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Category Archives: General

Spam as Turing Test

08-Nov-06

I received an impressive spam a while ago. It was a comment to my SQLObject post a while back, telling me “Have you tried Ruby language? It has quite good database object system.” Not a bad comment, taken by itself. But the poster’s submitted website was clearly some search engine optimization type spam site. I’m […]

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break from the hiatus

27-Oct-06

somehow haven’t posted here for a month and a half, phew. thesis progress still continuing but slow (I think I’ve said “Yeah, I’ll be graduating in a year and a half” for the past two years now). speaking of thaeces, learning the hard way the difference between science and systems. ugh, it’s so hard to […]

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Five Years Ago Today

11-Sep-06

Five years ago today I had literally just moved to Taipei. At the time, I was sharing an apartment with an Indonesian dude who spoke very little English (and I, at that point, spoke very little Chinese…we communicated through lots of gestures and a Chinese-English pidgin, needless to say). So, it’s late afternoon (time difference, […]

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Semantic Web 2.0

22-Aug-06

Attended a talk today by Stefan Decker of DERI in Ireland this morning. “Semantic Web 2.0” was the title of the talk–and I think Stefan wins the Most Buzzwords in a Talk Title award. I must admit when I came into the talk that I was a bit skeptical–Semantic Web 1.0 never got off the […]

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Fragmented thoughts on readworthiness

12-Aug-06

Ultragleeper, by the guy who made Beautiful Soup. A “Recommendation Engine”. Ultragleeper takes group data from technorati, del, google, and personal recommendations regarding readworthiness of web pages. This is a neat subset of what I’m looking at for a good feedreader. I need to browse his source (python, yay) to take a look at how […]

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Meta

19-Jul-06

It’s kind of meta, isn’t it? These guys are not marketing Che, but rather marketing the marketing of Che. Oh, you hipsters and your rapier wit.

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What we can learn from Folksonomy

24-Jun-06

Outward-facing Questions: The great thing about delicious and folksonomy is that it creates an ontology as an emergent biproduct of individual self-serving efforts (that is, personal bookmarking). I’m wondering if we can take a similar tact to solve other AI problems. Inward-facing Questions: What is the best way to represent the evolution of a tag’s […]

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Quals Tomorrow

22-Jun-06

Not too nervous about it, just want to get it over with. Putting on the finishing touches to my slides for tomorrow.

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Finished the Dissertation Proposal

19-Jun-06

Ahhh, I’m done. Now, don’t that feel good. 71 pages on building a computational model of language learner errors. Phew, now to sleep.

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Consuming

12-Jun-06

Talking to a friend last week, an interesting idea came up: We don’t just consume information, information also consumes us. My attention is a scarce resource, and different ideas, media, schools of thought, compete for it. (This is what makes multidisciplinarity hard). It makes me think twice about metaphors for learning that compare research and […]

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