JA-DARK TUMBLR BLOG ARCHIVE | JAN 2014 - JUN 2017

Posts in reverse chronological order

Sherlockian Learning

As you may or may not know, the logical method of the character Sherlock Holmes was not actually deduction, it was abduction or ‘retroduction’. That is, abductive reasoning, as opposed to deductive or inductive.

The standard example of the differences is something like so: 

  • Deduction: You have a small bag of sucking-stones. The general rule is that all of the sucking-stones in the bag are white. Why sucking-stones? Because that’s more memorable an image than marbles or something. Anyway, so you also have the specific case where you pull a sucking-stone from the pouch. What is the result, if so? What color would it be? White.
  • Induction: You start pulling stones from the bag. For each specific case, the result is that you have a white stone. You infer the general rule that all of the sucking-stones in the bag are white.

So far we have two formulae, as it were: 

  • Deduction: Rule + Case  → Result
  • Induction: Result + Case  → Rule

Now let’s look at the third, lesser known form.

  • Abduction: On a desk is a pouch of sucking-stones. You observe that all of the stones in the bag are white (rule). Next to the bag is a pile of white sucking-stones (result). You then come up with the case that the white sucking-stones were pulled from the bag of white sucking-stones.

The formula here is:

  • Abduction: Rule + Result  → Case

So which does Sherlock Holmes primarily use and advocate in the stories? Given a knowledge of various rules he’s picked up from his specialized studies, and observations of clues, he generates hypotheses about how these results came about. 

So if we rewrite the example, it’s more like: He knows the general rule that the British were recently campaigning in Afghanistan. He sees a wounded British gentleman with a military air and a tropical tan–the results of particular circumstances, and infers the specific case that he recently served in Afghanistan.

The science of abduction.

So now that we know that. 

In Anki we have 3 cards I promote: grammar w/ both sentence and meaning as a cue on the front, unscrambling/unshuffling character/word/sentence cards (be sure to see o+1 feature in second link), and gist/scaffolded (with glosses) comprehension cards. 

Why I refined grammar cards in simple terms: Grammar cards are usually inductive:

Case (the sentence or phrase exemplifying the specified grammar point) →  Rule (the abstract grammar point). Except you also need the ‘result’ in the formula… the 'result’ would be the translation/meaning. It should be with the case, that is, the sentence, which is on the Front. 

So the Front: Sentence (Case) + Translation (Result), Back: Rule (the principle/point). So my grammar cards are refined inductive reasoning cards. The encoding process (i.e., when looking at the answer) is essentially deductive: You start with the rule (grammar point) and use the case (example sentence) to walk you through to the result (translation/meaning). Sometimes, of course, grammar cards are deductive: case (sentence) + rule (principle) →  result (translation/meaning).

We can also apply this to recognition/comprehension cards. Recognition cards would be Case (the sentence or word) →  Result (Meaning). It’s like the deduction formula. But it’s missing the 'Rule’–the encapsulating constraint, which is flexible here. It can be a list of the word meanings, shuffled (e.g., using my CJK Scalpel tool). It can be a PAS diagram illustrating the parts-of-speech and how they relate (e.g. this verb is acting on this object, this word is the agent doing the action)… 

So my comprehension/gist cards (with a gist card, you just focus on knowing what the diagrammed predicate-argument structures mean, rather than the whole sentence… with a scaffolded comprehension card, you use sentence + shuffled word definitions to recall the sentence meaning) are 'refined’ deductive reasoning cards to have the complete formulas.

Then we have production cards. Given the result (meaning) on the Front, we produce the case (sentence or word) on the back. Which formula is this? Abduction, moving from a given conclusion to a hypothesized premise. It’s missing the 'rule’, which is flexible. I think a shuffled list of the words and their meanings works well here (hence the o+1 feature of CJK Scalpel), or scrambled kanji and their shuffled meanings, or scrambled subcomponents, and so on. So we have Result (cohesive meaning) + Rule (scrambled elements and their glosses) →  Case (sentence or word or character). So my unscrambling cards are refined abductive reasoning cards. Refined Sherlockian quizzing, so to speak. Solving the murder the assassin committed.

I think what most people miss out on is refining in those ways above. And they miss out entirely on doing abductive sentence cards, I think, or when they do them, they don’t refine them by making them into unscrambling tasks.

You could also make abductive grammar cards, by placing the grammar point (rule) and the meaning (result) on the Front, and asking for a sentence or phrase (case) on the Back. 'A’ because it’s relatively open-ended, as long as the answer is sound.

You could also make mixed abductive cards: a large pool of elements, a general context, and your goal is to produce an appropriate sentence. I suppose that’s sort of like multiple-choice (see my new deck) and free recall mixed in, also.

So, get more Sherlockian by using abductive reasoning cards.

Now Sherlock Holmes, in Moffat’s version, uses the memory palace, which I also advocate (more recently, experimenting with vocabulary loci cards). The trick people forget is to combine it with spaced retrieval. The book Making it Stick mentions this, as I note here.

Perhaps think of the memory palace, which takes advantage of spatial cognitive processes, as a more deductive encoding technique (rule + exemplar → meaning/output) for storage strength, and spaced retrieval can be any of the three formulae, for retrieval strength (well, storage strength also–that’s the point of spacing and retrieval, making the retrieval strength weak enough that retrieving the memory increases both retrieval strength and storage strength in a superior way to re-reading or cramming). The memory ‘palace’ is the vessel, the spaced retrieval is for active learning. To integrate, instead of revisiting the palace in the cramming style that many seem to do, revisit through SRSing. 

For sequential learning you might aim for more like free recall cards and longer journeys, leaving the more atomic items for cued recall cards/single rooms.

"Only memorize the things you use every day. Everything else, just memorize how to look it up."

“Only memorize the things you use every day. Everything else, just memorize how to look it up.”

-

Google not, learn not: why searching can sometimes be better than knowing

ja-dark: Don’t try to memorize everything, as I advise in ‘Voidness’. The above is a variant of a popular, unsourced quote by Einstein, the original sourced version being: “ [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. …The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” 

It’s a tricky tradeoff between the benefits and perils of transactive memory (which I also mention here, re: “The Google effect”) in programming and fluent on-line (sense 8, as I say here) knowledge of the ‘high percentage’ tools to minimize disruption. Also, don’t discount the ability to use the code itself as providing external cues to long-term working memory as you interact with it–distributed cognition. 

Attempting to produce something meaningful/functional repeatedly is a good way to notice the gaps in your knowledge that you might benefit from deliberately memorizing (that’s why ‘comprehensible output’ is an important strand in language learning). And of course, we want to learn from the researchers who emphasize that memory retrieval is a dynamic, “inferential and reconstructive” process, “itself a potent learning event”.

Or: “Your brain does not store and retrieve concepts—it makes concepts on the fly, as needed…”

Related: “Content management is for losers… “ (originally cited here).

Speaking of memory palaces, which use spatial memory and frequently target detailed, ordered sets (as noted here); I haven’t yet practiced much the more ‘atomic’ variant of the method used by the winners of the ‘Memprize’ contest–using spatial memory through pictures of rooms for vocabulary words on SRS cards, essentially–but I do think it’s interesting: this is a good resource, I think, for such images.

“If I have done the public any service this way, ’tis due to nothing but industry and a patient thought. ” - Sir Isaac Newton

Also.

Are You a Self-Interrupter?

16000 French sentences sorted from easiest to hardest [1/3] - AnkiWeb

16000 French sentences sorted from easiest to hardest [1/3] - AnkiWeb:

There’s quite a few of these decks for many languages on AnkiWeb (you can find by searching for ‘hardest’); I think the use of weighting sentences by average word frequencies is interesting, it was something I had considered when trying to crack a certain algorithmic sorting process I remain interested in (I did crack it partially, I know how to find the ‘core’ sentences in a collection, similar to this research on dictionaries, but it’s terribly inefficient at present, I may need to incorporate hashing).

Language Shapes People's Time Perspective and Support for Future‐Oriented Policies

Language Shapes People's Time Perspective and Support for Future‐Oriented Policies:

Abstract:

“Can the way we speak affect the way we perceive time and think about politics? Languages vary by how much they require speakers to grammatically encode temporal differences. Futureless tongues do not oblige speakers to distinguish between the present and future tense, whereas futured tongues do. 

By grammatically conflating “today” and “tomorrow,” we hypothesize that speakers of futureless tongues will view the future as temporally closer to the present, causing them to discount the future less and support future-oriented policies more… 

… Our results imply that language may have significant consequences for mass opinion.”

“Cognitive science has produced solid empirical evidence showing that linguistic differences in grammar often shape our thinking, knowledge, and construction of reality. Language guides our understanding of such fundamental phenomena as space, time, causality, and relations with others. The language we speak can affect whether we interpret events as accidents or foul play, whether we save money and exercise, whether we express prejudice, and whether we are inclined to solve conflicts. These results have important implications for politics, law, and society…

People frequently encounter choices whose repercussions are hard to immediately appreciate. Take the many individuals among us who procrastinate, leaving their present tasks and chores for another day. For these people, the future is both distinctive and more remote from now—a mental space to where they can defer unfinished business. Research shows that there is considerable variation across individuals in their level of short-termism, that is, in the extent to which they discount the future…

Ours is the first study to show that whether or not language requires its speakers to distinguish between the present and future has significant effects on mass opinion about politics… It suggests that simple quirks in language can impose important constraints on one’s temporal thinking and affect how mentally receptive people can be to solving problems whose full ramifications will not materialize until a seemingly distant future arrives.”

Related: Decreased mental time travel to the past correlates with default-mode network disintegration under lysergic acid diethylamide

Block Based Languages Are Best

Block Based Languages Are Best:

“If you program and have ever looked at a block-based language such as Scratch you might not have been impressed. The immediate impression is that it isn’t programming. If you have tried to teach programming, on the other hand, you may well think better of block languages. A new study suggests that they are better than you think.”

Learning to Skim Text

Learning to Skim Text:

Abstract:

Recurrent Neural Networks are showing much promise in many sub-areas of natural language processing, ranging from document classification to machine translation to automatic question answering. 

Despite their promise, many recurrent models have to read the whole text word by word, making it slow to handle long documents. 

For example, it is difficult to use a recurrent network to read a book and answer questions about it. In this paper, we present an approach of reading text while skipping irrelevant information if needed. 

The underlying model is a recurrent network that learns how far to jump after reading a few words of the input text. 

We employ a standard policy gradient method to train the model to make discrete jumping decisions. In our benchmarks on four different tasks, including number prediction, sentiment analysis, news article classification and automatic Q\&A, our proposed model, a modified LSTM with jumping, is up to 6 times faster than the standard sequential LSTM, while maintaining the same or even better accuracy.

Not really but sort of related: Systemic Functional Gistics

More Than Words: Do Gendered Linguistic Structures Widen the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurial Activity?

More Than Words: Do Gendered Linguistic Structures Widen the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurial Activity?:

Abstract:

“Leveraging linguistic relativity theory which suggests that language systems structure thought and action, we investigate the relationship between gendered linguistic structures and the persistent gender gap in early-stage entrepreneurial activity…

We find that in countries where the dominant language’s structure incorporates sex-based systems and gender-differentiated pronouns, there is a greater gender gap in entrepreneurial activity. 

Our results suggest that gendered linguistic structures reinforce gender stereotypes and discourage women’s entry into entrepreneurship.”

“… Linguistic structure asymmetries convey power such that the way a language is gendered may create and reinforce gender stereotypes and inequalities (Cameron, 1998; Prewitt-Freilino et al., 2012). 

Adherence to gendered linguistic structures is required to communicate with others in a language and is acquired at a young age. For instance, a child whose first language has either no or weak gender marking (e.g., Finnish) acquires gender identity later than his/her counterparts with moderate (e.g., English) or strong (e.g., Hebrew) gender-marked languages (Guiora, Beit-Hallahmi, Fried, & Yoder, 1982). 

Children develop their language abilities, including how to manage different gendered linguistic structures, concurrently with other cognitive abilities and competencies, such as how to assign and associate gender (Mills, 2012). For example, speakers will learn to judge and categorize inanimate and abstract nouns as having a gender (Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003).

 The early and persistent gendering of linguistic structures significantly impacts normative cultural values (Santacreu-Vasut et al., 2014). Gendered language can also perpetuate stereotypes of male and female activities, including whether these are positive and normal. For example, Senden, Sikstr€om, and Lindholm (2015) find that English-language Reuters news uses “he” pronouns nine times more frequently and also far more positively than “she” pronouns…

Gendered linguistic structures create and maintain structural differences throughout society, including labor market dynamics. That is, in environments where the linguistic structures are gender neutral, individuals may not have gendered prejudices about certain professions and positions (van der Velde, Tyrowicz, & Siwinska, 2015). By contrast, in a society where the dominant language requires extensive gender distinctions, individuals may have more biased perceptions of labor market possibilities. 

A growing body of empirical evidence reveals that countries in which the dominant language has more gendered linguistic structures have lower levels of female labor force participation (Mavisakalyan, 2011), shorter maternity leaves, and greater tolerance for gender-based discrimination (Givati & Troiano, 2012). These countries also have fewer females board directors, senior managers, and leaders of corporate teams (Santacreu-Vasut et al., 2014); higher wage gaps between men and women (Gay et al., 2015; van der Velde et al.); and greater marginalization of women in certain professions (Coates, 2015).”

Previously: Move over Shakespeare, teen girls are the real language disruptors 

Related: Subversive script and novel graphs in Japanese girls’ culture

Morphological Families for Two-Kanji Compounds (Multiple Choice Anki Template)

As I mentioned, I had intended to make a multiple choice add-on and use with my morphological families deck, but the aforelinked resource saved me the trouble. So I added a Choices field to my morphological families deck, which consists of two-kanji compounds sharing morphemes (kanji represent morphemes–small units of meaning), and added the MC template.

Here (just now re-uploaded as I mistakenly renamed KanjiMeaning field to to Question instead of Definition field: [Link temporarily removed]

Sometimes the choices field contains the answer compound, so as you’re learning new cards, you may want to double check and remove it so it’s not shown twice on the Front.

If you have the original version, now the Definition field is Question, Compound is Answer.

Update: Oops again, I forgot to deal with the constituent order (first kanji or second kanji in compound). Hold on… this could take a while.

‘Zooming’ buttons Memrise MC template (Anki)

Here’s a rough tweak to the CSS (”Styling” section of Anki Card template) of the previously linked resource to make the buttons ‘grow’ on hover;

From initial experiments, I prefer setting the “table” width to 50%, also.

I believe I got it here.

Basically, just append that last line to the .container section, and add the other sections for .container: https://pastebin.com/s1LwsmGX

Edit: Tweaked z-index to make sure button stays on top when zoomed. You can always reduce the scale increase from 1.25 to 1.10 or something like that.

RTK Multiple Choice with Look-alike Kanji - AnkiWeb

RTK Multiple Choice with Look-alike Kanji - AnkiWeb:

Appears to be a polished resource that someone made. I’ve been playing up the ‘exoneration’ of multiple-choice testing (for a while, spaced retrieval researchers considered these generally inferior because the ‘cues’ are easy and thus not as ‘desirably difficult’ as cued recall or free recall), with the intention of making an add-on for it, complete with fancy Javascript/CSS (flipping/zooming squares–I managed to get a decent looking flip effect happening despite the lack of support for hidden backface-visibility in the current Anki); one deck I was thinking about using such MC was the morphological families deck, but fortunately between this add-on and the one linked above, I don’t think it’s necessary to go to the trouble. This person’s description above also features links to a template/kana deck.

If you remember my talking about cognitive load and decision fatigue in the Low Key Anki description and how some researchers (I believe here or maybe here) were looking into automatic scoring rather than just binary pass/fail self-scoring, I was also originally wanting to add in automatic scoring (with both MC and my CJK Scalpel o+1 features) but decided not to, because it would be too tempting for folks to miss out on the essential corrective feedback (spending a few seconds looking at the back of the card), which enhances metacognitive abilities and helps reconsolidate/augment the retrieved memories which were rendered labile through the retrieval process. For simpler cards, I imagine it’s fine to display the correct answer briefly before showing the next question, however. And note that as long as you get feedback within 24h, in many cases, you’re fine.

A brief recap on MC, which needs a handful of plausible, competitive candidates for best effect: it helps stabilize marginal information, and for pretesting it’s better at potentiating related information.

Some MC research I’ve linked before:

Threshold: Auto-suspend cards, auto-add/remove tags, auto-fill field - AnkiWeb

Threshold: Auto-suspend cards, auto-add/remove tags, auto-fill field - AnkiWeb:

I updated my threshold add-on (a compilation of previous add-ons) to better enable the ‘radical’ (I should stop putting that in scare quotes, but I use them to signify the irony that it’s radical to Anki users but grounded in non-radical research on spaced retrieval) ‘void’ version of Anki where there’s no due cards, no lapse penalties or multiple eases, intervals between study sessions determined by algorithm are irrelevant: rather than requiring your installation in front of it so it can throw assigned items for study at you per ‘the algorithm’, Anki becomes just a passive system for storing material to be practiced in a distributed [spaced]–any distribution/spacing–manner, to supplement your use of that material outside of Anki. 

The retrieval practice is the key, supplemented by spacing sessions roughly ‘just enough that you forget to some degree’ to learn ‘more’ effectively, rather than spacing sessions precisely ‘just before you totally forget’ to learn ‘most’ effectively (pretending to space them precisely, to be more accurate). The overall effect, I think, factoring in the cost of trying to optimize, etc., is that the ‘good-enough’ approach is the most practical and effective.

With that add-on, you can automatically suspend cards after x passes, rather than a threshold of x days. The idea via the approach described in a paragraph here is that you review only from filtered decks using “is:review” (not “is:due”) and randomly selecting cards. Thus whether the interval or ease is reduced or boosted is irrelevant, since the dueness that they affect (effect, actually) is irrelevant. Only whether the card has been passed successively across study sessions distributed according to your desires/needs–passed 4 times (by default, you can change but 4-5 total sessions is what researchers recommend).

The mindset is that Anki-like systems do not represent the sum totality of your knowledge or comprise your sole engagement with materials, it merely supports efficient spaced retrieval-based learning (and is not required for spaced retrieval-based learning). The more we try to maximize it, the less useful it becomes. The mindset in some form is what I’ve always stressed (’start off using Anki more, progressively use it less’, etc.), but I think it requires increasingly ‘radical’ changes to promote effectively.

I’ve been trying to simplify those changes more and more (from elaborate settings adjustments in CriteriEN to gutting Anki with Low Stakes down to the devious new Low Key Anki), and this might be the simplest yet: just using filtered decks with “is:review” in general rather than narrowing selections to the “is:due” subset of “is:review” cards, + random selection, and auto-suspending by # of passes might be all that’s necessary.

Note: Modifying the add-on further so all options/thresholds can be pass-based rather than interval-based.

Also: Friendly reminder that frequently in research intervals are measured in terms of interfering items (e.g., with interleaved topics, or number of tests on other items between testing a given item). This is in line with the fundamental idea that memory retrieval strength decays as a function of interference rather than simply the ‘passage of time’. (Bjork’s classic NTD [New Theory of Disuse] model rather than TD.)

More on adaptive scheduling

As you know from my Low Key/Low Stakes add-ons and ramblings, I feel that because we’re in the ‘pilot study’ stages of adaptive [to personal performance] scheduling research (e.g., response-time-based) and the results are trivial and unconvincing (e.g., maybe a graduate thesis on a small cohort showing that with a cumbersome implementation, there’s a ‘statistically significant’ but otherwise uninspiring improvement over non-adaptive spacing), we need to dispense with the faux-adaptive implementations in current software (typically blown out of proportion for marketing purposes) and streamline in accordance with the core research: binary pass/fail, don’t reset/shorten failed item intervals, just retest each session until all items are passed once.

You’ll also note that I’ve linked to promising developments on adaptive scheduling and even made a basic add-on inspired by it (even though my add-on goes in a more asocial direction).

Specifically, the developments aspire to ‘dynamically infer the knowledge states’ of learners using Bayesian inference and collaborative filtering–whether you pass/fail is just a component in this complex system. They specifically note this combination is what’s necessary, rather than what’s used in standard software like Supermemo. The initial results of this complex form of adaptive, personalized scheduling of intervals are promising but not super impressive.

What’s interesting to me upon re-reading that paper which uses fancy machine learning that one day we may have access to, is not just how dubious the improvement was in its current form (compared to other forms of spaced retrieval) relative to its complexity, but how much smaller it was for random non-adaptive spacing in Experiment 2 when they swapped out the ‘massed’ scheduling from Experiment 1, than for ‘generic’ non-adaptive spacing. (If you review that paper and note the surprisingly small difference between ‘massed’ and ‘generically spaced’ retention results in Experiment 1, they explain on p. 20 that it’s because it’s actually ‘spaced’ rather than massed according to normal standards; not sure why they use the term in the first place.) The sophisticated adaptive spacing approach was ~5% better than generic spacing in the first exam and ~3.5% better than random, though in the second exam this was even smaller and for the ~3% improvement over random, “not statistically reliable”. (The surprisingly trivial differences were similar for relative benefits: benefits of each test on overall performance.)

The generic scheduler used the standard non-adaptive spacing found to be optimal in research that doesn’t reset/shorten failed item intervals or use multiple graded buttons for passing.

The randomized scheduler “drew items uniformly from the set of items that had been introduced in the course to date”.

Also: “… all items had equal opportunity and… all schedulers administered an equal number of review trials.”

That is, rather than testing yourself in a session on cards that in Anki terms are not just ‘in review’ but are ‘due’ according to the algorithm, in the randomized version, there’s just cards ‘in review’ (that you’ve tested yourself on previously), and they’re only ‘due’ if randomly selected at study time. Sort of like building a filtered deck in Anki not from randomly selected “is:due” cards (the subset of “is:review” cards), but randomly selected “is:review” cards (”Reviewing ahead” except not “ahead” since they were never due/not-due). And only ever reviewing “is:review” cards that way by rebuilding such filtered decks, rather than the “is:due” subset. (I guess in this random system, the expanding interval size is irrelevant, just the number of passes such that you can retire cards after ~4 passes, which you can do with this add-on.)

You may have seen me mention this idea in Void Anki that “there are no due cards”, just what you want/need to study, which you use a ‘terminal’ to dynamically bring to you, on-the-fly. That research seems to suggest that this might be more true than I realized.

Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb

Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb:

I should note that the most recent version of the ‘radical’ skip version of Low Key Anki now has two properties: the Escape key = Skip to next card functionality as per Dmitry Mikheev’s Not Now, Later add-on–that’s literally all it does, and 1 key/Incorrect button skips to the next card but also increments the lapse count, reps count, allows for undoing, and does a leech check–that’s all it does, no ease/scheduling aspects, because it entirely bypasses the standard Anki functions for grading: Anki never registers that you lapsed, I merely artifically added the increment in lapse count and have the leech checking function (based on the lapse count) execute on the ‘skipped’ cards.

A trick to remember from the research linked in the pages above is that trying and failing to recall something you’ve learned is a learning event in itself (as long as you check your answer)–equal to trying and succeeding–both are “retrieval-based learning”. In Rawson, et al.’s model (they’re the ones primarily researching criterion level benefits where you retest until all lapses are passed each session) to explain the research results and the practices found to lead to the most benefits, it’s the first stage of a two-stage processing: 1) retrieval attempt 2) postprocessing the answer (by the answer being successfully recalled and/or checking the answer [corrective feedback]). As long as you get those two stages through trying-failing-checking-answer or trying-recalling-the-answer, you’ve ‘won’. (Stage 2 is what I usually call ‘studying/encoding’ in the CriteriEN method.)

And the other trick to remember is that trying (and most likely failing) to recall something you haven’t learned--”pretesting”–potentiates learning it. (”Test-potentiated learning.”)

(As I understand it, where criterion levels per session comes into play with this model combined with the seminal NTD model of Bjork, et al. [retrieval strength vs. storage strength] is that for items of weaker retrieval strength such that you failed, you further bolster the storage and retrieval strengths with additional retrieval attempts/postprocessing of the answer–but doing so more than once [e.g., for passed cards] is wasteful overall; the storage strength doesn’t benefit from the increases in retrieval strength we spend the extra time achieving, the retrieval ‘fluency’ feels nice but prevents storage strength from increasing [this is why we space/test until we get our desired level of storage rather than just re-read/cram and maintain high retrieval strength: the difficulty through lower retrieval strength is what improves storage strength]. Also remember that storage strength doesn’t decrease, retrieval strength does: you don’t forget, access/performance decreases… relearning is easier than learning.)

Note on ‘radical’ version of Low Key Anki

Recently, I posted a ‘radical’ version of Low Key Anki that more effectively mimics how spaced retrieval research actually handles missed items by bypassing Anki’s built-in lapse handling: not by resetting or shortening subsequent intervals, but by simply having you retest (you don’t restudy/re-encode as a separate session: after that initial [optional*] encoding/study phase, from there on you use mandatory corrective feedback (look at ‘the back of a card’ whether you pass or fail) as the ‘restudy’/’reconsolidation’ aspect). 

Relearning is easier than learning, as I mention/link to research about here: we don’t forget, we lose retrieval strength due to interference over time. This fundamental understanding of forgetting/memory and the actual practice in the body of literature on the experiments that supposedly are why we use spaced retrieval in the first place tells us we don’t need to reset/shorten intervals. 

You retest until all items are passed once per session (until a ‘criterion’ level of 1 pass–the key isn’t actually the success of retrieval according to Rawson, et al.’s two-stage model, it’s the retrieval attempt with either successful retrieval or corrective feedback [note that feedback with success, i.e., looking at the back of a card even when you pass, is still of great benefit to our metacognitive development and helps reconsolidate/augment our memory]–repeating retrieval attempts to criterion level ensures this two-stage benefit, where missed items are bolstered with an additional cycle of the stages–and doing so more than 1 pass, they found, is counterproductive long-term). 

It doesn’t particularly matter how you space out subsequent sessions for [re]testing yourself on those items: according to ongoing, back-and-forth research working out the details to maximize the benefits, ideally they should be expanding in some fashion, but in the long-term, even equal intervals (e.g. every 10 days) gives the same results: the important thing is spacing to desirably increase retrieval difficulty, period, and even that as a supplement/complement to testing/retrieval practice itself–think about that in the context of software-influenced assumptions you’ve made. 

Each item in the long-term should be tested in this way at least 3-4 times, so that could theoretically be 3-4 study sessions spaced out by 10 days each. Let the per session criterion method of retesting handle missed items.

How much time between that initial encoding, or subsequent corrective feedback, and testing/retesting? Per session, we can roughly conceptualize it as 5-10 minutes after encoding we retest, or 5-10 minutes after testing/failing/getting feedback, we retest. But that’s if we imagine studying a batch of cards about some topic taking 5-10 minutes per session on average, and [re]testing at the end of a session. So we can use Anki to cement this with a 5-10 minute learning step, or if using the ‘skip’ option and you reach the end of a ‘pile’ of cards, just wait a few minutes before proceeding from the overview page that you’re automatically returned to (if using my Progress Bar add-on, the bar will remain only partially filled till you hit Study Now and retest ‘failed’ (’skipped’) cards to criterion).

However, that’s not a fixed requirement. In reality, short-term memory is on the order of seconds. The common practice in research on spaced retrieval (and memory experiments in general) to flush it is a 15-30 second distractor task (frequently, counting backwards by 3s from some random 3-4 digit number like 547 or 3,078) between encoding (initial study or corrective feedback) and [re]testing. This distractor task seems to have originated from the classic Brown-Peterson Task.

That is to say, we don’t need to enforce a separate minutes-long waiting period before testing/retesting items we just studied the answer to. This means testing other cards will commonly be a built-in distractor task. In cases where you miss the final item in a session and hit ‘Skip’ (in the radical version of Low Key Anki ‘Incorrect’ is ‘Skip’) and it would immediately reappear because it’s the only item left, taking 15-30s to flush memory is enough. 

That intra-session gap between testing and encoding (or vice versa) is not the gap we really care about (and that initial [even if failed] retrieval attempt is the most powerful learning event of the session–the corrective feedback and retesting until retrieval success are supplements of that). It’s the intersession gap between tests: the gap between a session of learning-by-testing (or relearning-by-retesting) and the next session: that’s the gap we want to be strong enough to ensure “desirable difficulty”–the mechanism by which spacing/testing benefits learning. I also want to re-emphasize: testing/retrieval is the superior learning method to passive restudying (e.g., just re-reading), and is independent of but supplemented by repeating that testing a few more times, which can be achieved with spacing or massed/cramming of testing sessions, but the best support for those repeated testing sessions comes from spacing–essentially any kind of spacing.

We don’t need to adjust the intervals for missed items (or passed items!) to gain all the marvelous benefits of spaced retrieval that research demonstrates; in fact, it’s in line with the research to not touch missed item intervals, and instead retest on all lapses in that session. Yet how many people have been influenced by spaced retrieval software practices to do the opposite? Stress over micromanaged intervals and let lapses pile up?

*The buzzword in research here, re: optional initial encoding, along with “retrieval-based learning”, is “test-potentiated learning”–testing/retrieval is the most effective learning process in itself, not a passive task to support an initial studying/encoding-based learning phase. 

Because of this, ‘pretesting’ (an ‘impossible’ test on something you haven’t learned yet) helps you learn better than encoding/studying and then testing. I already folded ‘restudy’/’re-encoding’ into corrective feedback during reviews (already eliminated separate non-initial encoding phase), and I already mentioned pretesting as an optional alternative in CriteriEN, but I’m beginning to think I should make it the default recommendation–skipping that initial encoding phase entirely, and going straight into testing. 

By using those terms researchers use and promoting that, perhaps we can finally destroy the myth that Anki is just a container to review items you’ve already learned rather than a flexible piece of software to help you structure learning through spaced retrieval practice, and the mistaken assumption that highly regulated spacing (and adjusting the generalized power law functions to optimize forgetting curves and simulate neuronal processes with special patented algorithms and neural networking machine learning collaborative filtering you can find in our AI app/gamified website for the low price of x-dollars a month, etc.) is the primary component, not roughly spaced retrieval or retrieval by itself (and not just simple Q/A retrieval [cued recall], but any form of retrieval, especially free recall, with or without software).

Summary: All that’s necessary for optimal learning: 1) Test yourself. Either you pass or fail. 2) Look at the answer whether you pass or fail. 3) If you fail, test yourself again in seconds/minutes after a distraction. 4) Some period later–days or weeks or months or years–repeat 1-3. 5) Repeat 4 a few times, depending on how much you want/need the information.

In Anki terms, really we just need the ‘radical’ skip version of Low Key to do this, and the idea of ‘no card left behind’. No need to tweak other settings, if it comes to it, because the consistency of Skip/Good will take care of it. Outside Anki, we don’t need anything but the ideas, since precise scheduling is unnecessary and free recall is great (no need for simple QA quizzing, recalling entire passages might be even more effective–and multiple choice may be better for peripheral/related information.).

Of course, see Voidness for other optimizations such as mnemonics and interleaving, changing study locations, etc.

Re-reading this post from a researcher, this phrasing stood out to me: “forget just enough information between” sessions to improve your learning. Contrast this rather relaxed ‘good-enough’ metric with the algorithmic “just before forgetting” mantra of arbitrary software implementations (the idea being to predict the precise timing for each item’s forgetting for each learner’s brain) and you have the empirical, practical ‘satisficing’ approach I’m advocating vs. a pseudoscientific ‘maximizing’ approach.

Note on ‘radical’ version of Low Key Anki

Recently, I posted a ‘radical’ version of Low Key Anki that more effectively mimics how spaced retrieval research actually handles missed items by bypassing Anki’s built-in lapse handling: not by resetting or shortening subsequent intervals, but by simply having you retest (you don’t restudy/re-encode as a separate session: after that initial [optional*] encoding/study phase, from there on you use mandatory corrective feedback (look at ‘the back of a card’ whether you pass or fail) as the ‘restudy’/’reconsolidation’ aspect. 

Relearning is easier than learning, as I mention/link to research about here: we don’t forget, we lose retrieval strength. This fundamental understanding of forgetting/memory and the actual practice in the body of literature on the experiments that supposedly are why we use spaced retrieval in the first place tells us we don’t need to reset/shorten intervals. 

