sardonick

Late yesterday afternoon was an anti-climactic end to a weeklong binge of paper-writing, as my advisor and I sat down to examine our ICALT paper and realized that–because of lack of performance data on the ASR system that my work receives as input, and because of lack of overall pedagogical effectiveness of our project–the paper would likely be shot down if it was submitted right now.

It’s a bit frustrating because these are data that I have no control over getting. Part of shortcoming in doing research in a pipeline fashion, where one system feeds into another feeds into another–you are dependent on others for your results.

In retrospect (and, futurespect, as this is what I’ll need to be doing in the future so as to avoid this), I see that there are alternatives to only being able to look at my work in context of a pipelined system–I see I’ll need to build some experimental trials to isolate the effect of my system by swapping it out with a placebo system in some of the test subjects. The problem, of course, with when your software does something actually useful, people or institutions volunteer to be test subjects because they feel it will benefit them for the time they invest. In our case, they’re getting a free Arabic learning class. But it’s a hard sell to tell people “yes, we’re going to give half the people from your institution a dumbed-down version of our software, to measure effects. Nobody wants to be shortchanged. And, shoot, it’s demanding to build high-level tests for every part of the subsystem–we have enough trouble getting test subjects as it is, that it’s hard to spare enough people to make control groups for every subsystem we want to test.

It’s a bit of a let-down, not to be able to publish. It’s not that I’m not going to be able to get the information out ever (this conference was actually going to be the middle-step for a journal paper)… The real let-down is that I won’t be able to go to Kaohsiung for this conference. Was looking forward to being able to network with profs from China and Taiwan, as I’m considering future work in that area of the world as a post-doc or professor.

Instantes

Si pudiera vivir nuevamente mi vida
en la próxima trataría de cometer más errores.
No intentaría ser tan perfecto… me relajaría más.
Sería más tonto de lo que he sido;
de hecho tomaría muy pocas cosas con seriedad.
Sería menos higiénico.
Correría más riesgos, haría más viajes, contemplaría más atardeceres,
subiría más montañas, nadaría más ríos.
Iría a más lugares a donde nunca he ido;
comería más helados y menos habas;
tendría más problemas reales y menos imaginarios.
Yo fui de esas personas que vivió sensata y prolíficamente cada momento de su vida.
Claro que tuve momentos de alegría, pero si pudiera volver atrás
trataría de tener solamente buenos momentos.
Por si no saben, de eso está hecha la vida, sólo de momentos; no te pierdas el ahora.
Yo era uno de esos que nunca iban a ninguna parte sin un termómetro,
una bolsa de agua caliente, un paraguas y un paracaídas.
Si pudiera volver a vivir, comenzaría a andar descalzo a
principios de primavera y seguiría así hasta concluir el otoño.
Daría más vueltas en calesita, contemplaría más amaneceres
y jugaría con más niños, si tuviera otra vez la vida por delante.
Pero ya ven, tengo 85 años y sé que me estoy muriendo…

–Jorge Luis Borges

UPDATE:
Whoops, and it looks like there is some skepticism as to authenticity of this poem.
This text did seem a lit too whimsical for Borges when I was reading it (Since when does he talk as goofily as needing to take a thermos and parachute outside with him). But, the talk of dawn and sunsets, and especially that bit about being 85 and dying at the end, well, it had me fooled.

In addition to my research at USC, I’m auditing Second Language Acquisition class by John Schumann over at UCLA. The class is a refreshing break from the Chomsky-loving Theorists that comprise the Linguistics department over at USC. Not that Generative Linguistics is as horrible as some people might say, but it’s great to get diversity of opinion. And, it’s great to hear language addressed from a real-world perspective, instead of language from the perspective theoretical prose, thought up by highly educated academians. But I digress…

About a week ago, Schumann brought up the concept of language as an emergent cultural artifact–that, just like arrowheads, or canoes, or the subway system or the Queen Mary, language emerged in human society because it made society function better. While I disagree with this (partly on religious grounds), it does give us an interesting way to look at language that takes away one Chomsky’s biggest arguments for Universal Grammar: that we need some sort of specialized principles-and-parameters area in our brain in order for us to learn language so quickly. But if we look at language as a socially evolved artifact, then this means that instead of the brain being specialized for language, language is specialized for the brain. Language, if it’s evolved, has evolved in such a way as to be easily acquirable by the infant mind.

