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This past weekend at Oak Island, NC was extremely fun. My sister got married, I got to catch up with family and friends, and I got to bask in the beauty of the ocean and great weather. It was very depressing to leave. The beach house we stayed in was surprisingly nice. The game room had a large poker table and there was an enormous hot tub. If you think sitting in a hot tub looking out on the ocean is cool, you’d be right. The wedding itself took place right on the beach. The background was punctuated by the odd pelican plunging into the surf, shooting up large sprays of water.
My friend Israel has a passion for helping people. He’s currently working on a grant proposal for a project to bring text alerts to farmers in so-called developing nations. Currently, middle men come to farmers and buy their goods at prices that aren’t always the going market rate. Farmers are often isolated and so getting updated information on prices isn’t easy. The goal is to provide them cell phones (this would be done by another agency) and then to send them text messages with the latest prices. This can be generalized to a wide variety of alerts to help people whose access to information is otherwise limited.
The NetSquared Mashup challenge is providing a group of non-profit projects a chance to compete for funding. All you have to do to help is vote for CellAlert.net to win. So, please help him out, won’t you? (Voting begins Monday March 17th.)
NOTE: To vote, you will need to register with netsquared on the site and choose at least 5 projects you support.
My longtime friend over at the Wrathful Dove has an excellent post today on the lack of superness in this so-called Super Tuesday, and I wanted to give it a plug. Here is a brief excerpt that I thought sheds light on the charade that we call “elections” in America:
I was reading the “issues” section of the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Sunday where there was an entire article devoted to comparing the musical selections of the candidates to see what exciting insights this exercise might provide. The same article also subtly observed the importance of selecting a candidate who seems likely to win in November, effectively reducing elections down to the horse race terms in which it is often framed in the corporate media.
These elections are a sham and an obscene circus.
Every four years the American public gets to select its master-in-chief from a narrow field of candidates who fiercely compete and debate within a very narrow range so as to give the illusion of choice and dialog while keeping the true options fixed to those acceptable and profitable to corporate America.
Check out his blog for the rest of the post.
You Belong in London |
 A little old fashioned, and a little modern.A little traditional, and a little bit punk rock. A unique soul like you needs a city that offers everything. No wonder you and London will get along so well. |
This, via my friend Israel. I guess we both belong there. Let me know what your results are. I had no idea about the first question. I only recognized Versace so picked that.
I just attended a wedding yesterday and have been without Internet for way too long. Interestingly, my last post became wildly popular on both digg and stumbleupon. That post has more than doubled the total traffic of all time to my blog, bringing it to over 10k hits. As of the writing of this post, the post has gotten 4,060 hits today alone, about 550 yesterday and 990 Friday. Crazy. Thank you, whoever put up that sign. On a side note to anyone who might be wondering, CMU uses blue cannisters for recycling. There isn’t normally a cannister in that location and people were standing around it the past couple days before it, so anyone who passes through there on a regular basis would know not to use it. Some funny comments on the post and on digg.
Anyhow, at the wedding, the best man gave the traditional toast. The couple being married had dated for about 10 years, so it was a pretty special wedding to a lot of people. The best man made the point that, in marriage, it’s easy to fall in love with somebody, but a happy marriage comes from growing that love. As your love grows, you’ll look back and see your wedding day as the day you loved each other the least. He concluded with the following line (my paraphrase since I can’t remember exactly):
“May the best day of your past be the worst day of the rest of your life.”
It got a round of laughs, but it’s also a great way to put it.
My friend Israel is trying to raise money for laptops for school kids in Tanzania. If you’re on Facebook and have about 30 seconds, why not vote for him? Razoo is a speed granting organization that gives money to small charitable projects. You can view his oh-so-pitiful video below. I’ve suggested he update it by putting on heavy eye makeup and getting under a sheet and lamenting the fact that only a few thousand Tanzanian kids graduate high school every year. They really could use your help, though and this requires you to spend no money!
Wednesday night I had the rare opportunity to go out to a bar and try some Bell’s beer. There was a special event run by the distributor where they gave away a shaker, a coaster and a pin if you bought their beer. The shaker unfortunately featured the Oberon, my least favorite Bell’s, but I’ll take what I can get. The bar was a pretty cool little place call Fat Heads Saloon. They had a bunch of decent stuff on tap and I got to try the Lagunitas Sonoma Farmhouse Hop Stoopid, which was a massively floral hop monster. Fat Heads also has a custom Belgian Trippel made for them by some Belgian brewery I didn’t recognize. It was decent, but I’m always a little underwhelmed by Trippels.
There are a disturbing number of Jason Michael Adamses in the world. Two years ago, I tried googling myself and gave up after 20 pages. Using searches that included schools I went to yielded two math competitions from high school in 1992 and 1994 where I ranked in one and my team ranked in the other. Now I am proud to announce that I have made it to page 2 for the search “Jason Adams”. Woot! And “Jason M. Adams” puts me on page 1. I don’t know why I care about this since I’m the only one liable to search for myself. I’m very happily married so I’m not out dating, which is probably the main purpose of googling. I guess people might also google me when I make stupid comments on other blogs. Maybe I care because it’s like being on TV. You might not want to admit that you want to see yourself inanely answering a question on the 6 o’clock news about Mother’s Day cards just after you were ambushed at a local Wal Mart, but you rush home and program your DVR.