You retest until all items are passed once per session (until a ‘criterion’ level of 1 pass). It doesn’t particularly matter how you space out subsequent sessions for retesting yourself on those items: according to ongoing, back-and-forth research working out the details to maximize the benefits, ideally they should be expanding in some fashion, but in the long-term, even equal intervals (e.g. every 10 days) gives the same results: the important thing is spacing, period, and even that as a supplement/complement to testing–think about that in the context of software-influenced assumptions you’ve made. 

Each item in the long-term should be tested in this way at least 3-4 times, so that could theoretically be 3-4 study sessions spaced out by 10 days each. Let the per session criterion method of retesting handle missed items.

How much time between that initial encoding, or subsequent corrective feedback, and testing/retesting? Per session, we can roughly conceptualize it as 5-10 minutes after encoding we retest, or 5-10 minutes after testing/failing/getting feedback, we retest. But that’s if we imagine studying a batch of cards about some topic taking 5-10 minutes per session on average, and [re]testing at the end of a session. So we can use Anki to cement this with a 5-10 minute learning step.

However, that’s not a fixed requirement. In reality, short-term memory is on the order of seconds. The common practice in research on spaced retrieval to flush it is a 15-30s distractor task (frequently, counting backwards by 3s from some random number like 547) between encoding (initial study or corrective feedback) and [re]testing.

That is to say, we don’t need to enforce a minutes-long waiting period before testing/retesting items we just studied the answer to. This means testing other cards will commonly be a built-in distractor task. In cases where you miss the final item in a session and hit ‘Skip’ (in the radical version of Low Key Anki ‘Incorrect’ is ‘Skip’) and it immediately reappears because it’s the only item left, taking 15-30s to distract yourself is enough.

We don’t need to adjust the intervals for missed items (or passed items!) to gain all the marvelous benefits of spaced retrieval that research demonstrates; in fact, it’s in line with the research to not touch missed item intervals, and instead retest on all lapses in that session. Yet how many people have been influenced by spaced retrieval software practices to do the opposite? Stress over micromanaged intervals and let lapses pile up?

*The buzzword in research here, re: optional initial encoding, along with “retrieval-based learning”, is “test-potentiated learning”–testing/retrieval is the most effective learning process in itself, not a passive task to support an initial studying/encoding-based learning phase. Because of this, ‘pretesting’ (an ‘impossible’ test on something you haven’t learned yet) helps you learn better than encoding/studying and then testing. I already mentioned this as an optional alternative in CriteriEN, but I’m beginning to think I should make it the default recommendation–skipping that initial encoding phase entirely, and going straight into testing. By using those terms researchers use and promoting that, perhaps we can finally destroy the myth that Anki is just a container to review items you’ve already learned rather than a flexible piece of software to help you structure learning through spaced retrieval practice, and the mistaken assumption that highly regulated spacing (and adjusting the generalized power law functions to optimize forgetting curves and simulate neuronal processes with special patented algorithms and neural networking machine learning collaborative filtering you can find in our AI app/gamified website for the low price of x-dollars a month, etc.) is the primary component, not roughly spaced retrieval or retrieval by itself (and not just simple Q/A retrieval [cued recall], but any form of retrieval, especially free recall, with or without software).

Highly recommended: Optimizing Learning in College

Disease naming must change to avoid scapegoating and politics – Laura Spinney | Aeon Essays

Disease naming must change to avoid scapegoating and politics – Laura Spinney | Aeon Essays:

Under the 2015 guidelines, infectious disease names would no longer single out places, species or human groups defined by their sexual, religious or cultural identity. Nor would they include alarming terms such as ‘unknown’ or ‘fatal’. Such monikers as Rift Valley fever or Legionnaires’ disease would never fly, though disease names already ensconced would not be changed.

Instead, according to the WHO, disease names would thenceforth make use of generic descriptive terms…

Previously:

Got the Anki RecSys/alternate filtered deck creation add-on...



Got the Anki RecSys/alternate filtered deck creation add-on looking the way I sort of envisioned here, with some changes based on Ubuntu (get the font). It’s semi-transparent. Maybe I should add customization options.

The autocomplete is very simple at the moment, just pulls from a short list of queries I think will be useful/common.

Got the Anki RecSys/alternate filtered deck creation add-on...



Got the Anki RecSys/alternate filtered deck creation add-on looking the way I sort of envisioned here, with some changes based on Ubuntu (get the font). It’s semi-transparent. Maybe I should add customization options.


The autocomplete is very simple at the moment, just pulls from a short list of queries I think will be useful/common.

voidRec (Anki Recommender System, Multi-lingual)

voidRec (Anki Recommender System, Multi-lingual):

Just finished a good working draft of this (well, works for me). Details in link.

voss (Anki Recommender System)

voss (Anki Recommender System):

Just finished a good working draft of this (well, works for me). Details in link.

(via Hills Beyond a River_隔江山色 on Vimeo)

(via The Supervised Word Mover’s Distance ) “Bag of...



(via The Supervised Word Mover’s Distance )

“Bag of Words Vector” – A bit on the nose. ^_^

(via The Supervised Word Mover’s Distance ) “Bag of...



(via The Supervised Word Mover’s Distance )

“Bag of Words Vector” – A bit on the nose. ^_^

Update: Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb

Update: Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb:

I really messed up this add-on while trying to replace the Again/Lapse function, so I rolled it back to the simpler version. Apologies if you downloaded the buggy version from a few days ago.

Update: Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb

Update: Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb:

I really mangled this add-on while trying to replace the Again/Lapse function, so I rolled it back to the simpler version. Apologies if you downloaded the buggy version from a few days ago.

Update: Nevermind, fixed it! http://www.mediafire.com/file/39jfn882hfvbitz/Low_Key_Anki.py (See Low Key description for more.)

Related add-ons to Void Anki, Void Prompt

Interesting add-ons related to Void_Anki and Void_Prompt that others have made:

re: Void Anki (skip over the strange ramblings about keys and cues).

I recently adjusted my Void_Anki add-on so that it replaces rather than supplements an add-on that inspired it.

I am in the process of making add-ons/features, regarding alternate filtered deck creation, that I think will be most excellent.

Hideki Isozaki's CaboCha 'Falls' diagrams

Hideki Isozaki's CaboCha 'Falls' diagrams:

Here’s the new official link from the author for the LaTeX code for the popular diagrams from the Tae Kim deck.

image

I didn’t include them in the new ~36k sentence series because they don’t contain the ChaPAS predicate-argument structure information, they’re just dependency diagrams. 

Of course, neither did the original code I modified to generate the combined diagrams. I just didn’t want to modify again.

I have uploaded the raw CaboCha -f3 output and modified ‘Falls’ .tex (if you want to generate them yourself), and the ChaPAS output and combined .tex used to generate the ~36k sentence diagrams. If I recall correctly, you just need to include the cabochatrees files in the same folder as the .tex files you’re processing, rather than having to install them into MiKTeX, etc.

To use (perhaps you’ll want to change the color scheme), you’ll need ImageMagick, GhostScript, and XeLaTex (e.g., through MiKTeX), as described in this post.

Hideki Isozaki's CaboCha 'Falls' diagrams

Hideki Isozaki's CaboCha 'Falls' diagrams:

Here’s the new official link from the author for the LaTeX code for the popular diagrams from the Tae Kim deck.

image

I didn’t include them in the new ~36k sentence series because they don’t contain the ChaPAS predicate-argument structure information, they’re just dependency diagrams. 

Of course, neither did the original code I modified to generate the combined diagrams. I just didn’t want to modify again.

I have uploaded the raw CaboCha -f3 output and modified ‘Falls’ .tex (if you want to generate them yourself), and the ChaPAS output and combined .tex used to generate the ~36k sentence diagrams. If I recall correctly, you just need to include the cabochatrees files in the same folder as the .tex files you’re processing, rather than having to install them into MiKTeX, etc.

To use (perhaps you’ll want to change the color scheme), you’ll need ImageMagick, GhostScript, and XeLaTeX (e.g., through MiKTeX), as described in this post.

Here are the raw diagram and import files for the ~36k decks.

~36k Japanese Sentence Diagrams (CC BY-SA 4.0)

After some cleaning, the number was reduced quite a bit from the original ~42k.

image

They had to be split into 3 decks to stay within the 250mb limitation:

~36k Japanese Sentence Diagrams (CC BY-SA 4.0)

After some cleaning, the number was reduced quite a bit from the original ~42k.

image

They had to be split into 3 decks to stay within the 250mb limitation:

Update: 42k Japanese Sentence Diagrams

Production complete. It turns out that 42k small .png files total ~700mb. I suppose I’ll have to upload them as a single archive that can be accessed programmatically as needed, an idea I stole from cb4960, re: JDIC Audio Extraction Tool, previously mentioned here (note that deck link is down).

(via rendat on Twitter) 『ローゼンクランツとギルデンスターンは死んだ』



(via rendat on Twitter)

『ローゼンクランツとギルデンスターンは死んだ』

(via rendat on Twitter) 『ローゼンクランツとギルデンスターンは死んだ』



(via rendat on Twitter)

『ローゼンクランツとギルデンスターンは死んだ』

moji:一天地六        rendat   / Homework





moji:

一天地六        rendat   / Homework

moji:一天地六        rendat   / Homework





moji:

一天地六        rendat   / Homework

(via あらたかな on Twitter: “5/13 アプリオリ 隠れ鬼”)

(via あらたかな on Twitter: “5/13 アプリオリ 隠れ鬼”)

“Orthogonal”

MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue
here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging  —
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I like that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I should have — I probably should have said  —
JUSTICE SCALIA: I think we should use that in the opinion.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I thought — I thought I had seen it before.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Or the dissent.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: That’s a bit of — a bit of professorship creeping in, I suppose.


  • Previously: The UK Supreme Court discussing how to pronounce “De Keyser”.  

Update: CJK Scalpel: Stand Alone Complex - AnkiWeb

Update: CJK Scalpel: Stand Alone Complex - AnkiWeb:

Added a gimmicky conversion to vertical text. Only works with specific size ratios at present, and only maps the most common punctuation from horizontal to vertical, where Unicode entries are available.

image

Update: CJK Scalpel: Stand Alone Complex - AnkiWeb

Update: CJK Scalpel: Stand Alone Complex - AnkiWeb:

Added a gimmicky conversion to vertical text. Only works with specific size ratios at present, and only maps the most common punctuation from horizontal to vertical, where Unicode entries are available.

image

Vertical Japanese/Chinese text in Anki

Adding this feature to CJK:SAC soon. Need to work out a few kinks.

image

Vertical Japanese/Chinese text in Anki

Adding this feature to CJK:SAC soon. Need to work out a few kinks.

image

~45k Japanese sentence diagrams

Currently in production; Creative Commons. May add another 55k+ after that from a different corpus, or more likely 20k; I should probably use a Hadoop cluster, if the former, as at scale, processing is slower than anticipated. May make a better add-on resource than a deck. I’ve been putting this off, but I’ve been sufficiently convinced the corpus has had enough filtering to be a worthwhile supplementary resource.

image

CaboCha dependency analysis, indicated via the arrows at the top, is about 90% accurate, according to various research. I forget where I read it, but ChaPAS, which provides predicate-argument structure analysis, indicated by the arrows at bottom, is I believe less accurate, more like 75-80%. Which is fine: like the sentences, they are merely intended as supplemental guidelines to help develop structural intuitions about bunsetsu, word order, syntactic and semantic relationships. I suspect the value alone in how the bunsetsu chunking elucidates the post-positional nature of Japanese makes the diagrams worthwhile.

image

~45k Japanese sentence diagrams

Currently in production; Creative Commons. May add another 55k+ after that from a different corpus, or more likely 20k; I should probably use a Hadoop cluster, if the former, as at scale, processing is slower than anticipated. May make a better add-on resource than a deck. I’ve been putting this off, but I’ve been sufficiently convinced the corpus has had enough filtering to be a worthwhile supplementary resource.

image

CaboCha dependency analysis, indicated via the arrows at the top, is about 90% accurate, according to various research. I forget where I read it, but ChaPAS, which provides predicate-argument structure analysis, indicated by the arrows at bottom, is I believe less accurate, more like 75-80%. Which is fine: like the sentences, they are merely intended as supplemental guidelines to help develop structural intuitions about bunsetsu, word order, syntactic and semantic relationships. I suspect the value alone in how the bunsetsu chunking elucidates the post-positional nature of Japanese makes the diagrams worthwhile.

image

Update to Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb

Update to Low Key Anki: Correct/Incorrect - AnkiWeb:

Finally figured out how to implement my CriteriEN strategies (ditching Anki’s ‘failure’ function entirely) in a smoother fashion by having the ‘Incorrect’ button or Escape hotkey trigger a ‘skip to the next card’ function during reviews.

"The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue."

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”

- Antisthenes

"The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust...."

“The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.”

- A. Bronson Alcott (via ja-dark)

"To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day."

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”

- Lao Tzu

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. She builds her..."

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. She builds her castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination… Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be…

Not all is delight, however… First, one must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work.



- Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

o+1 (Comprehensible Output): Stand Alone Complex - AnkiWeb

o+1 (Comprehensible Output): Stand Alone Complex - AnkiWeb:

Major rewrite of this add-on to let you left-click/touch to automatically send the automatically cut, defined, and shuffled sentence segments into the type answer field with pop-up (on hover) definitions (also definitions in a separate field), and click/touch again to remove them. See description for more.

image
image

Update: Sentence Cut & Shuffle (Japanese, Chinese, Spaced) - AnkiWeb

Update: Sentence Cut & Shuffle (Japanese, Chinese, Spaced) - AnkiWeb:

It now will cut and shuffle Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and spaced (e.g., Korean, French) sentences in addition to Japanese.

I added these types of sentences as part of my moving toward the next Phase of the o+1 tools I’ve been intermittently working on. The next step is to allow sentences to be recomposed by simply clicking on/touching a given piece, rather than having to manually select and drag the characters into a text input box (with the type-answer option in Anki). The idea is to streamline it as much as possible. There’s a step after that, but it’s a secret. I bet you can guess.

Edit: I figured out the Anki HTML/JS/CSS code for the next step (single-click recomposition/undoing), just need to integrate into the add-on’s Python functions… I also have a very good idea of how to implement the step after that… and connect it all to a related project…

Orthographic effects in spoken word recognition: Evidence from Chinese

Orthographic effects in spoken word recognition: Evidence from Chinese:

Full PDF

Abstract:

Extensive evidence from alphabetic languages demonstrates a role of orthography in the processing of spoken words. Because alphabetic systems explicitly code speech sounds, such effects are perhaps not surprising. However, it is less clear whether orthographic codes are involuntarily accessed from spoken words in languages with non-alphabetic systems, in which the sound-spelling correspondence is largely arbitrary…

These findings indicate that orthographic information is involuntarily accessed in spoken-word recognition, even in a non-alphabetic language such as Chinese. 

Discussion:

… This finding constitutes clear evidence that orthographic information affects spoken word recognition, even in a language in which the relationship between orthography and phonology is largely arbitrary.

… orthographic codes are unlikely to be accessed due to participants’ conscious strategies, but rather as an automatic process as spoken words unfold…

In the present study, we investigated the complementary issue, and demonstrated that orthography constrains Chinese spoken word recognition. As mentioned in the Introduction, spoken Chinese is characterized by pervasive homophony, and a single spoken syllable/ character is oftentimes semantically ambiguous when presented in isolation. The ambiguity can be overcome either by context, or by accessing orthographic form. For this reason, orthographic information may be even more important in Chinese than in other languages.

PreviouslyOrthographic facilitation in Chinese spoken word recognition: An ERP study

Related

ja-dark: To reiterate the above links: 

Learn to read kanji to listen better… (and learn to write kanji to read better). And knowing kanji also facilitates reading purely phonographic (e.g., kana-only) text.

Using the computer as a tool for thinking in discrete mathematics

Using the computer as a tool for thinking in discrete mathematics:

“As a professor, I’ve been teaching a steady diet of discrete mathematics courses, particularly aimed at computer science majors. In these courses we study concepts that are foundational to the study of computing: logic, functions, sets, combinatorics, and mathematical proof in the first semester of the course and then recursion, graphs, relations, and trees in the second semester. 

While I think that Papert and Wing’s idea of computational thinking works in almost all areas of mathematics, I think it has a special affinity for discrete mathematics because so much of discrete math is computational in nature. By this, I don’t mean that most of what we do in discrete math is compute stuff. What I mean is that computation — as an idea and a methodology — is never far away from anything we do in this subject.”

PreviouslyDiscrete Mathematics with Python (PDF)

srsing for school re-re-dux; multiple choice in Anki

First, a quick refresher on what spaced retrieval researchers have to say about free recall

“There are many different ways to design retrieval-based learning activities, but practicing free recall of information is an especially effective method. During free recall, students set aside their study materials and freely reconstruct as much of the material from memory as possible.

Practicing free recall allows learners to construct their own organizational structure and then use that structure during retrieval practice, and past research has suggested practicing free recall may improve learning more than other forms of retrieval practice such as answering short-answer questions.

In addition to promoting student learning, free recall is a relatively practical way to engage in retrieval practice because neither students nor teachers need to prepare additional materials. In addition, students do not seem to need training to engage in free recall. Students can simply set aside their textbooks or notes and practice freely recalling information.”

In short, free recall is awesome, and requires no additional resources or tools or fancy strategies. And like all retrieval practice, it works best on a spaced schedule.

A simple Voidness way of implementing spaced free recall is as follows: 

  • Start reading a chapter. Every paragraph, select the key ideas as you read and make a note of them with short keywords. Most likely this will just be a keyword or two per paragraph. 
  • Every 5-10 paragraphs, depending on the density of information, stop and read over the list of keywords (most likely a list of 5-10 keywords) and try and recall what they refer to from what you just read. 
  • Scan back through to double-check when you feel fuzzy. Normally I say always check the answer even if not fuzzy, but you can wait a day or so for corrective feedback, so save that for the next step:
  • A day or two later, go over the list(s) from the chapter (always nice when chapters are divided into sections and subsections, like 2.1.1… 2.1.5, 2.2.1, 2.2.2,… etc.) and again try to freely recall the information. Skim and scan back through to check your answers. 
  • A week or so after that, practice free recall of those lists again. If you want to recall past the semester/quarter, do it again about a month later, then again several months later, then a year+, etc…. It’s just a handful of times you do this per chapter to give you excellent retention. 
  • (Prioritize sections/chapters pertinent to your lectures /assignments /exams, disregarding the rest if necessary for time and energy–you really don’t want the remorse of exhausting yourself and running out of time for assignments and exams because you pored painstakingly over details that were irrelevant for a class, however interesting they may have seemed or useful in the long-term.)

Alternately, after you finish the chapter, just chunk those small 5-10 keyword sublists into a single meaningful prompt to unite them “Recall the info/passage(s) pertaining to [sublist].” You could put this in Anki as a single card, and on the back of the card put maybe a page number or snipped screenshot of the passage(s) from the textbook to check your answer. So you’d abstract a full chapter from a textbook into 10-20 free recall cards.

Your mental model of Anki is possibly too influenced by the classic ‘short answer’/’single point of failure’ idea, where you imagine each card as an atom in an isolated universe, sensitive to minute gradations in spacing. Forget it. It’s just a rough scheduler for practice with cool presentation options. 

You can apply this same idea to lectures. Just make concise lists and regularly pause to do free recall (if they’re not recorded, you won’t be able to ‘pause’ till a break/the end, so keep up with the sublists in a way you can look things up later using slides and other resources–if you have slides before the lecture as some professors give, use those to reduce what you need to write down even further). In fact, I would recommend prioritizing lectures, as they tend to dictate what’s relevant for your assignments/exams/readings.

With courses that don’t have many pre-made question-and-answer resources (which means using Anki would be quite painstaking), this free recall/chunking process is simple and surprisingly fun, and as the quote above noted, it might be superior to the cued recall/Q&A style we’re used to with the trad Anki model.

For instances where many pre-made question/answer resources are available–e.g., if past quizzes and exams are available, you might try the opposite: primarily using Anki, but: with multiple choice cards as an additional format possibility. Multiple choice! Yes, if you’ve been paying attention, multiple choice questions have been ‘exonerated’ by the spaced retrieval researchers: as long as the candidate answers are competitive (plausible alternatives to the correct answer). Turns out MC also ‘stabilizes marginal knowledge’.

More on multiple choice and Anki soon-ish, because this opens up very interesting possibilities regarding automation.

Of course, use whatever format the pre-made materials uses for card-creation simplicity, i.e., the usual cued recall (e.g., short answer questions) or ‘work through this procedure’ type questions, or multiple choice, etc.

Bonus: The JOIs of Text Comprehension: Supplementing Retrieval Practice to Enhance Inference Performance (PDF Download Available)

Update: RTK Reconstructed: Unscramble kanji in the optimal order (radicals, complexity) - AnkiWeb

Update: RTK Reconstructed: Unscramble kanji in the optimal order (radicals, complexity) - AnkiWeb:

Added pausable animated stroke diagrams to this deck, to be placed on the Front and used as incremental hints (click to ‘play’ for as long as mouse cursor is on the image, move mouse away to pause). Anki wouldn’t export or upload these I think because the field used “object data” instead of “img src”, but here they are: https://1fichier.com/?kfsqp0meso to extract into your collections.media folder after downloading the new version of the deck.

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The same diagrams are on the back but without the pausable code in the .svg files, and with replayable code in the HTML field (I couldn’t figure out how to make the pausable svg files work with the same replayable code).

image

Alternatively to downloading the RTK deck, you can download the svg files here (many more than in the first link above) and extract into the media folder, then use this import file (matching against kanji field to update notes with a fresh ‘pausable diagram’ field).

Low Stakes Anki: No Penalties or Boosting - AnkiWeb

Low Stakes Anki: No Penalties or Boosting - AnkiWeb:

I think I fixed this add-on so it doesn’t reset failed cards at all, just temporarily places them in the learning queue for restudy/retesting to criterion level (no card left behind in a session, pass every card once).

The button gives an inaccurate reading when you fail and go to pass it again the first time (though oddly if you fail twice in a row it gives accurate reading), but the actual due date and interval work as intended: no reset, the next due date and interval are almost identical to if you had passed originally.

Update: Fixed the button label issue. Hopefully didn’t break anything.

Update to RTK Reconstructed: Unscramble kanji in the optimal order (radicals, complexity) - AnkiWeb

Update to RTK Reconstructed: Unscramble kanji in the optimal order (radicals, complexity) - AnkiWeb:

I added animated stroke order diagrams via AniKanjiVG X. I prefer these to the versions from the hanzi stroke order animation add-on. According to research (which I noted previously here), animated stroke order diagrams appear to be a viable alternative to handwriting practice. 

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They are clickable/replayable already via code I used in the import file, but if you somehow strip the HTML from the Diagram field, you may need to use this replayable gif add-on (and replace “gif” with “svg”). Here’s the import file.

Answer Feedback - AnkiWeb

Answer Feedback - AnkiWeb:

Made an Anki add-on to display images when you answer.

Progress Bar Addon - AnkiWeb

Progress Bar Addon - AnkiWeb:

I created a progress bar for Anki. Consider it a rough draft.

image
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Update: I fixed all the bugginess I was originally aware of, be sure to update!

Getting things done while you wait for WiFi: Tool from MIT CSAIL harnesses 'micromoments' to teach you vocabulary

Getting things done while you wait for WiFi: Tool from MIT CSAIL harnesses 'micromoments' to teach you vocabulary:

“To help us make the most of these “micro-moments,” researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a series of apps called “WaitSuite” that test you on vocabulary words during idle moments, like when you’re waiting for an instant message or for your phone to connect to WiFi.

Building on micro-learning apps like Duolingo, WaitSuite aims to leverage moments when a person wouldn’t otherwise be doing anything – a practice that its developers call “wait-learning.”

‘With stand-alone apps, it can be inconvenient to have to separately open them up to do a learning task,’ says PhD student Carrie Cai, who leads the project. ‘WaitSuite is embedded directly into your existing tasks, so that you can easily learn without leaving what you were already doing.’”

ja-dark: Sort of the opposite of ‘dark kaizen’ (brief forced breaks to flush memory/interleave, although I did invert this a bit here) and also the opposite of making Anki more opt-in. Yet it correlates with the idea of dissolving Anki, so to speak, into the operating-system/world-at-large. Perhaps the recsys-esque aspect will help bridge these ideas (re: relevance noted at end of article).

Update to Low Stakes Anki: No Penalties or Boosting

Update to Low Stakes Anki: No Penalties or Boosting:

Clued in by a recent review, I saw that for some reason the lapse reset (back to the previous successful interval) wasn’t working consistently for all cards, so I made a small change and now it works consistently for me.

The inconsistency and a side effect of the interface changes I made caused me to not notice (I removed the interval times above my buttons). Thankfully with CriteriEN and gaps set to 500% (Day 1, Day 3, Day 13, Day 63, Day 313…) I don’t even think too much about such things.

Anki add-on: Void_Prompt

Anki add-on: Void_Prompt:

Update 2: Fix turned out to be as simple as I imagined. Uploaded to AnkiWeb.

It’s a rough work-in-progress as I work on streamlining the ‘Void Anki’ idea I talk about here (part of my Voidness series of posts). A previous add-on for Void Anki is Void_Simple, which supplements the unfortunately named Blind Anki.

Basically it breaks (oops) the ‘f’ key to create filtered decks and instead uses what I feel is a superior system where you hit ‘v’ (for ‘void’, you know) to create a filtered deck by opening a prompt to name the deck (instead of just calling it the meaningless ‘Filtered deck x’)… the cool part is that if you name the deck using typical filter options (e.g., “is:due tag:japanese”), it will automatically enter those in the following filter options dialogue. This auto-input is triggered by having a colon (”:”) in the filtered deck name you enter. 

In the future, I think autocomplete and a more terminal-esque appearance would be nice. I actually created a hotkey to prompt for search input and then open the browser with that input, but it broke things, and would require modifications for the new versions of Anki which use WebEngine.

I’ll upload it to AnkiWeb eventually but if you want to try it in the broken-f-hotkey phase, feel free to save the code as a .py in your addons folder.

Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News

Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News:

“Often an underlying assumption in fake news discussion is that it is written to look like real news, fooling the reader who does not check for reliability of the sources or the arguments in its content.

Through a unique study of three data sets and features that capture the style and the language of articles, we show that this assumption is not true. Fake news in most cases is more similar to satire than to real news, leading us to conclude that persuasion in fake news is achieved through heuristics rather than the strength of arguments.

We show overall title structure and the use of proper nouns in titles are very significant in differentiating fake from real. This leads us to conclude that fake news is targeted for audiences who are not likely to read beyond titles and is aimed at creating mental associations between entities and claims.”

Typing the technical interview

Typing the technical interview:

The interviewer—Criss, his badge says—is young, as is customary in the Valley. Wearing a hoodie which, judging from the lack of branding, cost at least three hundred dollars. He resembles no animal in particular, which gives you pause. Usually you’re better at that sort of thing.

“Do you mean in general? I don’t think so.” You look around at the conference room as if to confirm. The walls smell of Slack DMs and conflict avoidance.

“Ah, well, um. Yes, you’re probably right.” He sounds bashful. “But I’d like to do a little exercise with you nonetheless. Just a simple programming puzzle, so I can understand how you solve problems.”

Once, you solved a problem with a knife of shattered sky-glass. You wonder whether Criss would have the strength to do what you have done.

“Sooo… this problem is called N-Queens, and it’s fairly simple. Given an NxN chessboard, you need to find a way to place N queens on that board safely.”

You draw an eight-by-eight grid on the whiteboard, and neatly arrange eight queens together in the center. They face each other in a tight circle, to converse as equals.

“Er, no—that’s not right. See? This queen could kill any of these four, in one move.”

“Are you really unable,” you ask, voice as calm as stone, “to imagine eight powerful women in the same room without them trying to kill each other?”

“It’s… it’s just how the problem works.”

Massive horizontal transfer of transposable elements in...

How Google Book Search Got Lost – Backchannel

How Google Book Search Got Lost – Backchannel:

“It’s almost like finger-picking on a guitar,” Jaskiewicz says. “So we find people who have great ways of turning pages — where is the thumb and that kind of stuff.”

“It’s not clear that...”

Just noticed this is another weasel phrase to add to the list (which I link to despite the presence there of willfully ignorant phonocentrist Mair) alongside “It turns out that…”, which I previously noted here when making fun of Harnad and the so-called ‘symbol grounding’ problem.

Of course, it turns out that these can be legitimate phrases, it’s how they’re (ab)used that’s the issue. It’s not clear that these are inherently convincing, at all.

A Former Student Says UC Berkeley’s Star Philosophy Professor Groped Her And Watched Porn At Work

(via Robot’s Delight - Japanese robots rap about their...

Not Only Us: Cedric Boeckx vivisects Berwick & Chomsky's "Why Only Us?"

Not Only Us: Cedric Boeckx vivisects Berwick & Chomsky's "Why Only Us?":

ja-dark: Cedric Boeckx works under the moniker of ‘biolinguist’ and ‘nativist’ but apparently not [PDF] in the ‘exuberant’/’exceptional’ Chomskyan/generative sense I’ve often mocked in the context of evolutionary linguistics. I had no idea there were rogue biolinguists!

Optimizing Learning in College: Tips From Cognitive Psychology

Optimizing Learning in College: Tips From Cognitive Psychology:

Full paper [PDF]

Abstract:

Every fall, thousands of college students begin their first college courses, often in large lecture settings. Many students, even those who work hard, flounder. What should students be doing differently? Drawing on research in cognitive psychology and our experience as educators, we provide suggestions about how students should approach taking a course in college. We discuss time management techniques, identify the ineffective study strategies students often use, and suggest more effective strategies based on research in the lab and the classroom. In particular, we advise students to space their study sessions on a topic and to quiz themselves, as well as using other active learning strategies while reading. Our goal was to provide a framework for students to succeed in college classes.

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RelatedVoidness Way

"Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success."

“Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success.”

-

Savas Dimopoulos, Particle Fever

Related: Backus on failure

Game elements improve performance in a working memory training task

Game elements improve performance in a working memory training task:

“… in this study we implemented three game elements, namely, progress bar, level indicator, and a thematic setting, in a working memory training task…

Participants interacting with game elements showed higher scores in the working memory training task than participants from a control group who completed the working memory training task without the game elements. Moreover, game elements facilitated the individuals’ performance closer to their maximum working memory capacity.”

ja-dark: I don’t care for the elaborate gamification stuff with its corporate connotations, but a simple progress bar for Anki study sessions like Memrise has could be interesting (or annoying, perhaps). Most likely I will never get around to making an add-on for that, so some enterprising coder should feel free… 

I found the lack of an increase in ‘flow’ perception in this study a little surprising.

Some other visual touches I like the idea of in future Anki add-ons I may never get around to: the flash of a large-ish centered cheerful green ✓ check mark for Correct, a more muted looping replay arrow ↺ for Incorrect… Also, a happy little animation for completed sessions, instead of the ‘Congratulations’ text. The closest I’ve gotten to the check/replay icons is playing w/ the tooltips in the Answer Confirmation add-on.

+: 耳なし芳一

Perspectives on Language Evolution: interview with Morten...



Perspectives on Language Evolution: interview with Morten Christiansen

“Oftentimes, when people are talking about what’s special about language the focus has been on syntax, and it’s a little bit akin to considering during language learning the child as a mini linguist having to identify some sort of grammar ‘out there’ in order to be able to use language.

In my work we’ve been looking at language in a different perspective…

The idea being that rather than the child being a mini linguist, the child is a developing language user who needs to learn to become better and better at processing and producing language given the various constraints that the child can pick up from the environment.”

'Deermania' takes off in Nara with Fab Four lookalikes:The Asahi Shimbun

'Deermania' takes off in Nara with Fab Four lookalikes:The Asahi Shimbun:

“NARA–A photo of deer sauntering across a crosswalk in single file has generated a huge buzz on Twitter because of the resemblance to the Beatles’ iconic “Abbey Road” album cover

Nara Park and its surrounding areas are home to more than 1,000 wild deer.”

ja-dark: I was a little surprised that Nara wasn’t featured in the recent, mind-blowingly amazing Planet Earth 2x06 episode, Cities.

Waiting for a virtual Nara to study in for when the virtual Kyoto shrine gets boring.

ja-dark: 花見(はなみ [hanami]) - (n,vs) cherry blossom viewing, flower viewing, (P)

This is a two-kanji ‘complement + verb’ compound, where 花 represents the complementary morpheme (small unit of meaning) ‘flower’, and 見 represents the verb ‘see/look at’. Thus ‘flower’ (complement) + ‘see/look at’’ (verb) = ‘flower viewing’… This is how you should be learning Japanese vocabulary: start with this deck, which happens to contain 花見…

Study it and develop your flowering word soul.

