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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Friday, September 8, 2006
2:24 p.m.
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Back from two solid days of listening to people talk about N-best reranking with 5-gram language models, word alignment with GIZA++, and minimum error rate training with BLEU scores — it's been a fun trip, if somewhat intense. My advisor rented a car, and the two of us drove down to Washington Tuesday evening. The workshop started Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., and then we drove back after it finished yesterday just before dinner time. I was kind of nervous about the car trips, spending nine hours with a professor probably almost twice my age. It wasn't so bad in the end. We just listened to NPR for the first hour or so, until we lost WDUQ on the far side of the Allegheny Tunnel, and after that I think conversation was a bit easier. Dinner at a KFC in Breezewood at Alon's suggestion; I guess it's where he usually stops. It was the first time I'd been to one in a whole bunch of years, so I was kind of surprised to see their menu extended to almost a Boston Market-esque point. Arrived at the conference hotel in due course. It was the Capital Hilton, just a few blocks up 16th Street from the White House, as I mentioned in my last entry. A very fancy place. I felt like I was old, rich, and living in the '40s the whole time we weren't in the workshop. We surrendered the car to valet parking at the door, were directed by three people towards the front desk, and got asked if we needed any help with our luggage. My room on the seventh floor was pretty elegantly turned out, but of course most hotel rooms are. The weirdest part was at the workshop's meal and break times. We existed mostly in a large room set up with rows of long tables all facing a platform and a projector screen, and most of us brought our breakfast and snacks into there to eat; hotel staffers circulated among the rows removing empty dishes. Lunch was served in a separate fancy dining room down the hall, where crews of waiters wordlessly removed dishes and refilled water glasses. Yesterday at check-out time there were bell captains, consierges, car fetchers, and random other people in hotel suits standing round the lobby. I started getting nervous, waiting for Alon to come back from getting directions at the front desk, that they would start asking me "May I assist you with anything, sir?" if I showed the slightest sign of indecision, so I parked myself near the door and stared resolutely at the little circle drive out front. We left the hotel in the middle of rush hour yesterday, just before 6:00. Dinner again at Breezewood; we pulled into the Pizza Hut there only to find the SMT people from CMU already inside — they had arrived just before us, so we joined them and had a party of six. It wasn't until Joy and I explained to Bing and Alon what a safety is in football that I realized I was the only American at the table. I took over the driving from there, and we pulled up right near my house a bit after 11:30 p.m. As far as the workshop itself goes, it was quite interesting to see the the Who's Who of machine translation debate points during the discussion sessions, and it didn't take long to pick up certain parties of opinions based on people's backgrounds or whatever. Some people I thought rather improper, but there were many more ideas that even my novice self agreed with. A guy from Cambridge, speaking in a wonderfully British accent, presented some hypothesis combination work that got improved results where the MEMT probably wouldn't and gave us some new ideas. It seems everyone on the planet is doing N-best list reranking on their output with stronger language models, and Google's system is trained on more words that I thought anyone could ever have. |
Sunday, September 10, 2006
1:22 a.m.
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I have a new bike! Well, new to me, at least. Apparently the Free Ride people were getting annoyed about the one I was working on there, and they said (via Ross) that if I didn't come in and work on it today they were going to give it away to someone else. So I skipped out on newspaper work and finished the thing off. Now it is in the hallway downstairs until I decide how I want to manage having two bikes. The new one is a road bike, so it's all sorts of light and fast, which means it's wobbly to the 10th power and I don't feel so confident on it yet. It also has frame shifters, which I have yet to master on anything but straight and flat roadway. Tonight there were three party-type things going on roughly concurrently. I went to Chris's and Dave's around 9:00. I wanted to ride my new bike, but I couldn't detach the rear light holder from the old one; I eventually hit upon the solution of unclipping the light and reclipping it to the back pocket of my shorts. So I rode off through Shadyside with a blinking butt, and almost didn't make it up Wilkins because I was afraid to unbalance myself by messing with the frame shifters while going up a hill. But I arrived at the house without death or disfigurement. The party itself felt a lot like the CTFWS parties, which somehow immediately triggered the social awkwardness cortex of my nerd brain. I talked to a few people, but mostly wandered round abstractedly clutching a cup of ginger ale. Left around 10:30 with the intention of checking out the status of ITR games in Wean. On my way to campus I remembered the "chill party" that was supposed to be in Roselawn 7, and then I caught Tom just coming down the Roselawn driveway. It was thus that I was directed up to Seven for tasty bread pudding and assorted fun stuff. (The approved term there would probably be "lollery.") Tyler, Car, Tom, freshman Matt, and (briefly) George were there, and jgrafton came in later shortly before I left. There is something about these people that reminds me of my former suitemates — and this is all to the good, by the way. I think next time I should fit in a bit better if I brought along my laptop, but I got by with talking about math and crumpets and COBOL, and also leafing through Phillip's copy of Jurafsky and Martin that was on the coffee table. I found LTI professors cited all over the place in the index, which was pretty cool. People decided to watch a movie around 1:00, so I came home on my bike. It does feel a good bit faster than the old one. Long day at the newspaper tomorrow, so I think I'll cut off any description of the KGB Underground Tour (last night) and go to bed. |
Monday, September 11, 2006
8:55 p.m.
