Posts Tagged ‘blogs’

Computational Linguistics Blogs

Posted: 24 January 2009 in Uncategorized
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Since I started blogging almost a year and a half ago, I have been following many blogs. I managed to find some blogs dealing with computational linguistics and natural language processing, but they were few and far between. Since then, I’ve discovered quite a few NLP people that have entered the blagoblag. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the many that I follow.

Many of these bloggers post sporadically and even then only post about CL/NLP occasionally. I’ve tried to organize the list into those who post exclusively on CL/NLP (at least as far as I have followed them) and those who post sporadically on CL/NLP. I would fall into the latter, since I frequently blog about my dogs, regular computer science-y and programming stuff, and other rants. P.S. I group Information Retrieval in with CL/NLP here, but only the blogs I actually read. I’m sure there’s a bazillion I don’t.

If I’ve missed one+, please let me know. I’m always on the lookout. Ditto if you think I’ve miscategorized someone.  I’ve excluded a few that haven’t posted in a while.

RedOrbit Blog of the Day

Posted: 6 June 2008 in Uncategorized
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RedOrbit Blog of the Day 2008-06-06

RedOrbit named me one of their blogs of the day today. Go me! I had come across them a time or two before. They are a space/tech news site. Not bad for that sort of thing and certainly less spammy and clunky than Space.com.

Donald Knuth = 70

Posted: 10 January 2008 in Uncategorized
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Today is Donald Knuth‘s 70th birthday. If you haven’t at least heard of him, then you probably are not a programmer. I’ve heard several bloggers refer to him as a modern-day Alan Turing (who is widely considered the father of computer science). Knuth is sometimes referred to as the father of algorithmic analysis, so at the very least, his contributions to the field should definitely earn him a place of high regard.

While I’ve never read any of his books, I have used one of the tools he created quite extensively in the past two years: TeX. For those who’ve never had the pleasure of using TeX and seeing documents come out beautifully and professionally formatted with relatively little effort, you’re missing out. Some might argue that you’re missing out on hours of headaches for something you could do in Microsoft Word in 1 minute. I would argue back that while getting TeX to do exactly what you want can sometimes be hard, there are things you can do in TeX very easily that you will never, ever be able to do in Word. Try producing a lower case delta with a hat in Word. Unless you are lucky enough to have a font on your computer with it (and please send me a copy of that font if you do), you will be searching a long time.

There are many Knuth tributes out there from people with far more interesting stories than me. There was an even a call to post, issued by Jeff Shallit. Here are a few:

  • Recursivity – biographical notes and discussion of Knuth’s impact on his life (Jeffrey Shallit)
  • Computational Complexity – some observations about his achievements, his books, and TeX
  • Good Math, Bad Math – a lot about TeX if you’re interested
  • Geomblog – a discussion of something from the second volume of his book The Art of Computer Programming
  • Shtetl-Optimized – more in-depth observations of Knuth’s many contributions
  • in theory – more biographical info and background
  • 0xDE – a pretty remarkable Knuth tribute with some very interesting CS stuff, complete with exercises!
So today presents a great opportunity to learn more about a guy to whom all programmers owe a debt of gratitude.

Wonkosphere in the Blagoblag

Posted: 12 September 2007 in Uncategorized
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I happened on a political tracking website today that rocks. Wonkosphere scans the political blagoblag for buzz about presidential candidates. Blogs are classified as conservative (if they support a conservative candidate), liberal (if they support a liberal) or independent (if they don’t indicate support of anyone and choose to be considered as such). Scanning these blogs, they keep track of the buzz in the blogosphere that each candidate is generating. Each candidate’s page shows a graph of the amount of buzz amongst conservative and liberal blogs they are generating as well as the tone on those blogs. The tone is gauged by the language used on the blogs and it would seem that the average tone is slightly in the positive range (or else Wonkosphere needs to tweak its tone algorithm). This is some seriously cool analysis all done automatically. I wonder how well this will correlate with actual elections.

Sadly, Dennis Kucinich isn’t generating a whole lot of buzz at the moment. I submitted this blog to them and we’ll see if they accept me. I’m not exactly a political blog, but I don’t shy away from voicing my opinion here and there. Dennis appears to be largely ignored by liberals but is attracting some conservative attention. The negative levels in conservative blogs for him is definitely much higher than is typical, which means he’s doing something right.

Buzz generated about Dennis Kucinich in the blagoblag

Tone of the buzz generated for Dennis Kucinich in the blagoblag.

Four-leaf clover

Posted: 15 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, has an interesting post on his blog about luck and entrepreneurship.  My entrepreneurial genes are currently switched off after a few years of wheel-spinning, but this is good info to store against a future need.  He describes the four types of luck written about by Dr. James Austin in his book Chase, Chance, and Creativity:

  1. pure dumb luck (I)
  2. keep busy and luck (II) will find you
  3. luck (III) will find the prepared mind
  4. who you are and how you behave draws out luck (IV)

So type I is the kind of luck that most people associate with the word luck or chance (Austin refers to all of these as types of chance).  Type II luck is the kind of luck that happens because you stumble upon it.  It doesn’t often happen to people who are inactive.  Type III luck is the kind tailored to a person specifically prepared for it.  Andreesen gives the example of Sir Alexander Fleming who discovered penicilin.  Type IV luck is the kind of luck that happens because you are pursuing your hobbies or interests in your own way.  This luck won’t find someone else because that person would be doing things differently, presumably.

New Domain Name

Posted: 6 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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Well, I have registered mendicantbug.com for this blog. This is in part an effort to ensure I will actually stick to blogging this time. I was slightly surprised the domain wasn’t taken, though I probably would have been more surprised if it were. The advantage of crackheaded naming.

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