Summpy (Japanese summarization tool)

Summpy (Japanese summarization tool):

“Text summarization (sentence extraction) module with simple HTTP API. (Currently supports Japanese only.)”

ja-dark: In this post and elsewhere in the past, I’ve discussed text summarization, etc. I haven’t played with Summpy, but it’s something to look at.

If you haven’t already installed Anaconda (which features many of the dependencies for Summpy), what is wrong with you?

Update: Here’s the top 5 sentences that summpy extracted from the first LoGH book, Dawn:

  1. そのときはどうする?
  2. させるほうもさせるほうだが、やるほうもいやはや……。
  3. 「もし失敗したらどうします?」
  4. ヤンはそう前置きし、占領地を放棄して撤退してはどうか、と提案した。
  5. しかも、この方面、C戦区の帝国軍指揮官キルヒアイスは、すでに第七艦隊を敗走させていたが、兵力と物資を連続して最前線に投入し、間断ない戦闘によって同盟軍を消耗させようとしている。

In this instance, Janome was used for morphological segmentation, with LexRank for summarization (actually in this case, the ‘continuous’ variant, clexrank). Here’s the top 100 w/ continuous LexRank; and w/ non-continuous LexRank. Will keep experimenting…

Interestingly, with English LexRank, it gives similar results for summarizing lengthy abstracts for research papers as the summarizations I do manually when I post abstracts here. That is, it will often select the same 3-4 sentences from a section of a paper that I myself selected when posting.

ads and affiliate links

Just realized there’s two settings on Tumblr I didn’t know existed/that you had to opt-out of, switches that allow ads and affiliate links, which have now been turned off. Apologies to anyone who for some reason are not using Adblock/Privacy Badger/uBlock Origin and saw ads when visiting this microblog till now.

Hanzi Knife (Hanzi Stroke Decomposer) at Anki Web

Hanzi Knife (Hanzi Stroke Decomposer) at Anki Web:

I created an add-on to get the strokes from hanzi (and many hanja/kanji) as a step toward recreating my Japanese KSG method for Chinese.

It’s based on cjklib.

Zhuyin (bopomofo) resources at Anki Web

The Influence of the Pinyin and Zhuyin Writing Systems on the Acquisition of Mandarin Word Forms by Native English Speakers

The Influence of the Pinyin and Zhuyin Writing Systems on the Acquisition of Mandarin Word Forms by Native English Speakers:

“We thus conclude that despite the familiarity of Pinyin graphemes to native English speakers, the need to suppress native language grapheme-phoneme correspondences in favor of new ones can lead to less target-like knowledge of newly learned words’ forms than does learning Zhuyin’s entirely novel graphemes. “

“Native speakers of English who had access to Pinyin (familiar writing system, some unfamiliar grapheme-phoneme correspondences) experienced difficulty learning the words’ phonological forms due to interference from English grapheme-phoneme correspondences.”

Previously

ja-dark: Even if you’re just learning to speak/listen to Japanese or Chinese, etc., you should spend a few days learning the kana or zhuyin to avoid the mistakes the above research discusses. 

Anyway, it’s useful to have some kind of bridge to the new sound system which meshes with the writing system, a script that’s economical and transparent (reliable visual cue to pronunciation), to learn separately from words (due to the cognitive load caused by the longer audiovisual strings and meanings, learning both audio, spelling, and meaning with a new sound/writing system seems to be excessive).

With Japanese we can learn kana separately, then start learning vocabulary (with low priority to readings vs. meanings), phrases, etc., and pick up the sound system as we go along. With Chinese we have Zhuyin, though sadly there don’t seem to be any good Anki decks with audio… yet. Update: Created a deck and an addon.

In the opposite direction, it’s too bad there’s no morphographic (e.g., kanji, hanzi) script to facilitate vocabulary learning in English. It’s purely phonographic! Yikes.

Resources

Related:

More: The influence of foreign scripts on the acquisition of a second language phonological contrast

“In other words, the processing of the visual input prompts the auditory system to strengthen activation of native phonological units, in turn impeding the complete appreciation of novel sound distinctions.”

Japanese video lo-gistics 2

Previously I posted about this N-back-esque video watching technique (for language learning or just in general) as part of my satisficing (rather than maximizing), Voidness series of posts. The n-back reference is to a quote from researcher Bridgid Finn in that post.

The pertinent excerpt from that first video lo-gistics post: 

“The idea would be that you preload a relative handful of items from, say, a short video. Your goal would be specifically to recognize them while watching, and no more. The entire video you would be listening for just that handful of words…  Another idea is to have some way to tick a list of the words off as you go, so you have some feedback and can narrow down your focus… focusing on the root verbs (final verb in the sentence) and trying to recall their arguments (subjects, objects, indirect objects) in the sentences. Perhaps tallying frequencies would be useful, also.”

Anime is a good example for doing this in a simple, easy way. Let’s say you’re watching a streaming anime episode. Go to Kitsunekko, grab Japanese subtitles for the episode, run the subtitle file through cb4960′s Japanese Text Analysis Tool to get a word frequency list, grab the top handful of verbs (labeled 動詞 in the frequency report) that interest you, and while you’re watching the video, listen for and tally them up. 

Check to see how many you got (remember, the number of occurrences is listed in the frequency report) when you’re done. What’s nice is that the verbs are in ‘dictionary form’ so it keeps you on your toes when listening (e.g., in the list it’s 言う but you might hear 言った). 

This is a low-overhead activity you can do while watching foreign-language shows with subtitles in a language you understand. No need to be paralyzed with the idea you have to stay immersed monolingually or can’t watch shows in your target language primarily for fun.

Note that this activity is more of a scanning activity–extracting specifics, rather than skimming, which is for gist. They’re both useful. I want to simplify and say the former is more syntactic (form), the latter more semantic (meaning).

This activity with subtitles you understand then becomes a visuospatial/phonological negotiation in your working memory between the meaning you glean through reading those and watching the events unfold, and the focus on form through scanning the audio for target words (e.g., verbs).

Anki Decks: Core 10k & Core 5k w/ Japanese Sentence Diagrams, Gist Template

Use the diagram arrows on the bottom (they point from verbs to complements, etc.) to just focus on a predicate-argument structure (e.g., “kicked the ball”, the predicate/verb is “kicked” and the argument/complement is “ball”) and grade yourself on whether you know what it means.

Ideally just pick a single PAS based on the root (final) verb, preferably a direct object or indirect object (’o’ or ‘io’ in the diagram labels… ‘s’ is subject), in that order of priority, depending on which and how many PAS links are present in a given sentence.

So if you see:

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You want to pass or fail based on whether you understand “below the horizon ← io – was sinking” and that’s it. If you happen to comprehend the rest, that’s fine, just don’t grade on it.

A previous deck w/ diagrams and explanations. Arrows on top point from dependent units (bunsetsu) to the units they depend on (e.g., an adjective depends on the noun is describes, a noun depends on the verb that’s doing something to it, a subject depends on the verb it’s doing). They’re just there as guidelines to help parse the sentence, to see what the parts are and how they relate.

To make your own diagrams for any Japanese sentences (ideally following the ideas in the Systemic Functional Gistics post, but the diagrams are useful for any source/card template), use these tools:

  1. How to automatically make your own pretty Japanese sentence diagrams (offline edition)
  2. Generate combined PAS/dependency diagrams (‘80s colors for Night Mode)
  3. That is, install tools according to 1, use the .py in 2.

A Study on Implication of Prototype Theory in English Vocabulary Teaching

A Study on Implication of Prototype Theory in English Vocabulary Teaching:

“The following will suggest some implication of the three levels of terms for vocabulary teaching and learning, which includes: giving priority to basic level terms and paying attention to superordinate and subordinate terms…

The basic level is the level first named and understood by children, and the words are simple but useful, thus learning vocabulary is better to begin from the basic level vocabulary to the non-basic level vocabulary. To be more specific, the priority should be given to teach the basic level terms due to the following aspects. 

First, most of the basic level terms are simple and short, so they are easier acquired and used by students. Second, basic level category processes the most attributions and common gestalt features so that terms at this level have more close relation with the concrete objects, which can help students easily remember them. Third, the basic level terms are frequently used in the daily communication, so they can be memorized for a long term by students. Fourth, the basic level terms have a strong ability of word-formation potential and many subordinate level terms comes from the basic level terms, and based on this, students can learn vocabulary from the higher and lower levels of vocabulary. Therefore, teachers should assign basic-level terms to the primary place. 

The priority of basic-level category terms does not mean that other categories should be ignored in language teaching. The superordinate level terms should be always introduced together with basic level terms which can help students understand and remember them all. For example, when introducing the basic level terms like “chairs”, “tables” and “bed”, their higher level term “FURNITURE” should be introduced at the same time. Different from superordinate categories, attributes of subordinate categories are specific which can help students master the words always used in some specific fields. 

Teachers should appropriately link the superordinate, subordinate and basic-level terms together, which may help students enlarge their English vocabulary. Students can make a list in their notebook of each category which is beneficial for their long-term study. ”

ja-dark: Already posted about this topic here (and previously during my rambles about WordNet, ConceptNet, FrameNet, etc.), but it’s worth its own post, as I doubt I’ll ever formalize this into a method, but it presents ideas to consider when learning vocabulary, such as focusing on ‘prototypical’ words and using hypernyms (e.g. ‘furniture’ for ‘chair’)/hyponyms (e.g. ‘chair’, ‘bed’ for ‘furniture’) as cues/feedback context for a target word…

Related: Extracting semantic prototypes and factual information from a large scale corpus using variable size window topic modelling

cabochatrees.zip for ‘Falls’ diagrams

-Luc Steels: Can robots invent their own language? “For more...



-Luc Steels: Can robots invent their own language?

“For more than a decade we have been doing robotic experiments to understand how language could originate in a population of embodied agents. This has resulted in various fundamental mechanisms for the self-organisation of vocabularies, the co-evolution of words and meanings, and the emergence of grammar. 

It has also lead to a number of technological advances in language processing technologies, in particular a new grammar formalism called Fluid Construction Grammar, that attempts to formalise and capture insights from construction grammar, and a new scheme for doing grounded semantics on robots.

This talk gives a (very brief) overview of our approach and discusses some details of the technical spin-offs that have come out of this work. The talk is illustrated with live software demos and videos of robots playing language games. The talk ends with a number of open problems and issues that we need to tackle before having adaptive open-ended language communication between humans and robots.”

Previously

Visual trimorphemic compound recognition in a morphographic script

Visual trimorphemic compound recognition in a morphographic script:

Abstract

The questions answered were, in the course of decomposing and composing Japanese trimorphemic compounds, (1) whether recognition processes are tuned for a specific branching direction, (2) whether the morphological processing proceeds in a bottom-up combinatorial manner, and (3) whether the three constituents of trimorphemic compounds are equally important and processed serially.

PDF - 

Conclusion

This regression study was a modest attempt to understand how multiple lexical distributional predictors contribute to the visual recognition of Japanese trimorphemic compounds. A lexical decision with eye-tracking experiment revealed several notable phenomena: (1) late left-branching advantage, (2) character-driven, as opposed to radical-driven, bottom-up processing, and (3) uneven and asymmetrical contributions of constituent characters reflected in the bathtub-like constituent frequency effect and the early within-word parafoveal-on-foveal effect. 

While the character-driven processing and the within-word parafoveal-on-foveal effect were also found in a previous bimorphemic Japanese compound processing study, the left-branching advantage and the bathtub-like effect are specific to trimorphemic compounds and in line with lexical distributional characteristics of trimorphemic compounds found in a corpus. Native speakers of Japanese apparently make use of lexical distributional statistics in the course of recognizing compounds in a brief second.

Discrimination in lexical decision - On lexomes (”semantic units… pointers to locations in a high-dimensional semantic vector space”) and a rejection of the oft-debated ‘morpho-orthographic segmentation’ (’semantically blind’ decomposition based on the orthographic form rather than meaning).

  • More on lexomes [PDF]: “we define the lexome as a theoretical construct at the interface of language and a world that is in constant flux with the flow of experience. Lexomes are the lexical dimensions in the system of knowledge that an individual acquires and constantly modifies as the outcome of discriminatively learning from experience within a culture…”

Comprehension without segmentation: a proof of concept with naive discriminative learning - 

Current theories of auditory comprehension assume that the segmentation of speech into word forms is an essential prerequisite to understanding. We present a computational model that does not seek to learn word forms, but instead decodes the experiences discriminated by the speech input.

Implicit Grammar - 

Implicit Grammar is the name for a research programme that applies basic principles of learning to understand those aspects of language processing that are acquired through implicit learning.  Many aspects of adult language use go beyond what is learned without conscious awareness.  We can craft new brand names, come up with blends, write poetry, reflect on our own language and impose norms of style and proper use.  In this course, the focus is not on such higher-order processes, which require conscious reflection about different options, but on the learning that underlies our spontaneous intuitions that evolve as our knowledge of language is constantly recalibrated as experience accumulates over the lifetime.

The core of the implicit grammar programme is a computational engine in which implicit learning is formalized as error-driven supervised learning.

Implicit Morphology - 

“Can you rig up a system that starts to give proper predictions depending on support for the different meanings, given very simple aspects of the words?” Baayen asked a group of BYU linguistic professors and students. He was referring to the standard approaches in linguistics in which words and morphemes are the atomic building blocks of meaning.

But Baayen believes the current practice is too limiting. He explained, “If you take this setup as your axiom of language, then you deny yourself access to lots of regularities that concern sub-word and sub-morphemic features in the language that pattern together across words and morphemes.” The current practice, Baayen argues, focuses too much on words as atomic units. Once we start looking at subword features in sentences, there is sufficient systematicity to straightforwardly predict that “kick the bucket” means “die” but “kick the ball” means that a ball is being kicked.

But keeping track of sub-word co-occurrences is not all of the story: The details of error-driven learning are crucial for getting it right.

Previously from the same authors with a discussion of sub-morphemic elements in Chinese characters, within the character-driven processing model.

"Grammar is politics by other means."

“Grammar is politics by other means.”

- Donna Haraway

radiation-hardened thinking

I think a good shortcut along the way to becoming a more balanced thinker (in terms of science + humanities, Apollonian + Dionysian, etc.), if you come from the fuzzy end of things, is to learn a lowercase calculus (”a little-c ‘calculus’ is really just any system of calculation”).

For example, propositional, predicate, or lambda, the latter described in the quoted link above.

Learn the notation and practice being able to read/write in the system. Nothing fancy, could be the logic stuff from a discrete mathematics book.

I think learning to think this way, at the very least, bleeds over in your mental toolkit to help harden your thinking, or give you the option for increased rigor, moving away from any tendencies to let your mind’s eye unfocus. By ‘shortcut’, I simply mean, no excuse that you need to spend years to become a less fuzzy thinker and become more productive in implementing your ideas.

Don’t be afraid of formal constraints. Constraints help creativity, as I’ve said before (tldr that link).

Previously.

While you’re at it, look at using meditation to debias (scroll down) your mind and avoid the sunk cost fallacy, base rate fallacy, etc.

conceptual combination

conceptual combination:

“Most scientists will tell you that your brain contains a storehouse of concepts to categorize the objects and events around you. In this view, concepts are like dictionary definitions stored in your brain, such as “A pet is an animal companion that lives with you.” Each concept is said to have an unchanging core that’s shared by all individuals. Decades of research, however, show this is not the case. 

A concept is a dynamic pattern of neural activity. Your brain does not store and retrieve concepts—it makes concepts on the fly, as needed, in its network of billions of communicating neurons. Each time you construct the “same” concept, such as “Dog,” the neural pattern is different. This means a concept is a population of variable instances, not a single static instance, and your mind is a computational moment within a constantly predicting brain…

The more familiar a concept—that is, the more frequently you’ve constructed it—the more efficiently your brain can make it by conceptual combination. Your brain requires less energy to construct the concept “Dog” than the combination, “Hairy, friendly, loyal animal with two eyes, four legs, and a slobbering tongue, who makes a barking sound, eats processed food from a bowl, and rescues children from danger in Disney movies.” 

That sort of combination is what your brain would have to do if it created the concept “Dog” for the first time. The word “dog” then helps your brain create the concept efficiently in the future…

Scientists consider conceptual combination to be one of the most powerful abilities of the human brain. It’s not just for making novel concepts on the fly. It is the normal process by which your brain constructs concepts. Conceptual combination is the basis for most perception and action.”

ja-dark: You may recognize the author’s name from my various posts on emotions.

Scientists win Memprize competition with best vocabulary learning method

Scientists win Memprize competition with best vocabulary learning method:

“The method combined adaptive retrieval practice, where the hardest words to remember were presented more often, and an introduction to mental imagery. A unique feature of the program: volunteers were asked to imagine the words in certain rooms so that they could later practice recalling the words by room.” 

ja-dark: Based on that description, it sounds like spaced retrieval (with expanding intervals based on whether you pass items) + changing study locations + possibly method of loci. Just the combination that ja-dark recommends. :) [Edit: n/m about the changing study locations: From this video, it seems it was more of a virtual memory palace, where the rooms aren’t necessarily places you’ve been.]

I’ve sort of stopped mentioning Memrise despite championing it in its infancy, because of its association at one point with Tim Ferris, and because of my recommendation to not obsess over algorithms and rely on online/web-based tools (hence Voidness).

Still, nice to see that it’s working/helping.

Edit: This article describes the algorithms as “basic” and “slightly more sophisticated” than basic…I imagine by ‘adaptive’ they just mean in the usual way, rather than in the more advanced techniques researchers are still playing with (based on response time, mastery speed [PDF], etc.). In other words, I don’t think they made any breakthroughs or relied on graded difficulty buttons, just the usual correct/incorrect that research uses–the key thing software allows is the automated scheduling of large amounts of items, I feel. The particular nuances of the spacing doesn’t need to be fine-grained. Though as I mentioned recently, research on recommender systems may advance us more quickly towards truly adaptive algorithms…

Retrieval Strength vs. Storage Strength

Retrieval Strength vs. Storage Strength:

Retrieval strength (RS) is a measure of how easily recalled something is currently, given what is relevant to the present situation (does it come to mind now?).

Storage strength (SS) is a measure of whether information is deeply embedded or well learned (is it likely to be recalled later?).”

ja-dark: Much of the research on spaced retrieval is based on the work of Robert Bjork, who I’ve referenced repeatedly in the Voidness posts.

It’s worth taking a second to step back and look at the fundamentals of how Bjork models memory, to better understand why spaced retrieval works.

Karpicke is the other figure to check out.

Note the “delayed testing” in the above main link is “spaced retrieval”, aka “successive relearning”.

An idea Bjork, Karpicke, et al. talk about is that “when information is not used it will become inaccessible over time - it will decrease in ‘retrieval strength’. However, the information is still present - it is easier to relearn that information, it can still be recognized if presented correctly, etc.”

Bonus: The Human Brain Could Store 10 Times More Memories Than Previously Thought

Bonus-bonus: Brain is 10 times more active than previously measured

Super-sized memory is trainable and long lasting

Super-sized memory is trainable and long lasting:

“The ability to perform astonishing feats of memory, such as remembering lists of several dozen words, can be learned, researchers report. After 40 days using a strategic memory improvement technique, individuals who had typical memory skills at the start and no previous memory training more than doubled their memory capacity, going from recalling an average of 26 words from a list of 72 to remembering 62. Four months later, recall performance remained high.”

ja-dark: You don’t need the special commercial version they used in this research (the use of which instantly makes me feel suspicious of the paper, unfortunately), but nice to see more on the method of loci/memory palace technique. My main interest in it isn’t the common, popular idea, but its integration into spaced retrieval, as I discuss at length here.

The key issue in that respect is understanding how memory works: it’s dynamic and reconstructive rather than passively stored and retrieved with monolithic, high fidelity, as my post describes/references.

how to use the web

Previously I posted about making the web ‘opt-in’; this will help you avoid that zombie-like feedback loop described here:

“The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation…

The behavior equates to mindlessly refreshing and ‘lozenging’ the same sources of information repeatedly. While performing this behavior the individual feels a sense of numb depersonalization, being calmly and pragmatically aware that they have no identifiable need to be at the computer nor are they gleaning any practical use from it at that moment… They may feel increasingly anxious and needful… while feeling as though they are calm or slightly bored. ” 

I believe I’ve also mentioned Zotero, and personal wikis, here and there. Zotero is a frequent topic at Programming Historian/by ProfHacker. All of those lengthy works cited lists at Dark Japanese @ Wordpress were generated with Zotero.

Over the years Zotero has displaced bookmarks for me–bookmarking in the browser now is just a secondary step I take out of habit.

The reason Zotero has displaced bookmarks for me is that with Zotero, sites never go offline (save snapshots), you can add tags and notes (and links/images/etc. within them), quote the pages you save, link pages together using the Related option, and of course, you can automate the export of citations in different formats (APA, MLA, etc.).

With Zotero, you can create a kind of cross between a personal wiki and an annotated bibliography of your mental life. In addition to the side-effect of internalizing that annotated bibliography at a higher level of representation (a general map of knowledge in your head), you might use it as a repository for deciding what you want to automatize for rapid access via spaced retrieval.

Key to this, of course, is being mindful and organized–in practice. On-line maintenance (sense 8), not ‘procrastination by organization’, as I discuss in this post on memory palaces. A satisficing approach to organization, not maximizing.

duality of patterning

Duality of patterning is the property of human language that enables combinatorial structure on two distinct levels: meaningless sounds can be combined into meaningful morphemes and words, which themselves could be combined further. We will refer to recombination at the first level as combinatorial structure, while recombination at the second level will be called compositional structure. (via)

Does Language Matter? Exploring Chinese–Korean Differences in Holistic Perception

Does Language Matter? Exploring Chinese–Korean Differences in Holistic Perception:

Cross-cultural research suggests that East Asians display a holistic attentional bias by paying attention to the entire field and to relationships between objects, whereas Westerners pay attention primarily to salient objects, displaying an analytic attentional bias. 

The assumption of a universal pan-Asian holistic attentional bias has recently been challenged in experimental research involving Japanese and Chinese participants, which suggests that linguistic factors may contribute to the formation of East Asians’ holistic attentional patterns. 

The present experimental research explores differences in attention and information processing styles between Korean and Chinese speakers, who have been assumed to display the same attentional bias due to cultural commonalities. 

We hypothesize that the specific structure of the Korean language predisposes speakers to pay more attention to ground information than to figure information, thus leading to a stronger holistic attentional bias compared to Chinese speakers.

Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man” might be a misquote

Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man” might be a misquote:

“Armstrong himself has always insisted he said “one small step for a man” not “one small step for man.” While the former is grammatically correct and meaningful, the latter is contradictory when coupled with “mankind” in the next part of the sentence…

… researchers in the US have finally shed some new light on the controversy. In some intriguing experiments published in PLOS-ONE, the team analyzed a large number of recordings of Midwestern American speech, and also used a group of Midwestern listeners to investigate how the speakers said the phrases “for” and “for a” respectively—and how the listeners perceived them.”

The Invisible Force That Warps What You Read in the News

The Invisible Force That Warps What You Read in the News:

“The Law of Narrative Gravity posits that the public and press are drawn to narratives, and the more widely accepted (or massive) a narrative, the more it attracts and shapes the perception of facts.

Which brings us back to unicorns and mutual fund markdowns. Which narrative was more prevalent in the fall of 2015?

  1. ‘Mutual funds often have imperfect information, which makes it difficult for them to value private companies.’
  2. ‘We’re in another tech bubble.’”

Machines aren’t growing more intelligent—they’re just doing what we programmed them to do

Machines aren’t growing more intelligent—they’re just doing what we programmed them to do:

“I’d suggest that one problem with AI is the name itself—coined more than 50 years ago to describe efforts to program computers to solve problems that required human intelligence or attention. Had artificial intelligence been named something less spooky, it might seem as prosaic as operations research or predictive analytics.

Perhaps a less provocative description would be something like “anthropic computing.” A broad moniker such as this could encompass efforts to design biologically inspired computer systems, machines that mimic the human form or abilities, and programs that interact with people in natural, familiar ways.

We should stop describing these modern marvels as proto-humans and instead talk about them as a new generation of flexible and powerful machines.”

ja-dark: The proposed new name sort of contradicts the spirit of the last paragraph. But perhaps the mixed message is useful: I think it’s important to stop thinking of AI as advanced ‘anthropic’ intelligence, but it’s also important to stay aware of the human biases lurking in the code, close to the metal…

Will naming the Anthropocene lead to acceptance of our planet-level impact?

Will naming the Anthropocene lead to acceptance of our planet-level impact?:

“ … in recent years, many scientists have advocated to name a new epoch to more accurately reflect the idea that humans have become the dominant planet-shaping force. The name they have proposed places humankind’s actions—and their consequences—squarely at the center: the Anthropocene—anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “geological epoch.”

The need to name a new epoch is gaining wide acceptance as most experts agree that this time period has been marked by geologically significant changes brought about by human activities, such as an accelerated rate of species extinction and changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and soils…

Does a name in itself have sufficient symbolic power to cause a paradigm shift in how humans perceive our role in the changing geological patterns of the planet?

That is among the questions with which David Casagrande, associate professor of anthropology at Lehigh University and his colleagues grapple in their latest article in Anthropology Today

  ‘…a major impediment to action on climate change is the deeply entrenched belief that humans are not capable of planetary-scale impacts.’”

We’re All Internet Trolls (Sometimes)

We’re All Internet Trolls (Sometimes):

“Software from Civil, a Portland, Ore., startup, forces anyone who wants to comment to first evaluate three other comments for their level of civility. Initially, the third comment people are asked to review is their own, which they have the option to revise—and they often do, according to Civil co-founder Christa Mrgan. In this way, the system accomplishes the neat trick of helping readers see their words as someone else would.

A site published by the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK just rolled out a system that gives readers a brief multiple-choice quiz about the contents of an article—proving they really read it—before allowing them to comment.”

ja-dark: The NRK strategy seems educational, if you see it as a form of retrieval practice. And unlike what the headline suggests, I don’t think the research suggested that most people who post troll some of the time, but that the people who do troll are not always serial offenders, but instead are people who are ignorant, moody, easily influenced, etc. I think the paper attacks a straw man, really; it seems as common to assume ‘trolls’ are regular people affected by the lack of accountability, etc. as it is to assume they are simply terrible people.

Related: WS Decon (Web Scene Decontamination)

Can You Change Your Personality?

Can You Change Your Personality?:

“Results from their analysis showed that within relatively short periods of time—as little as 2-16 weeks of therapy—personality traits did indeed shift, in positive and lasting ways. In particular, neuroticism went down and extroversion went up significantly, with conscientiousness and agreeableness rising incrementally, too. Openness was the only trait that didn’t seem to change much.

This result surprised lead author of the study and developmental psychologist Brent Roberts.

“It wasn’t even within our imagination that personality traits are things that would change over a period of weeks or months,” he said. “We’re pretty comfortable with the idea that personality traits could develop over the course of years, but not something shorter than that.”

Further analyses suggested that these changes in personality were not temporary, but lasted long after the therapeutic treatments had finished—at least in those studies that did long-term follow-up analyses. In addition, the shifts in personality seemed to reflect actual changes in general traits, not just a temporary change in mood, such as the alleviation of depression or anxiety.”

Programming Design Systems (online eBook)

Programming Design Systems (online eBook):

“This book is the result of a simple question: What happens when we try to redefine the graphic design curriculum using a programming language as the tool for the designer? …

This book is structured like an introductory text about graphic design, focusing on the elements of visual design and how they relate to algorithmic design. The book is written for designers wanting to become better programmers and vice versa…

At the end of the book, it is my hope that you have learned two new skills: How to use code to create new and interesting graphic designs, and how to evaluate whether these designs can be considered successful.

I have decided to use the P5.js JavaScript library for all examples in the book. It has proven to be a great programming environment for beginners while also being powerful enough for advanced users.”

Related: Creative Coding - “This course is an introductory programming class, appropriate for students with no prior programming experience. Traditionally, introductory programming teaches algorithmic problem-solving, where a sequence of instructions describe the steps necessary to achieve a desired result. In this course, students are trained to go beyond this sequential thinking, to think concurrently and modularly. By its end, students are empowered to write and read code for event-driven, object-oriented, graphical user interfaces.”

How a Typo Broke the Internet on Tuesday

How a Typo Broke the Internet on Tuesday:

Society is, according to an old aphorism, always nine meals away from anarchy. For the tech industry, the threshold of chaos lies, apparently, at around five hours of Amazon downtime. On Tuesday, the US-East 1 data-center region of Amazon Web Services — the vast but largely hidden web-hosting arm of the internet retail giant — experienced extended downtime for a large number of websites and services. The cause? A typo entered by an Amazon tech.

ja-dark: I was wondering why I had such difficulty launching instances of every type in every region, re: EC2 being affected (as mentioned in the Amazon summary).

Related: Japan in $617bn ‘fat finger’ error

See also

Why Are There Different Languages? The Role of Adaptation in Linguistic Diversity

Why Are There Different Languages? The Role of Adaptation in Linguistic Diversity:

Adaptation to the Technological Niche

“To avoid ambiguity and increase efficiency, the written register led to an expanded vocabulary and greater syntactic complexity. This added complexity is not without cost. Written language tends to be harder to process than spoken language, but this added cost is partly offset by the reader’s ability to slow down and reread if necessary. 

There is some evidence that learning to read, (i.e., becoming trained in a language register that has evolved to fill the particular needs of the written modality) augments several cognitive and perceptual abilities, and affects the processing of spoken language. 

Research here is sparse, but there is some evidence that literate speakers have a stronger representation of words as individual recombinable units and that experience with notation more generally (e.g., musical notation) may aid people’s ability to reproduce novel compositional structures.”

Conference Report on Evolang 11 † | Journal of Language Evolution | Oxford Academic

Conference Report on Evolang 11 † | Journal of Language Evolution | Oxford Academic:

“In particular, the Iterated Learning (IL) paradigm (Kirby et al. 2008) has become highly influential, and papers using the IL method were well represented at this year’s Evolang. In fact, ‘Iterated Learning’ occupies rank three of the most chosen keywords in the online proceedings, only surpassed by ‘cultural evolution’ and ‘gesture’.”

RecentlySequence Memory Constraints Give Rise to Language-Like Structure through Iterated Learning - It’s only mentioned in passing, but this, along with the now-or-never bottleneck, putatively meshes with neurolinguistic findings about hierarchical processing (see references 17,18 I think) despite the actual linguistic structures being fundamentally non-hierarchical (not ‘trees’ in the brain).

Random quote from that last link:

“Traditionally, meaning has been assumed to arise from a Language of Thought [76], often expressed by hierarchically structured formulae in predicate logic. However, an increasing amount of psychological evidence suggests that the mental representation of meaning takes the form of a ‘mental model’ [77], ‘image schema’ [78] or ‘sensorimotor simulation’ [79], which have mostly spatial and temporal structure (although, like sentences, they may be analysed hierarchically if so desired).”

Speaking of which, I forgot to mention that much like the slightly older ‘sea-change in linguistics’ paper, the response to commentary and the comments for that bottleneck paper [PDF, scroll down] present a good overview of the ongoing changes in linguistics and the challenges faced…

The above report is for Evolang 11, which I posted about before (incl. the proceedings); note the quote on the Evolang conference in Kyoto in that post, regarding so-called ‘biolinguistics’.

The report also notes ‘cumulative culture’ is a buzzword now; one definition is:

“Cumulative cultural evolution is the term given to a particular kind of social learning, which allows for the accumulation of modifications over time, involving a ratchet-like effect where successful modifications are maintained until they can be improved upon.”

How Donald Trump won the White House with a 21st-century mindset

How Donald Trump won the White House with a 21st-century mindset:

Beyond the untruths lie Trump’s genius for messaging, such as his recent contention that the free press is the enemy of the American people.

“The press did something really dumb after that happened,” Lakoff said. “They came out with a Twitter (post): ‘Not the enemy.’ Nixon said, ‘I am not a crook.’ Everybody thought he was a crook. (Say) ‘Not the enemy,’  and you’re going to think of them as the enemy. The reason is very simple. In order to negate something, you have to activate in your brain what is being negated. And every time you activate something in your brain, it becomes stronger. So the more you negate something, the stronger it gets.”