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Ugh, The Tartan took forever last night. We were doing amazingly well, too, up until about 11:30, and then we had all sorts of trouble with News that kept me in the office until 6:12 a.m. An interesting progression of mental states during the 19 hours I spent in the office. Up until about 2 a.m. I was feeling quite normal, but by 3:00 I was getting to the point where I'd laugh at anything and nothing. This lasted until some time past 4 — Brittany and I were playing around with fake accents and writing people's signatures on the board — and from about 4:45 onward I started feeling more and more detatched and full of inertia. I kind of stopped caring about trapped whitespace in the headlines and columns that didn't line up; Tiff and I were working through the News thirds at about six minutes per page, barely checking anything but the basics. I think it came out all right in the end, though I haven't had a chance today to look through the paper properly yet. Ally pointed out after the KGB meeting that the two jumps we listed as going to A4 actually both went to A6, so I guess that's one mark against us so far. Forced myself out of bed at 1:00 this afternoon — and I wouldn't have even managed that if I didn't have a 2:00 meeting with Alon and a quiz at 3:30 I hadn't done the reading for. Went late to KGB at 5:00, right after class, then to dinner in the new Carnegie Mellon Café in Resnik, and finally over to the cluster for a bit to try to work. It was kind of difficult to research papers on syntax-based MT with a whole crowd of people intently hacking (literally, I believe) on something or other and using vocabulary I couldn't even begin to understand, so I packed up and came home after less than an hour. I am feeling more stable on the new bike, and a little bit faster as well. There will be the obligatory Sept. 11 post later on; right now I have a whole lot of work to do. |
Monday, September 11, 2006
11:54 p.m.
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Well. My "official" Sept. 11 post was going to mostly be an excerpt of what I wrote on that day in 2001 in my written journal, but I find that I considerately failed to write anything from July to November of that year. This is very strange, since I'm almost certain that I remember myself writing down an account of what I did that day. (I was doubtlessly influenced by an interview project we did in my 10th grade history class: one of the questions, to be posed to a grandparent or suitable substitute, was "Where were you and what were you doing when you found out that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.") I suppose it's possible that I wrote up the story separately and stashed it in my "clippings box" with old newspapers and such things. I've just written it up again, but I don't think I'll post it because it's kind of long. I was a freshman at Case that year, and the story of that particular Tuesday morning involves two hours in front of the TV in Tyler, flying down to the quad on my bike long after CHEM 111 was supposed to have started, Doc letting us go after about 15 minutes, Chris cancelling class, and me spending the rest of the day variously watching TV, collecting pictures from online news reports, and calling home. I wrote an article for The Observer in the following weeks about how other students had reacted; I also ended up writing for the paper about memorials in one or two of the years since. So. Now it's five years later, and journalers, columnists, and public officials are spewing their guts out today on how things have gone for us since. Are we "safer"? I doubt it. We've only gotten ourselves into a security battle that's like trying to hit a randomly-moving target while going round on a Sit 'n' Spin attached to the Scrambler. Is there really such a stark difference between the "pre-" and "post-9/11" worlds? I suppose so. The public face of this country has shifted focus enormously, and I bet I'll be a doddering and ancient oldy-moldy before the politicians stop whinging Sept. 11 around as a political hot potato. I don't like to be an overly political person, but I think this country has seen a very troubling half-decade for which we won't be treated very kindly by the history books. I can't estimate the number of times I've wanted to fling my newspaper across the room in disgust due to the absolute depravity of some of the current administration's schemes and ideas. In the name of this messy "war on terror," the U.S. leadership has destroyed its credibility abroad, killed off a few thousand of its own citizens and who knows how many more of someone else's, and lost the confidence of more than 60 percent of its population. Le Monde — the same French newspaper that five years ago published the headline "Nous sommes tous américains" — wrote an editorial today that says, in part: The first war driven by the United States benefitted from unanimous support. Washington [...] upset the Taliban in power in Afghanistan and deprived the jihadist movement of its logistical base. That war was a success, looking from what happened next in Iraq and despite some current reversals. I really hope we can get ourselves cleaned up in the next five years, 'cause we're sure in the muck right now. |
Friday, September 15, 2006
1:46 a.m.
