year as a student run organization under the excellent leadership of Yitian Liu and Maria Guirguis!
2. The NYMC will begin it’s second full year of operations. For 2009, we will be expanding to include programs to server the middle schools. New programs include two middle school student classes (I will be directing the program in Manhattan), and a middle school teacher program.
3. My healthcare strike team is shaping up quite nicely and we’ve finally located a project. I can’t reveal much about it yet.. but needless to say.. it kicks ass!
4. After consulting with a few friends, most notably jenniewang and Jorian, I’ve actually decided to take up Yoga. We’ll see how that goes.
5. NYCVPF made its first grant to Concrete Safari! Consider joining the organization if you are interested in social philanthropy.

Even though I am in the midst of a blogging break, I am still quite active on twitter.

In the mean time, check out this kickass Christmas card from First Round Capital.

Wow, I’m really impressed with the disastrous state of economy. I don’t really have much to say about it except that I am expecting these companies to fail within the next year or so:

• Citigroup
• GM
• Ford
• Chrysler
• Goldman Sachs
• Yahoo
• Citadel

Let’s see what actually happens….

So I just had dinner with two of my close friends, Ji Li and Dr. Wen Shi. One topic we touched on was our personal life philosophies. I assure you we don’t talk about serious stuff all the time, but sometimes it comes up! (In fact, if you had actually sat through the 3 hours, you would have thought all of us were total retards).

As a direct result of tonight’s conversation, I decided to write a few posts about my personal philosophies on life. Here is part I, my philosophy on effort.

If you read my about me section, you’ll probably see that I’m involved in a lot of different things. I often get asked how I could possibly manage having all these commitments at once. My secret weapon is in fact not brilliance, but what I like to call “compounding effort”.

The basic tenants of “compounding effort” is to simply push yourself 5% harder every year. I know it sounds simple and trivial, but the overall effect can be quite shocking. Indeed, humans in general are incredibly bad at recognizing anything non-linear. We really do not understand multiplication, and thus have very little intuition on how fast “compounding” really is. This is possibly a direct result of the environment we live in. Very few things in nature are non-linear. To add to the problem, we also have a need to see tangible results. The combination of these two qualities is that we as a race, especially Americans, rarely understand the need for long periods of sustained effort.

Take my “compounding effort” rule for example. Here is what happens to Person A’s efficiency over the course of 20 years if he / she follow my rule strictly.

That means compared to Person B who did not push him / herself, Person A is 3 times more efficient at the 20 year mark! Person A can do in a day what takes 3 days for Person B! How can Person B possibly hope to compete with Person A at that point? In fact, I can define a new quantity “effective life experience”, which is based on the amount of work a person actually does (think of it as the area underneath the curve of the effort curve).

There is something I’m sweeping under the carpet of course. Specifically, it takes time to become more efficient. Personally, I think I spend around 30% of my time just to become more efficient in the next year. So naturally this leads to an optimization question. Assuming I start pushing myself when I’m 10, and will stop working when I’m 60, how long should I push myself before the function is no longer optimized? Below, I’ve plotted a few life experience vs years curves.

Notice that for all of these curves, it is NOT worth it to push yourself forever. There is in fact a point at which you should stop pushing yourself, and use 100% of your efficiency. Also notice that the maximum life experience point, pushing yourself 5% harder a year is akin to accomplishing TWICE as much as a person who only pushed him / herself 2% harder a year, and is akin to accomplishing THREE times as much as a person who never bothered pushing at all. From the graph, it is clear that everyone should be pushing themselves until at least they are 30, which unfortunately most people do not do.

As my parting words, here is Jack’s intended life experience equation.

In the process of managing non-profits and startups, I’ve used many different online tools to better enable collaboration and communication in organizations. Through the years, I’ve tried many different tools, and now think I have a pretty good list. Please bear in mind that the three dimensions I’m optimizing across are ease of use, reliability, and cost. I am still looking for solutions in two major areas, and would love suggestions if anyone has them.

Website Registration: I’ve used GoDaddy and Namecheap in the past and they are both really good. If you have to be anonymous, try International Alliance Privacy Services.

Website Hosting: I’ve tried self hosting, as well as many different online hosts. If you have a good technical person on board, and REALLY have the need for something advanced (cron jobs, RoR, significant processing needs), try either dedicated hosting or colocation. For dedicated hosting, I really like Softlayer. For NYC based colocation, I really like Pilosoft. For most website hosting needs, all you need is a good shared hosting provider. I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech. They are extraordinarily cheap for low traffic websites, and I have yet to see them go down. I do NOT recommend GoDaddy, or NameCheap for web hosting.

DNS Hosting: Normally I just use my domain registrant, or my webhost, for DNS hosting. However, if I really need to be anonymous, I will use FreeDNS.

Email Needs: I used to use my own mail servers, but now, I completely rely on Google Apps. If you are a registered 501-c3 organization, you can also get GoogleApps Education and Google Checkout for free. Therefore you get the hyped up version of Google Apps, as well as free payment processing!