"You shall know a word by the company it keeps."

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

-

J. R. Firth, 1957

Is Allison More Likely Than Lakisha to Receive a Callback From Counseling Professionals? A Racism Audit Study

Is Allison More Likely Than Lakisha to Receive a Callback From Counseling Professionals? A Racism Audit Study:

Using an audit study, we examined racially biased callback responses in the mental health field by leaving voicemails soliciting services with practicing counselors and psychologists.

To manipulate perceived race, an actor identified herself with either a stereotypically Black- or non–Latino White-sounding name. 

Although the difference in callback rate between the two names was not significant, the difference in voice messages from therapists that either promoted potential services or impeded services was significant. 

The caller with the stereotypically White-sounding name received voice messages that promoted the potential for services at a 12% higher rate than the caller with the stereotypically Black-sounding name.

See also:

Previously: The Influence of Japanese Names

RelatedJimmy Kimmel Gets His Own Taste of Mean Tweets After Mocking ‘Non-White’ Names at the Oscars | Inc.com

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media:

“That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?”

ja-dark: I’ve noted this, also; most recently the prevalence of ‘patriotic’ emoji flags are an ironic tactic to try and create the illusion that a bigoted subgroup of whites living in monocultural bubbles isolated from the rest of the country/world are ‘real Americans’, despite their preference to live in a country as shaped by Putin or Hitler… 

The better way to fact-check Trump | CNN Video

The better way to fact-check Trump | CNN Video:

“Linguist George Lakoff offers recommendations for effective fact-checks.“

ja-dark: Another ‘worked example’ for how to fact-check proactively rather than reactively reinforcing the framing of fools.

Previously“Keep Going Back to Substance and the Truth”

Perspective API

Perspective API:

“Perspective is an API that makes it easier to host better conversations. The API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation. Developers and publishers can use this score to give realtime feedback to commenters or help moderators do their job, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information, as illustrated in two experiments below. We’ll be releasing more machine learning models later in the year, but our first model identifies whether a comment could be perceived as “toxic" to a discussion.”

See also: Google’s Perspective API Opens Up Its Troll-Fighting AI | WIRED

Sidney Harris



Sidney Harris

5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World | Nautilus

5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World | Nautilus:
  • A Language Where You’re Not the Center of the World
  • A Language Where Time Flows East to West 
  • A Language Where Colors Are Metaphors 
  • A Language That Makes You Provide Evidence
  • A Language That Has No Word for “Two”

"Journalists are courageous people who #ProtectTheTruth. Using #NotTheEnemy as a slogan helps Trump...."

“Journalists are courageous people who #ProtectTheTruth. Using #NotTheEnemy as a slogan helps Trump. Framing 101. https://georgelakoff.com/2017/02/18/protectthetruth/

- George Lakoff

"Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which..."

“Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882)

Edgelords aren’t the internet’s cultural leaders — snowflakes are

Edgelords aren’t the internet’s cultural leaders — snowflakes are:

“… it’s useful to know that someone like PewDiePie is almost certainly not a Nazi, but his jokes end up giving cover to actual bigots, while creating an environment in which bigotry feels increasingly normal. We know that the internet’s ability to create self-contained, self-reinforcing spaces makes that whole process easier…

Meanwhile, the people who seem to be most genuinely alien to older generations (including me, sometimes) aren’t the “edgelords” picking up the dusty banner of the ‘70s punk swastika. They’re the much-derided “special snowflakes” that have college professors and pundits doomsaying about the rising threat of trigger warnings and safe spaces… the strangest and most extreme thing that a group can be right now is radically, intensely dedicated to emotional intelligence and the notion of inclusivity.

When people in non-stereotypically masculine spaces come under criticism, warranted or not, the reaction is often as chiding and dismissive as it is horrified. Take, for example, the many articles about left-wing campus activism. The people involved are often presumed to be privileged pseudo-intellectuals looking for something to complain about, not people who deal with things like racism or misogyny on top of feeling like they’re being ignored or left behind by modern capitalism. (Never mind that plenty of right-wing reactionaries are financially comfortable.) ”

The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You

The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You:

The problem here is not just that this singling out creates a distorted, fish-eye lens version of what’s really happening. It’s that the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration—what linguist George Lakoff has called the “salient exemplar”—and conflate it with the norm. This cognitive bias itself isn’t new. But in a media environment driven by clicks, where politicians can bypass journalistic filters entirely to deliver themselves straight to citizens, it’s newly exploitable.

You know who else isn’t as likely to commit murders in the US as native-born citizens? Refugees. Or immigrants from the seven countries singled out in President Trump’s shot-down travel ban. Or for that matter, immigrants at all. According to numerous studies, increased immigration correlates with lower violent crime rates in a community. Yet next week, Trump is promising a revised travel ban in the name of safety…

Lakoff, a University of California, Berkeley linguist and well-known Democratic activist, cites Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” as the signature “salient exemplar.” Reagan’s straw woman—a minority mother who uses her government money on fancy bling rather than on food for her family—became an effective rhetorical bludgeon to curb public assistance programs even though the vast majority of recipients didn’t abuse the system in that way. The image became iconic, even though it was the exception rather than the rule.

Psychologists call this bias the “availability heuristic,” an effect Trump has sought to exploit since the launch of his presidential campaign, when he referred to undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists.

“It basically works the way memory works: you judge the frequency, the probability, of something based on how easily you can bring it to mind,” says Northeastern University psychologist John Coley. “Creating a vivid, salient image like that is a great way to make it memorable.”

This is the same bias that makes you fear swimming in the ocean lest you get attacked by a shark, despite shark attacks being far less common than, say, death by coconut. When something is memorable, it tends to be the thing you think of first, and then it has an outsize influence on your understanding of the world.

"By charging admission to party rallies, Hitler created a self-financing political entity while..."

“By charging admission to party rallies, Hitler created a self-financing political entity while simultaneously enhancing Nazism’s revivalist novelty.”

- Hitler and Abductive Logic: The Strategy of a Tyrant by Ben Novak (review)

“The Blau monument may be the oldest extant artifact...



“The Blau monument may be the oldest extant artifact combining words and pictures on the same surface.” – Meggs’ History of Graphic Design

Linguist's 'big data' research supports waves of migration into the Americas

Linguist's 'big data' research supports waves of migration into the Americas:

In “Linguistic Perspectives on Early Population Migrations and Language Contact in the Americas,” Sicoli shows how big data analyses point to the existence of at least three now-extinct languages of earlier migrations that influenced existing Dene and Aleut languages as they moved to the Alaska coast. The data comparing dozens of indigenous languages support phases of migration for the Dene languages and multilingual language contact systems along the Alaska coast, which potentially involved languages related to current linguistic isolates. Traces of such language contacts support that the mixing populations also mixed their languages as part of human adaptation strategies for this region and its precarious environment.

Japan's interpreters hard-pressed to make clean sense of Trump's disjointed, offensive banter | The Japan Times

Japan's interpreters hard-pressed to make clean sense of Trump's disjointed, offensive banter | The Japan Times:

“He rarely speaks logically, and he only emphasizes one side of things as if it were the absolute truth. There are lots of moments when I suspected his assertions were factually dubious,” said Chikako Tsuruta, who routinely covers Trump-related news as an interpreter for CNN, ABC and CBS.

“He is so overconfident and yet so logically unconvincing that my interpreter friends and I often joke that if we translated his words as they are, we would end up making ourselves sound stupid,” Tsuruta, who is also a professor of interpreting and translation studies at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, said in a recent interview…

Now a professor emeritus at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, Torikai said she was loath to imagine herself interpreting for the new president, whose sexist and nationalistic attitudes are anathema to her. “There is nothing he says that I can agree with. Frankly, I think he is a very dangerous person who never should’ve become the U.S. president in the first place. It would be absolutely intolerable for me to lend my own voice to disseminate his views,” Torikai said.

On Not Saying His Name

On Not Saying His Name:

Last week, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King shared a widely circulated list to her Facebook page offering tips for resisting Trump. The top suggestion: “Use his name sparingly so as not to detract from the issues.”

In all of these instances, it’s what’s missing that is loudest. “Absences can be significant,” James Sias, an ethical theorist and assistant professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, told me. “What stood out to most people about Michelle Obama’s speech is what she didn’t say.”

For some, the refusal to name Trump amounts to denial or dissociation. But for many of the tactic’s adoptees, it’s a signal of resistance—an indication that the speaker rejects Trump’s legitimacy.

ja-dark: According to George Lakoff, the list that King shared came from a Sonoma talk he gave and it wasn’t quite accurate. He shared this as an update (I posted a couple points here). From what I recall, King’s version got the key issues correct and in that sense I’m glad it ‘went viral’; these ideas in general about framing, etc., are important for individuals who work in the media, or will in the future, to understand. For you, too, of course.

CFP: Japanese Language Text Mining: Digital Methods for Japanese Studies

CFP: Japanese Language Text Mining: Digital Methods for Japanese Studies:
image

“Emory University is pleased to accept applications, beginning January 20, 2017, for participation in an interdisciplinary workshop — Japanese Language Text Mining: Digital Humanities Methods for Japanese Studies. The workshop will bring together researchers working across the fields of computational text analysis and Japanese Studies…

The workshop sessions will focus on the unique challenges of digital analyses of Japanese texts. Topics will include:

  • Finding and using web-based corpora, e.g., the Aozora Bunko
  • Using web-based analytical tools, e.g., PhiloLogic
  • Creating digital collections (corpora), including challenges of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for Japanese texts
  • Specialized tools for classical, early modern, and modern Japanese grammar
  • Methodological principles that underlie standard text mining techniques (e.g., word frequencies, collocation, KWIC, document term matrices, metrics of text similarity)”

Semantizicing New Learner Vocabulary via Prototype Theory – A Cognitive-Empirical Study in the EFL-Classroom

Semantizicing New Learner Vocabulary via Prototype Theory – A Cognitive-Empirical Study in the EFL-Classroom:

“Reflecting an emerging trend in EFL (English as a foreign language) research, the talk presents an empirical classroom-based study inspired by Cognitive Linguistics methodologies. While the study’s general interest is L2 vocabulary acquisition, it focuses on vocabulary ‘semantizations’ within the EFL classroom, i.e. the presentation of new words to learners by way of paraphrase, explanation, or definition. 

Based on evidence from Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics on the pervasive presence of prototype effects in the organization of the mental lexicon, the study empirically investigates whether a novel approach to vocabulary semantizations that is based on Prototype Theory might prove superior to traditional methods of introducing learner lexicon.

As its main hypothesis, the study posits that L2 vocabulary acquisition in non-native speakers is facilitated by creating word semantizations (i.e. explanatory paraphrases) that deliberately contain typical representatives (in accordance with Prototype Theory) of vocabulary to-be-acquired. Conventional approaches to semantization, in contrast, as seen in monolingual dictionaries or school textbook glossaries, typically contain attribute-based descriptions of L2 target words that enlist necessary-and-sufficient features thought to detail the word’s meaning. This time-honoured method, however, is habitually fraught with low vocabulary retention rates as well as student word sense misconstruals.

To illustrate the study setup, compare the L2 learner word furniture as introduced to non-native speakers (also take into account their limited access to more specialized L2 vocabulary) in a traditional as opposed to a prototype-based semantization:

  1. furniture is movable articles used in readying an area (as a room or patio) for occupancy or use.
    (= conventional learner dictionary semantization; Merriam-Webster 2016)
  2. furniture is, for example, chairs, tables, cupboards and shelves.
    (= innovative best-representative semantization) ”

RelatedConceptual Metaphor and Vocabulary Teaching in the EFL Context [PDF] -  “This paper will give a brief discussion about conceptual metaphor theory and analyze how to apply this theory into vocabulary teaching in the EFL context, in order to help learners to learn vocabulary thoroughly, systematically, and efficiently.”

ja-dark: Too busy via the activities of other ‘avatars’ at present, but when I get more time I will be developing another method or two in this vein, specifically with regards to ideas I’ve had since my last methodological updates (Voidness, PAS), namely prototype theory, basic level categories, and verb-argument constructions (VACs).

Previously: Populating ConceptNet Knowledge Base with Information Acquired from Japanese Wikipedia

See also: WordNet

Renowned programmer pulls out of tech conference hosted by Shopify

Renowned programmer pulls out of tech conference hosted by Shopify:

Last Wednesday, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke published an online essay titled “In Support of Free Speech,” calling his company “an unlikely defender of Breitbart’s right to sell products.”

“To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas,” wrote Lütke. Lewis found that ridiculous.

“I was really disappointed, and quite mad,” she said. “Freedom of speech is something people are quite confused about in this type of climate. It’s defined in many dictionaries quite clearly; it’s the ability to state your options without government reprisal … as long as they don’t alter the quality of life of the people around you.”

Lewis said she’s alarmed people believe not engaging with controversies relieves them of moral responsibility.

“There are many other platforms this site can host their content on. So there isn’t any silencing going on; it’s more of a moral stance.”

PreviouslyTolerance is not a moral precept

(via An AI Pattern Language: Accounting for Human Factors and...

Amazonian language spoken by only 14 people documented

Amazonian language spoken by only 14 people documented:

“… the research produced a database on the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Peruvian people; a description of Iskonawa grammar; an Iskonawa vocabulary of about 2,000 words; and a wealth of Iskonawa songs, rituals, hunting prayers, dances and oral narratives. It also provided resources to educate anthropology and linguistic students at Tufts and Pontifical Catholic University about techniques they might use to document some of the roughly 3,000 other languages that are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth, out of a total of 6,000. Much of the Iskonawa research material is available to the public here.”

Hidden chamber in 5th-century Japanese burial mound poses new puzzle

Hidden chamber in 5th-century Japanese burial mound poses new puzzle:

“In 1968, researchers uncovered a sword blade with a gold-inlaid inscription at the site. Called Kinsakumei tekken, the blade is designated as a national treasure and believed to be among the oldest examples of Japanese script in the nation. The inscription refers to King Wakatakeru, who is assumed to have been the Emperor Yuryaku in the fifth century…

The inlaid characters on the sword only came to light in 1978 after the artifact underwent X-ray imaging. The inscription states that the sword was made in 471 by an individual named Wowake who served King Wakatakeru as the head of his royal guard.

The reference to King Wakatakeru had a profound impact as it confirmed the existence of an individual of the same name who appears in classical Japanese histories, such as ‘Nihon Shoki’ (The Chronicles of Japan) and ‘Kojiki’ (Records of Ancient Matters).”

How to Destroy the Business Model of Breitbart and Fake News

How to Destroy the Business Model of Breitbart and Fake News:

“Even when ad placements are automated, companies still have the power to control whether neo-Nazis or fake news hucksters profit. In fact, it’s actually rather simple for companies to impose ethical policies, according to Mr. Zeitz. Indeed, his own company (which handles programmatic advertising for other organizations) recently decided to get out ahead of the issue by removing Breitbart News from its advertising marketplace. “We’re not banning them because they’re alt-right or conservative. We banned them from our marketplace because they violate our hate speech policy, which prohibits ad serving on sites that incite violence and discrimination against minority groups.” (Breitbart has said that it condemns racism and bigotry “in any form.”)

He pointed out that brand-name companies had already figured out how to keep their ads from flowing onto porn sites, because “you really don’t want your ad for a breakfast cereal next to a hard-core pornographic video,” and so “there are tools in place that allow companies to control where their ads go.” A company can block a specific site like Breitbart News from its ad buy. Or it might pick a “white list” of sites that align with its values…

In the behavior of some of these companies, you can detect the way our norms have already shifted. In the old normal, it would have cost little to stand up against neo-Nazi slogans. But in the new normal, doing so might involve angering key players in the White House, including the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who has hired the former editor of Breitbart as his senior adviser. Mr. Trump recently proved the damage he could do to a company by criticizing Lockheed Martin on Twitter; soon after, its stocks prices tumbled.Still, a new consumer movement is rising, and activists believe that where votes failed, wallets may prevail. This struggle is about much more than ads on Breitbart News — it’s about using corporations as shields to protect vulnerable people from bullying and hate crimes.”

Labeling a Third-Party Conflict “Genocide” Decreases Support for Intervention

Labeling a Third-Party Conflict “Genocide” Decreases Support for Intervention:

“Drawing on research on the collapse of compassion and group processes and interrelations, four experiments investigated how labeling a conflict “genocide” affects distant bystanders’ support for intervention. 

The genocide label (compared with no label or the label “not a genocide”) weakened Americans’ support for intervention in a crisis analogous to Darfur. Ingroup glorification moderated this effect such that the genocide label decreased support at high levels of glorification (Studies 1-3). 

Ingroup attachment, if anything, moderated such that the genocide label increased support at high levels of attachment (Studies 1 and 3).

Importantly, the effects occurred even when controlling for conservatism (Studies 1 and 3), gender, religion, military affiliation, and level of education (Study 2). 

Decreases in anticipated guilt over possible nonintervention (Studies 1 and 3) among high glorifiers, and a subsequent decrease in perceived obligation to intervene (Study 3), mediated the effect of the genocide label on support for intervention.”

Related: A hypothetical neurological association between dehumanization and human rights abuses

"As long as we consider any content moderation to be censorship, minority voices will continue to be..."

“As long as we consider any content moderation to be censorship, minority voices will continue to be drowned out by their aggressive majority counterparts.”

-

Alice Tiara, Are There Limits to Online Free Speech

Related: A hypothetical neurological association between dehumanization and human rights abuses

How Japan weaves caring and sharing into all layers of society

How Japan weaves caring and sharing into all layers of society:

“Although they are ubiquitous, Japanese people rarely notice the grooved lines on their pavements. Every footpath that is wide enough seems to have these extruding lines. They inhibit the smooth movement of prams, wheelchairs and trolleys. In the rain or snow, they can be a hazard for the cyclists who share pavements with pedestrians. They are expensive to maintain.

But these lines serve a purpose. With their prominently raised grooves they provide a means for blind people to traverse the city. They can feel these footpath guides with their feet or follow them with walking canes.

These pavement guides are symbols of a polite society – material evidence of a culture that accepts small inconveniences to the majority to help a few… ”

RelatedTake It From A German: Americans Are Too Timid In Confronting Hate

"Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the..."

“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”

- Winston Churchill

"… the way you deal with “fake news” and an information campaign is by more competing news and..."

“… the way you deal with “fake news” and an information campaign is by more competing news and information, as opposed to just hitting back.”

-

Michael Sulmeyer

ja-dark: Just wanted to post this b/c it correlates (I suppose at the ‘state level’) with the personal-level strategy I advocate which I’ve been jokingly calling ‘xenoforming’ (hostile terraforming of media ecology).

Watch: Short videos that TED says will recharge your brain

Watch: Short videos that TED says will recharge your brain:
”With more than 100 speakers over five days, attending TED conferences can be an emotional roller coaster ride, as attendees flit from talks on virtual reality to racial prejudice, climate change to Google art, incarceration to drones. TED uses brief videos in between talks to reset the mood and help attendees battle mental fatigue.

The videos at the latest TED conference in Vancouver, which wrapped on Friday, ranged from funny ads to music videos to short films, judiciously deployed as amuse-bouche or palette cleansers throughout the rich speaker program…

‘The misconception is that the videos always need to be funny,’ explains TED’s media archivist Anyssa Samari, who collects these special clips year round. ‘Sometimes you just need something to clear your mind,’ she says to Quartz.”

RelatedJapanese video lo-gistics

All The Methods I Learned In My Mathematics Degree Became Obsolete In My Lifetime

All The Methods I Learned In My Mathematics Degree Became Obsolete In My Lifetime:

“So what, then, remains in mathematics that people need to master? The answer is, the set of skills required to make effective use of those powerful new (procedural) mathematical tools we can access from our smartphone. Whereas it used to be the case that humans had to master the computational skills required to carry out various mathematical procedures (adding and multiplying numbers, inverting matrices, solving polynomial equations, differentiating analytic functions, solving differential equations, etc.), what is required today is a sufficiently deep understanding of all those procedures, and the underlying concepts they are built on, in order to know when, and how, to use those digitally-implemented tools effectively, productively, and safely…

The most basic of today’s new mathematical skills is number sense. (The other important one is mathematical thinking. But whereas the latter is important only for those going into STEM careers, number sense is a crucial 21st Century life-skill for everyone.) Descriptions of the term “number sense” generally run along the lines of “fluidity and flexibility with numbers, a sense of what numbers mean, and an ability to use mental mathematics to negotiate the world and make comparisons.” The well-known mathematics educator Marilyn Burns, in her 2007 book, About Teaching Mathematics, describes students with a strong number sense like this: “[They] can think and reason flexibly with numbers, use numbers to solve problems, spot unreasonable answers, understand how numbers can be taken apart and put together in different ways, see connections among operations, figure mentally, and make reasonable estimates.”

In 1989, the US-based National Council of Teachers identified the following five components that characterize number sense: number meaning, number relationships, number magnitude, operations involving numbers and referents for number, and referents for numbers and quantities.”

Media, Technology, Politics

Media, Technology, Politics:

“To document some of our thinking, we are releasing six pieces that look at different issues that we think are important for trying to make sense of the relationship between technology and current political dynamics in the US.

  1. In Hacking the Attention Economy, danah boyd describes some of the tactics and strategies that people have taken to manipulate old and new media for fun, profit, and ideology. This essay explores decentralized coordination efforts, contemporary information campaigns, and cultural logics behind gaming the system.
  2. In What’s Propaganda Got To Do With It? Caroline Jack brings historical context to the use of the term “propaganda,” arguing that the resurgence of this label amid social anxieties over the new media landscape is reflective of deeper cultural and ideological divides.
  3. Did Media Literacy Backfire? by danah boyd examines how media literacy education efforts to encourage the public to be critical consumers of information may have contributed to widespread distrust in information intermediaries, complicating efforts to understand what is real and what is not.
  4. In Are There Limits to Online Free Speech, Alice Marwick explores how the tech industry’s obsession with “free speech” has been repurposed (and newly politicized) by networks whose actions are often seen as supporting of hate speech and harassment.
  5. Why America is Self-Segregating is danah boyd’s attempt to lay out some of the structural shifts that have taken place in the United States in the last twenty years that have magnified polarization and resulted in new types of de-diversification.
  6. In How do you deal with a problem like “fake news,” Robyn Caplan looks directly at the challenges that companies face when they seek to address the inaccurate and often problematic content that is spread widely on social media sites.”

Trending: Ryan: Assange 'a sycophant For Russia'

Trending: Ryan: Assange 'a sycophant For Russia':

M-W: “Sycophant (“a servile self-seeking flatterer”) spiked in lookups on January 4th, 2017, following House Speaker Paul Ryan’s comments on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Asked about Mr. Assange, Mr. Ryan called him a “sycophant for Russia. He leaks, he steals, and compromises national security.”
—Damian Paletta, The Wall Street Journal, 4 Jan. 2017

There is no unanimity of scholarly opinion as to why a word meaning “fig-revealer” came to take on the sense of “slanderer.” Various theories have been posited; one is that the original sycophants were tattling on fig merchants who failed to pay their taxes when selling the fruits at market, and another has to do with the sense of the word fig to indicate a gesture of contempt.”

ja-dark: It’s a perfectly cromulent word, either way.

Political computational thinking: policy networks, digital governance and ‘learning to code’

Political computational thinking: policy networks, digital governance and ‘learning to code’:

“ … through learning to code, young people are being inculcated into the material practices and codes of conduct associated with the culture of code, ways of viewing the world and politics of computer programmers – particularly the technically solutionist assumption that technical engineering, algorithms and coding solutions can be applied for ‘social good’ and to ‘hack’ human, social and public problems. 

This shaping of students’ digital subjectivities prepares them as the ideal participants for the ‘digital governance’ of the reluctant state, as citizens with the technical skills, computational thinking and solutionist mindsets to ‘hack’ solutions to problems of contemporary governance on behalf of the government. 

This emerging solutionist state is one in which political computational thinking, based on a technocratic logic that all social phenomena can be formalized into computable models, has become the main governmental style of thought; and it delegates its problems to active citizens with the technical literacies… “

From Computational Thinking to Computational Participation in K-12 Education

From Computational Thinking to Computational Participation in K-12 Education:

“Computational thinking should be reframed as computational participation.

Computational participation involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior in the context of computing. It allows for participation in digital activities.”

How to Become a ‘Superager’

How to Become a ‘Superager’:

“Of course, the big question is: How do you become a superager? Which activities, if any, will increase your chances of remaining mentally sharp into old age? We’re still studying this question, but our best answer at the moment is: work hard at something…

In the United States, we are obsessed with happiness. But as people get older, research shows, they cultivate happiness by avoiding unpleasant situations. This is sometimes a good idea, as when you avoid a rude neighbor. But if people consistently sidestep the discomfort of mental effort or physical exertion, this restraint can be detrimental to the brain. All brain tissue gets thinner from disuse. If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

ja-dark: I’ve been noting the author (Lisa Feldman Barrett) quite a bit recently with regards to ‘emotions’; this article makes a good case for ‘desirable difficulties’ (e.g. spaced retrieval), though it doesn’t specify it. The bit about happiness recalls my recent post about hedonic happiness vs. eudaimonic well-being.

I’ve left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators

I’ve left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators:

“… the breaking point for me wasn’t the trolls themselves… it was the global repercussions of Twitter’s refusal to stop them. The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now – how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? – and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist… Twitter executives did nothing.

On 29 December, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “What’s the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?” One user responded: “Comprehensive plan for getting rid of the Nazis.”

“We’ve been working on our policies and controls,” Dorsey replied. “What’s the next most critical thing?” Oh, what’s our second-highest priority after Nazis? I’d say No 2 is also Nazis. And No 3. In fact, you can just go ahead and slide “Nazis” into the top 100 spots…”

Beyond sex differences: new approaches for thinking about variation in brain structure and function

Beyond sex differences: new approaches for thinking about variation in brain structure and function:

“In the study of variation in brain structure and function that might relate to sex and gender, language matters. It matters because the choice of words and the meanings behind them frame our research questions and methods. And it matters because inconsistent or imprecise use engenders confusion…

…  sexual dimorphism is extremely rare (if it exists at all) in the human brain…

While some newer scientific work seems to have dropped the use of dimorphism or reference to male versus female brains, instead referring to human brains, the use of the word dimorphism to describe sex-related brain differences appears in the scientific literature frequently and seemingly without critique. Matters are far worse in popular renditions of scientific findings. These routinely portray brain differences as dimorphic, uncritically comparing ‘male brains’ to ‘female brains' (as opposed to comparing brains from males to brains from females).”

Related: Sex redefined - “The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

British Museum View

British Museum View:

Interior ‘Street View’ of museum exhibits… Looking forward to visiting this in VR… really looking forward to olfactory VR tech. Library musk, museum smell, etc. Mummy dust, dinosaur bone soil petrichor.

Take It From A German: Americans Are Too Timid In Confronting Hate

Take It From A German: Americans Are Too Timid In Confronting Hate:

“Germans have also worked hard to understand how the unspeakable happened. They have one of those unwieldy compound words for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “the process of coming to terms with your past.” The concept includes a duty to intervene when another’s dignity or life is in danger.”

Damaged by War, Syria’s Cultural Sites Rise Anew in France

Damaged by War, Syria’s Cultural Sites Rise Anew in France:

“PARIS — When the Islamic State was about to be driven out of the ancient city of Palmyra in March, Yves Ubelmann got a call from Syria’s director of antiquities to come over in a hurry.

An architect by training, Mr. Ubelmann, 36, had worked in Syria before the country was engulfed by war. But now there was special urgency for the kind of work his youthful team of architects, mathematicians and designers did from their cramped offices in Paris: producing digital copies of threatened historical sites.

Palmyra, parts of it already destroyed by the Islamists who deemed these monuments idolatrous, was still rigged with explosives. So he and Houmam Saad, his Syrian colleague, spent four days flying a drone with a robot camera over the crumbled arches and temples…

They need it in a new push for virtual preservation that scientists, archaeologists and others, like Mr. Ubelmann, are compiling on a large scale. The records could be used to create computer models that would show how monuments and endangered historical sites might one day be restored, repaired or reconstructed…

Using drones in archaeological work is not entirely new, specialists say, but at a recent gathering in Paris researchers from Europe and the Middle East said they were now having to practice “war archaeology,” that is, collecting reliable data from off-limit areas.”

Previously: Rescued History

Related: The Fate of Cultural Property in Wartime

Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Eudaimonic Meaning: A Process Model of Mindful Positive Emotion Regulation

Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Eudaimonic Meaning: A Process Model of Mindful Positive Emotion Regulation:

… here we describe the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory, from which we derive a novel process model of mindful positive emotion regulation informed by affective science, 

in which mindfulness is proposed to introduce flexibility in the generation of cognitive appraisals by enhancing interoceptive attention, 

thereby expanding the scope of cognition to facilitate reappraisal of adversity and savoring of positive experience. 

This process is proposed to culminate in a deepened capacity for meaning-making and greater engagement with life.

Unlike hedonic approaches to happiness, which depend on obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain, eudaimonic well-being is characterized by a sense of purpose and meaningful, positive engagement with life that arises when one’s life activities are congruent with deeply held values even under conditions of adversity.

We propose that through the mechanism of reappraisal, mindfulness may generate eudaimonic meaning and foster flourishing in life…

To reiterate, the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory asserts that mindfulness facilitates positive reappraisal in that it evokes a decentered mode of awareness in which thoughts and emotions are viewed from a metacognitive perspective - allowing for the flexible construction of more adaptive appraisals. By mindfully accepting experiences instead of perseverating on them, cognitive resources are freed up to broaden the scope of attention to encompass pleasurable and meaningful events and thereby build motivation toward purposeful engagement with life…

The aim of this therapeutic process is not to anesthetize the individual from difficult life experiences by regulating thoughts and emotions “away” with some Pollyanish delusion, but rather, to promote commitment to valued action and imbue life with a sense of purpose. Ultimately, mindfulness may be the fulcrum upon which reappraisals can be leveraged in service of living with the freedom, and therefore, the responsibility, for constructing a more meaningful and eudaimonic existence.

In 2017, Pursue Meaning Instead of Happiness

In 2017, Pursue Meaning Instead of Happiness:

“But should happiness really be the only goal that motivates us?

Research by the two of us shows that the happy life and the meaningful life differ — and that the surest path to true happiness lies in chasing not just happiness but also a meaningful life. Psychologists have started to look more closely at how seeking happiness affects people, and unearthed some unsettling trends. The pursuit of happiness, it turns out, negatively affects our well-being.

ja-dark: Raises important emphasis on meaningfulness over shallowness, though it’s not a binary thing. Or another way to put it, hedonic happiness vs. eudaimonic well-being… (see below excerpt). Also a nice emphasis on not ‘putting on rose-tinted glasses’–as Rick Hanson has said, it’s about removing your ‘smog-covered glasses’ so you can see the good, neutral, and bad more clearly, increasing your resilience and well-being.

Here’s some articles connecting savoring, reappraisal, mindfulness, and meaningfulness: 

For me, the primary goals for all this stuff is to increase learning, hence I always add the ‘limitless’ tag… the rest is icing.

Rich Points

Rich Points:

“For the most part people take for granted the many different cultures – national, ethnic, religious, geographical, class, gender, age, and much more – they are members of. Yet when a rich point occurs some of our invisible cultural jackets become apparent to others and ourselves.

In anthropological speak, a rich point is when one “languaculture” meets another. Languaculture is the idea that language isn’t simply about syntax, spelling and vocab. Speaking is also about background knowledge, cultural translation and local context. “

ja-dark: I first mentioned rich points here. In that post, the author(s) weave the idea of ‘rich points’ in with cognitive metaphors (via Lakoff, whom I’ve been mentioning recently with regards to political frames). This new post I’m linking (originally posted a few years ago in The Guardian T&T) seems to change the focus to subcultures within a nation’s culture… ah, the uncanny horror of political rich points.

Economic Efficiency vs Democracy: ... Regulating Digital Markets in Times of Post-Truth Politics

Economic Efficiency vs Democracy: ... Regulating Digital Markets in Times of Post-Truth Politics:

“In times of digitisation, citizens increasingly rely on news disseminated by Internet intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter or Google for making political decisions.

Such firms design their business models and their algorithms for selecting the news according to a purely economic rationale. 

Yet recent research indicates that dissemination of news through social platforms in particular has a negative impact on the democratic process by favouring the dissemination of false factual statements, fake news and unverifiable conspiracy theories within closed communities and, ultimately, leads to radicalisation and a division of society along political and ideological lines. 

