Hi there, unsuspecting Web surfer. Due to some horrible misalignment of the stars or a punishment for being personally ousted by Donald Trump's grandson on Apprentice Season 36, you've managed to wander over to my Website. Or maybe you were just looking for a little pit stop on your latest voyage through the wild dirt roads of the information superhighway, and followed the misleading neon signs on that search engine. (We all get lost sometimes.) Whatever the reason, I, Wes Ulm, your friendly neighborhood Webmaster, will do my utmost to make your little sojourn here enjoyable while you're waiting for Craigslist or Amazon to load up on that browser of yours.

I'm an MD/PhD graduate of Harvard Medical School with subsequent endeavors in cliinical, research, and entrepreneurial areas.  In 2007 I became interested in efforts to recapitulate and reverse-engineer our cells and tissues in a digital environment, which has since led to more broadly-encompassing projects involving self-generating complexity and intelligent networks, hence the more AI-ish feel of my work since then despite the a priori medical orientation.  

In any case, since there are dozens of other pages set aside for my professional pursuits and publications, this Website is more-or-less reserved for the "everything else" side of things.  For you frequent visitors out there, the popular linguistics and history sections have been fully transferred from the Harvard Medical School site (which had to bid adieu since my graduation), as has most of the original material from that site with a few exceptions.  So things are in a continuous process of (re)-construction, with work-related (and entrepreneurial) efforts on intelligent networks and of course, the revised (now 380-page) novel receiving increasingly top billing as they're updated.  I know this personal Website sometimes receives the runt-of-the-litter treatment in comparison with my professional pages, but I've resolved to be a well-tempered Webmaster and make sure it stays updated in a somewhat reasonable fashion.

All material on this Webpage and all subsidiary pages is copyrighted 2003-2010 by J. Wes Ulm, all rights reserved.  Copying and posting of material contained herein is fine with proper citation, as follows: "Homepage of J. Wes Ulm, Harvard University Personal Website, Copyright 2003-2010."

The E.M.P.O.W.E.R. Initiative

E.M.P.O.W.E.R., an acronym for "Education and Microcredit for Poor Women in Endemic Regions," is a public health and policy project that I initiated while completing my studies at Harvard Medical School; it has become my chief focus of late.  It represents a systematic, coordinated effort to rapidly enhance sustainable development on a global scale, focusing on cost-effective and widespread improvements in an area with the most consistent, demonstrated causal link to optimal community health and sustained economic gains in poor societies: provision of the means for girls and young women to improve their station, decide their own futures, and acquire a stronger say in the direction of their towns and villages.  E.M.P.O.W.E.R. provides an efficient, targeted strategy to establish the social structures that open such opportunities, focusing on innovative steps to supply relevant basic education and facilitate access to streamlined microcredit sources.  By emphasizing the growth and maintenance of local networks, gains can be sustained even in the face of adverse social and economic circumstances�while fostering �islands of stability� that spread the knowhow and experience of local volunteers to adjacent localities with or without the direct input of E.M.P.O.W.E.R. participants themselves.  This document furnishes a brief (two-page) introduction to the initiative, intended both as a general description and an invitation to potential partners to join in this crucial effort.

Wes's Languages and Linguistics Page

Ever had that burning urge to just plunge in and learn a dozen foreign languages or so? Yeah, I didn't think so; but for reasons inexplicable even to him, your friendly neighborhood Webmaster did. And he's got a section tailor-made for the aspiring multilingualist in you. My Languages section uses "practical linguistics" techniques to help you learn and master a foreign language rapidly, efficiently, and-- most importantly-- with maximal retention for the long term, the sticking point for virtually any foreign tongue. 

Our brains are structured to learn new items in the form of narratives, joining the cold data of factual memory (associated with the brain's hippocampus) with the emotional richness of event-driven memory (associated with the brain's amygdala), to create a coherent narrative that links symbols (and words) to the concepts and experiences they are intended to represent.  Languages throughout the world have evolved according to this structure, with sophisticated and abstract vocabulary generated from metaphors involving more concrete objects and concepts.  In some languages (such as Chinese, Arabic, or French), which have historically been "prestige languages" and generally retain their original vocabulary (e.g. of Greco-Latin origin in French), these metaphors are obvious, since both abstract vocabulary and grammar, and the basic wordstock we first learn as toddlers, draw from the same stream.  Things are different for languages like English, German, Farsi Persian, and Japanese (which evolved historically by absorbing thousands of loanwords from prestige languages in their civilizational spheres-- like Latin, French, Arabic, and Chinese), and so grasping thsi narrative structure in the etymology of such languages can take some effort, which I've tried to distill in a hopefully interesting and entertaining manner in this section.