Actual Website:: I am now a total Wordpress convert. It started as a blogging software, but has grown to become a very very stable content management system. I’ve tried other CMS like Joomla and Drupal, but they are really really complicated to work with.

Internal Website: Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is great for internal websites. Any member can just click on edit and then add or remove information. I’ve tried other wiki installations, but none are easier to maintain than MediaWiki.

UPDATE 1: I’ve since tried out “Google Sites”, an app that’s part of the ever expanding Google Apps, and found it even superior to Mediawiki. Here you’ll also be able to easily manage spreadsheets and files!

Phone Service: For those who simply need a phone number, but don’t necessarily want to answer it all the time, I highly recommend the currently freeGrandCentral if you can secure an invitation. If you can’t secure an invitation, you can use RingCentral.

Fax Service: For a great fax to email service, definitely try RingCentral.

Conference Call Service: Unless you really need a toll-free number, I highly recommend FreeConferenceCall. There is a short message in the beginning of the call saying this is a service provided by freeconferencecall.com, but do you really mind?!

Forms, Spreadsheets and Documents: I really like GoogleDocs (part of Google Apps mentioned above) for simple spreadsheets that are shared between multiple people, i.e. financial projections between executive committee members. However, if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just collected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

Business Banking: I am starting to really like Chase Business banking. They have a pretty high monthly service charge, but one that can be waived if you open a business credit card and charge any amount on it each month. So simply have your credit card make 1 dollar monthly payment onto Paypal.

Newsletter: I’ve tried out Constant Contact and they are a great service provider. Unfortunately, they are also decently expensive (15 dollars a month) for organizations starting out. I’ve tried open source solutions like Dadamail and Phplist and they are both too difficult to use for any normal human being. If anyone knows of any good newsletter provider, hosted or not, I would LOVE to know.

Project Management This is an area I’ve tried many tools and just can’t quite get used to any of them. BaseCamp seems to be the best at the moment, but they are REALLY expensive. Also, I STILL don’t know the difference between milestones and tasks. Ever since Activecollab betrayed the open source community, it has started to really suck even as a tool. I have found Collabtive to be a really good imitation of BaseCamp, but not nearly as polished. So if someone knows of a good project management tool, I would love to know.

So there you go, my years of trying out different tools boiled down onto one blog post!

In the interest of anti-stealth, I’m going to publicly announce one of the for profit ventures that I am currently working on. Incidentally, what exactly happened to the NextNY anti-stealth movement? There was a lot of activity at the end of October, and then the whole movement seemingly collapsed.

Anyway, a friend and I have started exploring the idea of a new campus based venture. Many of you who are students are probably familiar with the few awkward minutes that you spend every few hours in an elevator traveling to and from class. While you are in the elevator, wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice LCD displaying current campus events that might be of interest to you, or perhaps an ad telling you about the discounted food at Chipotle down the block this week?

Our idea is exactly that, we would like to create a network of LCDs in campus elevators that would stream both campus events as well as advertisements. A well established player, Captivate Network, currently does this in the office building market. We would like to stay away from office buildings at the moment, and focus purely on college campuses (Facebook vs LinkedIn analogy?).

Since both of us are current Columbia students, in fact both BME PhD students, we have decided to use Columbia University as a pilot site. I haven’t had time to put together a powerpoint presentation yet, but I will definitely post it in the next few days. For now we are tackling several thorny issues:

• Is it even possible to do it in NY? We are currently checking the New York Fire Code. Safety code for elevators and escalators : an American national standard by the American Society for Mechanical Engineers will be our guide. Looks like I won’t need sleeping pills tonight.
• We have done some back of the envelope calculations to see whether the idea is sustainable and scalable. If we intend to get more funding, we will have to produce a full financial projection. The projection itself is of course of no great importance to either investors or us, since reality almost always deviate significantly from the projections. Though it’s important to have one anyway, if nothing else than to show that due diligence was performed.
• To start campus based businesses that depend so much on campus infrastructure, we are clearly going to need a faculty champion. We have started approaching various members of the engineering faculty, the business school faculty, as well as Columbia’s Science and Technology Ventures group to begin soliciting feedback and buy-ins. We’ve had a lot of success getting people excited about the concept, but haven’t found a champion of the project yet. If you know of a Columbia faculty who might be interested, please let me know!
• I will also begin to approach NYU and CCNY about the idea as well, in case Columbia falls through as a pilot site.
• We will clearly need a powerpoint presentation down the line. I’ll put up version 1.0 of the presentation in a few days.

Since we are still very early in our planning stages, we are open to all suggestions and ideas. Let me know if any of you have any feedback or have seen existing implementations on college campuses! If you happen to be a college student / faculty, and are interested in joining our team, shoot me an email: mail @ jackpo dot org.

After months of inactivity, I’ve decided to finally update my blog to a more web 2.0 look. I’ve also updated the About Me page to reflect a bit more about what I”ve been doing lately, check it out if you are interested.

For the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future, I will be absolutely swamped with multiple academic and non-academic projects. As part of NextNY’s open movement, I will be announcing a few of my projects publicly in the next few months and would love to hear any feedback that you all have!