Experience based on the Brexit referendum in the UK and the recent presidential elections in the US highlights the ability of populist political movements to abuse the business rationale of Internet intermediaries and the functioning of their algorithms in order to win popular votes with their ‘post-truth politics’…

Recent research explains that such intermediaries and the algorithms they employ play a major role in facilitating the dissemination of populist and even ideological ideas, as well as conspiracy theories. Social platforms allow users to gather in homogeneous communities where various biases are easily reaffirmed and almost never challenged. The economic logic of the algorithms of Internet intermediaries contributes to this development by targeting the users with information that appeals to them.

However, regulating this issue is not an easy task. Disseminating and receiving such information is part of the freedom of expression and the freedom of information that form the legal backbone of Internet communication. Outright censorship has no place on the Internet. Yet there is a case for regulation…

Potential regulation should target the criteria on the basis of which the algorithms for selecting information are designed…

In addition, legislatures and competition agencies should refrain from unnecessarily intervening where Internet intermediaries facilitate access to media content that contributes to media plurality.”

ja-dark: I’m guessing that there’s going to be a wealth of data analytics/text mining/et cetera projects in this brave new era we’re entering. (Speaking of eras, I pointed out the arbitrariness of the ‘year’ concept in a previous post; recently Emily Gorcenski darkly joked that we’re moving to semantic versioning for years, 2017′s going to be 2016.1).

RelatedA hypothetical neurological association between dehumanization and human rights abuses

Think Sharply with C#: How to Think like a Computer Scientist

Think Sharply with C#: How to Think like a Computer Scientist:

The above version is named after Downey’s Think Like a Computer Scientist series of free ebooks and their variations, it’s nice but not all that similar to those books; this second version, Think Sharp: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, appears to be the the standard variation of the series for C#.

Previously I posted about the lesser known variation of the series for C.

I should mention the latter book takes a ‘late objects’ approach; I actually prefer ‘early objects’, which is what’s used in the first book (that is Think Sharp uses late objects, Think Sharply uses early objects).

  • From the foreword of Think Sharply: “I advocate early exposure to objects, terminology, and use-cases, but late synthesis of objects.”
  • From the foreword of Think Sharp: “Some books introduce objects immediately; others warm up with a more procedural style and develop object-oriented style more gradually. This book uses the ‘objects late’ approach.”

Automatic detection of xenophobic narratives: A case study on Swedish alternative media

Automatic detection of xenophobic narratives: A case study on Swedish alternative media:

Abstract: In this work we use text analysis to analyze communication on a set of Swedish immigration critic alternative media sites. 

Our analysis is focused on detecting narratives containing xenophobic and conspiratorial stereotypes. We are also interested in identifying differences in emotional tone and pronoun use in a comparison with traditional media. 

For our analysis we have used the text analysis tool LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and a set of dictionaries made to capture a xenophobic narrative. 

The results show that there are significant differences between regular media and immigration critic alternative media when it comes to the use of narratives and also in the emotional tone and pronoun use.

ja-dark: An excerpt: “… the use of third person plural in online groups such as American Nazis and animal rights groups has been proven to be the best single predictor of extremism” (”they”, related to outgroup focus).

Always good to be aware of narratives in the media… you can watch the generation and competition of frames/narratives unfold in real-time via Google News and social media. Usually it’s very narrow and predictable. On that note, contrary to current narratives, I’d imagine BO is playing Go, not chess or checkers, and recent events are going as planned.

"European culture entered a phase where the neat criteria of good and evil, of truth and falsity,..."

“European culture entered a phase where the neat criteria of good and evil, of truth and falsity, disappeared; at the same time, man became a plaything of powerful collective movements expert in reversing values, so that from one day to the next black would become white, a crime a praiseworthy deed, and an obvious lie an obligatory dogma. Moreover, language was appropriated by the people in power, who monopolized the mass media and were able to change the meaning of words to suit themselves.”

- Czeslaw Milosz, late WWII poet and Nobel laureate

A hypothetical neurological association between dehumanization and human rights abuses

A hypothetical neurological association between dehumanization and human rights abuses:

We propose that the new social neuroscience of empathy suggests that both the vagaries of the definition of ‘legal personality’ or legal fiction of ‘personhood’, and hate speech, that explicitly and implicitly dehumanizes may (in their respective ability to artificially humanize or dehumanize) manipulate the neural mechanisms of pain empathy in ways that pose more threat to human rights (international or as embodied in constitutional, rights-based democracies) than previously appreciated.

Robert Mark Simpson recently suggested that hate speech might be justifiably legally restricted when there are ‘good reasons to think that hate speech contributes to, and/or bears responsibility for, the establishment and perpetuation of identity-prejudicial social hierarchies, and the harms and disadvantages that individuals experience as a consequence of those hierarchies’…

Further, there seems to be growing tension, in America, between liberal political theory’s dual commitments to free speech and social equality. This tension is apparent in increased calls for more legal restriction of hate speech, particularly on the Internet. People and political leaders are alarmed not only by how rapidly hate speech can spread online, but how fast it can incite horrific, widespread acts of terror and violence, whether perpetrated by lone wolves or in a coordinated fashion…

While sudden, violent surges of hatred seem to make no sense, that may be because, under the theory we present, hate speech goes around the conscious mind to directly attack the emotional mechanisms of empathy or moral restraint. This proposed automatic effect of hate speech on the brain, coupled with the ability of such a verbally transmitted, emotional contagion of disempathic hatred to be spread at exponential speed over the Internet, or this capacity of hate to go viral in the violent flash of a mob, may warrant a reconsideration of current, jurisprudential concepts of ‘immanence’ and ‘incitement’, as has long been argued by other commentators…

Perhaps, neuroscience will … refute the folk psychology that name calling is harmless or put to bed the nursery rhyme, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones/But words will never harm me’. For, as emerging neuroscience, children bullied online and Holocaust survivors equated with cattle can tell you, such platitudes may not be true, even in a literal, physical sense.

ja-dark: A round-up of the responses. I relate this to the ongoing discourse about censorship, especially in our brave new world.

We can’t have it both ways: language has power, and the research shows speech, sign, and writing affect us, both good and bad. It’s valid for individuals and platform providers to decide whether, what, and how to enable certain language acts, through moderation, self-censorship, boycotts, policies, etc. 

Once you set aside the intuition pumps abstracting those decisions about language away into deceptive, partisan talk about an infinite regress of censoring violent media or thought-policing deviance, the everyday choices are really quite simple and clear. Will proactively principled reason or aggressive, moralizing stupidity prevail?

A languaculture (I’ve been using ‘linguaculture’, sort of like that better, more process-oriented) that’s the product of critical thought and discourse will involve both freedom and constraint.

Constructing mental time without visual experience (PDF)

Constructing mental time without visual experience (PDF):

“Across many cultures, people create spatial representations of time. The direction of mental timelines often follows the direction of writing in a person’s language. A new study demonstrates that blind participants (who read with their hands) also show mental timelines that follow reading direction.

How do we think about abstract ideas like time or number, things that we cannot see or touch? Across many cultures and contexts, people create spatial representations of both time and number. We use spatial language (e.g., the past is ‘behind’ us), create spatial artifacts like graphs, timelines, and calendars, and automatically construct mental time-lines and number lines when reasoning… “

ja-dark: I’m reminded how thanks to calendrical and linguistic constructions we’re indoctrinated into, people really think “2016″ is a thing, and even anthropomorphize it. Really messes with our well-being/mental time travel. Construct your own epochs, if you must (apparently 3 seconds is an average; there’s also 90 minutes). Choose wisely the spectrum of future selves you perceive and interrupt.

Related: The Geopolitics of the Gregorian Calendar

Semi-related (w/ regards to measurements based on ‘universals’): 

Previously.

Bonus (Gall–Peters projection).

+ (On data and ‘deep time’.)

Big history

Annales School of historiography

More on frames, etc.

When you can predict the adversary’s response, don’t just sardonically repeat it/reinforce the frames, “Oh I bet they’ll just say [insert predictably stupid thing the adversary does, reinforcing the frame]”; don’t do their work for them… if you can predict it, preempt it, with a generalized, indirect nullification (general and indirect to remain proactive and independent and adhering to Pareto principle in effects rather than reactive and dependent/reinforcing on a more insignificant scale).

Remember, aim at creating an evidence-/fact-based, frameless ecology where ‘victory’ is incidental (moot, really). ‘Hostile terraforming’/’xenoforming’ the cultural landscape so that partisan deception/trolls/etc. can’t survive.

If you know an event will be seen politically, present it apolitically while making sure to preemptively counter the predictable arguments/interpretations with simple evidence and logic, such that those attempts will be as blatantly vapid as possible to everyone, with the counterarguments inherently apparent to all observers. Note this is different from simply stating the facts, assuming they’ll be accepted.

Oh, and if you do spot an ally making that mistake, you can turn it around/undermine the reinforcement by imposing new frames over the premise, riffing onto a new tangent, in part pre-empting the adversary’s ‘response to the prediction’, cutting off further reinforcement, and in part continuing the xenoforming process (though with a less effective contribution due to the smaller scale).

Previously.

Three Tips From A Neuroscientist On How To Be The Most Productive Multitasker

Improving Multitasking Ability through Verbal Memory Training

Improving Multitasking Ability through Verbal Memory Training:

“… Results indicated that multitasking performance was improved by memory intervention. In addition, working memory ability measures were strongly related to multitasking performance, contributing to a large variance. Findings suggest that performance in certain multitasking situations can be improved through training in verbal memory.”

Previously.

Growing up multitasking: The costs and benefits for cognitive development

Growing up multitasking: The costs and benefits for cognitive development:

Current work, play, and learning environments require multitasking activities from children, adolescents and adults. Advances in web-enabled and multi-function devices have created a perceived need to stay “wired” to multiple media sources. The increased demand that these activities place on information processing resources has raised concerns about the quality of learning and performance under multitasking conditions…

… when the cognitive, perceptual, and response requirements of the tasks are controlled by the individual, when learning platforms are developmentally appropriate, and when practice is permitted, multitasking strategies can not only be successful but can result in enhanced visual and perceptual skills and knowledge acquisition. Future progress will come from advances in cognitive and computational modelling, from training attention and brain networks, and from the neuroergonomic evaluation of performance that will enable the design of work and learning environments that are optimized for multitasking.

Previously:

“Page from Alfabeto in sogno (1683) by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli....



“Page from Alfabeto in sogno (1683) by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli. The title translates as Dream Alphabet — Source.”

(via The Human Alphabet)

The Last Word: We Fetishize Dying Languages. Why?

The Last Word: We Fetishize Dying Languages. Why?:

“I’m not saying that language endangerment and extinction shouldn’t be deeply significant to native communities and to linguistic science, or that threatened languages aren’t important to celebrate and sustain. But when issues like these are so visible in mainstream publications whose audiences don’t or didn’t speak minority languages — and when there are real advances in scientific understanding other than death and extinction — something else has to be going on. Shaylih Muehlmann, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, articulated what that might be in a paper about the countdown of last things — speakers, birds, fish, water resources — in a Mexican indigenous community she studies: “It is hard to avoid the impression that there is a certain pleasure with this spectacle of extinction, or at the least a powerful anticipation,” she writes.”

The Varieties of Anger

The Varieties of Anger:

The author has written on language and emotional granularity, etc., before.

See also.

How we perceive colour depends on our culture and language

How we perceive colour depends on our culture and language:

14. 12. 2016 | Our ability to see a colour is limited by the words we have to describe it, and understanding more about colour categorisation could help improve how colour-blind children learn and develop, according to Anna Franklin, professor of visual perception and cognition at the University of Sussex in the UK, who is studying the relationship between language development and colour perception.

Our theory is that there are natural fault lines that infants have; that we have a basic template for categorising colour and then you personalise that depending on what distinctions are important in your culture…

What we found is that there are differences but they come relatively late – a couple of hundred milliseconds after seeing the colours. This suggests that two people with different colour lexicons see the colours the same way but they think about colour differently: the difference is cognitive rather than visual. Language hasn’t fundamentally altered how colours are seen, but it has changed what we do with the information.

Related

The universe is beige

The universe is beige:
image

ja-dark: Old news, but I just learned of it; apparently the universe was ‘blue’, is now ‘beige’, and is gradually shifting to ‘red’. See also this Guardian post on it, and Wikipedia article. Original source.

I first heard of it as ‘univeige’ which I think is cool, so I’m calling it that. I’m not calling it ‘cosmic latte’. In the name of all that’s good, these ‘scientific dad jokes’ in naming must stop; though we don’t have to go back to invoking the connotations of scientific racism/linguistic imperialism via von Linné (’Linnaeus’), either.

#FFF8E7; R:255 G:248 B:231

Previously.

Roses are red; violets are — red? How color terms arise - The Boston Globe

Roses are red; violets are — red? How color terms arise - The Boston Globe:

“Normally, you’d think that colors are just something that are out there in the world, right? No matter who you are, that thing over there is red,” said Simon Greenhill, a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “Berlin and Kay’s stuff says, ‘That’s not the case — not all languages have categorized these things, and not all languages care about these distinctions.’ ”

But this study reveals a few exceptions to that theory. For one, a language in the Pama-Nyungan family called Kukatj named four colors, but none of them are red. The phylogenetic tree also shows that another language, Wayilwan, may have lost blue as a color term over time, which goes against the idea that there’s a universal way that these words develop.

“It suggests that at least some of the steps of Berlin and Kay’s hierarchy might need to be looked at more closely,” Greenhill said. “Cultures might also be determining how people divide up or categorize the world into different colors.”

ja-dark: This is another article covering the study I posted about previously. Feel like there’s some mixed messages; but it falls in line with the notion that language culturally evolves in a way that’s constrained by the brain (and physics, etc.) [not language-specific modules/grammar in the brain, etc.], while at the same time language affects us in various ways (it’s a complex adaptive system).

For instance, learning new color names produces rapid changes in the brain and affects our perception of color (as noted in that link, and here).

That is, names affect perception of color, among other things.

See also.

A Positive Technology System for the Promotion of Well-Being

When I was posting again the other day about VR and well-being, etc., I also read a paper about positive technology; I was going to write a round-up post about some of these papers I just read, but I’ll mention this one early, as it featured Singin’ in the Rain as a mood-lifter, and I decided to re/watch it. 

Then Carrie Fisher, daughter of one of the stars (amongst other things, obviously, including ‘mother’ of Gary), Debbie Reynolds died. Now her mother has died, after apparently saying, ‘I want to be with Carrie.’

Well. Perhaps no better time to watch it.

Speaking of musicals, I watched this Japanese musical, Memories of Matsuko, about 10 years ago and quite enjoyed it. Starring Miki Nakatani (Ringu) and Eita (Summer Time Machine Blues).

Rescued history

Rescued history:

“It is often said that history is written by the victors. But it’s probably more true to say it is written by the people who have the opportunity to write.

One example of this is the study of black women, their lives and their experiences. Documents recording the lives of black women are often historically obscure, hidden away in vast library collections and unintentionally misleadingly titled or cataloged. Other historical documents don’t mention black women directly but may still offer clues. Until recently, researchers had no good way of recovering this “lost history” from either of these categories of documents.

Ruby Mendenhall, an associate professor of sociology, African American studies and urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois (UI) at Urbana-Champaign, is leading a collaboration of social scientists, humanities scholars and digital researchers that hopes to harness the power of high-performance computing to find and understand the historical experiences of black women by searching two massive databases of written works from the 18th through 20th centuries. The team also is developing a common toolbox that can help other digital humanities projects…

Words translated into numbers, graphics

To make sense of the huge datasets, the investigators turned to two sets of computational techniques: topic modeling and data visualization.

Topic modeling looks at how often certain keywords appear in connection with other terms. For example, a book that contains the word “negro” – at the time considered the most respectful term to describe black men and women – the word “vote” and the word “women” might offer clues about black women’s participation in the women’s suffrage movement.”

ja-dark: They’re also looking at 3D photogrammetry of cultural objects.

Related:

derek beaulieu: “Arnold McBay has started printing visual...



derek beaulieu: “Arnold McBay has started printing visual poems by his peers on birch bark he has harvested himself – i’m honoured to have work in his early attempts alongside Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin and bpNichol … “

Japanese designer creates beautiful VR map of his country,...

居眠り [いねむり] (inemuri)

“But in Japan, napping in the office is common and culturally accepted. And in fact, it is often seen as a subtle sign of diligence: You must be working yourself to exhaustion.  

The word for it is “inemuri.” It is often translated as “sleeping on duty,” but Dr. Brigitte Steger, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at Downing College, Cambridge, who has written a book on the topic, says it would be more accurate to render it as “sleeping while present.”  

That, she said, captures Japan’s approach to time, where it’s seen as possible to do multiple things simultaneously, if at a lower intensity. So you can get credit for attending that boring quarterly sales meeting while also dreaming of a beach vacation…

An unwritten rule of inemuri is to sleep compactly, without ‘violating spatial norms… '”

via

  • Wiktionary definition
  • The Japanese Art of Not Sleeping -  “Even though the sleeper might be mentally ‘away’, they have to be able to return to the social situation at hand when active contribution is required. They also have to maintain the impression of fitting in with the dominant involvement by means of body posture, body language, dress code and the like.”

Text Mining in Python through the HTRC Feature Reader | Programming Historian

Text Mining in Python through the HTRC Feature Reader | Programming Historian:

Summary: We introduce a toolkit for working with the 13.6 million volume Extracted Features Dataset from the HathiTrust Research Center. You will learn how to peer at the words and trends of any book in the collection, while developing broadly useful Python data analysis skills.

ja-dark: Posting about VR and ‘awe’ earlier had me reflecting on immersion in the ‘unnatural’ for awe (I cited Irrational Exuberance along with TheBlu in that post); another experience I forgot to mention that really stuck with me was roaming around Van Gogh’s The Night Café with the HTC Vive; I enjoyed simply subimposing my Steelcase Leap beneath the crude (or merely the ‘expression’ of crudeness, heh) furniture in the café and (blindly, for now, VR tech’s still evolving) sipping barrel-aged Roquette 1797. (My favourite spot, I think, was the green canapé [I think that’s right] in a corner across from the pianist.)

Which is related to this post (repost, actually) simply in the possibilities of teaching/exploring history through technology… (reminded now of Assassin’s Creed and the French Revolution). [On the design/architecture.]

Mostly unrelated but fun: The Salon by Nick Bertozzi

Previously: Studying Japanese with Anki in a virtual Japan

Also related: The overview effect and Google Earth VR… (also, taking off in the Apollo VR experience… ) 

Margaret Atwood dancing with the text of her novel,...



Margaret Atwood dancing with the text of her novel, Hag-Seed.

via:

“In the fall, South Bank Center and the publishers of Margaret Atwood’s new novel Hag-Seed reached out and asked if I’d be interested in making interactive animations based on the book and I jumped at the opportunity. The book involves a solitary figure who comes from the theatre world and for me it seemed really fitting to make animations that involve the body and typography.

One of the highlights of the year was watching Margaret Atwood dance with it at the South Bank Center, seeing her own words wrap around her silhouette.”

Image by Zach Lieberman; via: How Do You Say ‘Welcome in...



Image by Zach Lieberman; via: How Do You Say ‘Welcome in Europe in Maltese? Check an Arabic Dictionary

“Since 1934, Maltese has been written in a Latinate alphabet; before then, no standard existed, and people sometimes wrote in a mix of Latin and Arabic letters.

Some common phrases in Maltese use all Arabic-based words, like “il-foqra ssibuhum dejjem maghkom” (pronounced il-FO-ra ssibu-hom DEY-yem MAA-kom), which means “the poor will always be with you.””

A slave mother's love in 56 carefully stitched words

A slave mother's love in 56 carefully stitched words:

For about $300, a 9-year-old girl named Ashley was sold as a slave.

Her mother, Rose, remained a house slave at a mansion in South Carolina.

This was the 1850s, roughly a decade before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, setting slaves free.

Before mother and daughter were separated, Rose gave Ashley a cotton sack. It contained a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans and a lock of her hair. Rose told Ashley it was filled with love — always.

Ashley never saw her mom again, but she kept the sack. It was handed down through the generations, along with her story, to her granddaughter, Ruth Middleton.

Ruth, a single mom in Philadelphia, stitched her family story into the cloth sack in 1921.

She was sold at age 9 in South Carolina

it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of

pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her

It be filled with my LOVE always

she never saw her again

Ashley is my grandmother

Ruth Middleton

1921

(via Tiny Tokyo time lapse 2014 by Day and Night - YouTube)

What can Camus teach us about the importance of plain language, in the face of totalitarianism?

What can Camus teach us about the importance of plain language, in the face of totalitarianism?:

“It is only by getting the words right — using them to describe the world as it is — that one can act right and make the world a bit more the way it should be. Totalitarianism — for which the plague stands as the allegorical representation — gets words wrong. It uses them to describe a world that isn’t, and thus creates a world that should never be. It comes to power through the harrowing of terror, and maintains itself through the hollowing of language.”

Why millennials are choosing strange baby names

Why millennials are choosing strange baby names:

“Unusual and truly unique names are becoming far more common – and the trend reflects some profound shifts in our culture.”

Previously:

Stuplimity

Stuplimity:

“What constitutes the stuplime will become increasingly clear below, but for now I will briefly describe it as a syncretism of boredom and astonishment, of what “dulls” with what “irritates” or agitates, of excessive excitation with extreme desensitization or fatigue.”

Related.

Shadowtime

Shadowtime:

Shad-ow-time

noun

Definition:  A parallel timescale that follows one around throughout day to day experience of regular time. Shadowtime manifests as a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.

One might experience shadowtime while focused on goal oriented conversations, tasks and planning for life as we have known it—(college, career or occupational ambitions).  During such moments there is a creeping sense of concerns that would make all said planning obsolete or seem unimportant, i.e. the collapse of the Larson B Ice Shelf that will accelerate sea level rise. Shadowtime may also occur when one is preparing a meal for their child and suddenly realizes that an endemic flower that had evolved over 42.7 million years has gone extinct within their child’s lifetime.

Related: Zenosyne

Have you ever felt ‘solastalgia’?

Have you ever felt ‘solastalgia’?:

“While you won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, philosopher Glenn Albrecht once coined one such word while working at the University of Newcastle in Australia. ‘Solastalgia’ – a portmanteau of the words ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’ – is used not just in academia but more widely, in clinical psychology and health policy in Australia, as well as by US researchers looking into the effects of wildfires in California.

It describes the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home, explains Albrecht.”

ja-dark: Reminds me of weltschmerz. What’s the word for the creeping horror of remote oil spills and nuclear reactor leakage…

The Potential of Virtual Reality for the Investigation of Awe

The Potential of Virtual Reality for the Investigation of Awe:

The emotion of awe is characterized by the perception of vastness and a need for accommodation, which can include a positive and/or negative valence. 

While a number of studies have successfully manipulated this emotion, the issue of how to elicit particularly intense awe experiences in laboratory settings remains. 

We suggest that virtual reality (VR) is a particularly effective mood induction tool for eliciting awe. VR provides three key assets for improving awe.

 First, VR provides users with immersive and ecological yet controlled environments that can elicit a sense of “presence,” the subjective experience of “being there” in a simulated reality. 

Further, VR can be used to generate complex, vast stimuli, which can target specific theoretical facets of awe. 

Finally, VR allows for convenient tracking of participants’ behavior and physiological responses, allowing for more integrated assessment of emotional experience. 

We discussed the potential and challenges of the proposed approach with an emphasis on VR’s capacity to raise the signal of reactions to emotions such as awe in laboratory settings.

ja-dark: Irrational Exuberance and TheBlu come to mind. Unforgettable experiences.

A Positive Technology System for the Promotion of Well-Being: From the Lab to the Hospital Setting

A Positive Technology System for the Promotion of Well-Being: From the Lab to the Hospital Setting:

“A positive psychology intervention (PPI) has been defined as a “treatment method, strategy or intentional activity that aim to cultivate positive feelings, behavior, or cognition” [1]. Currently, there is evidence that shows the effectiveness of PPIs to enhance the subjective and psychological well-being and to reduce depressive symptoms in both general and clinical populations (e.g. anxiety, depression) [13]. PPIs are mainly brief and simple exercises or activities that can be implemented as part of one’s daily routine, and where commitment and daily practice become essential elements of their efficacy [4].”

See also: The Manufactured Intimacy Of Online Self-Care

(via Hello Tokyo on Vimeo)

Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety

Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety:

“…  while positive or negative MTT had no effect on anxiety, engaging in neutral MTT seems to significantly reduce stress over 15 days.”

I’ve emphasized Positive MTT (Positive Mental Time Travel) previously, and positive reappraisal for dealing with stress and anxiety, but it’s also worthwhile to look at Neutral MTT (Neutral Mental Time Travel) to combat anxiety.

Methodology excerpt for neutral:

“‘Please try to imagine, in the most precise way, four neutral and routine events that could reasonably happen to you tomorrow. Imagined events have to be things really neutral that you are used to doing such as taking a shower, tying your shoe laces, or turning on your computer.’ 

Examples of neutral events imagined by participants were as follows: ‘waking up at 9 a.m.,’ ‘borrowing my friend’s cognitive neuroscience book,’ ‘taking the bus to work’, and ‘brushing my teeth.’

… imagined events had to be specific (i.e., they had to take place in a specific place at a specific moment) and inviting them to take the time to think of elements, namely, phenomenal characteristics, such as where and when the event could take place, the people and objects surrounding, other sensory details such as sounds or smells, and emotions they could feel.”

The authors speculate that the improvements from neutral MTT result from the planning, organizing nature of the time travel, with its focus on daily routines, citing this paper as an example of planning having a causal benefit on well-being (that paper used a ‘GAP’: ‘goals and plans’ intervention).

As for Positive MTT:

“‘Please try to imagine, in the most precise way, four positive events that could reasonably happen to you tomorrow. You can imagine all kinds of positive events, from simple everyday pleasures to very important positive events.’ 

Examples of positive events imagined by participants were as follows: ‘Before going to bed I could get an SMS from my ex-boyfriend,’ ‘I can see myself savoring meatballs and French fries at the Rendez-Vous Cafe´ with my friend Evelyne right after our Pilates workout at the gym’, and ‘After a great job interview, the boss of the company I applied to work for will tell me I got the job.’”

ja-dark: Don’t forget the ‘could reasonably happen’ part. I mean, there’s a place for the unreasonable, but if you attach expectations to the MTT that are likely to disappoint when the time comes around, it’s quite unsavory.

How Talking About Trump Makes Him Normal In Your Brain

How Talking About Trump Makes Him Normal In Your Brain:

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You made a point of, you know, you can report on what Trump means, but you don’t have to use his language, as in “Trump wants to get rid of regulations.”

GEORGE LAKOFF:  Right. Very important, what is a regulation? A regulation is a protection from corporations doing things that would harm the public, for example, putting poisons in the environment. But if you said, Trump is getting rid of protections and he said for every one protection, we’re gonna get rid of two protections -

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

- very different.

On intolerance

I have a complicated feeling about this: I’ve seen instances of progressive types being too intolerant/oppressive for little cause (though I seldom say anything since it’s low on the priority list when you have actual fascists out there). Generally, I think the whole anti-PC thing is just people being ironically hypersensitive. Not all constraints are bad, however. Self-censorship is par for the course for functioning societies, and constraints can force us to look at novel pathways and make us more creative.

On the other hand, I don’t buy the idea that you should never suppress the speech of others, out of the fear that it leads to an infinite regress of everyone censoring everyone.

I believe it’s possible to ruthlessly censor without falling into this trap with specific conditions, but it’s a tricky idea I have never been able to word properly. I’ll give it another try.

The condition is something as follows: only censor/oppress an entity (group/person) if that entity is censoring/oppressing another entity, and that latter entity is not censoring/oppressing anyone, or if they are, it’s based on the same condition: the entity they’re censoring/oppressing is censoring/oppressing an entity that isn’t censoring/oppressing another entity, and so on. 

That is, “it’s OK to suppress those whose aim is to suppress those who aren’t suppressing”. So imagine group A is oppressing group B. Before you ‘stop’ group A (’free speech!’), check whether group B is oppressing group C. If they’re not, then stop group A. 

But if group B is oppressing group C and if group C isn’t oppressing anyone, leave group A alone, stop group B. 

If group B is oppressing group C and if group C is oppressing group D, check the same conditions as above: if group D isn’t oppressing anyone, then group C should be stopped, group B should not be, and group A should be, and ‘you’ (group Z?) should not be. If group D is oppressing group E, repeat condition check.

That seems like some kind of infinite forward recursion, but in reality, infinite recursion doesn’t happen (see this post for an example in language), it’s always going to be limited to a few groups with justifications that are pretty straightforward (bigoted attacks based on race, etc.). So the intuition pump of infinite recursion or masked motivations might make it seem implausible in theory, in reality I think it works.

At any rate, the idea’s a work in progress. I do think Twitter and the like need to be much more ruthless about neo-Nazis, etc., cutting through the BS.

I go back and forth with this idea. I’ve had it for years but only shared it with one person, as I alternate between thinking it’s foolish vs. awesome.

Go Ask Alice: Addendum to note on frames

Addendum to this post.

A key idea here that can not be stressed enough: don’t be Alice from the film 28 Weeks Later. Spoiler: Alice was an asymptomatic carrier of the Rage virus. She wasn’t savagely killing people, but those who came into contact would be infected.

So my previous post was an idea for how to engage without reinforcing the adversaries’ messages. Practice memetic hygiene: don’t contaminate, vaccinate. 

I’ve personally used that technique for years to great effect. It’s actually a very brutal, ruthless game in a sense, but it’s only as brutal as the adversary makes it through their own aggressive bigotry, etc. being turned against them.

But ‘xenoforming’/terraforming the media/memetic landscape can’t occur with just one person doing that. So despite my qualms of giving away the trick I decided to share the idea. (Perhaps we can use tree-planting as part of this metaphor, complete with the caveats to tree-planting regarding placement.)

I realized that it’s not a problem to share it, because terra-/xeno-forming is something only those who believe in change and growth can accomplish. And it’s inexorable, really. After all, it’s based in and fueled by frameless reality. Far superior to propaganda.

Relatedly, Lakoff talking about frames more and more actively won’t hurt its effectiveness, it’ll just keep spreading awareness of the importance and use of frames if you address it.

I’ll try and come up with better examples of my technique later.

A Brain Scientist Explains How To Turn Trump Into A 'Loser'

A Brain Scientist Explains How To Turn Trump Into A 'Loser':

“So how to defeat a master of self-promotion like Trump?

Start by pointing out that Trump is the biggest popular vote loser ever to win the Electoral College.

“Don’t let anyone forget it,” Lakoff suggests. “Keep referring to Trump as the minority president, Mr. Minority and the overall Loser. Constant repetition, with discussion in the media and over social media, questions the legitimacy of the minority president to ignore the values of the majority.”

Trump’s unique status as the most unpopular man ever to enter the White House can chip away at his core “Strict Father” appeal, which explains why pointing it out irritates him so much.

“There are certain things that strict fathers cannot be: A Loser, Corrupt, and especially not a Betrayer of Trust,” Lakoff writes.

Trump’s conflicts of interests and their potential for corruption are also unprecedented in American history and any retreat from his promise to preserve Medicare must be framed as a catastrophic betrayal.

But Lakoff warns Democrats against “showcasing Trump, keeping him in the limelight” and urges them to instead to focus on reinforcing the values of the “American Majority” movement.”

How to Help Trump

How to Help Trump:

“Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message.

Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.

When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.

Nobody knows this better than Trump. Trump, as a media master, knows how to frame a debate. When he picks a fight, he does so deliberately. He tweets or says outrageous things, knowing they will be repeated millions and millions of times. When the news media and Democrats repeat Trump’s frames, they are strengthening those frames by ensuring that tens of millions of Americans hear them repeated over and over again.

Quick: don’t think of an elephant. Now, what do you see? The bulkiness, the grayness, the trunkiness of an elephant. You can’t block the picture – the frame – from being accessed by your unconscious mind. As a professor of brain science, this is the first lesson I give my students. It’s also the title of my book on the science of framing political debates.

The key lesson: when we negate a frame, we evoke the frame. When President Richard Nixon addressed the country during Watergate and used the phrase “I am not a crook,” he coupled his image with that of a crook. He established what he was denying by repeating his opponents’ message.

