Let’s say you are standing next to a 10-foot tall box filled to the brim with blankets. Wouldn’t you bark at it so the giant could lift you up and put you in it? After a short period of discomfort, because he didn’t know what he was getting himself into, the little buddy is sleeping [...]
Archive for August, 2008
Creature Comforts
Posted: 29 August 2008 in UncategorizedTags: blankets, boxes, comfort, dogs, funny dogs, humor, moving
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The mind of Daedalus
Posted: 23 August 2008 in UncategorizedTags: beagles, dog behavior, dog parks, dogs, moving
Donna is visiting family with Willow, while I have remained behind in Pittsburgh with Daedalus to pack and show the place. The Jason sweepstakes (hat tip for the great term) have ended, and I may talk about that further in the near future. Suffice it to say, it turned out very well for me, and [...]
I tried to get some action shots of Willow catching the frisbee, with limited success. Daedal had his nose to the ground, as usual. I’ve been in high gear preparing for the move and trying to finish up work here by the end of the month, which has left me little time for blogging.
Rat cyborg
Posted: 14 August 2008 in UncategorizedTags: ai, artificial intelligence, bioethics, biological computers, cyborgs, neurons, rats, real sci-fi, robotics
Boffins at the University of Reading have created a robot controlled by a biological “brain” consisting of rat neurons. They began by taking a culture of neurons specially separated from the rest of the fetal brain tissue. The neurons are placed across a platter of electrodes that simultaneously allow the brain to control parts of [...]
Opinion Mining
Posted: 14 August 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, data mining, machine learning, opinion mining, opinions, sentiment
Digging through customer review information appears to be a hot topic these days. There are a multitude of tasks that fall under the umbrella opinion mining, a few of which are: Feature identification – identifying features belonging to products in unstructured data Opinion word identification – identifying which words actually indicate a statement of opinion [...]
Blog Anniversary
Posted: 12 August 2008 in UncategorizedTags: blagoblag, blog anniversary, blog statistics
I managed to miss mentioning the one-year anniversary of this blog. My first post was on August 5, 2007. Since then I have written 410 posts, received 538 comments, and 1227 spam comments. I currently have about 27 people reading my FeedBurner feed, another 15-20 reading my wordpress direct feed, and average about 190 hits [...]
An afternoon in Seattle
Posted: 10 August 2008 in UncategorizedTags: books, homeless, sci-fi, seattle, space needle, spaceman blues
I got to spend much less time in Seattle than I did in Boston, though I did manage to walk around the city a bit. I visited Pike Street Market, which looked like it would have been awesome if I could have gotten there much earlier. In the evening when I got there, things were [...]
A weekend in Boston
Posted: 4 August 2008 in UncategorizedTags: anthropological linguistics, boston, breweries, computational linguistics, harvard, john harvard, movies, sapir-whorf, says you, the dark knight, vacation, wanted
So I spent the last weekend in Boston. I stayed at the very enjoyable Inn at Harvard. I was reminded several times by the women staying at the hotel of the female players in the public radio game show Says You! That was show actually one of my early influences in choosing the field of [...]