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This has been a very disappointing week academically, though there's not really one thing I can point to that explains it. I am becoming more and more firm in my belief that I hate Language & Stats II and understand none of it, and French is turning out to be a whole lot more work than I'd expected. Between the two, I'm drowning in homework to the point that I haven't done any MEMT work this week — and I had outlined to my advisor on Monday a plan of action that was quite ambitious, even for a normal week. Of course now there's no hope of getting that done, and I'm not sure how he'll take that. On the positive side, I was on time to French this morning for the first time all semester. I think I must have been mentally unbalanced when I decided I wanted a 9 a.m. class twice a week. Also went to a lovely dinner party in Roselawn on Tuesday evening; afterwards Philip invited me to stick around, so I camped out on the couch and worked on the Language & Stats homework for a good three hours. That place still reminds me of my old suite, except since everyone there has laptops they do their homework in the living room and kitchen. Rain for the past three days, right up until after 8:00 this evening. I'd been wanting to go running since Tuesday, so I took a break around 9:30 and went. I made the mistake of biking to campus both Tuesday and today; on Tuesday I had to leave the bike there overnight (under the overhang at Wean, at least, so it was dry) and collect it Wednesday. Today I put it in front of Newell-Simon, where it promptly got drenched, and then in the afternoon I took the bus with Christine to the Highland Park farmers' market down at the zoo, so the bike's still there. Really I am falling apart this week. This feels very unlike my usual writing, so I think I'll stop now and go to bed. Just wanted to post that I was, as they say, "not dead yet." |
Friday, September 15, 2006
11:36 p.m.
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I realized today that I have a four-page French paper to write on the analysis of a certain sonnet. Due Tuesday. I am sick of ineffectual work. Is anyone doing anything interesting, and preferably outdoors, tomorrow? |
Monday, September 18, 2006
11:38 p.m.
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Went on a nice walk in the park with Evan last night — I'd been feeling kind of lonely at my apartment and didn't want to spend the rest of the night thinking about various things. So I sought outdoor adventures from the people on #cslounge and in the cluster and found one taker. We ended up talking about some interesting language-related things. Evan's teaching himself to read Braille, and from his description of the more complex parts of the language it seems like it's got many of the same shortcuts and heruistics as shorthand. (I should really pick that up again if I ever get the time.) After I mentioned I'd tried learning shorthand to help with doing interviews for the newspaper, Evan told me about his system of re-mapping keys on his laptop to take class notes in LaTeX. It will be fun to see if he can make it up to normal speaking speed and transcribe every word. We ended up climbing around a bit on one of the playgrounds, the same one where we had the KGB picnic in the spring. I was a bit surprised to find I could fit myself through a space that certainly looked too small to accomodate my hips. A really roundabout discussion on the walk back eventually led into the definition of the worst punishment ever: disconnect the brain from the body and find a way to keep it (= the person) alive and conscious indefinitely. After I stopped thinking about the brain in the jar from "Look Around You," I decided that this really would be a horrific situation. Sure, you'd be free to ponder the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything, but I'm not sure how long even a corpulent me could be satisfied with nothing but my own thoughts. In the brain-only case, even if you hit upon some great philosophic discovery, there'd be no way to communicate it to anyone else. And how would you interpret physical space, the external world, and time? There'd be absolutely no way out and no way to tell how long you'd been in. A frightening exercise in consciousness that maybe Chris will want to take up... So that part of Saturday night wasn't bad. The paper ran deathly long again last night (5:48 a.m.), but I was introduced by Liz, Ariane, and Shawn to the wonderful pursuit of racing our blue wheely-chairs down the hallway on the third floor of the UC. I discovered that the best way to build up a decent speed without veering into walls is to push yourself somewhat sideways instead of completely backwards. Put a bit of water on your shoes and I bet you can do better still. If Ariane posts the digital pictures she took last night, I'll be sure to link to one from here so the description will make a bit more sense. Today was all right until I got out of software engineering and caught the end of the KGB meeting. I followed a bunch of people up from the basement in Maggie Mo who all seemed to be heading for dinner somewhere, only to have them evaporate in the hallway upstairs in various and sundry directions. Then another food group came up, and we headed out towards Resnik. Someone mentioned eating in the Indian place there, but I said I'd prefer somewhere else because that costs a lot if you're not on the meal plan. After some discussion on possibly trying the free A Phi O hamburgers, everyone else in the group suddenly decided that the Indian place was actually the perfect solution, and they all ran off with one accord, as they say, and left me standing on the sidewalk. After scouring the Tartan office and the cluster for people to eat with, I ended up grabbing something from the trucks and eating it by myself on the Cut near where the Kiltie Band was practicing. Then to the cluster to work on my French paper, which went badly there and isn't going much better here at home... |
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
9:49 p.m.