There are also some scattered articles on linguistic history, etymology, and policy, but overall this is a how-to guide designed to be of practical utility for you as you embark on your linguistic journney. I've tried to make this especially useful for the figurative 21st-century treadmill runner who doesn't have much time to travel (and thus acquire conversational practice firsthand), providing you with an easy-to-use instructional toolkit to learn a language whatever your circumstances.

Wes's History Section

Looking for a site on history that leaps off the (Web)page? Something that demonstrates the relevance of ancient events to our modern world and answers all those nagging "I wonder how..." questions? A page that boasts a section on "sleeper history," about lesser-known historical events and figures that have had a massive impact on the course of world events? A page that'll help you finally win back that "I lost my other shirt in Las Vegas" T-shirt from your buddy via a well-placed (and well-informed) bet in Trivial Pursuit? Well, this is the page for you. I began writing historical essays all the way back in college, originally as an organizing scheme for the Jeopardy! quiz program I took part in just after graduation.  However, several readers found the articles interesting enough to suggest I expand on the work and assemble the oeuvre in book form-- an effort which became Frozen Accidents. (For those you who've heard about the project, it's a vignette-structured book on so-called "frozen accidents" as the title indicates-- fundamental, historically contingent events that have frozen in the arbitrary cultural features that we consider "standard" today across the world, everything from the 60-second clock to sports we play and the side of the road that are vehicles prefer for driving.  I've had to give priority to the sci-fi novel-- see below-- and so Frozen Accidents has been in hibernation until that's published.)

On this site, I've put together a sampling of my most popular amassed writings to provide some readily readable and digestible historical goodies, focusing in particular on "sleeper history"-- intriguing and less-studied political movements, phenomena, individuals, and battles that you probably never encountered in school, but which continue to exert their effects on the cultural map of the modern world.

Application of the Chinese Characters as a Systematic, Quantitative "Universal Background Language" for Meaning- and Concept-Based (CONBASE) Data Searches and Interlingual Searching of High Sensitivity and Specificity

One of the perhaps more quirky, yet fascinating spinoffs of my recent work (as of Fall 2008, when the manuscript for this is being prepared) on self-optimization and spontaneous emergence of intelligent behavior in networks of independent components, driven by recursively evolving algorithms.  (A mouthful, I know.)  This particular project actually began many years ago, but I've been making broad strides on it upon incorporating some of the more esoteric ideas in what's now become a career-defining interest for me, in studying and elaborating these sorts of self-optimizing networks (a project which began, interestingly, with a strictly clinical interest in modeling human cells and tissues as information processors, which could be digitally reverse-engineered to enable high-value pathophysiological studies and discovery of new pharmaceuticals). 

Concept-based (CONBASE) searching is extremely difficult to do in any kind of search environment, whether for Webcrawling search engines or specialized, tag-driven database searching for specialized and scientific literature (my initial focus).  Combining a number of interdisciplinary, often rather arcane fields related to comparative linguistics, etymological history, and linguistic Sinology, I found that the Chinese characters could be adapted to do just this, and even allow such searches across numerous languages.  Read on about The CC-CONBASE project

So You Want to be a Jeopardy! Contestant

I competed on the Jeopardy! (with Alex Trebek) quiz show back in 1997-1998 and did much better than I deserved-- 5 shows and Tournament of Champions, with the everpresent possibility of alighting the soundstage again for a Special Tournament perhaps.  Winning on this thing is more a matter of buzzer timing and category/clue selection than raw knowledge, since prior screening ensures that all contestants have the last of these.  This page contains some tips on everything from auditioning to Final Jeopardy! wagering to how to manage that tricky buzzer. (under construction)

