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Monday, Jan 19, 2009 - 18:10 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

- -
Week In Review

But if in your fear you would seek only
love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover
your nakedness and pass out of love's
threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you
shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,
and weep, but not all of your tears.

 - The Prophet by Khalil Gibran



Tuesday

Microeconomics III. The class was held in a room due to the relatively small enrolment. Will have to sit closer to the front next time if I hope to make head or tail out of it.


Wednesday

Ah, the 8 a.m. day, covered a couple of posts down.

Perused a tome on traditional Chinese folk religion while waiting for the meeting with my FYP supervisor. Supposedly we have three souls, one that stays in the grave, one that resides in the memorial tablet and one that reports to the nether world. Quite a bother if you think about it.

Getting into the library was an issue in itself as my matriculation card had expired. A reminder that I really should be a graduate by now. Bought the Development Economics textbook (appropriately titled EC3371 Development Economics I) to round off the day.


Thursday

Natural Language Processing. This professor also printed the notes, which I again didn't need. Recognized finite state machines from the Theory of Computation module I took years ago, though I must admit I had forgotten most of the finer points.

Learnt that ambiguity is the main issue in natural language processing (the module seems to be focused a bit more on English here rather than natural languages as a whole, with good reason I gather). Got introduced to Google Language Tools (more of an Altavista Babelfish guy myself, shown by having it on this blog) and the Columbia Newsblaster, which automatically summarizes news by drawing on multiple sources.

Wondered why internet translation tools require one to specify the source language - if a person doesn't understand a language, is that any reason to suppose he knows what language it is? Contrasting English with Chinese or Japanese may be easy enough, and some may be able to make an educated guess, but I suppose telling stuff like Spanish and Portuguese apart isn't trivial.

There is a simple rough-and-ready solution, taking a standard translation service as a black box: One simply requests a translation of the unknown text in all available languages, and presumably only the correct language will return something intelligible. The downside is of course greatly increased load for the translation server, but if implemented by the service itself they could probably reduce this overhead significantly by doing away with the multiple connections an external wrapper service would demand.

I was almost ready to write such a wrapper, when I discovered that Google had stolen a march on me with a Language Detection API. Ah well.

Input Text:
Input Language:
Output Text (in English):
Powered by Google AJAX Language API*
* with additional IFUL functionality
The most natural use of this technology would probably be some sort of browser plug-in that automatically translates everything into one's target language, while translating all responses (e.g. comments, forum posts, etc) back to the original language, possibly with a disclaimer stating that the text is machine-translated. But someone's probably done that.

Oh, Google has also incorporated some form of NLP into Gmail - accessing an email about a bowling event organized by NUS resulted in a suggestion to add the date to Google Calendar. Since they got the wrong date, however, I suppose more refinements are possible.

Bought the NLP textbook (Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky & Martin) to round off the day.


Friday

Environmental Economics at 4 p.m., but I arrived at 11 a.m. for a spot of badminton. The bus trip was quite eventful towards the end, as an old guy who hadn't been behaving normally suddenly threw his arms up, started screaming and then eventually collapsed face first on his seat. No-one quite knew what to make of it, as he seemed more mentally unbalanced than in pain (to me at least).

After the passenger behind him tapped him and got no response (other than his breathing), the bus driver was informed and the bus stopped and cleared at the ITE Dover (i.e. opposite NUS) stop awaiting an ambulance. What a start to the day.

Was rudely reminded of my flagging fitness levels during badminton, where I got acquainted with the new scoring system (adopted from 2006 on). Still feel closest to the old 15-point days.

Met a few of the 4O guys for lunch (and ice-cream), and discovered that I had no access to the computer labs either thanks to the expired matriculation card, which had to be renewed at the Computer Centre. Read TIME magazines while waiting for the Environmental Economics lecture instead.

Having no lecture slides posted in the IVLE workbin beforehand should have been a hint that the lecturer hadn't prepared any digital copies, but it still came as somewhat of a shock (with audible groans and sharp intakes of breath) as he dragged out the overhead projector and began flashing handwritten transparencies - I can't even remember the last module when this happened.

With experience born of years of note-taking, I wasted no time in whipping out pencil and paper and scribbling furiously. There is something of an art in copying slides, especially at the beginning, since it is unknown whether the lecturer will leave the slide up for long enough to transcribe fully (while they might agree to put the slide back up upon request, it is also possible that they could dismiss copying as unimportant). The technique is then to pick out the most important points first, and then fill in the less important ones if the lecturer drones on, kind of like interlacing GIF image files.

Proper knowledge of shorthand may help - I might get on that sometime after I master true touch typing, from my current bastardized six-finger-pecking method (blame my right index finger for being too hardworking).

Anyhow, there may be something to be said for transparencies, as they sure do increase one's concentration during a lecture. As it turned out, this lecturer tends to spend rather more time talking about each slide than needed to copy them in their entirety, so I ended up able to retype an unabridged version of his notes in Powerpoint (with diagrams) just for kicks.

The Environmental Economics textbook was out of stock, so I couldn't get it to round off the day. Sob.


Saturday/Sunday

Finally annotated my notes for the week.

Manchester United left it very late to beat Bolton 1-0. Looking at their recent games, it might be worthwhile to watch the kickoff and the last half-hour, and skip the part in between:

21 Dec - LDU Quito 0 Man Utd 1 (Rooney 73)
26 Dec - Stoke City 0 Man Utd 1 (Tevez 83)
29 Dec - Man Utd 1 Middlesbrough 0 (Berbatov 68)
4 Jan - Southampton 0 Man Utd 3 (Welbeck 20 Nani 48 Gibson 81)
7 Jan - Derby County 1 Man Utd 0 (Commons 30)
11 Jan - Man Utd 3 Chelsea 0 (Vidic 45 Rooney 63 Berbatov 87)
14 Jan - Man Utd 1 Wigan 0 (Rooney 1)
17 Jan - Bolton 0 Man Utd 1 (Berbatov 90)

I couldn't see how they were going to pull the bunny out of the hat for their latest escape, though, but they somehow did it again. Top of the table deservedly:



Chelsea too got their comeback in the last minute, to ensure things remain tight at the top; West Brom and Villa likewise won to get my Challenge back on track. Yippee!


Monday

Continued clearing stuff off my to-do list.

I thought I had seen the last of my internet problems after switching to Starhub, but a sudden spate of seemingly-random Resolving Host... errors had me groaning. Solution: OpenDNS on my router, worked like a charm.



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