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Arr, mateys! It be Talk Like a Pirate Day, so I'll be celebratin' it by writin' this post in an appropriate pirate style. And ye better read it, too, or I makes ye walk the plank! 'Tis an odd thing, this pirate speakin'. Though I be a salty sea dog meself on the ocean o' linguistics, I'll bet ye a bottle o' rum that real pirates didn't go a-plunderin' under the Jolly Roger with these sorts o' accents. It'll not be a natural manner o' speakin', swashbucklin' sentences that be half Irish and half apostrophes. The other privateers would be sendin' 'em straight to Davy Jones's locker. But 'tis me own conclusion — hey, me hearty! Trim the top-mast! Man the fo'c's'le! — arr, 'tis me own conclusion that it be a fun pastime for ye mateys who enjoy havin' fun o' a Tuesday. 'Twas also fun for the job-huntin' scalliwags at the TOC, and 'tis a reported fact, me laddies, that the fine recruiter cap'ns at the Google booth were a-talkin' back the same way. Arr, it be hard work writin' like this for more 'n a paragraph, or else I'll be a-wantin' some pieces of eight for me trouble. So I'll be goin' back to me homework, ye scurvy C slugs. Avast, ye lily-livered LAN lovers! |
Thursday, September 21, 2006
10:37 p.m.
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I'm writing this from Roselawn 7, at the end of a very nice day of varied activities. It started out kind of badly, though: after staying up late to catch the midnight showing of "Dr. Strangelove" in McConomy with Christine and Matt, I woke up just in time to throw on clothes and bike down to French class at 9:00. Then, since I hadn't had any breakfast, I biked back home to eat a bit and start off the next part of the day on a more controlled footing. Work in the afternoon, pleasantly interrupted by my advisor asking me to come upstairs and join a meeting with some DoD people who had asked for an impromptu presentation on our MEMT stuff. At 6:30 it was off to Roselawn for a dinner party, which has been all sorts of fun. These people cook like four-star gourmets (today it was grilled tuna and salmon steaks), and my dessert of toffee bars also came out quite well. I am all for starting a Thursday night dinner-dessert club if it weren't for the fact that I'd be essentially inviting myself over to other people's houses all the time; this is one of the situations in which I regret living so far off campus and in a one-bedroom apartment. I do think I want to try a tea party at my apartment some time, as soon as I can buy an electric kettle to make more than three cups of hot water at a time. Everyone else has been commenting on the weather, so I might as well throw in my bit. Yesterday was pretty cold — 57 degrees, I think it was supposed to be — and the heat came on in my apartment towards the evening. It was pretty nice, actually, because I could drink a cup of tea while reading a paper on syntax-based statistical machine translation without feeling like I was dying from heat stroke. Today it was supposed to be 65, and it turned out to be a lovely day with blue skies and puffy white clouds. Nice cool weather for walking, too. I think I'd like to go out walking again tonight — if anyone reads this before midnight-ish and wants to go, just drop me a comment. |
Monday, September 25, 2006
1:17 a.m.