Das Ulm-Projekt:  Eine kollaborative Bem�hung

{Webmaster's note: This was a project I began all the way back during a clinical rotation at von Haunersches Kinderspital in Munich, Germany, in March of 2006, with its conceptual roots stretching back even before that, to about 2001.  There was some impressive work on bioinformatics at several of the universities I visited while on the overseas rotation, and I became interested in a system to "evolve human cells from the ground up" using evolutionary algorithms.  The "Ulm Projekt" designation is obviously unofficial, a facetious appellation that an old friend of mine applied to it-- Ulm is a city in Germany, and a number of my ancestors have some association with it that we've never quite been able to figure out. Many projects have been associated with names of cities or regions-- the Philadelphia Project, Manhattan Project to name a couple, so my old pal started jokingly referring to this in the same way, though it's nowhere near on that scale and I doubt anywhere near as groundbreaking...

Anyhow, due to circumstances and the origin of the idea, I originally wrote it in German, but don't worry about translation; as it turns out, I've essentially folded these original ideas into the implementations of collective intelligence and emergently-intelligent networks that I've been constructing my career around these days: More specifically, the systematic study of the self-optimization and spontaneous emergence of intelligence within networks of independently interacting components, under the control of recursively evolving algorithms.  This work has been proceeding in German, English, Spanish, and Chinese for me, so as interesting things hopefully emerge soon from it, I'll make sure it's available in whatever language readers have an interest in.)

Seit mehr als 6 Jahre-- mit Beginn ungef�hr in der Mitte meines PhD Programms-- hab' ich ein ganz gro�es Interesse aufgezogen, in der M�glichkeit, eine Menschliche Zelle wesentlich "vom Grund auf" zu entwickeln und aufzubauen.  Das hei�t, ich will mit elementaren Komponenten anfangen, dann mathematische "Auswahlsregeln" wiederholt und rekursiv anwenden (und sie sich selbst fein abstimmen), um eine menschliche eukaryotische Zelle mit vollen selbst-aufrechterhaltenden F�higkeiten zu schaffen.  Die Makromolek�len, die die Zelle entstehen, werden durch ihre mathematische �quivalenten vertretet, dann in einem simulierten System entwickelt.  Um die Evolution immer mehr komplexere Strukturen zu modellieren, brauchen wir sowie ein "Entwicklerprogramm" (the "Evolver"), um die �nderungen einzuf�hren, und auch ein "W�hlungsprogramm" (the "Selector"), um die Evolution der Zelle zu richten.  Mein Zweck hier ist wesentlich, die Evolution der Zelle, der Geweben, und der Organe zu rekapitulieren um "Bilder" zu schaffen und aufzuzeichnen.  Damit k�nnen wir die entscheidenden Einzelheiten jeder Stufe der Evolution sehr klar beobachten und bemerken, um die zellulare Physiologie und Pathophysiologie leicht zu modellieren und verstehen.  Als wir die Zelle und ihre grundlegende Funktionen vertreten, so k�nnen wir auch die Ursachen und Urspr�ngen der wichtigsten Krankheiten-- w.z.B. Krebs, ansteckenden Krankheiten, Autoimmunerkrankgungen, und anderen wichtigen Krankheitsklassen.  Dann-- vielleicht die interessanteste Anwendung-- auch molek�lare Therapien dieser Krankheiten zu entwickeln, bei der Selektion und Evolution von Therapien in demselben System.  Somit handeln wir das Emergenz und die Evolution der Zelle, ihre Physiologie und Pathophysiologie, und die Therapien der Krankheiten, auf dem Niveau der reinen Information selbst. 

Ich hab' schon viel von diesem Projekt angefangen, aber am wichtigsten ist diese eine kollaborative Bem�hung.   Ihre Teilnahme ist willkommen!  Bitte klicken sie auf dem Link, um mehr �ber diesem Projekt zu lernen.

(Brief English recap:  I'm endeavoring to evolve and reverse-engineer a human cell from the ground up, then tissues, then organs.  Not in a Petri dish or a lab flask, but in a simulated environment with the basic macromolecules represented by mathematical equivalents, with "Evolver" and "Selector" programs to push the code to evolve as a functional cell, then on to more complex tissues and systems.  The idea is to recapitulate the evolutionary process that has fostered these complex structures and to capture snapshots on the history of this evolution and basic cellular processes like division, apoptosis, migration, and so on.  Then to model pathophysiology in the same manner, with the rise of e.g. cancer cells or active viral infection modeled within the same environment.  Eventually to evolve something of particular interest-- molecular therapies to treat those the homeostatic derangements in cells and tissues that cause what we recognize macroscopically as disease.  It's more-or-less conceived as a toolbox for rapid development of molecular therapies and tissue engineering.)