This illustrates one of the most important principles of framing a debate: When arguing against the other side, don’t use their language because it evokes their frame and not the frame you seek to establish. Never repeat their charges! Instead, use your own words and values to reframe the conversation.”

ja-dark: In that post, Lakoff states he’ll be more regularly posting about this vis-a-vis the minority President-Elect. Very welcome, people need to take more notice.

Stoicism Now: Conversation with Massimo Pigliucci

Stoicism Now: Conversation with Massimo Pigliucci:

Stoicism was recently likened to the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On”. How well does this maxim reflect the essence of Stoicism?

You won’t find that phrase in any of the ancient Stoic texts, but you are right, it has become associated with the current popularization of Stoicism. I think that’s fine, so long as we understand what the phrase means within a Stoic context. Most importantly, it does not mean that we should go through life with a stiff upper lip because that’s the best we can do in a world that is fundamentally not going to change. Instead, it means that one should keep a level-headed attitude because that’s the best way to tackle complex problems. Sometimes to “carry on” means to start a revolution, as one of the Stoic role models, Cato the Younger, did against what he saw as the tyranny of Julius Caesar.

ja-dark: Deconstructing ancient philosophies for contemporary life advice; both Skye Cleary and Massimo Pigliucci seem very savvy–Cleary is noted here and has written on ‘existentialism and romantic love’ before, though one wonders whether it’s worthwhile to maintain the original -ism at all, or just take what’s useful, research it for evidence it works (as is done with meditation), and discard the rest. Else you’ll end up with many people looking to the source to ‘interpret’, either promoting new angles to milk the meme for all its worth, new frames to interpret through, warring factions each trying to define the limits and staying within the imagined confines with their rival self-help books and that terrible creature, the guru (or do they call them life coaches now).

Stuff in the interview about emotions reminds me of reappraisal, mentioned in posts here under the happiness tag–or limitless, I forget.

How learning a new language improves tolerance

How learning a new language improves tolerance:

“Language learning inevitably involves learning about different cultures…

Researchers Hanh Thi Nguyen and Guy Kellogg have shown that when students learn another language, they develop new ways of understanding culture through analyzing cultural stereotypes. They explain that “learning a second language involves the acquisition not only of linguistic forms but also ways of thinking and behaving.

The second way that adult language learning increases tolerance is related to the comfort level of a person when dealing with “tolerance of ambiguity.”

Someone with a high tolerance of ambiguity finds unfamiliar situations exciting, rather than frightening. My research on motivation, anxiety and beliefs indicates that language learning improves people’s tolerance of ambiguity, especially when more than one foreign language is involved.”

Note on frames

I’ve been posting about the problems with frames vs. facts, and how negating frames merely reinforces them. I’ve posted about the incredibly popular ‘argument from hypocrisy’ (”but so-and-so did this first/too’), and there’s also the newly pertinent ‘burden of proof’ issue partisan conspiracy theorists are using.

Another popular thing I’ve seen besides the gaslighting, projection, tu quoque, etc. I noted here when describing empathy vs. necessary inhumanity and ‘xenoforming’ (of the media landscape) is posters on social media preemptively predicting stereotypical responses, as if being able to predict the obvious replies to bigotry, etc., and pointing it out gives the bigot authority and invalidates those responses (predictive lampshading?). (It’s also an attempt at a ‘chilling effect’: don’t vocalize your dissent, it will make you a ‘caricature’, a simplifying label/insult to be harassed and threatened as less than human).

“Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed.” - Thoreau

And of course the idea of creating ‘memes’ (the Internet version) is another way to give a veneer of authority: turn whatever rubbish thought you have into a picture quote with a pop icon and hope it gets elevated by a Photoshopped celebrity character endorsement. A tragicomic sock puppet show. It’s tied to the appeal of quotes; quotes can be nice when they point us to historical parallels or refer to a pool of insights, but they’re no substitute for original thought (nor is simply reblogging/retweeting/regramming). Most quotes online seem to be intended to freeze thought, to get you to conform to a particular framework. Painting a blue pill red.

I tentatively recommend a simple way to engage when dealing with dishonest actors, or those so unreasonable that the goal isn’t to convince them, but to speak to lurkers and future readers while developing your own ideas in an objective way (using a dialectical process) and fueling your own continuous research and learning.

It’s a two-pronged approach: direct and indirect. The direct is optional (it may not be possible or worthwhile to directly reply without reinforcing frames, getting bogged down).

“Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” 
― Twain

  • The first is to not directly allow the presuppositions of the adversary even to refute; it doesn’t matter whether they are trolling or simply being an imbecile: dismiss the implications/presuppositions at face value, cut it off at the knees. However I personally feel about Jerry Lewis, the recent viral interview is a good example: he saw through the questions’ implications about age and change and nostalgia, the narrative frame the interviewer wanted to contain the interview in, and in a brutal, concise way he wouldn’t let himself be contained by the frame and shut those presuppostions down without reinforcing them. It goes beyond reinforcing frames, though… when we go after the easy stuff (ad hominem, shallow politicizing), we tend to normalize them (think making fun of Bush’s ‘nucular’ or Trump’s hair), or give them ammunition when the easy stuff turned out ‘too good to be true’ (from the partisan politicization standpoint), inflating stories about hate crimes that turn out to be fake giving neo-Nazis the opportunity to deny hate crimes exist–gaslighting.
  • I wonder if more examples are needed. It’s like when someone makes a joke with a premise and a punchline, and the premise assumes an alleged truth that you reject. Respond to the premise’s presupposition, not to the punchline (when you refute the presupposition, don’t even deign to acknowledge it, this may take the sardonic form of taking the punchline as a literal statement, because a punchline without the setup is just a dumb statement). The joke as a whole never becomes the topic directly, it never reaches that point. Bad jokes, jokes with faulty premises, are just statements of ignorance, hate, or stupidity.
  • I also recommend a cool exterior in engagements. Always remember you’re talking to a human being (directly or indirectly, e.g. a troll or a bot). That doesn’t mean empathizing with an attacker as they attack you. More like the polite tones a doctor might use as they perform surgery. Necessary inhumanity (see the end of this post). See also point 6 here.

“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.”  ― Dijkstra

  • The second is to process what they said inwardly, and to indirectly respond by creating your own response(s) by proactively producing your own frames conveying your ideas, in a standalone way that can be generalized to all readers without falling back into the frame vs. frame discourse. Sometimes this may require moving to a different social medium (say, from a language-learning forum to a microblog, or from a blog’s comments section to your own blog). Sometimes creating a new, seemingly unrelated thread that can stand on its own (proactive and independent, remember, not a reinforcement/extension/rehash that relies on linking back to an original post/set of frames) is all that’s necessary.

Always strive for that flexible and porous meta-framing or framelessness, a metacognitively narrative mindset which deconstructs and disintegrates partisan frames… 

Humans are always biased. But this process allows you to transcend bias and communicate a-/multi- partisan-ly while remaining motivated by imperfect, biased agendas you’re continually evolving into/from/above. Create a sustainable ecology of compelling, digestible, evidence-driven fact-spreading that considers frames carefully, always fluid.

I would say play Go, not Chess, but maybe it’s both… micro-level Chess, macro-level Go…

Perhaps this approach will destroy the tribal bubbles and vapid vs. negative atmosphere on the online ecosystem, flooded with spam, bots, propaganda, etc. Have you tried doing ‘neutral’ news searches on the major sites like Google or Twitter? Disturbingly propagandistic and abusive when not simply empty pop talk elevated (algorithmically?) over factual and important yet exhaustingly negative news of substance.

mutual | Free On-Line English Dictionary | Thesaurus | Children's, Intermediate Dictionary | Wordsmyth

mutual | Free On-Line English Dictionary | Thesaurus | Children's, Intermediate Dictionary | Wordsmyth:

This should’ve been word of the year, with a very simple definition. It doesn’t sound as cool as the two words following it in this context, but it’s the most important part.

Against Empathy

Weiqi vs Chess: The thin ‘red’ line between smart and subtle power

Sartre, viaRelated.+



Sartre, via

Related.

+

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but..."

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

- Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism” (PDF)

"If the facts don’t fit the frame, it’s the facts people reject, not the frame."

"The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands out the much greater business of..."

“The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands out the much greater business of plunder.”

- Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”

‘Post-truth’: Orwell would spot the doublespeak in the Word of 2016

‘Post-truth’: Orwell would spot the doublespeak in the Word of 2016:

“Defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, post-truth has been around since 1992. But a spike in usage coinciding with the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s election as US president saw the word selected by the lexicographers as the one that best captures the “ethos, mood or preoccupations” of 2016.

But it doesn’t. Post-truth is an adjective. We think of adjectives as describing how things are. Yet the popularity of post-truth is a perfect illustration of how the world can be remade through being redescribed. Words are a fundamental means by which we understand what is happening around us, and they can bewitch us into all manner of errors.”

Related: Orwell: “Politics and Language

Graduating Dr. Briana Morrison: Posing New Puzzles for Computing Education Research

Graduating Dr. Briana Morrison: Posing New Puzzles for Computing Education Research:

Guzdial: “I’ve written about Briana’s work a lot over the years here:

But what I find most interesting about Briana’s dissertation work were the things that didn’t work:

  • She tried to show a difference in getting program instruction via audio or text. She didn’t find one. The research on modality effects suggested that she would.
  • She tried to show a difference between loop-and-a-half and exit-in-the-middle WHILE loops. Previous studies had found one. She did not.”

I studied full-time for 8 months just for a Google interview

I studied full-time for 8 months just for a Google interview:

ja-dark: Note the section on spaced retrieval (two processes: spacing and testing, which is what most people are actually referring to when they say spaced repetition) is actually a top highlight.

Related.

The Great A.I. Awakening

The Great A.I. Awakening:

“How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services – and how machine learning is poised to reinvent ocmputing itself.”

“Unpresidented act” - presumably meant to be ‘unprecedented’, but given the pre-inaugural blunder...

“Unpresidented act” - presumably meant to be ‘unprecedented’, but given the pre-inaugural blunder that led to it, ‘unpresidented’ seems accurate–perhaps it’s an improvised version of Nadsat; maybe it can be a new word for the ongoing ‘horrorshow’ (to appropriate another Nadsat term allegedly from the Russian khorosho or ‘good’).

Conservatives can be convinced to fight climate change with a specific kind of language

Conservatives can be convinced to fight climate change with a specific kind of language:

“… a new study shows that focusing on the past is effective in getting conservatives (who are much more likely than liberals to deny climate change) to act to protect the planet. Specifically, the key is using pro-environment messaging that focuses on preserving a greener past, rather than averting future climate disasters, according to the study, published Dec. 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

The temporal framing did not affect liberals’ pro-environmental beliefs, and they were as likely to react positively to past-focused statements on climate change as those framed with a forward looking message. However, in the charity experiment, liberals tended to allocate more money to the future than the past…

While climate change advocates often frame their message as a warning about the future of the planet, it might be more effective to speak about restoring the environment to its former glory.”

ja-dark: Related to this post on language, framing, and politics: specifically note two things. 

First, the media’s framing of events and politicians: “Because framing has the ability to alter the public’s perception, politicians engage in battles to determine how issues are framed. Hence, the way the issues are framed in the media reflects who is winning the battle.” (Wikipedia)

Second, how trying to negate the opposition’s frames reinforces them (the “white bear problem”).

A more concise excerpt from the post from cognitive linguist George Lakoff:

“A worldview is an overall conceptual framework you use to understand the world. It is made up of mental “frames,” which are used to understand situations… Political worldviews are complexes of political frames that fit together coherently…

In politics, institutions, and cultural life, words tend not to be neutral. Instead their meanings are defined with respect to political worldviews… Politically charged meanings put the other side in a bind. The opposition cannot answer directly…  Instead they have to change the frame.

In general, negating a frame just activates the frame and makes it stronger…  The first thing that is, or should be, taught about political language is not to repeat the language of the other side or negate their framing of the issue…

The more neural circuits are activated, the stronger their synapses get, and so the more easily they can be activated again and the more likely they will become permanent. The more the public hears one side’s language, or sees one side’s images, the more that side’s frames will be activated, and the more that side’s worldview will be strengthened in the brains of those who watch and listen. This is why political communication systems matter.”

See also: How Media Frames Structure Our Political Perceptions

ja-dark: This was created in a different era… Perhaps...



ja-dark: This was created in a different era… Perhaps Parasyte can provide alternatives.

"When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword; do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet."

“When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword; do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.”

-

Ch’an proverb

image

ja-dark: I like Indy’s response better… Indy always has the best responses.

"Remember that unbalanced force is evil; that unbalanced severity is but cruelty and oppression; but..."

“Remember that unbalanced force is evil; that unbalanced severity is but cruelty and oppression; but that also unbalanced mercy is but weakness which would allow and abet Evil. Act passionately; think rationally; be Thyself.”

-

Aleister Crowley

Related.

Now you can fact-check Trump’s tweets — in the tweets themselves

Now you can fact-check Trump’s tweets — in the tweets themselves:

ja-dark: A Chrome extension… clearly Twitter won’t do anything about the chilling cesspool of propaganda and abuse it has become, so I suppose more reliance on personal tools is necessary. At least until we have our own personal AI to help us filter idiocy and lies–personal filters to eliminate bubbles/echo chambers, that is; perhaps designing these sorts of systems will give designers and users greater self-awareness of algorithmic bias to avoid, as well. I find it disturbing, by the way, how many neutral, simple Twitter and Google News searches turn up a lot or even mostly propaganda, fake news, abuse, etc.

Maybe someone can write a neural-network-based extension which flags logical fallacies like the argument from hypocrisy. A semi-quantitative nudge to not slip into the endless polarizing loop of partisan rhetorical debate. I imagine the Internet would break.

Running Lots Connects Your Brain Regions

Running Lots Connects Your Brain Regions:

“Researchers are finding all sorts of benefits to running, beyond cardio: It clears your mind, helps alleviate depression, teaches you to become comfortable with the uncomfortable. A new brain-imaging study suggests that it wires your brain in smart ways, too.

As noted by Gretchen Reynolds at the New York Times, University of Arizona scientists recruited 11 competitive runners and 11 dudes who said they hadn’t exercised in the past year, then had them go into brain scanners for a new paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.”

Related

The Science Behind Well Being and Trail Running

image

(Above picture is Alan Turing.)

ja-dark: Don’t forget, if you’re into endurance training, you’ll want to do keto (carbs < 50 net grams, get a couple grams extra sodium per day).

As for trail-running… you’d be amazed how many trails are lurking just around the corner from where you live, I suspect. Those parks and rec people are sneaky like that.

image

I have noted some of my personal caveats to ‘nature’ and well-being in the past, but two things worth noting are A) the actual physical aspects of the environment mentioned in the Related link, and B) the memory-enhancing element of having ready-made environmental variability (see this post on changing study locations to increase learning).

Perhaps in the future as VR/AR hardware develops with more sensory simulation, lighter weights, wireless tech, etc, on the software end we’ll have generative photorealistic environments to run through at home on treadmills (at the same time, expect more and more photogrammetry).

If you start running, worth taking a few minutes to read up on proper form, and looking into a basic stretching routine (maybe Active Isolated Stretching or your own scientifically deconstructed version of yoga).

Don’t be afraid of using some vanity as motivation and getting cool athetlc gear to inspire you, but be practical and minimal about it (although not necessarily minimal in running shoes, seems like maximalist vs minimalist in shoes is a point of contention).

See also: Google teams up with Improbable to recreate the real world in VR

Oh, and I’ve posted about research into the benefits of exercise on language learning here, and also on this tumblr under the limitless tag.

Spelling it out: why Cyrillic slogan streetwear is the new punk uniform for post-Soviet teens

Spelling it out: why Cyrillic slogan streetwear is the new punk uniform for post-Soviet teens:

ja-dark: I suppose we’ll all be seeing a lot more Cyrillic in the future. You may want to download some Anki decks.

via: https://twitter.com/DBanksy/status/806790810804981760ja-dark...



via: https://twitter.com/DBanksy/status/806790810804981760

ja-dark: I know nothing of their politics, but the President of the UK Supreme Court was quite on point here. Our lives are mostly made up of written language, directly or indirectly.

“Once you see Trump’s hair in the New York Times’...



“Once you see Trump’s hair in the New York Times’ typeface you can’t ever unsee it (I’m so sorry)”

ja-dark: I see mime makeup and a long eyepatch, also. Reminds of an utterly un-subtle Hitchcock silhouette. Or maybe… (I’m giving you an out there, see that instead. Customize yourself at every level. Proactive, not reactive. Metacognitively adaptable filtering.)

Japan Sends Long Electric Whip Into Orbit, To Tame Space Junk

Japan Sends Long Electric Whip Into Orbit, To Tame Space Junk:

“A cable that’s as long as six football fields has been launched into orbit — and when it’s deployed, it’ll test an idea to knock out debris that threatens astronauts and spacecraft.”

Yale linguists explore the evolution of color in new study

Yale linguists explore the evolution of color in new study:

“The naming of colors has long been a topic of interest in the study of human culture and cognition — revealing the link between perception, language, and the categorization of the natural world. A major question in the study of both anthropology and cognitive science is why the world’s languages show recurrent similarities in color naming. Linguists at Yale tracked the evolution of color terms across a large language tree in Australia in order to trace the history of these systems…

The results of the Yale study provide an detailed history of color terms across a large language sample, say the researchers, and show that there is broad support for the color terms defined by the Berlin and Kay theory, which maintains that the world’s languages share all or part of a common group of color names, and that terms for these concepts evolve in a specific order.”

Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self

Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self:

“The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.” 

Lazy coders are training artificial intelligences to be sexist

Lazy coders are training artificial intelligences to be sexist:

“When we humans hear a word like “rose”, it might elicit a rush of related memories and associations: romance, the color red, Shakespeare’s famous line.

But for a machine, there aren’t many clues about meaning in the arrangement of a handful of letters. So, to help computers form associations, programmers often turn to a popular technique called “word-embedding”. The computer crunches through a pile of text, mapping words as “vectors” that demonstrate their relationships to each other.

Through these maps, machines can learn the subtle linguistic links that come intuitively to humans. For example, a king and a queen pair together – they’re both royalty – but one is male and the other female… Pile all these relationships together, and you’ve got some semblance of meaning.

Inevitably, less agreeable associations are also hiding in those calculations… Imagine, for example, that you’re doing a web search for “CMU computer science phD student”. The search engine wants to give you the most relevant results, so perhaps it decides to show you links to male students first, sidelining women to the second page. In an unfortunate loop, this also makes women look even less likely to be programmers, reinforcing the bias…

Perhaps we could make algorithms that can strip these mistakes back out of software. Kalai’s group has come up with tools to tweak the word maps without losing much of the original meaning. For example, certain words could be reset to gender-neutral. Other words, like “grandma” and “grandpa”, could be “equalised”, making them more similar in meaning without losing the gender essential to their definition.”

Free ebooks: Machine Learning with Python and Practical Data Analysis

Design Patterns for Deep Learning Architectures

Design Patterns for Deep Learning Architectures:

“Pattern Languages are languages derived from entities called patterns that when combined form solutions to complex problems. Each pattern describes a problem and offers alternative solutions. Pattern languages are a way of expressing complex solutions that were derived from experience. The benefit of an improved language of expression is that other practitioners are able to gain a much better understanding of the complex subject as well as a better way of expressing a solution to problems.

The majority of literature in the computer science field, the phrase “design patterns” is used rather than “pattern language”. We purposely use “pattern language” to reflect that the field of Deep Learning is a nascent, but rapidly evolving, field that is not as mature as other topics in computer science. There are patterns that we describe that are not actually patterns, but rather may be fundamental. We are never certain which will are truly fundamental and only further exploration and elucidation can bring about a common consensus in the field. Perhaps in the future, a true design patterns book will arise as a reflection of the maturity of this field.”

(via MNIST tutorial with TensorFlow - O'Reilly Media) ja-dark:...



(via MNIST tutorial with TensorFlow - O'Reilly Media)

ja-dark: My first thought was the katakana ヲ (を [wo]).

Python Data Science on Twitter

Python Data Science on Twitter:

“The Python Data Science Handbook is now available! The entire book is also openly published as Jupyter notebooks”:

https://github.com/jakevdp/PythonDataScienceHandbook

How Hackers Think: A mixed-method study of mental models and cognitive patterns of high-tech wizards

How Hackers Think: A mixed-method study of mental models and cognitive patterns of high-tech wizards:

“Hackers account for enormous costs associated with computer intrusion in a world increasingly reliant on computer and Internet-based technologies. In the general sense, a hacker is a technologist with a love for technology and a hack is an inventive solution executed through non-obvious means. They speak the language of code which propels the evolution of our information technology. 

This makes hackers the solvers of our largest, most complex issues. They seek out weaknesses in computers and networks that can be used to steal data or impact the functionality of the entire Internet. In consequence, they are experts at solving poorly understood and challenging problems in a variety of settings requiring deep understanding of technical details and imagination. 

Hacking is an activity that requires exceptional cognitive abilities. Through explanatory, sequential mixed methods research completed over three empirical studies, I discover how the mental models and the cognitive skills and traits of skilled hackers affect the way they learn and perform forward thinking. Proficient hackers construct mental representations of complex systems and their components. As they learn and interact with the system, their mental models evolve and become more reliable. 

This research reveals that hackers use these continuously evolving cognitive structures to conceive of future results through speculative forecasting. These models are instrumental in setting the hacker’s expectations about effects of actions, planning of actions, and ways of interpreting feedback. 

This dissertation makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on the mental models and cognitive faculties of hackers and practice through the development of evidence-based and research-informed strategies for improving the cognitive mechanisms necessary for hacking. 

The findings will be useful for leaders and managers in private, government, and nonprofit sectors with an interest in the advanced thinking required for cybersecurity and innovation. 

Additionally, this research contributes to the development of strategies for developing and managing effective hackers and improving talent identification and recruitment performance. It can serve as the foundation for the development of a training platform that improves the cognitive abilities necessary for effective hacking.”

“A spatial map of the rightwing fake news ecosystem. Jonathan...



“A spatial map of the rightwing fake news ecosystem. Jonathan Albright, assistant professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, “scraped” 300 fake news sites (the dark shapes on this map) to reveal the 1.3m hyperlinks that connect them together and link them into the mainstream news ecosystem. Here, Albright shows it is a “vast satellite system of rightwing news and propaganda that has completely surrounded the mainstream media system”. Photograph: Jonathan Albright”

(via Google, democracy and the truth about internet search | Technology | The Guardian

“And the constellation of websites that Albright found – a sort of shadow internet – has another function. More than just spreading rightwing ideology, they are being used to track and monitor and influence anyone who comes across their content. “I scraped the trackers on these sites and I was absolutely dumbfounded. Every time someone likes one of these posts on Facebook or visits one of these websites, the scripts are then following you around the web. And this enables data-mining and influencing companies like Cambridge Analytica to precisely target individuals, to follow them around the web, and to send them highly personalised political messages. This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go.”” )

(Which was via: The Field of Cultural Evolution is Vital Now:

“The image above was taken from this article in the Guardian about the hidden patterns that lurk within the vast information networks of the internet. It reveals a decentralized web of authoritarian, hateful, and fear-based rhetoric against women, Jews, Muslims, and people of color.

This meshwork of influence has grown organically throughout the lifetime of the World Wide Web without anyone seeing it and few knowing that even a part of it might exist. And fewer still exploring whether it might be an influence on the world. It has parasitized the “knowledge ecologies” for news and information — with unmeasured and largely unknown consequences on global events.” )

Before race mattered: what archives tell us about early encounters in the French colonies

Before race mattered: what archives tell us about early encounters in the French colonies:

“On the basis of her extensive work on underexplored archival material, Lamotte argues that before the 18th century, “race didn’t matter” in the same way that it came to matter when ideas of racial differences became more fixed, most famously by laws that prohibited marriages between different groups… although notions of blood and breeding were powerful in French society… the non-whites encountered by France’s empire-makers were initially not seen in the same terms…

In arguing that “race didn’t matter”, Lamotte does not suggest that prejudice did not exist (it most certainly did) but rather that it took forms dictated by the preoccupations of a society concerned with behaviour, dress and manners – and, of course, with religion. During an era in which the outward signs of politesse were paramount, newly-encountered people were judged, and categorised, in terms of their level of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ or (at the other end of the scale) ‘civilisation’…

‘Ultimately, ‘racial’ discourses developed partly because the French needed to justify discrimination and segregation towards people who were viewed as a threat to French socio-economic and imperialist ambitions. These people included slaves who could claim emancipation, free peoples of colour who presented as economic competitors, and the large Native American population, unreceptive to French policies of ‘Frenchification’ and evangelisation,’ says Lamotte.

‘People continue to use language and ideas inherited from colonial times, for example, by using the term ‘nègres’ to designate blacks, and maintaining the image of blacks as lazy or violent. As the result of centuries of prejudice, many blacks in the Antilles consider themselves inferior to whites. A creole phrase often heard in Guadeloupe when a baby is born is ‘ti-moun la bien soti’, meaning ‘your baby looks good as he or she doesn’t have too dark a skin’. Exposing the ways in which such views took hold over the centuries, and telling the tales of those who lived with prejudice, is a powerful way of shaping a more equal world.’”

Women are seen more than heard in online news

Women are seen more than heard in online news:

“It has long been argued that women are under-represented and marginalised in relation to men in the world’s news media. New research, using artificial intelligence (AI), has analysed over two million articles to find out how gender is represented in online news. The study, which is the largest undertaken to date, found men’s views and voices are represented more in online news than women’s.

What is perhaps more interesting is that the research found - while being overall under-represented - women appear proportionally more in images than men, while men are mentioned more in text than women.  A breakdown of topics shows that women feature more in articles about fashion, followed by entertainment and art, while being least present in topics including sport and politics.”

Intelligence rethought: AIs know us, but don’t think like us

Intelligence rethought: AIs know us, but don’t think like us:

“In artificial intelligence, a machine is said to learn when it improves its behaviour with experience. To get a feel for how machines can perform such a feat, consider the autocomplete function on your smartphone.

If you activate this function, the software will propose possible completions of the word you are typing. How can it know what you were going to type? At no point did the programmer develop a model of your intentions, or the complex grammatical rules of your language. Rather, the algorithm proposes the word that has the highest probability of being used next. It “knows” this from a statistical analysis of vast quantities of existing text. This analysis was done mostly when the autocomplete tool was being created, but it can be augmented along the way with data from your own usage. The software can literally learn your style…

Matching users to products on the basis of previous transactions requires statistical analysis on a massive scale. As with autocomplete, no traditional understanding is required – it does not need psychological models of customers or literary criticism of novels. No wonder some question whether these agents should be called “intelligent” at all. But they cannot question the word “learning”: these agents do get better with experience.”

Julian Jaynes’s Software Archaeology (1986) [PDF] - Daniel Dennett

Julian Jaynes’s Software Archaeology (1986) [PDF] - Daniel Dennett:

“… After all, one way of casting this whole question (the way that I usually think about it) is not “How do we get from the bricks, amoebas, and then apes to us?” but “How in the world could you ever make a conscious automaton, how could you make a conscious robot?” The answer, I think is not to be found in hypotheses about hardware particularly, but in software. What you want to do is design the software in such a way that the system has a certain set of concepts. If you manage to endow the system with the right sort of concepts, you create one of those logical spaces that Jaynes talks about.

This in fact is a ubiquitous way of talking in the field of artificial intelligence. Consider for instance the idea of LISP. LISP is a programming language. Once you have LISP, your whole vision of how a computer is put together, and what you can do with it, changes dramatically. All sorts of things become possible that weren’t possible before. Logical spaces are created that didn’t exist before and you could never find them in the hardware. Such a logical space is not in the hardware, it is not in the “organs”; it is purely at the software level. Now Jaynes, in his largest and most dispensable optional module, ties his entire theory to the structure of the brain and I am fascinated to know whether there is anything in that. But I am quite content to jettison the whole business, because what I think he is really talking about is a software characterization of the mind, at the level, as a computer scientist would say, of a virtual machine.

The underlying hardware of the brain is just the same now as it was thousands of years ago (or it may be just the same), but what had to happen was that the environment had to be such as to encourage the development, the emergence, of certain concepts, certain software, which then set in motion some sort of chain reaction. Jaynes is saying that when the right concepts settled into place in the preconscious minds” of our ancestors, there was a sort of explosion. like the explosion in computer science that happens when you invent something like LISP. Suddenly you discover a new logical space, where you get the sorts of different behaviors, the sorts of new powers, the sorts of new problems that we recognize as having the flavor of human consciousness.

Of course, if that is what Jaynes’ theory really is, it is no wonder he has to be bold in his interpretation of the tangible evidence, because this isn’t just archeology he is doing: this is software archaeology, and software doesn’t leave much of a fossil record. Software, after all, is just concepts. It is abstract and yet, of course, once it is embodied it has very real effects. So if you want to find a record of major “software” changes in archeological history, what are you going to have to look at? You are going to have to look at the “printouts,” but they are very indirect. You are going to have to look at texts, and you are going to have to look at the pottery shards and figurines as Jaynes does, because that is the only of course, maybe the traces are just gone, maybe the “fossil record” is simply not good enough.

Jaynes’ idea is that for us to be the way we are now, there has to have been a revolution—almost certainly not an organic revolution, but a software revolution—in the organization of our information processing system, and that has to have come after language. That, I think, is an absolutely wonderful idea, and if Jaynes is completely wrong in the details, that is a darn shame, but something like what he proposes has to be right; and we can start looking around for better modules to put in the place of the modules that he has already given us.”  

RelatedConsciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking

A god who discusses is lost.”

Colo. Doctor Calls Michelle Obama ‘Monkey Face’ With ‘Ebonic English’

Colo. Doctor Calls Michelle Obama ‘Monkey Face’ With ‘Ebonic English’:

Another entry in the file for linguicism/accent discrimination/etc. Which is ultimately, of course, another entry in the file for racism/xenophobia/maliciously willful ignorance (aka stupidity).

See alsoIntroducing diversity in online language analysis: Linguist, computer scientists teach machines African-American English dialect

Exams and SRSing

Forgot to update: Can happily verify that using my Anki add-on to create an ‘urgent’ tag that is automatically deleted after x reviews (technically by interval size, not reviews) to study for exams even at a fairly late stage can result in acing those exams without cramming.

Previously I’ve gone back and forth on this topic, but recently I came up with what I call [in tongue-in-cheek fashion, as always, I’m not patting myself on the back for coming with badass names or anything] ‘Voidness Way’…

The ideal gap setting in Anki (e.g. 250-500%) is one I’m still torn on; I enjoyed 400% for a while but think 300% may be superior, in that it may be more robust across situations and subjects.

I can also verify that combining spaced retrieval practice with a memory palace is excellent—the thing to note here is that I advocate flipping the typical mentality for SRS and memory palaces. That is, the primary experts on SRSing (and memory research in general) say to look at SRSing as being the primary method for active learning, not merely retaining and accessing what you’ve already learned, and the memory palace as being for storage and access.

Of course, ideally what you study in Anki for exams transfers to the questions on those exams [Note: even more ideally, if you must have exams for assessment in the first place despite their inferiority as learning tools, they should be designed to reflect the types of problems you’d encounter in the real world]. I intend to extend Black Geas in regards to some excellent formats related to this. That is, the cards should be in the same format as the question types…

You can typically accomplish this when professors provide past exams to study (assuming you get the answers also, else you won’t have corrective feedback, which is essential). The specifics are different, but the formats are the same, so what you’re being tested on is the ability to internalize procedures for reaching solutions and to show you can transfer your learning to solve novel problems.

Concrete advice on teaching in the wake of the presidential election (essay)

Concrete advice on teaching in the wake of the presidential election (essay):

“But there’s more to campus climate right now than millennials perceiving they have simply lost, or won, an election. A deeper upheaval has been unleashed, and college campuses, populated with large groups of young people, are experiencing the same high levels of racial and religious frustrations and tensions that are playing out on other national stages.

Faculty members on the front lines of interacting with students face some difficult questions. What role should we play in working through all of this? How do we fulfill our responsibilities to teach students while also finding ways to support them in a divisive and sometimes even dangerous climate?

Given all of this, our role as educators on college campuses today is as crucially important as it is complex. So how should we respond? We have outlined five action items that faculty members can contemplate in the coming days, weeks and months.”

Related: New website seeks to register professors accused of liberal bias and “anti-American values.”