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A miracle has just occurred: we somehow managed to finish a Tartan at 1 a.m., and I am home at 1:15. This is the best we have ever done in my 16 weeks as copy manager, and an especially nice change from our recent 6 a.m. trend. For one thing, there weren't any early-morning joggers out on my way home, just a few late-night CMU kids walking near the UC. The best part is that I was actually out an hour early this morning, so I could drive down to the Waterfront and buy an electric tea kettle for the office. All in all, then, a very smooth day. Anything else to report? I guess Friday night was a pretty big KGB activity, consisting mainly of playing around outside of Doherty. We spent maybe an hour and a half tossing frisbees and balls around pretty much randomly at each other before eventually clustering around the benches and picnic tables near the Fence. Then we trapped Elise in a sort of plexiglas wooden-framed box that was lying in the grass, and then Ryan and one of the freshman Matts gave us an interesting... display in the same contraption. I will leave it at that. We also acertained that you can fit 12 or 13 people (standing) onto one of those brown-topped benches on the other side of the sidewalk. Inside Doherty, where we moved once it got colder out, Chris and I played a word game on the chalkboard based on the old trick of turning one word into another by modifying one letter at a time and making real words at each intermediate step. This can get kind of difficult for two arbitrary five-letter words, and we didn't even attempt six. Yesterday The Tartan had a barbecue at Evan's house after Saturday production, which was fun. The copy staff stuck together, like we usually do, but that just means we can talk about crossword puzzles and speech therapy without freaking out the normal people. Some of the Pillbox freshmen tried to start a dance party in Evan's living room; we more sedate old folks watched through the window on the porch and laughed when we found they were blocking Ali from getting into the kitchen. Home around 10:00, I think, and from there to the computer, where I again failed at convincing people that a walk in the park on a fine Saturday night would be a good thing. By the time the negative result was actually confirmed, it was too late to do laundry, so I watched "Memento" off my computer, read for a bit, and then went to bed. Perhaps better luck tomorrow. |
Monday, September 25, 2006
9:25 p.m.
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Lots of little things I want to post about, which will probably make it up here in some order in the next few days. I think I'll start with something to break up the chronology a bit, since retellings of my daily activities never seem to result in many comments or an interesting discussion, and I do think reading this should be worth something in terms of mental stimulation. I found myself this morning thinking about this bit from Dorothy Sayers: "You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. [...] You expend the trouble and you don't make any mistakes — and then you experience the ecstasy. But if there's any subject in which you're content with the second-rate, then it isn't really your subject. [...] If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller — all other interests, your own and other people's." It's from "Gaudy Night," a dense treatment of academic life in general and women's role therein in particular masquerading as a '30s mystery novel. (Dorothy Sayers always wanted to be considered a "serious" writer, I think, rather than someone who had to make money writing detective stories.) It's wondefully old-fashioned and British, and I like to read it every August as the academic year is starting up again, I suppose in the hope that it will inspire me to a semester of hard work and scholastic achievement. As usual, I'm sure it failed; I found myself running over the part I just quoted in the usual conflicted mental state of — can you guess it? — computer science versus newspaper work. Newspaper work is on the upswing. Every time I come across something like the home page for the American Copy Editors Society or the announcement of copy editing internships at the Washington Post, I have an intense desire to chuck everything else and make a living correcting em dashes. Marshall was telling me on Sunday about a friend of his who was given a trial period copy editing at The New York Times for $50,000 a year, which would increase to $70,000 if the paper decides they want to offer her a permanent position. I could do that — but who's ever heard of a copy editor with a master's degree in computer science? And do I have the commitment to dump language technologies just when I'm starting to get involved with things and my advisor is beginning to bring up the word "publish"? (If I ever thought two years was long enough to get to a new place, accomplish something, and move on, I was most assuredly incorrect.) So when exactly is it that other obstacles are getting mown down "like grass under a roller"? Where am I putting in the real work and only accepting the best results? What is my subject? These are things I really need to pay attention to in the coming months. |
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
11:33 p.m.
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I have discovered the thing to do when no one wants to go walking in the park at night: go biking in the park! I haven't yet convinced myself that walking alone in Schenley at 11 p.m. is a good idea, but I don't mind riding as long as the pavement is smooth. So tonight I ended up on a little tour of traffic-free park roads and similarly deserted parts of Squirrel Hill before coming home via the plunge down Negley. I'm feeling pretty good about using the frame shifters on the road bike, even going up moderate hills so far. A funny bike story, in fact: Yesterday I rode my old mountain bike to campus because the seat on the road bike had been progressively loosening itself, and I found I didn't have the right size Allen key to fix it. I guess I've been away from the old bike long enough to make riding it feel really weird — it felt like I was pedalling a squished-up little toy scooter down Ellsworth Avenue. Everything about the motion just feels wrong now, although the seat is about 30 times more comfortable and the bike handles bumps a lot better. Anyway, at the KGB meeting Ross asked me if I'd been able to fix my "saddle" yet and mentioned that he had the tools to fix it with him. This was kind of surprising, since I didn't remember telling anyone that it had come loose. I concluded, therefore, that either Ross was clairvoyant or that my hippocampus had developed a persnickety sense of humor. Wrong on both counts, in the end: what had actually happened is that Ross had bumped into my bike while it was parked in front of Wean and noticed that the bump made the seat rattle. It's fixed now, at any rate. Not a bad day on the classes front. I understood Language & Stats II today for like the first time ever, and in French we got our essays back. I discovered that I'm responsible for no less than three separate presentations next week, meaning that my world through next Friday is turning into PowerPoint. I hate PowerPoint. I think I can safely avoid it for the exposé des actualités for my French class, but next Friday I have to give a 20-minute talk on my research work, and you can bet your last pair of rubber-soled galoshes that they're going to want to see slides for that. (The third is the semesterly writing workshop for the Tartan staff, which probably means some example sentences I can put up and talk about.) That's a lot of me in the spotlight, though, and a lot of time preparing bullet points that I'd prefer to be otherwise employed. |
Thursday, September 28, 2006
11:29 p.m.
