Rant warning. Craig Venter is a geneticist who has been working on engineering new organisms and recently spoke at TED. He made news (as every news story you see about him over the past couple days is happy to point out) in 2001 for sequencing his own genome. His current project is in creating a [...]
Archive for February, 2008
Soylent Green
Posted: 29 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: alternative fuels, artificial life, bioethics, biological warfare, craig venter, genetic engineering, genetics, peak oil, rants, real sci-fi, wet artificial life
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Is Systran going statistical?
Posted: 27 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, jobs, linguist list, machine translation, statistical machine translation, systran
Systran is one of the oldest companies around that provide machine translation software. They power some language-pairs of Microsoft’s translation service, Altavista’s Babelfish, and quite a few others (including, until recently, Google). In the past, their software has been rule-based, so translation is done with a bilingual dictionary and a set of rules of how [...]
The Enormity of Space
Posted: 26 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: enormity, language change, prescriptivism, richard branson, space, spaceflight, virgin galactic
Whenever I hear the word enormity used to describe how gi-freakin-normous something is, I always willfully misinterpret it to mean an act of extreme evil or extreme wickedness. Now before you start screaming prescriptivist and throwing Kleenexes drenched in the snot of sociolinguistics at me — I’m not being a prescriptivist. Of course people have [...]
Go Snapback Symmetry
Posted: 26 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: board games, games, go, online go server, strategy, symmetry
Go (围棋, 碁, 바둑) is one of my obsessions. I’ve been playing for a year, mostly as ealdent on Online Go Server (OGS) and am currently about 12.5 kyu, though I shift around a bit. At the moment, I’m in a bit of downswing, mostly because stress and not concentrating is leading me to make [...]
A Dance with Dragons Cover Art
Posted: 25 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: a dance with dragons, books, fantasy, george r r martin, grrm, song of ice and fire
Unfortunately, no release date yet on this book. I am dying, dying waiting…
Ralph Nader enters the race
Posted: 24 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: green agenda, obama, presidential election, ralph nader
The best criticism Obama can level against him is that he criticizes people for not living up to his standards. When it comes to choosing a president, I want someone with high standards.
Syntactic Features for MT Eval
Posted: 24 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, kernel trick, machine translation, machine translation evaluation, mt eval, syntax, tree kernels
Stepping back in time in MT Eval from my last post, Liu and Gildea (2005) were among the first to really bring syntactic information to evaluating machine translation output. They proposed three metrics for evaluating machine hypotheses: the subtree metric (STM), the tree kernel metric (TKM), and the headword chain metric (HWCM). STM and TKM [...]
LSD still in French Candy
Posted: 24 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: candy, commercials, france, kitkat, lsd
We’ve all had these days. But if we were in France, the outcome might have been different.
It seems to me that the first question on any free online IQ test is whether to take the test. You automatically fail to achieve high marks if your answer is yes (take the test).
Product Visualization
Posted: 21 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: bluray, children, hddvd, light sabres, products, star wars
How do you best visualize the struggle between two competing standards? Light sabre battles between children, of course!