The Physician-Scientist Mini-Manual

There's a lot of literature out in the public domain and bookstores about gaining admittance into medical school and even MD/PhD programs; there's comparatively little on what to do when you're there.  The paucity of reference material is especially pronounced for MD/PhD students, who are embarking on a seldom-travelled journey for which there's generally ltitle in the way of a map.  Herewith, a little guide for those of you just starting to navigate the waters.  {Archived from 2004; these pages regrettably did not make the transition from my Harvard University Website, and they're currently in the process of recovery.}

 Wes's Little Boston Citysearch Page:  Movies, Music, Restaurants, and other Pleasantries

Boston has perhaps a justifiable reputation as the USA's premier college and young adult town, with several campuses and commuter institutions, a rousing sports scene at the college and especially professional levels, and so many decked-out Irish bars you'd be forgiven for thinking we have a rabbit hole straight to Limerick and Dublin.  (Cue a catchy tune from The Dropkick Murphys or The Twilight Lords in the background-- no trip to Boston is complete without it.)  Boston's restaurant scene is also a lesser-known gem that's (understandably) overshadowed by a certain 5-boroughed city to Boston's south; Boston's North End is perhaps best renowned as the HQ of Italian-American cuisine, but the Southeast Asian and especially Spanish/Mexican cuisine in this city has a surprising flair, even if at times it'll seem that you need to fork over a portion of your monthly salary for it.  This page has a little more on Boston's dining options, music, clubs and other hangouts.  {Archive from 2004-- a number of pages unfortunately didn't make the migration well from my Harvard University page, so it's still in the process of restoration.}

Wes's Travelogues Page

AKA Wes's lame attempt to imitate Let's Go and Fodor.  I've done a good deal of globetrotting since 2004, beginning with a conference in Singapore in February of that year and both professional and personal disembarkations thereafter.  I've had about a dozen visits over the years to East Asia (particularly Taiwan, Japan, China, and Singapore) but also through a good chuck of central Europe and the Netherlands.  There are some traveler's tips here along with on-site recountings (including the all-important list of must-remember items to pack before heading overseas), so I hope it'll be to your liking. {Archived from the Harvard University Website, still under reconstruction}

If you need to contact me, please do so here.

A brief recent resume is available here.

My Cross-Genre Novel

Update Summer 2009: The sci-fi novel is up!  It's a "labor of love" over several years which, as anyone who's undertaken such an effort can tell you, is as much a labor of exhaustion and sheer exasperation at various points.  It was about  420 pages at first draft, since pared down to roughly 380:  the sci-fi/suspense, high concept thriller which I've entitled The Leibniz Demon.  I've been describing it to friends and collaborators as "Michael Crichton crossed with Dan Brown and The Matrix Series"; it's in the midst of late-stage revisions for publication.  I don't want to give too much away here regarding the plot, but I'll supply a few of the basics regarding the thematic elements and the novel's origin itself.  To paraphrase Bismarck's witty remark about making laws and sausages, the process of authoring a novel is not exactly a clean and pristine affair.  (A hint to those diving into the process: Economy is the key to effective writing, and you don't want to use 9 or 10 words where 4 or 5 will do.  The first draft is like the sculptor pouring the plaster; it's your subsequent drafts and fine-tuning that actually make the art!)  Nevertheless, the seeming paradox at the heart of the process-- a kind of fuzzy, oblique idea-gathering and assembly that eventually give rise to a concrete, organized conceptual scaffolding and coherent literary work-- is truly one of those incomparable journeys of the mind that traces out a fascinating tale in its own right.

