sardonick

Vannevar Bush predicts how I spent my post-lunchtime. A mention during lunch of Wittgenstein lead me to read about Bertrand Russell which in turn led to analytic philosophy and logical positivism (no I didn’t succumb to Hegel’s side of things, too). Instead I got caught up in John Searle and found this great talk that he wrote to the American Philosophical Association entitled “Is the Brain a Digital Computer”. If this isn’t a memex trail then I don’t know what is =).

On re-read: hmmm, that’s really scatterbrained. I guess this is intellectual-attention-deficit-disorder (IADD?).’

Update: a better name for it is Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder. This totally fits. But, the question it begs is: does the environment attract people who are so intellectually fickle, or does it make them intellectually fickle? And if it makes us fickle, is it something that shapes us permanently, or does the UI just force a temporary fickleness upon us so that we can get the most content that the medium offers?

Via Great Minds Working and Slashdot: neurobiologists at MIT are studying the role of the basal ganglia in bird songs, in an effort to learn more of the BG’s role in human L1A (first language acquisition) & language processing.

Here’s MIT’s press release

I think the fact that this comparison between birds and humans is of particular interest, especially in the way that it calls established evolutionary theories into question. Most all evolutionary accounts of language I’ve read about have said human language arises out of gesture and social interactions in primates. Given, however, that that birds are so distant from humans from an evolutionary standpoint, this “parallel evolution” between chirps and words, songs and paragraphs, could help us understand a different story about the low-level functioning of the BG. It could be parallel evolution, or it could be that the human basal ganglia wasn’t honed by evolutionary pressures of social interaction after all–that it was already sufficiently developed for these tasks in the brains of animals simpler than primates.

Here’s the full research study (which I will read in my copious spare time).

Manhattan Clam Chowder uses a tomato base, while its more common New England Cousin uses cream.

Ingredients:

• 2 or 3 6.5 oz cans of clams, with juice
• 4 or 5 bacon slices, diced
• 1 onion, diced
• 1.5 potatoes, diced
• 2 tomatoes, cubed
• 1 bunch spinach, cut.
• 1 28oz can of peeled tomatoes, cubed, with juice
• 1 cup celery
• 1 cup carrots (i don’t like it, you might)
• 5-6 cups water
• basil (less),
• parseley (2T),
• thyme (more),
• bay (2 leaves),
• pepper, salt (to taste)

In a big pot:

1. saute bacon until crisp, remove from their fat and set aside.
2. add onion and potatoes to bacon fat (if you want to be more health-conscious at the expense of taste, you can discard the bacon grease and use olive oil).
3. saute onion and potatoes for 7 minutes.
4. Add celery, carrots, and half the thyme to the onion and potato.
5. Saute for 5 minutes more.
6. Add in water, tomatoes, tomato juices, and clam juices.
7. Bring to a boil.
8. Add the bay, basil, pepper, salt, rest of the thyme, and most of the parseley
9. Cover and simmer for 20-25 minutes (or however long it takes to tenderize vegetables), stirring as you will.
10. Add spinach and clams, and simmer uncovered for 5 minutes more.

Upon serving:

• sprinkle with the bacon and the leftover parseley (don’t cook the chowder with the bacon inside, or the bacony flavor goodness will disappear).

Serves 5-6.

Freetag - an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications.

Gordon is awesome.

Spent the good part of an hour yesterday night helping my girlfriend navigate between Big Blue Bus and Culver City Bus routes, so that she can get from Westwood to Culver city without a car.

What a pain.

After seeing the wonderful hack combining housing on Craigslist with Google Maps, it seems like it might be an easy extension to do the same thing with bus (or any public transit) routes.

LA is not known for its public transportation, but certainly the demand must be there for a city like New York.

Lazyweb, we need you!

UPDATE:
someone beat me to it.

Going to give a talk soon on Social Software in Academia.
The following is a report on wiki-use in for our project..

Context

• ISI is halfway in between industry and pure research.
• Wide range of users (language educators, artists, coders, researchers).
• ~50-70 people. None are too cutting-edge social-software wise. Most all use the wiki

(aside)
we’re also CMS (dotProject). We use it much in the way that industry would. Nothing too abnormal here. Bug/feature tracking, release calendars, etc. This isn’t too interesting or pertinent to discussion. Please contact me with questions

The TactLang Wiki: Uses

• reference:
  • content sharing (here is my module/plan/API/small blurb of research focus I need to talk to people about)
    http://twiki.isi.edu/TACTLANG/PedagogicalAgentArchitecture
    http://twiki.isi.edu/TACTLANG/AnimationCreation
• content collaboration (everyone integrate their meeting notes)
  http://twiki.isi.edu/TACTLANG/PedAgentMeeting20050218
• content distribution (e.g. “here’s the paper I submitted to XXX conference”, “here is some demo video footage or screenshots people can use”)
  http://twiki.isi.edu/TACTLANG/ProjectReports
• development
  • collaboration: writing scripts together
    http://twiki.isi.edu/TACTLANG/IraqiTextScripts
  • centralized place to upload files (annotation)
    http://twiki.isi.edu/TACTLANG/FtBragg2Annotation
• personal
  • personal TODO lists

WikiGoodStuff

• It does the job well, good for decentralized working and communication. I don’t have too much to say here because it’s a good tool.
• It does what it needs to, and the interface is comfortable enough to use. Even those who have had no prior social software experience have had no problem understanding the interactional paradigm.
• It’s really done well for for things like collaborative dev, like meeting notes, and pan-accessible file uploading (e.g. conference papers)

