Michael Bales

Personal interests

Michael Bales

Personal interests

New York City buses and subways My research interests and ideas Urban Hillbilly Quartet

Family

Photo of my parents Photo of my sister

My other web pages

My home page Knowledgeblog, my weblog

Questions or Comments? Please e-mail me at michael.bales@dbmi[dot] columbia[dot]edu

Some of my main interests are:

Taking New York City buses and subways to interesting neighborhoods and tasting food from all over the world. My favorite foods include noodles and burritos.
Developing my research interests and ideas
Playing instruments: acoustic and electric fiddle, acoustic guitar, mandolin. I am an alum of the Urban Hillbilly Quartet, based in St. Paul, MN. Here is a .wav file of me playing a song I wrote on fiddle: Indelible Reel, copyright M. Bales.
Speaking and learning languages: French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and German. In 1994, I studied in Avignon, France and stayed with this family.
Inline skating, hiking, disc golf.

My parents live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

My sister and her husband live in England. This is a picture of my sister and my mother.

An exciting new world

We are entering an exciting new world. The growing amount of text on the web, paired with ever-faster processing speeds, give us an unprecedented opportunity to analyze and represent human knowledge. Automated techniques can be used to process large volumes of unstructured text. When the resulting data are analyzed, associations and patterns emerge between concepts. These methods are, by nature, imprecise; however, conclusions known to be especially imprecise can be disregarded. The results could improve interdisciplinary collaboration and encourage scientific progress and discovery.

Recommended web sites

Boing Boing: A directory of wonderful things

Accelerating intelligence news on kurzweilai.net

Blogdex -- the weblog diffusion index