As I've communicated to some of you visiting this Website, the novel has been a long-term effort, the conceptual basis of which I first formulated in 2003, in the wake of more formal research for a project during my medical and graduate studies.  However, I conceived the novel and its plot itself in Taiwan in October 2007.  I can even recall the specific time and place of the epiphany, on an overcast and drizzly afternoon at a rather humdrum truck stop-style cafe near a construction site, on Jiankang Road (jian kang lu or 健康路 in Mandarin Chinese characters) in Zhonghe, Taiwan.  From a thematic standpoint, I was aggressively tackling my (at the time) newfound focus on generating "logical and algorithmic equivalents" of human tissues in a digital environment, leading to more sprawling investigations into concepts of spontaneous emergence of consciousness and intelligence (classic Hofstadter-ish questions applied to practical problems).  The Leibniz Demon--originally entitled Kant's Precipice (now one of the book chapters)-- was essentially my "sandbox" at the outset, to explore several of the ideas and more intriguing implications of this work in uncharted territory. 

I eventually took the explorations into some mind-teasing directions involving several ancient philosophical conundrums; the very nature of space, time, and consciousness (Lee Smolin's work being the chief inspiration, as well as that of David Layzer, both of them prominent and creative astrophysicists); and some other intriguing concepts.  Among the most fascinating are the "transmutability" of data-containing structures and the logical basis of natural laws and physical processes, inspired in large part by the work of Gregory Chaitin and Juergen Schmidhuber-- modern "Leibnizians" who apply ideas from AI and information theory to gain a more concrete understanding of our physical world, and to better describe how complexity and intelligence self-generate themselves in nature.  Much of their work, in turn, was inspired by Konrad Zuse, the inventor of our modern computer and the founder of so-called "digital physics," whose biography and incredible creativity also inspired the novel's conception back in 2007.

Ultimately, I wove together a sci-fi/suspense narrative set in the near future, in 2016, that also introduces some religious and spiritual concepts (such as resurrections) from an unprecedented perspective.  (For those of you out there already familiar with some of my work-- think of it as an updating of some concepts I first visited in my articles in the Harvard Vision Volume VII from 2003, but enhanced and radically altered to create what I hope is a gripping narrative for readers.)   The ultimate product, if I've done my job for you in the reading public, is a fascinating, mind-blowing, and thought-provokingly imaginative thriller, yet also a personal narrative with appealing characters and settings (as well as literally dozens of "Easter Eggs" amidst the chapter headings, titles, and a short, cryptic, Schiller-style poem that tracks along with the narrative itself). 

The dialogue and characterizations have received intense scrutiny to make them both realistic and engrossing, and the suspense in the novel is slowly drawn out, while gradually and progressively jolting the readers with increasingly mind-boggling revelations-- roughly in the vein of Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, and Anne Rice, yet in a distinctive style that readers will hopefully find riveting.  Finally, I've taken special care to set the mood in each chapter, and atmospherics have received particular attention on every one of its 380 pages.  My aim has been to paint a picture that stays with and haunts the reader-- an eerie, menacing, and mind-bending ambience that's sprinkled across the narrative as the plot gradually advances, leading progressively to the jarring realizations that are gradually presented beginning about halfway through the book.

As an essential facet in creating such literature, I've also had to conceive and implement my own fictional mythology and cosmology, as a conceptual scaffold for the mysterious and haunting events that take place-- inspired by what Tolkien, Rowling, Rice and other expert crafters have done in generating their fictional realms.  For the type of imaginative sci-fi I've spun out here, this means being "pseudo-realistic" in the fictional exposition-- creating a genuinely self-consistent, "semi-plausible" theoretical framework that hews as closely as possible to actual cutting-edge work today.  It's an interesting experience for the writer in this kind of cross-genre fiction, since in some respects this process mirrors the sort of rigor one needs in formulating a genuine, empirically-testable hypothesis used for investigations.  But it's well worth doing, since a well-conceived, rigorous conceptual framework will smooth the path to forging a coherent plot as one outlines and then composes the text itself.  As the author, you have to bring yourself temporarily into the domain that you're creating, to draw yourself into a "zone"-- thinking about the plot's events and characters from the standpoint of this fictional world and the logical strands that are woven through it.  It's taken dozens of revisions in some of the chapters to pull all the strands together and streamline my own narrative voice, but like any other professional endeavor, that sort of dedication is indispensable to fostering audience appeal.