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Wow... another black mark in my mind against Language & Statistics II: I think I just got a 2.5 out of 8 on the first homework assignment. I really am not enjoying that class. Probably because there's such a disconnect — as there was in Language & Stats I, as well — between the theoretical or mathematical stuff that gets covered in lecture and the very implementation-heavy tasks we get for homework. I sit in my chair for three hours a week looking at slides covered in probability equations while Noah scatters literature references by authors and year, and then I find out only too late that I have no clue how to actually do the crap we're talking about. I just can't seem to understand statistics. Some days I feel like I'm listening to gleeful word salad rather than meaningful English: "And this is just the path sum of the marginalized joint prior in a new semiring! All we're doing is transforming an HMM into a composed WFST and calculating MLE!" I often wish Alon had let me take the speech recognition class I'd originally had scheduled. It doesn't help that I spent hours and hours over the past week trying to make sense of a paper on syntax-based statistical MT for the gigantic lit review I have to do for the class. The first thing I read — I guess I'd call it "Yamada and Knight 2001" — went down quite nicely, and even the probability derivations made sense. Then I had the misfortune to come across Melamed 2004, which is like 15 pages of notation changes, strange grammar formalisms, acronyms, and made-up operators with names like "%" or the nabla symbol. The guy is actually coming to give the LTI seminar talk tomorrow afternoon; maybe that will be more approachable. Too many things to do in general this week and next. I've been wishing for summer again, when I only had research stuff to focus on and none of this insanity of shuffling it around between going to class, working at The Tartan, and struggling ineffectively on three homework assignments at once. It's funny how fickle people can be, isn't it? In the middle of August I couldn't wait to have new things to do again. Now I just feel like I'm failing at holding down three full-time jobs. |
Saturday, September 30, 2006
9:58 p.m.
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The workdeath continues, though I'm feeling much better about it now. I have some ideas for the Language & Stats homework, if only I can find some time to implement them before Tuesday's due date. Most likely this means Monday night, since tomorrow is entirely taken up with Tartan stuff as usual. I guess I should have done more yesterday, but I went to the LTI seminar at 2:00 (didn't understand a lot of it, as I expected) and from there almost immediately to the LTI picnic in Schenley Park. Talked with the usual people there — that's to say mostly the other American master's students in my year. The way these homogeneous clumps form, despite everything we've ever learned in elementary school about diversity and multiculturalism, is sometimes rather amusing. Ate ice cream with Aaron and his wife Lindsay, though it was only about 50 degrees out and rather cloudy. I went immediately from there to the KGB's "Get Board Get Carded" game night, but ended up leaving about 20 minutes later to get Scrabble from home because people were interested in playing. By the time I got back, they'd forgotten and had gotten distracted by other games, but we made up a new foursome of Alisa, Sean, jcreed, and me and had a game anyway. Then we picked up mstephen and played Sean's extra-double-plus expansion set of Carcassonne, which took perhaps two hours and was pretty fun. I kept re-hearing in my mind the dialogue I had with Erin during our camping trip over the summer: —"Do you know about a game called Carcassonne?" —"Yes. Carcass One." For some reason this still makes me laugh every time I think of it. Today I went apple picking with Vicki and Alisa at an orchard just over the line into Washington County. It turned out to be quite near a set of roads that Ross and I biked along on our mammoth 69-mile trip some months ago, and we ended up getting slightly turned around at the same crazy intersection. Eventually arrived OK at Simmons' Farm in Peters Township, where we enjoyed very nice views of the surrounding hills, plus a quiet little apple orchard to walk around in for a bit. I think we all enjoyed it quite a lot. Stopped at Alisa's on the way home to have tea and play with her kitten. After a careful count, I find that I came home with 19 apples in my possession — not bad for $6, since I split a half-bushel bag with Vicki. One of them I ate at The Tartan this afternoon, and four of them I turned into apple crisp about an hour ago in my kitchen. That leaves me with 13 to go. Someone, or some group of people, wants me to bake them yummy things this week, right? |
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
12:28 p.m.