The concept of language-as-system-of-emergent-order is intriguing.

Imagine another emergent-order system, that of a semi-public library of the order of 50-200 books. If just one person is using the library, they can organize it however they want, or they can not organize it, and rely on memory to find books where they’d put them before. If a few more people start using the library, an organizational system starts to emerge, regardless of if it was specifically discussed or not. People start putting books back in alphabetical order, or by subject, or by author–the only way a library is able to function productively is if people can find the books.

Emergent systems occur when the benefit of contributing becomes greater than the cost of contributing. One can imagine language emerging in the same way.
if (benefit of contributing > cost of contributing) then emerge.
Of course, continuing with our library analogy, there are going to be some free-loaders whose laziness wins out over the desire to classify, so they ignore the System for the sake of a few saved steps. One can imagine, if free-loaders get out of hand after a while, codified laws/rules emerge in the library-society. This modifies our boundary equation to be
if (benefit of contributing > cost of contributing - penalty of not contributing) then emerge.

This is Language as Game Theory.

Anyways, that’s just a taste of my thoughts. It’s interesting stuff.
It makes me wonder if any other parts of society that we take for granted as being innate is actually cultural artifact. Mathematics–is that something basic to nature or is it created? Do prime numbers exist without a number system to house them? Number systems surely seem a product of society. Was the Mandelbrot set, therefore, invented instead of discovered (well, discovered by Mandelbrot, but invented a long while back as an inadvertent byproduct of imaginary numbers)? What about the scientific method?

And, it makes me look at the emergent language of folksonomies in a different way too. Definitely their power-law distribution is patterned like the power-law distribution of langauge at large. I wonder what insights we can glean from language as a whole by looking at this evolution of folksonomy that’s going on now as we speak…

Telepolis has an interview with Slavoj Zizek entitled “Hysteria and Cyberspace”.
Deep, deep, good stuff.

Do you know the function ‘undelete’ in computers? The problem with computers is not that something can be erased: you worked all afternoon and then have a power failure and it’s gone. Okay, these things can happen. But you know that it’s sometimes even more horrible that you cannot really erase it. Once it’s in, it’s in. Here I see also the problem with cloning. It’s not the problem of: “Will I lose my individuality, will I be in the position of precise doubles etc.” The problem of cloning is that you cannot ever die. You kill yourself and they find (ideally speaking, of course it is not yet scientifically possible) just a little bit of you and they can reconstitute you. You are endlessly reproductable. Nobody knows how this will effect individuality.

Every class at my university starts the semester off with a good 15 minute long lecture by the professors telling us that we should do our own work, not copy from others’ when such an action is not fitting, and always list our sources if we do use someone else’s work.

Now, we’ve had two homework problem sets for my algorithms class so far, and each homework handout was mostly copied, word-for-word, from assignments from classes at other universities. Shoot, the first assignment’s PDF was just a copy of another class’s PDF file, typos and all.

Hypocrisy. When will they start handing out ethics code violations for professor’s too? This is not the first time I’ve had this happen.

In the future, will we all need spam filters for our RSS feed readers too?

Chalk up another one to Clay’s “social software is stuff that gets spammed” theory.

So, I’m pretty sure I’ll be buying an iBook sometime in the near future (within the next couple of days?). I’ve been considering it for a while now, need a laptop, and the price is definitely right, especially for Apple quality. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get a 12″–$900 is a good price, the weight/dimensions are perfect, and the screen isn’t painfully low-rez.

I think the inadvertant proseletyzing of Gordon, Liz, Leonard, and Merlin has finally got to me. None of it was overt, but it was definitely a constant drone in the background of my mind for the last 6 months or so.

A part of me feels like I’m selling out to hipster subculture. Another part of me feels like I’m coming home (I grew up with an old Mac SE, remember fondly the system upgrades from 5 to 6 to 7, which finally had good multi-tasking))…

I should ask: are there ANY downsides to getting a mac? What is it like to code on them? Will I miss the right mouseclick if I’m only using the touchpad? What’s all the good software out there?

Johannes at MonoChrom has an amazing project going on right now. He’s taken four old black-and-white drawings of chainsaw and wood, and invited netizens to use them as inspiration/illustration for graphical novel shorts.

His replies have been amazing, especially in their spread of subject matter.
Ranging from introspective

to psychotic

to (probably my favorite, by Doctorow), futuristic.