WikiBadStuff

• for things that need an external format, like conference papers, we’ve tried to write those in wiki, and the overhead of using markdown to format things is just too high. But, it’s good for what it does.
• easy to have orphaned information. When new stuff comes up we add new pages, and it’s easy to forget about old pages if they fall out of thought and out of the recent changes list.
• It’s easy for things to get lost if you forget their True Name.
• It’s hard for somebody new to come onboard and tell by browsing what is a new idea and what is something we’re not doing any more.
• It’s hard to encourage people to garden (should we even?).
• Because it’s just one medium of expression, it’s hard to keep it synchronized with the other means of communication.
• I suspect it’s easy for people to waste their time with. It’s quite easy to make organized, wonderfully structured pages meant as reference, but that no one else really uses but ourselves. I suppose this might help us organize our thoughts, but I wonder if it’s really worth it. TODO: explore online documentation.
• Perhaps a lot of this would be better if either wikis themsevles were more condusive to strict structure, or if we had a “best practices”/design/writing patters prep for all users.

Going to give a short presentation soon on Social Software in Academia.
What follows is a a public collection-place for my thoughts on Blogging in Academia:

Summary of my Use, and General Thoughts:

• Personal catch-all. Given that my interests are eclectic–borges & ts eliot, natural language processing, AI-driven pedagogy, social software, lingusitics, religion… the blog I have is the reflection of this.
• My research is at the intersection of computer science, pedagogy, and linguistics. A very restricted audience
• Blogs seem to benefit people inclined to write. By “writing” i don’t mean writing as a journalist or academian necessarily. I just spent this last week writing conference papers, and that blog-writing isn’t necessarily so painful.
• I mean writing in the same way that you would extrovert to your friends at a coffeeshop. Or writing in the same way as a radio talk show host pontificates. It’s that kind of sublime-in-thought-but-not-in-syntax kind of writing.
• I am inclined to write, when real life doesn’t get in the way.
• Blogs seem to be good when they have regular content. It seems like it takes a regular flow of new stuff to keep an audience once they are attracted. At least, that’s what I see when I read the A- and B-listers.

Am I blogging for myself or blogging for other people?

• If I am blogging for others:
  • I would say my goal is to develop a “community” rather than just a “readership”. how does community develop around blog? I’ve met about 3 (2 of whom I now correspond reguarly with) people now who’ve stumbled across the language pedagogy stuff I write about. With those 3, my blog has seemed more like a facilitator to begin talking more thru email than it is to form a community.
  • What does it take to form community? Perhaps multiple people interested in actively blogging and commenting on each others’ blogs is what it takes to form community. A community certainly hasn’t developed around what I have.
• If I am blogging for myself:
  • It makes things easily searchable (the whole “outboard brain”). This is what first got me starting to blog
  • It enforces clarity and quality of thought. When I know others are reading, and when I know google and archive.org are going to store what i write for all eternity, It makes me think through my thoughts a lot more, carry them out to their next logical step.
  • Interesting, it’s shown me a hierarchy I have for what I create: I was going to put up a final essay from one of my classes last term, and I realized I was embarrassed to have that quality of writing associated with me. granted, i’m taking engineering classes, but it’s funny i value the general unknown public more than my classes…). Contrasted, I just finished a paper for a conference in Portugal next fall, and I had no problem putting that up without any cleanup.

Shortcomings:

• Consistency in blogging encourages smallthought, rather than large thought. little, one-line commentary and linkage is the easiest to write consistently. this isn’t necessarily the most insightful of commentary.
• Expertise in a small or emerging area is projected by google into expertise in a larger area. An annecdote: About half a year ago I wrote a big old post on folksonomy, just when it was getting big. It must have done something big to my google rank, because later on I wrote a post referencing a conference, ICALT, that I decided *not* to submit to, and I found that I come up first in google for “ICALT 2005 blog”. Oh well.
• I suppose websearch is useful for discovering the existing A-list for an established subject, but hard to find new stuff.
• The dichotomy in pull between writing for yourself and writing for others:
  Like most nerds I’m scatterbrained and eclectic. Call it NADD or call it being a renaisance man. How do we reconcile the desire to track multiple subjects with the desire not to get too high noise:signal for readers on the blog? One answer is to have multiple blogs, but heck, I can hardly post to mine regularly.
• The difficulty in forming community: it’s hard to establish a community out of no-where, unless you’re contributing to something that’s already hot in the blogging world. My annecdotal experience says this. Is it true?

As of last night I finished up a submission to Eurospeech 2005 with Abhinav Sethy.

I’ve posted it here:
Modeling and Automating Detection of Errors in Arabic Language Learner Speech.

In a nutshell: Understanding bad-accent/bad-grammar learner speech is hard for humans. And what’s hard for humans is even harder for machines. Compound a relative lack of much speech data with an exponentially explosive number of ways a learner can mis-speak a sentence, and it feels like an impossible task. Through tricky statistical natural language processing techniques and smart Automated Speech Recognition, we do our best to face the problem.

This paper basically an abridged summary of my research up to this point for ISI’s Tactical Language Project, concentrating on the Speech Recognition aspect of things. It’s also the first time we’ve posted acutal results of system accuracy. I must say that, upon running the formal tests this last week, I was surpised (in a good way) with the accuracy numbers that we were able to get!

(aside: For more information on the TactLang project, here is a good intro news story.)

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

-e. e. cummings

Upgraded to 1.5 Testing post.