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I continue to exist, though this existence is made kind of annoying by the world's supply of things to do by Friday. Now the leftovers are spilling into next week as well. I have to give the first Tartan copy presentation tonight, and I've yet to make the handouts. More scarily, though, I have to give an actual research talk Friday morning, and I've yet to even come up with content for the more important slides. I also have to talk for 10 minutes tomorrow morning about a French TV news segment that I haven't even seen yet. Help! Things I need:
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Friday, October 6, 2006
6:11 p.m.
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Well, it's over. The presentations are written and... presented, I guess. With decent results, too. I got a 64 out of 65 on my French talk yesterday (one point off for not being visually interesting or something like that), and two of the LTI first-years said that they really liked my research talk today. I was leading off the Student Research Symposium at 9:30 a.m., after practicing my 25-minute talk once last night at 11:30 and putting the finishing touches on the slides after I got to campus around 8:30. A reasonable number of questions: two during the talk and then three at the end. If anything, I think I erred on being too high-level, though I certainly perfer that to filling the screen with cryptic probability equations for half an hour. So I'm officially declaring it the weekend. It probably won't be anything too exciting, though, since the combination of huge amounts of work to do plus not getting enough sleep for five nights in a row has decided to make me sick. It's starting to affect my voice now — thank goodness that mostly waited until after my presentation at 9:30 this morning. Currently it feels like my voice has fallen off the low end of the bass clef, and if I try to produce the lowest note I can it sounds like the lowest frequency ever heard in all of human history. (Think of an Eeyore who's slightly more careful with his syllables, and that's me.) It's probably the case, though, that a lot of it is just in my head and not so much in reality. KGB potluck dinner at 7:00 — I have no food to bring, so I feel a bit strange about going. I paid my dues for the year, though, so I'll probably look in for a while anyway. Then home and to sleep for as long as possible. |
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
12:39 p.m.
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This is a week for Case nostalgia, it seems. Not only have I gotten about 3000 e-mail reminders about homecoming and Alumni Weekend (starts Friday), but I keep bumping into aspects of my former self that makes me want to visit the place again. I discover that Nicole and Mark were both there last weekend, for example, and ran into Christian and Prof. Branicky. Then I got an e-mail from a Tartan news reporter wanting some inforation about physical fitness at peer schools for his article and asking me to forward some questions to people I know there. And then I was over at Roselawn last night and had a long discussion with Philip about college campuses and college life in general, which of course was liberally annotated on my end with sentences beginning "When I was at Case..." But it's likely that I won't have time to make it back to the Cleveland area until Thanksgiving. It's my hair, actually, that may suffer the most in the interval. I tend to have awful luck with barbers that aren't the one I usually go to back home, so my haircuts are rather at the whim of my scheduling constraints. The last time I was home was the very beginning of July, I believe, which was a little bit too soon for a trim, but now I find that it's been just over seven months since that horrid salon experience in March, and therefore about time to be making chopping-off arrangements again. The subject came up, actually, Saturday night at Joe Mama's — I had spent the day still feeling sick, but finally decided around 9:00 that I really needed to go to the cluster to print off and read some papers. Then, since I hadn't eaten too much that day, I found that I was actually quite hungry by the time 10:30 rolled around. Anyway, I asked people what I should do with my hair and made a mental tabulation of the results. They essentially boiled down to either "nothing" or "dye it blue." The second one I reject at least on grounds of being a grad student who needs to start interviewing for full-time jobs or Ph.D. programs in the coming months. The first one, I admit, is possible, though I don't think I'm much of a ponytail or "long flowing locks" person. The hair question, then, remains open. Today I'm washing my sheets for the first time in a period so long that I'm ashamed to admit to it, even on here. They should be done just in time for me to get down to campus and skim the software engineering reading before class. Then meetings, dinner, and work, since I've done almost nothing constructive so far today. |
Saturday, October 14, 2006
9:42 p.m.
