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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. Feel free to cite any writing contained herein as "Homepage of J. Wes Ulm, Harvard University Personal Website."
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.
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
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.
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 Bemühung
{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 ungefähr in der Mitte meines PhD Programms-- hab' ich ein ganz
großes Interesse aufgezogen, in der Möglichkeit, eine Menschliche Zelle
wesentlich "vom Grund auf" zu entwickeln und aufzubauen. Das heißt, 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 Fähigkeiten zu
schaffen. Die Makromolekülen, die die Zelle entstehen, werden durch ihre mathematische Äquivalenten 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 Änderungen einzuführen, und auch ein "Wählungsprogramm"
(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 können
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 können wir auch die Ursachen und Ursprüngen
der wichtigsten Krankheiten-- w.z.B. Krebs, ansteckenden Krankheiten,
Autoimmunerkrankgungen, und anderen wichtigen Krankheitsklassen.
Dann-- vielleicht die interessanteste Anwendung-- auch molekülare
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.
(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
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
If you need to contact me, please do so here.
Wes's Sci-Fi Novel
Update Spring 2009: The sci-fi novel is up! Grueling, intense, utterly exhausting to write-- 420 pages at first draft, since down to about 380 (varying with each revision): the sci-fi/suspense, concept thriller which I've entitled The Leibniz Demon. It's in the midst of late-stage revisions for publication, and in addition to other pressing matters, I'm too swamped at the moment to write too much in regard to synopses and descriptions online; but I'll try to supply some basics here.
I have told some of you visitors to my Website about it; in a nutshell, I conceived it in Taiwan in October 2007 (I can actually recall the specific time and place of the epiphany), when 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 wound up taking the explorations into some fascinating (hopefully, for my reading audience) territory involving very 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), and some other mind-candy concepts. Among the most intrguing 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 Jürgen 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 wound up weaving 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 a perspective that's never been utilized before. (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 Vision at Harvard in 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, 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 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, to paint a picture that stays with and haunts the reader-- an eerie, menacing, and mind-teasing ambience that's sprinkled across the narrative as the plot gradually advances, leading progressively to the jarring realizations that slowly unravel themselves about halfway through the book.
One of the especially fascinating aspects of a work like this has been the need for me to create my own fictional mythology and cosmology, as a conceptual scaffold for the mysterious and haunting events that take place-- a bit like 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. Even though this framework is obviously not conceived as a rigorous conception of nature, a good sci-fi/concept writer must be thorough and disciplined nonetheless, taking months to innovate these theoretical underpinnings *as if they actually did* constitute a novel, empirically testable way of viewing the world (or, in my case, at exploring ancient religious and philosophical conundrums). This is the sort of feature that draws the reader in, and to make it work, the author has to throw himself or herself into this domain, to be essentially in 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 to pull all the strands together and streamline my own narrative voice, but amazingly, it's finally been happening.
As far as help in learning the ropes (as this is my first novel), I've drawn a good deal of inspiration for this novel not only from the sci-fi. thriller, and psychological horror genres, but also vampire and werewolf lore, as well as a subset of Japanese manga and novelistic fiction-- 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, though it's also at the root of much of the country's output in other genres-- such as the "Ringu" films and the Silent Hill video game series.) Matthew Costello's oeuvre also turned out to be a surprising gem. The general feature of these works is a style of taut fictional exposition that re-imagines often ancient and still-puzzling concepts, from untried and often psychologically-jolting perspectives. On top of these inspirations, in any case, I've sought to create in my novel an entirely different sort of perspective and storytelling, including settings, 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 on forums. I obviously can't reveal the details here, but the mood-setting, the edge dialogue and character development, and the drivers of the plot are not something you'll have seen anywhere before.
As a conclusion here, I suspect that one finds, in pouring one's heart into something like this, that a "labor of love" is also a labor of intense exhaustion, frustration, and maddening hurdles at times. To write something that appeals to a large audience on different levels, it's impossible to do it half-heartedly; it has to be something that, at least for a time, 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 and ensuring that every little sentence and choice of words is as excellent as it can be-- like a sculptor refining a creation from the original mold. If there's a downside, it's that it's often difficult for me to even relate to much of my public work prior to 2007 (including much of the material on this Website). Everything just 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) hardly even speaks to its own author anymore; the more evocative style I've had to pioneer for this novel is a world apart from the form I used to have. But this development process is at the heart of honing one's craft and creating a rousing, exciting story for the audience. I hope you'll enjoy it.
Popular dens of iniquity-- er, pages on this site
A couple that seem to be grabbing the most attention:
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
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
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), Jürgen 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 ©2003-2010 (J. Wesley Ulm) (Jacob Ulm). All Rights Reserved.
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