On a side note, my friend Melinda clued me in on the term Googlewhackblatt. A Googlewhackblatt is a single word that has only one search result on Google. There is perhaps some debate whether additional search results that were omitted (because they come from the same site and the same link on that site) might nullify Goolgewhackblatt status. My contention is no. If the primary search returns 1 of 1 results, it’s a GWB (I’m getting tired of typing it out). So anyhow, Mendicant Bug is not a Googlewhack (when it’s two words instead of one). Obviously it’s not anymore since I’ve been blogging under that title, but even when I started there were search results like “… mendicant. [BUG] 2006-04-31″ etc. I couldn’t find any uses of the term that were in the same sentence, though, so decided to go with it.
Another thing that has gotten me excited is finding search terms that put me very close to the top on Google. I’ve compiled a short list.
- blagoblag
- “evil politicians”
- “dogbook parks”
- “language technologies institute” (this is my academic home page)
- “nasa slogan” (i was #2 a couple days ago, but more popular sites have dominated me)
So anyhow, if you’re bored out of your mind and find more, let me know.
Update
While driving home today from a dog event (which I may post pictures from in a bit), I saw this great bumper sticker:
“America is a Christian nation, which is why we don’t have any homeless people.”
Well put. And if you squint really hard, you’ll see that bumper sticker in the upper left corner of the back window of this blue Cooper Mini.
I also happened on another bumper sticker at the same time that I thought my friend John would really appreciate.
Donna and I went to Settlers Cabin Park today just west of Pittsburgh with my friend Eric and his fiancee Julie. The dogs came along and we cooked out and had a nice little picnic. After going on the teepee trail, I came across a woolly bear caterpillar. I’ve always found these caterpillars really interesting, because they look so freaky. People raise them, since they turn into Isabella tiger moths, which are a pretty-ish speckled beige.
After returning home, the dogs were wiped out, which is exactly what we were hoping for.
Just the other day I was discussing upcoming conferences with my friend Eric. We were lamenting the choice of location for the 2008 ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference in Columbus, OH — my hometown. At least I can stay with family (assuming I even go). The conference I really want to go to (and actually have a chance of going to) is ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning) in Helsinki, Finland. Eric said he’d rather to go to Spain, which sparked a very brief and unsuccessful search for conferences dealing with computational linguistics in Spain.
Today I came across a post on the comp.ai.nat-lang newsgroup pointing to a new wiki for calls for papers. How timely! And very nice. A brief search on WikiCFP revealed that Eric’s best chances are for the EURALEX conference in Barcelona, which deals with dictionaries (including software approaches). Not that he’s doing any work with dictionaries. I may be, though, with my new project. I’d much rather go to Helsinki, though, and ICML would do my career a lot of good.
Last year I worked on a project with my friend Israel Kloss called FreeAlert. The site is not-for-profit and was originally intended to help refugees entering the Washington, DC area find things they need for free. It now covers major metropolitan areas all across the United States and is intended to benefit everyone.
The idea is simple. Enter some keywords and get matching free items off of craigslist for your city sent to your cell phone. You can enter up to 5 sets of keywords and each set has exclusion terms. This makes it so that you can receive notices with the term computer but without the term desk. Israel just took the site out of private beta last week and it is currently in public beta mode.
It was an interesting project for me because it gave me the chance to work in python on some http and smtp protocol code. It also gave me the chance to work on processing xml and rss feeds. Definitely some cool stuff there and it has resulted in a spin-off that will probably be functioning fairly soon. Israel is one of those people with a lot of great ideas and he has the personality to inspire you with them. Plus he is also one of those rare people that actually care enough about the suffering of others to actually try to do something about it, which you just have to admire.
So, please, check it out and let us know how we can make it better.
Well, I’m not really into sports of any kind, but I don’t mind seeing games live. On July 4th, I got to see the Pittsburgh Pirates play the Milwaukee Brewers. And then a couple weeks ago, Donna (my wife) was offered tickets for a Steelers game from a friend at work, so we jumped on them. These tickets are very difficult to come by. Donna had no real interest in going, so I invited my friend Eric. The seats were expensive and in the nose-bleed section, but that didn’t really matter. The biggest problem was the fact that this game was pre-season. That didn’t really mean anything to me until it was explained that usually the starting players only make brief appearances and the rest of the game consists of the crappier players. Sure enough, once it was pretty much decided that Pittsburgh was going to win, the lower-ranked players jumped in and the sloppiness increased by an order of magnitude. No one was playing an especially great game. Pittsburgh made a lot of mistakes and really should’ve beaten the Eagles by another 14 points.
But it was great fun. If I get a chance to do it again, I’ll invite my dad, since he’s been a Steelers fan for as long as I’ve been alive.
