I’ve been seeing евтини мебелиPenrose’s quantum mind theory gain more and more traction lately. Every time I turn around there’s a new discussion about it, a new paper published, or a new blog entry… all proposed by intelligent people that I respect.

It brings to mind a theory that I heard a long while ago, that throughout history we’ve always used the latest technology and science to talk about the brain.

The ancient romans said the brain was like a catapult. Later, people have compared the brain to a hydrolics system, a telephone switchboard, or a calculator. And, now we say it’s like a computer, Turing-complete with a Von-Neumann architecture.

This is by no means evidence that there aren’t quantum effects, entanglement, what not, going on in the brain… but it does increase my skepticism whenever I hear “Oh, the brain is just a system that can be represented by $theory_du_jour “.

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Jetlag did a number on me (going to sleep at West Coast Time, then waking up in time for 8am EST talks…). Feh. Talks were worth it, though.

Met a bunch of really interesting people. It was great to talk to other folks that are doing classification at Google (including taxonomic classification like I’m doing!). Learned a lot (note to self: read up more on gibbs sampling, latent dirichlet allocation, and the RCV1 corpus). Also got to hang out with Chih-Jen Lin a bit, had great discussions about academia, publications (quality versus quantity of publications in China/Taiwan), and how to reform the academic publication system to give better signals as to what is readworthy. Right now, reviewers and conference organizers are the gatekeepers, and that doesn’t scale well. When you think of how many smart people read academic publications, the only way that they can give feedback is to publish something themselves. That’s such a high cost to communicate, it leads to stagnation and monoculturality in the community (echo chamber!). I wish I could easily see, for the profs I respect, a “Papers I read last year that I found really influential” list. Aggregate these and you get great, quantitative metrics of a paper’s worth. Also, “best in conference” awards for papers are so short-sighted; we really don’t know what’s good for a couple years. It would be great to have a “best 2 years ago” retrospective award for conferences and journals. компютриCiteULike starts to address these issues, but it isn’t in wide use and it’s not perfect.

The city itself

• So nice to be somewhere that prioritizes pedestrians over cars. By contrast, Santa Monica issues tickets if you start to walk in a crosswalk when the “walk” sign turns into a blnking red hand. Sigh.
• I’m reminded of Taipei every time I visit NY. There’s a semi-tangible energy in the air of both, lots of people crammed into a small area, everything walkable, and alive, all hours of the day and night. I would love to live here, at least before I have kids. Probably not going to happen, but it would be fun.
• One night, instead of going out, spent a chill 3 hours out on Google’s 8th story balcony overlooking the cityline, admiring the view and talking to co-workers. Amazing.
• Ate some good food there, but I have three regrets: (1) didn’t order any morning street bagels, (2) didn’t get any late-night pizza, (3) likewise for late-night street-gyros. Sigh, will have to come back again.
• Also, damnit, this is twice I’ve been to the city and haven’t yet heard any good jazz!

publications would be so much better if we were forward-thinking instead of rigorous in our testing. It seems like people judge a paper’s value by “in 10 years, will someone find a hole in the rigor of my testing procedure”. I would rather judge a paper by “does this make me have an interesting idea about the field that I’ve never thought of before”

All dissertations require four months of uninterrupted work.

• The last month of work takes 0.5 calendar months.
• The second to last month takes 1.5 calendar months.
• The first two months can take years, and they usually do.

Prof. Daneil Bewrry, U. Waterloo

Sigh… if only this were less true.

• 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 get an academically rigorous results out of a research project that has such practical demands on resources and functionality. just another game to play, I guess.
• More in the academic world, am trying to figure out how my work fits in with the rest of Computer Aided Language Learning field. It seems that statistical language modeling of learner errors is commonplace for pronunciation modeling, but an afterthought for any of the other fields. How is this possible?? Am I overlooking some major bodies of research (the field is horribly fragmented and it’s all too easy to do this)? Or do I really get the chance to carve a niche for myself with this thesis I’m writing?
• funding shortage in the research group. will be with the Google part time from January until at least May. Promises to be a fun experience.
• went to Shik Do Rak three nights ago. Easily the best restaurant in Korea-town. I think I’m still full =).
• Short backpacking trip tomorrow and Sunday in the Angeles mountains, a little north of Arcadia, with Eldwin and Christina. Hopefully the San Gorgonio fires won’t ruin the air quality. This will be my wife’s first time hiking! (and my first time in the past decade, nearly! where does the time go?)
• hacking on a feedreader in my spare time. it’s been slowly gathering statistics of my use over this past month or so, which I’ll use to train some different measures of interestingness and boringness. next up is to expose those measures to the UI, for some usefulness goodness

How pale the stars, that burn in pallid splendor.

• Bibdesk : an excellent BibTeX database management system. Beautiful. But for mac only.
• jabref : an open-source, java BibTeX database management system. Lacks Bibdesk’s panache, but not bad.
• bibtexml: an excellent tool. Takes .bib files, converts them to xml, and then uses DTDs or XSLTs to mark them down to html APA, MLA, or whatever. This is the type of thing that XML was made for. Requires sablotron or another xslt engine to work.
• citeulike : folksonomy + bibliography. A delicious clone built to manage academic paper metadata. Good for storing data, finding new papers to read, and making what I’ve read public