Thought for the night: We humans are amazingly good at finding patterns in data. So good, in fact, that we can even find patterns where there are none. The Skeptic’s Dictionary’s Law of Truly Large Numbers talks about just this…
Monthly Archives: December 2004
more wikis
20-Dec-04Finally got down to it and installed a wiki. MoinMoin was easy to config on Gentoo but a pain for Fedora Core 1. MediaWiki, in contrast, was a breeze to install on both. It feels like a little overkill for my needs (way too much cruft for a personal “offboard brain” with only one user), […]
Sigalert Troubles
15-Dec-04Somehow, it looks as if all the DOT sensors under the 10 freeway between the 110 and the 405 are down. Or, at least, Sigalert.com isn’t showing them. Bummer. Same with the 405S between the 10 and the 90. This, coincidentally, is the exact route I take to work every morning, if I take the […]
Faina Vahaleva, passed away at 88
14-Dec-04Faina Vahaleva (蔣方良, Chiang Fang-liang), wife of Chiang Ching-Guo (蔣經國 — R.O.C. nationalist leader, President of Taiwan, and eldest son of Chiang Kai-Shek), just passed away at around noon today. This site is a nice memoire.
Home English Home
12-Dec-04A wonderful bit of web-based English pedagogy. Perhaps I can use this as inspiration for my work in our Tactical Langauge Training System.
The World is Too Much With Us
12-Dec-04The World is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The […]
I’m one hour away from my presentation. Here are my powerpoint slides (with perhaps too verbose of attached speaker notes, because I’m like that). While I hoped to have more actual statistical results for my talk, lack of both time and enough annotation data kept me from that. Will definitely have it by the time […]
infornography
05-Dec-04The world is abuzz with talk of ontology, folksonomy, facets. entry on mefi full of tasty links Leonard talks about his take on things, which I want to focus on right now. Some cursory thoughts on Leonard’s entry. He says: I believe that both disambiguation and synonym merging are relative non-issues. For the former, the […]
Rene Magritte – Clairvoyance
05-Dec-04I like this picture. It talks to me about what it is to be a good artist, and a good designer. To see the potential as clearly as (or even more clearly than) one sees the actual… I love the way the artist is staring so intently at the egg, as if copying down from […]
Modeling Second Language Learner Speech
03-Dec-04A week from now I’m giving a talk on creating a language model for second-language-learner speech (basically, my PhD research up to this point, and what will eventually become my thesis). Information: Speaker: Nick Mote Date: 10 Dec 04 Time: 3:00pm – 4:30pm Location: Information Sciences Institute (Marina Del Rey, California) Abstract: ISI’s Tactical Language […]