Stop pretending there’s a difference between “online” and “real life”

Stop pretending there’s a difference between “online” and “real life”:

“As we continue forward into the twenty-first century, we need to take seriously the fact that every aspect of our lives has an online component, whether we like it or not. There is no such thing as an exclusively online movement or social experience. Our real lives, what we do in the streets, are wired into computer networks. The way those networks are run and the rules that govern them are explicitly political.

That means our civic responsibilities don’t end the instant we log into Snapchat or Reddit. What we do online matters. It can change the course of people’s lives and shift the balance of power in a nation. The sooner we take responsibility for what that means, the better.”

Related:

image

I trained a robot to write in Singlish, this is what it wrote.

I trained a robot to write in Singlish, this is what it wrote.:

“So recently I have been learning a thing or two about machine learning — one of the most basic form of artificial intelligence. Well, the best way to learn is by doing it. Hence, I decided to do a little project of getting a robot (in this case my computer) to write me a story in full Singlish.”

The reason you discriminate against foreign accents starts with what they do to your brain

The reason you discriminate against foreign accents starts with what they do to your brain:

“From experiments like these, it can be tempting to conclude that the cognitive difficulties imposed by non-native speech inevitably lead to social discrimination. After all, its linguistic bases seem so unavoidably natural. Even babies prefer native speakers of their language than they do non-natives.

But as Lev-Ari points out, the more we’re exposed to foreign accents, the more our brains train themselves to parse the speech more efficiently. In as little as four minutes, a person can improve how much they understand of speech with a foreign accent. So something else is going on…

Even though our brains are plastic, people’s stereotypes of non-native speakers are much less so. Ultimately, it’s those stereotypes that shape what will happen when people hear foreign accents.”

ja-dark: That’s a fairly recent article above. I also made a post about this and how to avoid it [for practical reasons if nothing else] a few years ago: Accent-independent adaptation to foreign accented speech (see also paragraph 3 here).

See alsoEnglish with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States

Related.

"Forget the terrible news you’ve read. Your mind’s at ease in an ostrich head!"

“Forget the terrible
news you’ve read.
Your mind’s at ease
in an ostrich head!”

-  Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss and “Adolf the Wolf” - “[Seuss] was also fond of...



Dr. Seuss and “Adolf the Wolf” - 

“[Seuss] was also fond of savaging America First, the country’s biggest and most influential isolationist organization…

Asked many years later about the rationale behind his scathingly funny wartime cartoons, [Seuss] gave a simple answer: ‘I just wanted the good guys to win.’”

Related (Seuss’ propaganda was not always ‘scathingly funny’.) [If the Dr. Seuss anti-Nazi thing goes viral, expect tu quoque to kick in from certain people who will point out those other cartoons.]

More on ‘America First’ in the modern age here at 7:30 into the clip.

New element names are the scientific equivalent of dad jokes

New element names are the scientific equivalent of dad jokes:

“The names were suggested back in June by scientists from the United States, Japan and Russia who discovered the synthetic elements. Each name bears special significance and creatively fits the guidelines, which require an element be named after a mythological concept or character, a mineral or similar substance, a place or geographical region, a property of the element, or a scientist…

Back in June, Jan Reedijk, who invited the element discoverers to brainstorm potential names explained, ‘It is a pleasure to see that specific places and names (country, state, city, and scientist) related to the new elements is recognized in these four names. Although these choices may perhaps be viewed by some as slightly self-indulgent, the names are completely in accordance with IUPAC rules.’”

ja-dark: I offhandedly insulted the new names in a previous post, careful not to invoke nostalgia for the man who dubbed himself ‘Linnaeus’ (see scientific racism, linguistic imperialism, etc.) [given the Latin and Greek of previous element names], and I’m posting this for the extra info on naming guidelines and corroborating acknowledgment of the lameness of the names.

But the whole enterprise showcases the ongoing importance of names to folks.

Chemists officially name four new elements, and here they are

Chemists officially name four new elements, and here they are:
  • “Nihonium (Nh), is element 113, and is named for the Japanese word for Japan, which is Nihon.
  • Moscovium (Mc), element 115, is named for Moscow.
  • Tennessine (Tn), element 117, is named for Tennessee.
  • Oganesson (Og), element 118, is named after Yuri Oganessian, honoring the 83-year-old physicist whose team is credited with being the top element hunters in the field.

‘The names of the new elements reflect the realities of our present time,’ IUPAC President Prof Natalia Tarasova says via press release. ‘Universality of science, honoring places from three continents, where the elements have been discovered — Japan, Russia, the United States — and the pivotal role of human capital in the development of science, honoring an outstanding scientist — Professor Yuri Oganessian’. ”

ja-dark: No fan of ‘Linnaeus’, but I had no idea how lame recent element names have become.

Ancient petroglyphs discovered in Jordan's Black Desert

Ancient petroglyphs discovered in Jordan's Black Desert:

“Archaeologists working in the Jebel Qurma region of Jordan’s Black Desert have uncovered more than 5,000 pieces of rock art over the last five years. They have identified elaborate inscriptions in Safaitic, an ancient script and dialect used in southern Syria and northern Jordan thousands of years ago, alongside depictions of animals.”

The Limitations of Teaching ‘Grit’ in the Classroom

The Limitations of Teaching ‘Grit’ in the Classroom:

”Howard said that exposure to trauma has a profound impact on cognitive development and academic outcomes, and schools and teachers are woefully unprepared to contend with these realities. Children dealing with traumatic situations should not been seen as pathological, he argued. Instead, educators need to recognize the resilience they are showing already. The instruments and surveys that have been used to measure social-emotional skills such as persistence and grit have not taken into account these factors, Howard said.

He questioned the tools used to collect data that suggest poor students and students of color do not have as high a degree of grit as middle-class and white peers.

The transformative potential in growth mindsets and social-emotional skills such as grit may be more applicable to students whose basic needs are already met. When asking the question of why some children succeed in school and others don’t, he said the educators and administrators tend to overestimate the power of the person and underestimate the power of the situation.”

Toward an exploratory medium for mathematics

Toward an exploratory medium for mathematics:

Michael Nielsen: “Written music originated as a recording medium, but became a creative medium in its own right. It made it much easier to compose complex, intricate music for many instruments and voices. This paved the way for Bach’s fugues, Beethoven’s symphonies, and much else. Written music became a medium for thought, a medium which expanded the range of musical ideas a composer could have, and thus changed music itself. It’s an example of a cognitive medium – a media environment to support and enable thought…

This essay is about the design of cognitive media for mathematics. Examples of such cognitive media include Mathematica, Matlab, Sage, and Coq. These programs are extremely useful, but conservative in that they represent mathematics in ways close to those used by mathematicians in (say) the 1950s, working with paper-and-pencil. By contrast, in recent years many people** A partial list includes Bret Victor, Marc ten Bosch, and Steven Wittens. have experimented with media which don’t treat the basic language of mathematics as given, but rather use computers to change the fundamental representations and operations used. Over the long run, I believe such experimentation will lead to radical changes in how we think about mathematics.

As a step in this direction, in this essay I’ll show a simple prototype medium which helps the user explore in a particular part of mathematics, namely, linear algebra.”

Related: Interactive Matrix Multiplication Calculator

Overview of the new neural network system in Tesseract 4.00

Overview of the new neural network system in Tesseract 4.00:

“Tesseract 4.00 includes a new neural network subsystem configured as a textline recognizer. It has its origins in OCRopus’ Python-based LSTM implementation, but has been totally redesigned for Tesseract in C++…

The Tesseract 4.00 neural network subsystem is integrated into Tesseract as a line recognizer. It can be used with the existing layout analysis to recognize text within a large document, or it can be used in conjunction with an external text detector to recognize text from an image of a single textline…

The neural network engine has not yet been integrated to enable the multi- language mode that worked with Tesseract 3.04, but this will be improved in a future release. Vertical text is also not yet supported, so support for Japanese and Traditional Chinese for example are limited to horizontally rendered text.”

ja-dark: cb4960′s very useful Capture2Text program uses Tesseract, I believe.

Datalegreya

Datalegreya:

“WHEN TEXT MEETS DATA VISUALISATION

Datalegreya is a typeface which can interweave data curves with text. It is designed by Figs, on the basis of open source font Alegreya Sans SC Thin by type designer Juan Pablo Del Perla

Datalegreya is available for a free download and keeps the original licence of the Alegreya SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, especially its sharealike and attribute properties.

A tool that helps to create datatypography is available at this url.”

Positive language is on the decline in the United States

Positive language is on the decline in the United States:

“Although recent election coverage may suggest otherwise, research shows that people are more likely to use positive words than negative words on the whole in their communications. Behavioral scientists have extensively documented this phenomenon, known as language positivity bias (LPB), in a number of different languages. 

However, a new study conducted by researchers at USC Dornsife and the University of Michigan, suggests that our tendency to use positive language has been on the decline in the United States over the past 200 years…”

On linguicism

Linguicism is akin to the other negative -isms: racism, classism, sexism, ageism. Linguicism can be defined as ideologies and structures which are used to legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language (on the basis of their mother tongues)."  — Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

On monolingualism

“For an individual, monolingualism almost inevitably means monoculturalism and monoculism, being able to see things with one pair of glasses only and having a poorly developed capacity to see things from another person’s or group’s point of view. It mostly means knowing not more than one culture from the inside, and therefore lacking relativity.

For a country, official monolingualism in the majority of cases means that all the minorities are oppressed and their linguistic human rights are violated.

To me monolingualism, both individual and societal, is not so much a linguistic phenomenon (even if it has to do with language). It is rather a question of a psychological state, backed up by political power. Monolingualism is a psychological island. It is an ideological cramp. It is an illness, a disease which should be eradicated as soon as possible, because it is dangerous for world peace.“  — Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

Related.

(via Alex J. Champandard on Twitter: “Awesome Typography:...

(via Sek Kathiresan, MD on Twitter: “Wow. Every scientist...

TensorBoard: Embedding Visualization

TensorBoard: Embedding Visualization:

Embeddings are ubiquitous in machine learning, appearing in recommender systems, NLP, and many other applications. Indeed, in the context of TensorFlow, it’s natural to view tensors (or slices of tensors) as points in space, so almost any TensorFlow system will naturally give rise to various embeddings.

To learn more about embeddings and how to train them, see the Vector Representations of Words tutorial. If you are interested in embeddings of images, check out this article for interesting visualizations of MNIST images. On the other hand, if you are interested in word embeddings, this article gives a good introduction.”

New typographic character?

While randomly re-consuming Colbert’s hilarious analysis of a song called “What makes you beautiful”, dubbing it ‘Möbius pop’, I noticed that the end quotation mark and comma in the subtitles appear to be vertically aligned; I think that might be a good standard, given the ‘debates’ about before/after re: British/American English… 

cabochatrees.zip for 'Falls' diagrams

cabochatrees.zip for 'Falls' diagrams:

By request, a re-upload of the cabochatrees package from Hideki Isozaki.

image

「値段が高いレストランはあまり好きじゃない。 」

Contexthttp://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/144706609402/how-to-automatically-make-your-own-pretty-japanese

Micromaking kindness: an experiment

Micromaking kindness: an experiment:

“So I’m starting with a simple version of my grander vision for A Kind Thing A Day. A Kind Thing A Day will start as a Twitter account that posts daily tasks for people to complete. Once someone has completed the task, they favorite the tweet and share it with their network via a retweet. The daily tasks increase the diversity of kind tasks that are presented and the fact that the tasks are delivered through Twitter maximizes their share potential.“

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say:

“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.”

ja-dark: The researchers note the idea of a “majority illusion” described in this article:

“… bots could contribute to a sort of majority illusion, where many people appear to believe something … which makes that thing appear more credible.”

I suspect for those who are vulnerable to it, the sight of all those likes and retweets, etc., likely has a morale-sapping, chilling effect, despite the token, phony nature of them.

The PropOrNot group, which seems to be anonymous and informal, made a Chrome extension.

An interactive matrix multiplication calculator for educational...



An interactive matrix multiplication calculator for educational purposes

matrixmultiplication.xyz

“One day it just snapped in my mind how the number of rows of the first matrix has to match the number of columns in the second matrix, which means they must perfectly align when the second matrix is rotated by 90°. From there, the second matrix trickles down, “combing” the values in the first matrix. The values are multiplied and added together. In my head, I called this the “waterfall method”, and used it to perform my calculations in the university courses. It worked.”

I WENT TO VISIT B.F. SKINNER AND THE OLD MAN PUT HIS HAND ON MY LEG AND I ASKED HIM, WELL, IF YOU...

I WENT TO VISIT B.F. SKINNER AND THE OLD MAN PUT HIS HAND ON MY LEG AND I ASKED HIM, WELL, IF YOU COULD JUST LEARN ABOUT THE BRAIN.

This is from the transcript of a C-SPAN interview with Temple Grandin. Technically she says ‘the old lech’, I think, and if ‘we’ could just learn about the brain; I think I prefer the all-caps version.

She discusses it here also: 

“I was shocked. I wasn’t in a sexy dress, I was in a conservative dress, and that was the last thing I expected." 

She remembers telling him, "You may look at them, but you may not touch them.”

So much to unpack from that.

“Ian Hamilton Finlay sculpture in Stuttgart, 1975; the word...



Ian Hamilton Finlay sculpture in Stuttgart, 1975; the word schiff (ship) is carved in reverse and can only be decoded when it floats reflected on water.”

How the alt-right uses internet trolling to confuse you into dismissing its ideology

How the alt-right uses internet trolling to confuse you into dismissing its ideology:

“For decades, the common wisdom online has been that the best way to interact with a troll is not to interact at all. But “don’t feed the trolls” failed spectacularly as a tactic during the 2016 election cycle, stunning many people who assumed the alt-right’s tactics were juvenile and easily seen-through…

As polls and pundits dismissed Trump’s chances of winning in the lead-up to the election, many people dismissed alt-right trolling, too…

One of the most significant and pernicious ways that members of the alt-right use trolling is to create a sincerity-proof chamber of distortion surrounding what their actual message is. They do this by pretending that what they’re really doing is satirically spoofing how progressives and members of the media view conservatives…“

ja-dark: I feel they were ‘fed’ by everything from 24/7 media coverage to insular, sarcastic tweets; of course, you could say this is because ‘don’t feed the trolls’ is part of the ‘don’t think about white bears’ problem of reinforcing the negative noted by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff. Memetic “carriers”. (‘Memetic’ from the original meaning of ‘meme’.)

(See:  A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do « George Lakoff )

We have a “negativity bias” and magnify/react to the negative, trying to clean our glasses with a dirty rag. I paraphrased neuropsychologist Richard Hansen before where he noted the aim to resolve the bias with a focus on positivity isn’t to put on rose-colored glasses, but to remove the smog-covered glasses and see things accurately.

In that sense, it’s better to reframe and reply on your own terms–not point by point as if there’s a false equivalency (in the grand scheme of things, the negative is a minority), reinforcing ridiculing labels and caricatures and assumptions, but more indirectly and asymmetrically, cutting the ‘virus’ off at the knees…

Living as/among avatars in a textual realm, words are actions. A seamlessly phony realization of the abstract is effectively a genuine, concrete realization of it, while impacting the ‘climate’. So as far as intentions go, take the entities’ actions at face value, even while aware they’re the tools of asymmetric warfare waged by human beings.

“Empathy” isn’t required–more like dispassionate sympathy, instead; practice a kind of necessary inhumanity and vivisect entities, peeling away the ‘face value’ and taking what’s useful (where available) from beneficial weeds and discarding the rest (redundancy keeps this process efficient by allowing one to discard the redundantly useless en masse).

Reframing the fruit of the above and passionately, genuinely affirming the constructive, creating and developing the garden, displacing misinformation (which has been 'given’ its sway). 

Focus on small, frequent proactions that are generalizable (think Pareto) and independent; a given result should be what one might call a total yet entirely incidental victory, so incidental you don’t even call it a victory (which requires an adversary). Asymmetric welfare.

Terraforming over conquering. (Or xenoforming, if you’re an anthropologist from Mars. I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned here.)

A Necessary Inhumanity? -- Richardson 26 (2): 104 -- Medical Humanities

A Necessary Inhumanity? -- Richardson 26 (2): 104 -- Medical Humanities:

“It is argued that the phrase “Necessary Inhumanity” more accurately describes the alienation required of doctors in some circumstances, than do modern sanitised coinages such as ‘clinical detachment’. ‘Detachment’ and ‘objectivity’ imply separation, not engagement: creating distance not only from patients, but from the self: the process may well be required, but where it becomes too extreme or prolonged, it can damage everybody, including patients, family members, doctors themselves, and wider society. An awareness of the history of health care in the context of our society might assist self reflection–might help keep initiates in touch with the culture they have been induced to leave and might help them remain humane despite the bruising process of training.”

ja-dark: To invoke ‘in-’ humane is to reinforce the humane (’don’t think about a white bear’; you can only be inhuman toward a human [in this context]); surgery, the act of cutting flesh as an act of inhumanity that only exists as it’s necessary to save the human. (Or/only if the human is a paying customer, I suppose.)

See also: The cultural background of the non-academic concept of psychology in Japan

Timely browser extension replaces ‘alt-right’ with ‘white supremacy'

Timely browser extension replaces ‘alt-right’ with ‘white supremacy':

The Stop Normalizing Alt Right browser extension is a way to avoid getting frustrated by websites or people who use the term “alt-right,” but it won’t actually affect whether people are using the phrase or not. It’s a trade-off between keeping tabs on what other people are saying, or excising the term “alt-right” from your browser for your own personal health.

Other similar browser extensions have popped up recently too, like this one that replaces “alt-right” with “neo-Nazi.”  

ja-dark: Interesting and important in purpose, but when I see that phrase ‘stop normalizing’, I’m reminded of the ‘white bear problem’… “Don’t think about a white supremacist.”

RelatedA Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do « George Lakoff

DefinedTerm: Asymmetric Welfare

DefinedTerm: Asymmetric Welfare:

“Asymmetric warfare is the fact that a small investment, properly leveraged, can yield incredible results.” 

ja-dark: Well, they tried.

Merkel fears social bots may manipulate German election

Merkel fears social bots may manipulate German election:

“Chancellor Angela Merkel’s biggest contender in next year’s German election campaign may not be a rival party leader but so-called “social bots” - software programmed to sway opinion on social media sites.

In her first speech to parliament since announcing plans on Sunday to seek a fourth term as chancellor, Merkel called for a debate on how fake news, bots and trolls can manipulate public opinion…

In a sign of how seriously Merkel is taking the matter, she invited Simon Hegelich, professor of political data science at the Technical University of Munich, to brief the executive committee of her Christian Democrats (CDU) on Monday.

“Merkel is really interested in the topic of bots and fake news and hate speech on the Internet and she’s very well informed,” said Hegelich.

While all of Germany’s political parties have said they will not deploy bots in the campaign, the fact that they are mostly anonymous makes it hard to work out who is behind them. Hegelich does not rule out third parties using them to try to discredit parties or politicians.

The head of the domestic intelligence agency raised concern last week about potential Russian interference in Germany’s election through the use of misleading media stories.”

Previously

Grammar: Radical Islamic terrorists: “Radical” puts Muslims on a linear scale and “terrorists”...

Grammar: Radical Islamic terrorists: “Radical” puts Muslims on a linear scale and “terrorists” imposes a frame on the scale, suggesting that terrorism is built into the religion itself. The grammar suggests that there is something about Islam that has terrorism inherent in it. Imagine calling the Charleston gunman a “radical Republican terrorist.”

Conventional metaphorical thought is inherent in our largely unconscious thought. Such normal modes of metaphorical thinking are not noticed as such. Consider Brexit, which used the metaphor of “entering” and “leaving” the EU.

There is a universal metaphor that states are bounded regions in space: you can enter a state, be deep in some state, and come out of that state. If you enter a café and then leave the café, you will be in the same location as before you entered.

But that need not be true of states of being. But that was the metaphor used with Brexit; Britons believed that after leaving the EU, things would be as before when they entered the EU. They were wrong. Things changed radically while they were in the EU.

ja-dark: Just some more of Lakoff’s insights into language in politics, from this post.

A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do « George Lakoff

A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do « George Lakoff:

Language in Politics

“… There are conservative and liberal vocabularies. “Save the planet!” is liberal. “Energy independence” is a conservative ‘dog whistle.’ It means dig coal and drill for oil and gas, even on public lands, and don’t invest seriously in solar and wind… Politically charged meanings put the other side in a bind. The opposition cannot answer directly. You won’t hear conservatives say “I don’t want to save the planet,” nor liberals say, “I’m against energy independence.” Instead they have to change the frame.

In general, negating a frame just activates the frame and makes it stronger… Liberals are often caught in this trap. If a conservative says, “we should have tax relief,” she is using the metaphor that taxation is an affliction that we need relief from. If a liberal replies, “No, we don’t need tax relief,” she is accepting the idea that taxation is an affliction. The first thing that is, or should be, taught about political language is not to repeat the language of the other side or negate their framing of the issue.

The Clinton campaign consistently violated the lesson… They used negative campaigning, assuming they could turn Trump’s most outrageous words against him. They kept running ads showing Trump forcefully expressing views that liberals found outrageous. Trump supporters liked him for forcefully saying things that liberals found outrageous. They were ads paid for by the Clinton campaign that raised Trump’s profile with his potential supporters…”

ja-dark: Lakoff’s a well-known ‘cognitive linguist’; he notes his book Don’t Think of an Elephant! in this piece, which relates to the ‘white bear problem’ (’Don’t think about a white bear’):

“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 1863

(Of course, we probably won’t have polar bears for long.)

I’ve written about scientific meditation before (esp. under the limitless tag); the second type I described is called Open Monitoring:

Open your awareness so that you do not fixate on any particular sensation, feeling, or thought. Maintain this open, reflexive awareness, also without judgment or emotional reaction when maintaining this state.

I’ve noticed that the more skilled you become at this (it’s a great tool for getting to sleep–you continually transition to ‘meta’ levels of reflection, letting go of progressively simple thoughts until the next thing you know, you’re waking up), the easier it becomes to dispense with bothersome thoughts without falling prey to the ‘white bear problem’.

I linked it in the original post, but this paper is quite accessible and informative on the two main meditation types (Focused Awareness and Open Monitoring).

Fake News Is Not the Only Problem

Fake News Is Not the Only Problem:

In a co-authored essay, John Borthwick and I define Media Hacking as the usage and manipulation of social media and associated algorithms to define a narrative or political frame. In that essay, we showed a few examples of ways in which individuals, states, and non-state actors are increasingly using Media Hacking techniques to advance political agendas.

More recently I’ve written about another form of media hacking — where Trump supporters successfully gamed Twitter’s trending topics algorithm to make the #TrumpWon hashtag trend worldwide after the first US presidential debate. As I was analyzing this data, it was striking for me just how organized this group of supporters seemed to be. They seemed to have been coordinating somewhere, all publishing to Twitter with the same unique keyword at the same time (a known tactic to get something to trend).

Computer scientists to Clinton campaign: Challenge election results

Computer scientists to Clinton campaign: Challenge election results:

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign is being urged by a number of top computer scientists to call for a recount of vote totals in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to a source with knowledge of the request.

The computer scientists believe they have found evidence that vote totals in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked and presented their findings to top Clinton aides on a call last Thursday.

The scientists, among them J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, told the Clinton campaign they believe there is a questionable trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners, according to the source…

Additionally, at least three electors have pledged to not vote for Trump and to seek a “reasonable Republican alternative for president through Electoral College,” according to a statement Wednesday from a group called the Hamilton Electors, which represents them.“The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as the last line of defense,” one elector, Michael Baca, said in a statement, “and I think we must do all that we can to ensure that we have a reasonable Republican candidate who shares our American values.” ”

Related

ja-dark: I wouldn’t get my hopes up…

Update: https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.42ria9dmm

Teens Vulnerable To Fake Digital News Stories, Stanford Study Finds

Teens Vulnerable To Fake Digital News Stories, Stanford Study Finds:

Related: Digital Native Fallacy

ja-dark: Similar flawed thinking probably led to acceptance of the terms ‘digital native’ and ‘millennial’.

Or ‘fake news’ instead of ‘propaganda’, etc. Doublespeak… like “anti-political correctness” as a euphemism for ‘casually bigoted and hypersensitive about it’…

Still, I think I see more adults fooled by fake ads & propaganda.

image

(via Research Blog: Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s...



(via Research Blog: Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System

“Part (a) from the figure above shows an overall geometry of these translations. The points in this view are colored by the meaning; a sentence translated from English to Korean with the same meaning as a sentence translated from Japanese to English share the same color. From this view we can see distinct groupings of points, each with their own color. Part (b) zooms in to one of the groups, and part © colors by the source language. Within a single group, we see a sentence with the same meaning but from three different languages. This means the network must be encoding something about the semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations. We interpret this as a sign of existence of an interlingua in the network.”

3 Tips to Help You Process Strong Emotions (and Respond Wisely)

3 Tips to Help You Process Strong Emotions (and Respond Wisely):

Now that the dust has settled just a bit on last week’s surprising and historic election, whatever your opinion of the outcome, you’re probably starting to try and sort through how exactly you feel about what happened and decide how to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the next four years.

Previously: Are you in despair? That’s good

See also: How You Can Find the Good in a Nasty Election Cycle

How the Naming of Clouds Changed the Skies of Art

How the Naming of Clouds Changed the Skies of Art:

The clouds in many 19th-century European paintings look drastically different than those in the 18th century. There are layers to their texture, with whisps of cirrus clouds flying over billowing cumulus, and stratus hovering low. Clouds weren’t classified by type until 1802, and their subsequent study influenced artists from John Constable to J. M. W. Turner.

Related: names/linguistic relativity

A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing (2016)

A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing (2016):

“Over the past few years, neural networks have re-emerged as powerful machine-learning models, yielding state-of-the-art results in fields such as image recognition and speech processing. 

More recently, neural network models started to be applied also to textual natural language signals, again with very promising results. 

This tutorial surveys neural network models from the perspective of natural language processing research, in an attempt to bring natural-language researchers up to speed with the neural techniques. 

The tutorial covers input encoding for natural language tasks, feed-forward networks, convolutional networks, recurrent networks and recursive networks, as well as the computation graph abstraction for automatic gradient computation.”

Language about climate change differs between proponents and skeptics

Language about climate change differs between proponents and skeptics:

Proponents of climate change tend to use more conservative, tentative language to report on the science behind it, while skeptics use more emotional and assertive language when reinterpreting scientific studies, says research from the University of Waterloo

“Tentative language would include words such as “possible,” “probable” or “might.” The terms “alarmist” and “wrong” are examples of emotional language.

Using a series of computational text analysis tools to measure the use of hedging or emotional words… examined two recent reports of opposing groups. The … (IPCC) holds that climate change is unequivocal and that humans influence climate, while the … (NIPCC) is skeptical of the human impact on climate change.

Although the IPCC clearly warns of the threat of climate change, the text analysis showed that their report used more cautious, less explicit language to present their claims… By contrast, the NIPCC report reinterprets the scientific findings with more certain, aggressive language to advance the case that human-made climate change is a myth.

“Given the scientific consensus that climate change represents a real threat, we might expect the IPCC report to exhibit a more assertive style, yet they don’t,” said Medimorec. “This may be because the charged political atmosphere has made climate scientists cautious in their choice of words.”

The study found substantial differences between the IPCC and NIPCC reports…

“The language style used by climate change skeptics suggests that the arguments put forth by these groups may be less credible in that they are relatively less focused upon the propagation of evidence and more intent on refuting the opposing perspective,” said Pennycook.”

The power of language and the language of power in Medieval Western Islam

The power of language and the language of power in Medieval Western Islam:

“EU research into rare Medieval documents has shed light on how language was used to assert imperial power over a diverse population under the Mediterranean Almohad Empire…

‘They wrote in rhymed prose and were often playing with language, with rhetorical innovations characteristic of great works of literature. Yet it is also an administrative language linked with the law - those letters were the creation of the law of the Empire and they became the specific voice of the authority of the Almohad rulers,’ continued Professor Buresi. 'They could take a word from the Koran and gave it a different meaning. So, openly they were claiming to be faithful to tradition, and able to say it was the true Arabic and Islam, but in fact they were innovating, and creating a new Islamic language of power.’

However, this also meant modern dictionaries could not help researchers understand the real intent of the texts. Fortunately, the research team also found Chancery manuals which explained how the letters should be written and the correct forms of words to use in different circumstances. There were hundreds of pages of explanations and rules, but also examples of missives which enabled researchers to decipher and interpret the language used.”

What does it mean to ‘normalize,’ exactly? - The Boston Globe

What does it mean to ‘normalize,’ exactly? - The Boston Globe:

“WHAT HAPPENS when a set of beliefs considered by many to be so fringe and so hateful are the winners of a national election? The losers beg that the behavior not be normalized. While warnings against normalizing President-elect Donald Trump have appeared all through the campaign, they’ve mushroomed since his election across the political spectrum. A Forbes article pleads, “Normalizing Trump: Why The Washington Media Must Break The Fluff Cycle.” A Media Matters piece claims, “60 Minutes Is Already Helping Normalize Trump’s Presidency.” The Lawfare blog discusses, “Donald Trump and the Normalization of Torture.” Meanwhile, the National Interest flipped the script, charging the press and Trump critics with “Normalizing Hysteria.”

“Normalize” is a word of the moment. But it, along with the idea of normalization, goes back to the 1800s. The earliest uses documented in the Oxford English Dictionary are related to biological processes, but one is a clear predecessor to today’s uses. A New York Times article from 1864 discusses how “… attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive.” The normalization of despotism is exactly what so many fear today.”

"Unite; for combination is stronger than witchcraft."

“Unite; for combination is stronger than witchcraft.”

- Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743-1803)

Your logical fallacy is tu quoque

Your logical fallacy is tu quoque:

/tuːˈkwoʊkwiː/

You avoided having to engage with criticism by turning it back on the accuser - you answered criticism with criticism.

“Pronounced too-kwo-kwee. Literally translating as ‘you too’ this fallacy is also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. It is commonly employed as an effective red herring because it takes the heat off someone having to defend their argument, and instead shifts the focus back on to the person making the criticism.”

ja-dark: You’ll be seeing this fallacy a lot on Twitter, etc. from a certain type of person, if you haven’t already, might as well learn the word for it.

You’ll see it used alongside gaslighting, ad hominem, normalization, and projection.

Gaslighting and tu quoque are closely tied up with conspiracy theories/misinformation. The idea is you spend your time amidst the abuse reacting to that (with the reaction labeled as overreacting/thought-policing and therefore justification for more abuse in a field of engagement chosen by the adversary), if the fear of being ridiculed as a stereotype/'meme’ doesn’t pressure you into silence.

Tu quoque is easy because humans are imperfect; we can never perfectly adhere to our aspirations. Of course, you never really fail at attaining ideals until you stop striving for them (you can also complacently lower the bar and normalize all the things you abhor).

Of course, pointing out double standards has its place, or any time when a point that relies on presupposed, nonexistent uniqueness is being made.

The History of 'Alt-'

The History of 'Alt-':

White supremacists have co-opted a combining form traditionally used for musical and literary genres. Why?

This edginess—with its vague historical echoes of online culture—seems to be what racist proponents of the alt-right had in mind when they rebranded old-school white supremacy under the alt- banner.

Related: XKCD on Free Speech

Real men don't say 'cute': Psychologists tap big data and Twitter to analyze the accuracy of stereotypes

Real men don't say 'cute': Psychologists tap big data and Twitter to analyze the accuracy of stereotypes:

What’s in a tweet? From gender to education, the words used on social media carry impressions to others. Using publicly available tweets, social psychologists and computer scientists from the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, Germany, and Australia are helping us to parse out the stereotypes formed by word choices on the social media channel Twitter. Utilizing natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence, the researchers show where stereotyping goes from “plausible” to wrong.

Diversifying Stock Photography: An Interview with Jenifer Daniels, Founder and CEO of Colorstock

Diversifying Stock Photography: An Interview with Jenifer Daniels, Founder and CEO of Colorstock:

For years, the world of stock photography has been overwhelmingly white and male, leaving huge omissions in the visual language of the internet. Here at Model View Culture, we’ve often struggled to find stock photos created by, and featuring people of color. Enter Colorstock: the first curated stock marketplace featuring all people of color. Launched last summer, it’s already changing the hue of stock photography. We chatted with founder and CEO Jenifer Daniels about the site, the changing world of visuals on the web, entrepreneurial advice for other tech + media upstarts, and Colorstock’s philosophy on supporting photographers of color.

ja-dark: Going ‘beyond the pale’ and removing the ‘shades of white’ camera lens to reflect the reality of the global community at a fundamental level often taken for granted.