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Hm... perhaps it was a bad idea to do no work on Wednesday, little work on Thursday, and very little work on Friday, but I guess it felt good not doing anything for three days. Somehow I must figure out a way to get truecasing in the MEMT system implemented by Monday so I have something to show my advisor during our weekly meeting. I also have like 70 pages of French to read, a few pages of stuff for my lit review to write, and a software engineering midterm to study for. Great fun! But instead of actually working on any of this stuff, I've spent the last eight hours at The Tartan. It's homecoming weekend and the paper's centennial is this month, so Alumni Affairs planned out a whole bunch of events for us today that kind of clobbered Saturday pre-production. First, we ran our own little Tartan open house, in the office, which I missed most of because I didn't come in until 1:30. Then there was a panel discussion with Brad and two Tartan alums, which I didn't go to because I was copy editing in the office. I did, however, go to the centennial reception down in the Danforth Lounge, which was quite interesting and a source of free food besides. CMU catering is nice: right down to heavy plates and cups subtly decorated in plaid and the usual lingering waiters who take them away from you as soon as you finish whatever you had in them. Having people around like that still manages to creep me out slightly — I usually end up feeling falsely and oppressively high-class. But talking with the alums was pretty interesting. One of them developed film on Sunday mornings in 1971 and got his degree in EE; he kind of reminded me of a cross between my dad and Mr. Hrbek, both in physical appearance and mannerisms. Then there was a couple from 1953: he was the editor and she was the cartoonist, and now they're married and back in town for an art exhibit. We also met the news editor from 1951, who came back to the office afterwards to page through the archives from that year. Such an interesting feeling it must be, to come back and examine something you worked with so closely and find it transformed into a pile of yellowing pages in a bound volume. (I can't quite arrive at seeing modern Tartans that way, with the quaint typographical customs and odd phrasings that are so typical of old newspapers now.) As Nancy (the news editor) turned through the archives, little bits of the pages kept flaking off of the edges and scattering into her lap. "They're falling apart just like I am," she said. She also kept pointing out pictures of people she knew: "I remember Anne Ross — oh, and there's Joe. We went out a few times." After the reception I tried to do some more editing, but then I found that someone had dug out The Tartan, Volume 2 (1907-08), and I just had to look over that book a bit. Sometimes I think that, if everything else in my career plans failed, I could end up just as happy as an archivist in a library or museum. Such a mass of contractions I am, seriously, when I'd rather read the results of a football game that took place 99 years ago than work on the research project that's making it possible for me to be here. I guess I should get to work. |
Monday, October 16, 2006
11:59 p.m.
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Today's date makes me laugh, since (if you write your "9"s a certain way) you can produce it by writing "90/91/01" and then flipping the paper upside down. I discovered this last night at The Tartan when I tried to write the issue date onto the top of a piece of paper Tiff was looking at across the copy table from me. Does anyone remember the Encyclopedia Brown story in which 1961 was noted as "the last upside-down year": that is, the most recent one that looks the same if you rotate the paper 180 degrees? The next one, as I believe the story mentioned, is 6009. Aside from such silly things, though, today provided a very timely software reset for my brain in the form of a concert by the CMU jazz ensembles. I had been feeling kind of annoyed after the KGB meeting, and it wasn't until I was walking back to campus after a solitary dinner at Panera's in Oakland that I remembered there was a thing at 8:00 I wanted to go to. The programme featured sets by both the "4:30" and "6:30" ensembles — so called because those are their rehearsal times, quoth the conductor — that were a good mix between old swing stuff and newer jazz arrangements, with liberal samples taken from Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Though they didn't explicitly say so, if I had to guess I'd say the 6:30 band was where the better players were stocked. The 4:30 group gave a kind of slush-filled and unexcited treatment of "Jumpin' at the Woodside" to start things off, though they got settled in to other songs pretty quickly afterwards. My favorite was something called "Mountain Aire" by Maria Schnieder. It was probably the simplest piece in terms of structure, but it had a wonderful lyricism and expressiveness that I really liked. The 6:30 band opened up with two tightly-arranged swing things that came across excellently precise and clear. The second, "Shiny Stockings," was all sorts of fun to listen to — so much energy, and yet you could hear the piano and muted trumpets peeking through in all the right spots. I don't think the 4:30 band would have pulled it off nearly as well. The encore was something else Basie and equally well done, but I didn't catch the title. And so I found myself headed clusterward at about 9:50, which turned out to be another good thing. I got some MEMT work done, and there were excellent people there who gave me cookies and made me laugh. I did waste half an hour tracking down an idiotic programming bug (I'd switched the directions of my less-thans and greater-thans in a conditional), but by midnight I was running the tests that I promised my advisor for tomorrow. I still have 10 pages to read in "Le Colonel Chabert" and questions to answer for French tomorrow, but I think I've read enough of the assignment to fake my way through the rest in class. |
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