As I was learning the ropes back in 2007 (given that this is my first novel), I drew a good deal of inspiration not only from the sci-fi. thriller, and psychological horror genres, but also vampire and werewolf lore.  A subset of Japanese manga and novelistic fiction also proved to be valuable-- especially the subgenres that are heavy on fictional exposition, and which explore concepts about the inner mind and the subconscious "manifesting" themselves in imaginative ways within the physical world.  (This is a recurrent leitmotif in Japanese fictional works, and it's spilled over into much of the country's output in other genres-- such as the "Ringu" films and the Silent Hill video game series.)  The oeuvre of the sci-fi author Matthew Costello's also turned out to be a gem, since much of his own work involves some very clever fictional exposition-- a technique at the very core of my own novel.  The highly original fictional exposition in the works of Costello and the other examples (particularly the vampire and werewolf lore) re-imagines often ancient and still-puzzling concepts from heretofore untried and often psychologically-jolting perspectives.  In this tradition, I've sought to create a distinct brand of perspective and storytelling in my own novel, including settings and atmospherics, standout characters, edgy dialogue, concepts, and elements of plot development that will strike readers as the kind of thought-provoking material that they'll want to spend weeks pondering and discussing.  

As a conclusion here, as noted briefly above, a "labor of love" is also a labor of intense exhaustion, frustration, and maddening hurdles as you pour your heart into a project of this nature.  To write something that appeals to a large audience on different levels, it's impossible to do it half-heartedly; it has to be a sustained effort that, for the few spare days you can cobble together in a busy schedule, consumes your waking and even sleeping efforts (if you're the type to jot down your dreams when you open your eyes in the morning).  You have to connect to the readers and stimulate their minds on many planes, and that means constantly revising and chiseling your work, ensuring that every little sentence and choice of words meets a standard of excellence-- again, much like a sculptor refining a creation from the original mold.  If there's a downside-- it's increasingly difficult for me to even relate to much of my public work prior to 2007 (including much of the material on this Website).  Other writers have confirmed this experience: everything you compose sounds and "feels" different after you find your narrative voice, and much of my earlier work (especially the material from 2003-2004, when I was so focused on my technical writing that the creative side often suffered) barely even speaks to its own author anymore.  The more evocative style I've had to pioneer for this novel is a world apart.  Nonetheless, this development process is at the heart of honing one's craft and creating a rousing, exciting story for the audience, and I hope you'll enjoy it.

For any questions, feel free to contact me here.

Popular dens of iniquity-- er, pages on this site

The most notorious of the attention-getters:

Taming the Linguistic Tiger:  Using the Chinese Character System to Maximal Advantage

Practical linguistics: A comparative analysis and organization of Japanese vocabulary and its derviation from Chinese precursors since the T'ang Dynasty-- as a means to more rapidly and sensibly learn both.

My Spanish Armada page:  Myths and facts about history's most confused and misunderstood battle

Links

Prague: A Novel by Arthur Phillips.  Arthur was my opponent on the Jeopardy! TV quiz program, but he's also a great guy, humble and incredibly insightful, and a wonderful novelist.  His Prague: A Novel, is one of my faves-- it's mostly set in Budapest despite the title, focusing on the intertwining tales of American expats just after the end of the Cold War.  And probably not since the treatments of Henry James and Hemingway has someone written a book of such caliber on this theme-- there's so much to the characterization and atmospherics that you'll be rereading each little section several times to gain something new.  (I set one of the decisive scenes within my own recent novel, The Leibniz Demon, in Hungary, in large part inspired by the renditions in Prague.)  Anyway, I'd definitely recommend taking a look! 

Those indispensable search engines

Hyperlink Prioritization Algorithm-based

Google  Yahoo   Altavista   Lycos/Hotbot    MSN    AlltheWeb.com   Wisenut  Webcrawler  Excite   Northern Light Search

Content Prioritization Algorithm-Based

Teoma   AskJeeves   Overture  

Metasearch

Gigablast    Dogpile    Mamma metasearch   

Homepage of one of the smartest guys on the planet right now-- computer scientist, AI specialist, and innovator (in learning algorithms and self-reinforcing intelligent networks), Juergen Schmidhuber.

That ultimate source of undigested, gut-bustingly funny, it-could-so-easily-be-true journalism, The Onion.

Network news Websites (nicely designed, good for a quick read): CBS, ABC,  MSNBC, FOX, BBC

This site and all its contents, including The Leibniz Demon, are Copyright 2003-2010 (J. Wesley Ulm) (Jacob Ulm). All Rights Reserved.