How do we end the advertising arms race? Start thinking like humans

How do we end the advertising arms race? Start thinking like humans:

AI, meet my AI

In the current advertising-publishing ecosystem, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an actual human or a drinking bird toy clicking those banner ads. And yet, to participate in this ecosystem is to submit to be profiled by click-tracking analytics companies and exposing ourselves to the risks of malvertising. Meanwhile, the companies who actually make those products real enough to be worth advertising must pay, regardless of whether their advertisements are clicked by interested consumers or click-juicing fraudbots. On either end of this equation, it’s humans who are paying steeper and steeper prices to subsidize the absurd theater of AIs talking to one another.

ja-dark: Relatedly, I mentioned having personal AI extensions to combat other AI here, in a different context.

400,000 bots are posting political tweets about the election, and they have influence

400,000 bots are posting political tweets about the election, and they have influence:

“A study published the day before the election found an estimated 400,000 bots operating on Twitter that were tweeting—and being retweeted—at a remarkable pace, generating nearly 20 percent of all election-related messages.

Besides being numerous, these bots are also quite influential, and capable of distorting the online debate, according to authors Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute.

One thing remains mysterious: who is creating them? That’s still impossible to determine, Ferrara told MIT Technology Review in a discussion about his study, conducted over a month this fall, a period that included all three presidential debates. Below is an edited transcript…

Do you expect this to have an impact on the outcome of the election?

It is really hard or maybe even impossible to make an interpretation of what influence these dynamics have on the outcome of the election, the actual voting and so forth. One thing at risk is voter turnout. We find in some states, in particular in the South and the Midwest, there are way more bots than in any other state. People might think there is a real grassroots support there, but in reality it’s all generated by the bots.

Nearly 75 percent of the bots you found were supportive of the Republican candidate Donald Trump, and the messages in their tweets were different, too.

The bots supporting Donald Trump are really producing an overwhelmingly large amount of positive support for the candidate, while in the case of Hillary Clinton supporters, more tweets are neutral than positive.

Social media bots getting involved in politics isn’t a totally new phenomenon, but you find that this year’s batch is particularly sophisticated.

These bots are more complex, using artificial intelligence to chat with people. They can aggregate the sentiment in a polarized discussion and maybe even further polarize it.”

ja-dark: If you’re interesting in making bots, see:

Just remember: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Video



Seems timely. Silver Surfer, 1968, I think. I generally prefer...



Seems timely. Silver Surfer, 1968, I think. I generally prefer sequential art from Japan, but I’ve always been partial to the solitary, resilient nobility and cosmic perspective of the Silver Surfer with his Hamlet soliloquies, however goofy the basic concept is. I’m perpetually disappointed that he’s not a more popular character, and hasn’t been featured in the MCU (especially given his prominence in the whole Infinity Gauntlet arc).

Practicing online mental hygiene redux

A ramble and a supplement to previous posts on the topics of online mental hygiene and creating a positivity bias, for when you don’t read the comment sections: when you read something online, imagine all the positive, constructive comments in response to it, rather than those hateful comments you know will be posted and have a tendency to focus on due to our innate negativity bias. I suspect many people now have internalized those ‘outer trolls’ into ‘inner critics’. Let a positive inner voice be the immediate habitual default you imagine lurking beneath the surface. And remember, this isn’t false positivity, a rosy lens. It’s removing the grime from the lens which tricks us into magnifying negativity. It’s seeing more clearly in all directions, not less clearly in a single direction.

There are times, however, when proactive reframing/reappraisal of stress and anxiety into positive, constructive action is what needs to be the priority. I suggest you read up on the research results you can enact in your life, if you’re not aware already.

Though this requires disrupting the passive reverie of the ‘linguistic turn’ and scrubbing in–now’s not the time for diagnosis or a post-mortem, it’s a time for surgery, to cut through disingenuous rhetoric perpetuated virally because it supports an agenda, or phony normalization that individuals create for clicks and paychecks each day (e.g. through writing and posting articles to create narratives about ongoing events which contain implicit presuppositions about facts). These cathartic escapes tend to make up our reality such that we rely too heavily on online text we write/repost in echo chambers as actions and/or to run from stress. (Contrary to what Adam Curtis and others have suggested, it’s not algorithms on social media that places us in bubbles, we mostly do that ourselves. We choose whom to follow/avoid.)

Related: Don’t retweet if you want to remember

It’s easy to get lost in the opiate of hateful punditry on the one hand, or sardonic, pithy commentary and observations on the other, sheltered online in insular, polarized tribes, mostly unaccountable/anonymous, especially since there’s no social apparatus for free, basic, safe engagement with a variety of persons irrespective of race, creed, or religion, despite all the technology we have.

Spending so much time as avatars without reflections, it’s easy to lose self-respect or to be cowardly. And of course, everyone always has an agenda. It’s okay to have an agenda/bias, as long as you’re honest about it, and willing to change your mind even as you have no intention to compromise your values and have a zero tolerance policy for ignorance and hate (you don’t have to engage with everyone, or engage on their terms). It’s a wonderful thing to approach every controversial subject you encounter, every adversary, as something to learn and grow from, even if that learning and growth is most often a strengthening of your pre-existing convictions. The introduction of objectivity gives rise to continuous ‘eureka’ moments, similar to the pleasure one derives from mathematical proofs or creating working software. (The best science takes a mixed methods approach anyway, quantitative + qualitative.)

I find it interesting that there’s no established counterpart to trolling. We have that word, ‘trolling’ and ‘trolls’, we magnify abuse and hate relative to the neutrality or kindness that permeates the bulk of our daily lives (as basic as being literate or able to type with two hands or read without aid or having electricity), but no behavior to point to which counterbalances trolling. Yet.

See also: How You Can Find the Good in a Nasty Election Cycle

Chinese Characters Are Futuristic and the Alphabet Is Old News

Chinese Characters Are Futuristic and the Alphabet Is Old News:

Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.

In other words, to type a Chinese character is essentially to punch in a set of instructions—a code if you will, to retrieve a specific character. Mullaney calls Chinese typists “code conscious.” Dozens of ways to input Chinese now exist, but the Western world mostly remains stuck typing letter-by-letter on a computer keyboard, without taking full advantage of software-augmented shortcuts. Because, he asks, “How do you convince a person who’s been told for a century and a half that their alphabet is the greatest thing since sliced bread?”

It’s China’s awkward history with the telegraph and the typewriter, argues Mullaney, that primed Chinese speakers to take full advantage of software when it came along—to the point where it’s now faster to input Chinese than English.

Previously: Chinese is Not a Backward Language

Related:

Faint symbols have been recorded in buildings and sites across...



Faint symbols have been recorded in buildings and sites across England, including Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Tower of London, and Wookey Hole caves in Somerset – where a tall stalagmite has been shown to tourists for centuries as the petrified body of a witch…

The witches’ marks are properly known as apotropaic marks, from the Greek word for avoiding evil.

Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said: “They really fire the imagination and can teach us about previously held beliefs and common rituals. Ritual marks were cut, scratched or carved into our ancestors’ homes and churches in the hope of making the world a safer, less hostile place.”

(via Witches’ marks: public asked to seek ancient scratchings in buildings | Culture | The Guardian)

(via Revellers in Costume Descend on Tokyo by the Thousands for...

Young Latino with perfect AP Computer Science score wants to inspire others

Young Latino with perfect AP Computer Science score wants to inspire others:

A Latino high school senior from Texas has achieved what very few people have done, and he’s really proud to be an example to his community.

Miguel Padilla is one of 10 people in the world who earned a perfect score on the Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam. Advanced placement courses are rigorous college-level classes offered in high school. If a student does well on the test — the material is tough — they may be able to place out of some introductory courses in college. A total of 58,141 students took the exam.

“It shows others within the community that people are capable of something more and should aspire to do more,” said Padilla, who attends the Harmony School of Innovation in Fort Worth, Texas, a public charter school.

ja-dark: Fantastic, although in general I am against ‘exams’ as metrics, and if anything, instead of learning tools they are learning impediments.

Frequent, low-stakes quizzes/self-testing with corrective feedback for each question/answer pair are superior, according to the research on retrieval-based learning, spaced retrieval practice, successive relearning, et cetera.

See also

Related: Voidness Way

Coding like Shakespeare: practical function naming conventions

Coding like Shakespeare: practical function naming conventions:

Code is prose.

Clear and meaningful prose is easy to read and follow. Everyone enjoys reading such prose.

The same quality should apply to source code. The way developer express his thoughts through a programming language is important. Writing code is communication: with your teammates and yourself.

Clean code practicing is a big topic. So let’s start with small steps.

The current article covers the functions/methods naming good habits. Functions are the moving parts of the application, so having named them precisely increases the readability.

6th-century tomb reveals longest sword from ancient Japan

6th-century tomb reveals longest sword from ancient Japan:

Textbook-changing discoveries were made after artifacts found in an early sixth-century tomb in the Shimauchi district here in southern Kyushu were examined, rewriting the histories…

One is the longest sword ever excavated from ancient tombs in Japan, and another’s hilt is covered with ray skin, making it the oldest ray-decorated item found in East Asia.

The swords were placed by skeletal remains in the tomb no. 139, and both are signs of high social status.

Debates: Linguistic trick boosts poll numbers

Debates: Linguistic trick boosts poll numbers:

“Linguistic style matching,” says a University of Michigan professor who led the study, has nothing to do with tone, cadence or the number of times one candidate interrupts the other. Nor is it about content—the nouns and regular verbs that make up “what” a speaker says.

It’s much more subtle. Linguistic style matching zeroes in on so-called function words that reflect how a speaker is making a point. It refers to conjunctions like “also,” “but” and “unless;” quantifiers like “all,” “remaining” and “somewhat;” and other supporting parts of speech.

“These function words are inherently social, and they require social knowledge to understand and use,” said study author Daniel Romero, an assistant professor in the U-M School of Information, as well as in computer science and engineering. “We think that matching an opponent’s linguistic style shows greater perspective taking and also makes one’s argument’s easier to understand for third-party viewers.”

Spirally Mapped Mandalas Twilled with Chinese Poems...



Spirally Mapped Mandalas Twilled with Chinese Poems (PDF)

Mandala patterns generated from Chinese poems which were composed by Su Shi (Su Tungpo) are shown. The drawing is based on the spiral mapping technique, with which one can visualize a statistical property of a text within a two-dimensional region through spirally folding a string of Chinese characters.

RecentlyContemporary Japanese Poetry Generator

Contemporary Japanese Poetry Generator

Contemporary Japanese Poetry Generator:

A JavaScript program, written in 2012 by SHINONOME Nodoka, that produces parodies of contemporary Japanese poetry. Translation to English by Andrew Campana.

See it in action here (click ‘reload’ as needed, in Japanese or English).

(via The Ancient Bookshelf: Ge'ez (Ethiopic) Flashcards) The set...



(via The Ancient Bookshelf: Ge'ez (Ethiopic) Flashcards)

  • The set includes over 700 individual flashcards
  • The flashcards are based on the vocabulary lists in Thomas Lambdin’s introductory grammar
  • The words are printed in the Ge'ez script, rather than transliteration, so you can learn to recognize them the way you’ll see them in actual texts
  • There is a separate card with the plural form(s) of each noun
  • The corner of each flashcard has a number that corresponds to the chapter in which it appears in Lambdin
  • The backs of the flashcards have the English glosses

The spherical keyboard, modeled on an early typewriter design,...



The spherical keyboard, modeled on an early typewriter design, has small keys—both because women tend to have more dexterity than men, and because it makes room for an extra set of keys at the top of the keyboard. Those keys, highlighted in orange, display “power verbs” (“claim,” “believe,” “ensure”). The keyboard tracks the words typed, and when using a particular word becomes a habit, replaces it with something else. “It becomes a game or challenge in a way,” says Ramezani. “Every day you have 10 words that you need to use somehow in your written interactions.”

(via Never Be “Sorry” Again, With A Keyboard That Helps Women Use More Assertive Language | Co.Exist | ideas + impact)

A gallery of interesting Jupyter Notebooks

One example of font therapy, or what Mervyn Peake has called...



One example of font therapy, or what Mervyn Peake has called “whisper writing,” has been recreated here. It was pieced together from sherds of vellum found in an ancient and extremely nasty midden pile in Northern Finland, a place of great beauty. Part of what makes this font, known as MP10x-SUOMI-T2, so incredible, is its simplicity. Its feral flourishes are mimics of the natural world and the font’s design talks as much about what is outside as it does inside. I cannot, due to a legal battle with my ex-patron, describe the details of the forensic deciphering techniques my team has used. I can say that it took years of research and archaeological fieldwork while living in Northern Finland.

(via Encrypted Font)

Jeramy Dodds Discovers & Re-Creates Ancient ‘Font Therapy’ From Northern Finland 

So You Want to Learn Physics... by Susan J. Fowler

So You Want to Learn Physics... by Susan J. Fowler:

Over the past few years, ever since writing “If Susan Can Learn Physics, So Can You”, I’ve been contacted by people from all backgrounds who are inspired and want to learn physics, but don’t know where to start, what to learn, what to read, and how to structure their studies. I’ve spoken with single mothers who want to go back to school and study physics, tenured philosophy professors who want to learn physics so that they can make significant and informed contributions to philosophy of physics, high school students who want to know what they should read to prepare for an undergraduate education in physics, and people in dozens of various careers who want to really, really learn and understand physics simply for the joy of it.

This post is a condensed version of what I’ve sent to people who have contacted me over the years, outlining what everyone needs to learn in order to really understand physics.

randexp.js

randexp.js:

Create random strings that match a given regular expression.

(via http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/vulcan.htm)

Vulcan Script Font

emoji2vec: Learning Emoji Representations from their Description

emoji2vec: Learning Emoji Representations from their Description:

Many current natural language processing applications for social media rely on representation learning and utilize pre-trained word embeddings. 

There currently exist several publicly-available, pre-trained sets of word embeddings, but they contain few or no emoji representations even as emoji usage in social media has increased. 

In this paper we release emoji2vec, pre-trained embeddings for all Unicode emoji which are learned from their description in the Unicode emoji standard. 

The resulting emoji embeddings can be readily used in downstream social natural language processing applications alongside word2vec. 

We demonstrate, for the downstream task of sentiment analysis, that emoji embeddings learned from short descriptions outperforms a skip-gram model trained on a large collection of tweets, while avoiding the need for contexts in which emoji need to appear frequently in order to estimate a representation.

"The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a..."

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.”

- Hermann Hesse

Ancient word puzzle found in Smyrna

Ancient word puzzle found in Smyrna:

Ersoy said it is hard to totally make sense of the crossword since there are also names of people featured in the crosswords. “There are scientists and historians who claim that the Christian community of the time was heavily pressured by the Roman authorities, and they invented these kinds of crosswords to communicate among themselves. However, we consider this as just a crossword because it’s very out in the open. There should have been stalls in front of these walls since this was a market place. This finding gives us a clue about how the sellers of the time entertained themselves during their spare time in the market place.”

How Vector Space Mathematics Helps Machines Spot Sarcasm

How Vector Space Mathematics Helps Machines Spot Sarcasm:

“But sarcasm is often devoid of sentiment. The phrase above is a good example—it contains no sentiment-bearing words. So a new strategy is clearly needed if computers are ever to spot this kind of joke.

Today, … they’ve hit on just such a strategy. They say their new approach dramatically improves the ability of computers to spot sarcasm…

According to Joshi and co, sentences that contrast similar concepts with dissimilar ones are more likely to be sarcastic.”

Neural Network-Based Model for Japanese Predicate Argument Structure Analysis (PDF)

Neural Network-Based Model for Japanese Predicate Argument Structure Analysis (PDF):

This paper presents a novel model for Japanese predicate argument structure (PAS) analysis based on a neural network framework. Japanese PAS analysis is challenging due to the tangled characteristics of the Japanese language, such as case disappearance and argument omission. To unravel this problem, we learn selectional preferences from a large raw corpus, and incorporate them into a SOTA PAS analysis model, which considers the consistency of all PAS in a given sentence. We demonstrate that the proposed PAS analysis model significantly outperforms the base SOTA system.

ja-dark: For more on Japanese PAS, see my posts under the grammar tag, and this post.

Re-uploads (Anki deck PAS diagrams)

Updated the download links to the (predicate-argument structures) diagrams.zip files for the decks. Use them with the provided import files with the downloaded decks.

When her best friend died, she used artificial intelligence to keep talking to him

When her best friend died, she used artificial intelligence to keep talking to him:

In February, Kuyda asked her engineers to build a neural network in Russian. At first she didn’t mention its purpose, but given that most of the team was Russian, no one asked questions. Using more than 30 million lines of Russian text, Luka built its second neural network. Meanwhile, Kuyda copied hundreds of her exchanges with Mazurenko from the app Telegram and pasted them into a file. She edited out a handful of messages that she believed would be too personal to share broadly. Then Kuyda asked her team for help with the next step: training the Russian network to speak in Mazurenko’s voice.

The project was tangentially related to Luka’s work, though Kuyda considered it a personal favor. (An engineer told her that the project would only take about a day.) Mazurenko was well-known to most of the team — he had worked out of Luka’s Moscow office, where the employees labored beneath a neon sign that quoted Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Kuyda trained the bot with dozens of tests queries, and her engineers put on the finishing touches.

Only a small percentage of the Roman bot’s responses reflected his actual words. But the neural network was tuned to favor his speech whenever possible. Any time the bot could respond to a query using Mazurenko’s own words, it would. Other times it would default to the generic Russian. After the bot blinked to life, she began peppering it with questions.

Who’s your best friend?, she asked.

Don’t show your insecurities, came the reply.

It sounds like him, she thought.

This site tracks GitHub events to generate calming work music

This site tracks GitHub events to generate calming work music:

“If you’re a developer and are looking for some pleasant background music to code to, you’ll love this new site I just stumbled upon.

GitHub Audio, built by Sudhanshu Mishra, keeps an eye on GitHub events and plays a combination of soft xylophone-like tones, plucked strings and uplifting orchestral sounds each time someone commits new code to a repository, or opens or closes an issue.

The site also presents a lovely visualization of these events in real-time; you can see which projects are being worked on and click to explore them as well. I’ve had it on all morning and found it to be a lovely soundtrack for work.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because GitHub Audio is based on similar projects that generate music from Wikipedia edits and Bitcoin transactions.”

Is Common Core math an advance for math education or a setback? - Quora

Is Common Core math an advance for math education or a setback? - Quora:

“As a mathematician who has consulted extensively for industry and various government agencies, I agree 100% that the above 8 principles are what any nation should aim for if they want to remain a world leader.

Unfortunately, the initial attempts to translate those 8 principles into classroom curricula did not go well, at least not uniformly so. And some of the initial attempts to develop assessments were a disaster. But that is not uncommon with something radically new.

Since today’s world is what it is, and will develop as it will, the need for mathematical education that meets those 8 principles will not go away. So decisions to abandon the CC are misguided – and dangerous for any advanced nation. Instead, we need to focus on better and better implementations of the CC.”

Thoughts on the future of math education

Thoughts on the future of math education:

I believe that computers and their ability to easily manipulate data offers a chance to truly redefine the mathematics curriculum, to make it more horizontal, and to refocus the tools we teach on what is actually useful and stimulating. Statistics, not calculus, should be the pinnacle achievement of high school, not relegated to box-and-whisker plots and an AP course which is accepted by relatively few universities. Algebra, the math of manipulating symbols, should be taught alongside programming. Calculus, a course which I have heard multiple people describe as “easy but for the Algebra,” should be relegated to a unit in Statistics. Trigonometric identities and conics should go away. And earlier math should focus on how and why a student arrives at an answer, and why her procedure always works, not just the answer itself.

Meet the New Math, Unlike the Old Math | Quanta Magazine

Meet the New Math, Unlike the Old Math | Quanta Magazine:

“Overall, there’s a movement towards more complex cognitive mathematics, there’s a movement towards the student being invited to act like a mathematician instead of passively taking in math and science,” said David Baker, a professor of sociology and education at Pennsylvania State University. “These are big trends and they’re quite revolutionary…”

“When you step back historically and sociologically, it’s clear education has really ratcheted up along these cognitive dimensions,” Baker said. “The idea that education is like men’s ties and just goes through this cycle of wide and thin is not true.”

Google's Quest To Design A Typeface For Every Language On Earth

Google's Quest To Design A Typeface For Every Language On Earth:

Why would Google invest such untold sums into a project like Noto? For one thing, it brings more people online, and gives them the opportunity to use Google services. But converting the world’s written languages to fonts serves another purpose. Allowing someone to type in their language, or convert an ancient manuscript from a JPEG scan to an actual document, doesn’t just put more information on the internet. It allows this information to be indexed, cited, and pulled forth in a search.

“They become Googleable!” Mansour laughs.

Also recent: Google and Monotype unveil the Noto Project’s unified font for all languages

"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire."

“Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”

- Arnold H. Glasow

We utilize Google’s image recognition technology,...



We utilize Google’s image recognition technology, developed by our Machine Perception team, to associate images with semantic entities — people, animals, cars, etc. We then apply a machine learned model that maps those recognized entities to actual natural language responses. Our system produces replies for thousands of entity types that are drawn from a taxonomy that is a subset of Google’s Knowledge Graph and may be at different granularity levels. For example, when you receive a photo of a dog, the system may detect that the dog is actually a labrador and suggest “Love that lab!”. Or given a photo of a pasta dish, it may detect the type of pasta (“Yum linguine!”) and even the cuisine (“I love Italian food!”).

(via Research Blog: “Aw, so cute!”: Allo helps you respond to shared photos)

Introducing the Open Images Dataset

Introducing the Open Images Dataset:

In the last few years, advances in machine learning have enabled Computer Vision to progress rapidly, allowing for systems that can automatically caption images to apps that can create natural language replies in response to shared photos. Much of this progress can be attributed to publicly available image datasets, such as ImageNet and COCO for supervised learning, and YFCC100M for unsupervised learning.

Today, we introduce Open Images, a dataset consisting of ~9 million URLs to images that have been annotated with labels spanning over 6000 categories. We tried to make the dataset as practical as possible: the labels cover more real-life entities than the 1000 ImageNet classes, there are enough images to train a deep neural network from scratch and the images are listed as having a Creative Commons Attribution license*.

The image-level annotations have been populated automatically with a vision model similar to Google Cloud Vision API. For the validation set, we had human raters verify these automated labels to find and remove false positives. On average, each image has about 8 labels assigned.

Making Morally Ambiguous Decisions Is Easier In A Foreign Language

Making Morally Ambiguous Decisions Is Easier In A Foreign Language:

Thinking in another language changes how we make decisions, and even affects our moral judgement. You may be more likely to do something risky if you make the decision in a foreign tongue, but you may also make better decisions because you suffer from fewer biases.

PreviouslyUsing a foreign language changes moral decisions

Removing gender bias from algorithms

Removing gender bias from algorithms:

A machine learning algorithm is like a newborn baby that has been given millions of books to read without being taught the alphabet or knowing any words or grammar. The power of this type of information processing is impressive, but there is a problem. When it takes in the text data, a computer observes relationships between words based on various factors, including how often they are used together.

We can test how well the word relationships are identified by using analogy puzzles. Suppose I ask the system to complete the analogy “He is to King as She is to X.” If the system comes back with “Queen,” then we would say it is successful, because it returns the same answer a human would.

Our research group trained the system on Google News articles, and then asked it to complete a different analogy: “Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to X.” The answer came back: “Homemaker.”

If these biased algorithms are widely adopted, it could perpetuate, or even worsen, these damaging stereotypes. Fortunately, we have found a way to use the machine learning algorithm itself to reduce its own bias.

Our debiasing system uses real people to identify examples of the types of connections that are appropriate (brother/sister, king/queen) and those that should be removed. Then, using these human-generated distinctions, we quantified the degree to which gender was a factor in those word choices – as opposed to, say, family relationships or words relating to royalty.

Next we told our machine-learning algorithm to remove the gender factor from the connections in the embedding. This removes the biased stereotypes without reducing the overall usefulness of the embedding.

Ingenious: Richard K. Miller - Issue 40: Learning - Nautilus

Ingenious: Richard K. Miller - Issue 40: Learning - Nautilus:

“ … the person in the academic world is basically saying we’ve never produced graduates who are better at solving the calculus problems than they are today. They do them quicker, they are more efficient. The people in the corporate world are saying so what? That has no relevance to what we need. We need graduates who can collaborate with others, who were creative, who can work on real world problems, who can make a difference in the world. That’s a mindset issue, and higher education has been blind to their responsibility to shape the mindset of the next generation. This is a big issue now.”

Could Neanderthals Speak Like Modern Humans?

Could Neanderthals Speak Like Modern Humans?:

It’s a conclusion that suggests the differences between humans and Neanderthals could be more down to the species taking separate evolutionary paths than one being more advanced than the other. The study also raises fascinating questions about the origins of the complex languages humans use today.

For more information, the study itself can be found here.

'Geek gene' denied: If you find computer science hard, it's your fault (or your teacher's)

'Geek gene' denied: If you find computer science hard, it's your fault (or your teacher's):

In a freshly published paper [PDF], the researchers describe how they analyzed the distribution of 778 sets of final CS course grades at a large research university, and found only 5.8 per cent of the distribution curves were distinct enough to qualify as bimodal or multimodal.

In other words, there’s no separation in terms of grade data between those who can and those who cannot. In most cases, graphs of student grades fit a normal statistical pattern.

“…Bimodal grades are instructional folklore in CS, caused by confirmation bias and instructor beliefs about their students,” the researchers conclude…

ja-darkAre there some students who can’t learn how to code?

Engineer, explain thyself: Collaboration tool helps grad students communicate — in their own languages

Engineer, explain thyself: Collaboration tool helps grad students communicate — in their own languages:

“A graduate student doing research on materials for circuit design might not share lab space with someone working on machine learning, but they still have a shared need: to explain what they’re working on to other people. Whether it’s to their advisor, a room full of their peers, a startup accelerator, or a project’s funders  — at some point everyone who does research is faced with an audience.

And so here comes CommKit, a new online resource poised to make the lives of engineering graduate students easier. Launched on Sept. 22, the CommKit is a website that provides discipline-specific aid to those seeking writing, speaking, and visual design support on a tight deadline. Designed for engineers by engineers — specifically, 50 graduate students who have been working as department- and area-based peer coaches at the MIT Communication Lab — the CommKit was designed to demystify effective scientific communication.”

Google unleashes deep learning tech on language with Neural Machine Translation

Google unleashes deep learning tech on language with Neural Machine Translation:

“Because language is naturally phrase-based, the logical next move is to learn as many of those phrases and semi-formal rules, applying those, as well. But it requires a lot of data (not just a German-English dictionary) and serious statistical chops to know the difference between, for example, “run a mile,” “run a test” and “run a store.” Computers are good at that, so once they took over, phrase-based translation became the norm.

More complexity lurks still in the rest of the sentence, of course, but it’s another jump in complexity, subtlety and the computational power necessary to parse it. Ingesting complex rulesets and making a predictive model is a specialty of neural networks, and researchers have been looking into this method — but Google has beaten the others to the punch.

GNMT is the latest and by far the most effective to successfully leverage machine learning in translation. It looks at the sentence as a whole, while keeping in mind, so to speak, the smaller pieces like words and phrases.”

ja-dark: Keep in mind that by ‘phrases’ they don’t mean the standard formalisms but what arises through statistical analysis and may appear unintuitive to human evaluations.

Digging up the building blocks of language: Age-of-acquisition effects for multiword phrases

Digging up the building blocks of language: Age-of-acquisition effects for multiword phrases:

“… our results suggest that children are sensitive to distributional information computed at multiple granularities (between sounds, words, and sequences of words), and draw on units of varying sizes in the process of learning. Our findings further support the claim that children are sensitive to input frequencies, and provide novel evidence for the usage-based prediction that multiword units serve as building blocks for language learning… 

… the findings…  blur the long-held lexicon-grammar distinction – multiword sequences show a key signature of lexical storage – and challenge the notion that words and larger patterns are processed by qualitatively different systems. Instead, our findings are better accommodated by a single-system view of language where all linguistic experience is processed by similar cognitive mechanisms…

In sum, the current study sharply undermines a long-held assumption in the study of language that treats words as ontologically distinct from larger sequences. Instead, we argue that multiword units, like words, serve as early building blocks that leave traces in adult language.”

ja-dark: Includes a slide/audio presentation accessible even without journal access; note they aren’t claiming a hardwired critical period (recent functionalist/emergentist research seems to suggest AoA effects are the result of non-biological systemic issues where adults are tabula repleta with less time and access to unlearn, etc., rather than tabula rasa [blank slates] with plenty of time for deliberate and statistical learning).

Introducing diversity in online language analysis: Linguist, computer scientists teach machines African-American English dialect

Introducing diversity in online language analysis: Linguist, computer scientists teach machines African-American English dialect:

For the past 30 years, computer science researchers have been teaching their machines to read standard English – for example, by assigning back issues of the Wall Street Journal – so computers can learn the English they need to run search engines like Google. But using only standard English has left out whole segments of society who use dialects and non-standard varieties of English, and the omission is increasingly problematic, say researchers.

Theories of Willpower Affect Sustained Learning

Theories of Willpower Affect Sustained Learning:

“We demonstrate that beliefs about willpower–whether willpower is viewed as a limited or non-limited resource–impact sustained learning on a strenuous mental task…. participants who were led to view willpower as non-limited showed greater sustained learning over the full duration of the task.”

If You Believe Your Willpower Is Limitless, It Is

If You Believe Your Willpower Is Limitless, It Is:

“A very intriguing direction of research is finding the power of a person’s own beliefs about willpower may be what makes the difference here. When people believe their willpower is limitless, they’re more likely to go after personal goals, they’re less likely to burn out, and they’re happier. In a sense, when people believe their willpower is limitless, it turns out to be true. ”

See alsohttp://europepmc.org/articles/pmc3773760

Annals of Spectacularly Misleading Media

Annals of Spectacularly Misleading Media:

ja-dark: I don’t link this for the forgettably curmudgeonly post but to point out that one of the authors comments (look for Damian Blasi in the comments); the new research is worthwhile, don’t let the attack on its hype dissuade you from giving it its due consideration.

I find the implicit insults toward the authors telling, but hey, it’s LL, I don’t expect much: it’s home to ‘scholar’ of Chinese Victor Mair. (I’ve written various posts in reply to his ignorance; one indirect reply is here.)

If you read between the lines of the LL post and witty remark about neuroscientists (referencing the bounty of bad popsci interpretations of neuroscience): Apparently prolific releaser of cutting-edge work and fascinating literature on language and linguistics Morten H. Christiansen is ‘mistaken’ as ‘just a neuroscientist’ who despite the ignorance that must follow from that reduction, along with the other authors should’ve made statements that prevent any possible hyperbolic interpretation from press release writers and instead convey the nuanced conclusions in a way that an array of armchair critics entrenched in obsolescent models and given to unfounded condescension can read without being offended. The implication being that maybe they didn’t want to, didn’t try hard enough, etc., due to defects in character, or delusion. ‘People are saying’. ‘Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, we just don’t know’. Familiar weasely rhetoric, so forgive me if I’m sensitive to any such subtext.

A huge portion of the powerful new work which overturns so many dead-end assumptions in linguistics over the recent years has sprung from Christiansen and friends, in case you weren’t aware.

One of the more interesting such new things you don’t hear enough about is on recursion: “Why do so many linguists believe that grammars of natural language incorporate unbounded recursion, one way or another, in the absence of empirical evidence thereof?”

That is, most arguments by linguists you’ll see seem to accept the presupposition that humans are capable of infinite recursion in language. Until the above paper, you may have also–but it’s easier to forgive that assumption if you haven’t spent years publishing on it and instead accepted that someone must’ve proven it.

How to Be Mindful While Reading Mindfulness Articles

How to Be Mindful While Reading Mindfulness Articles:

You’ve probably heard this before. You probably see stories and tips about mindfulness online every day. But did you realize that reading these articles is also an opportunity to be mindful? How many people spend their lunch breaks and commutes mindlessly clicking on these links? If you do it mindfully, instead, clicking on a link can also mean clicking on happiness.

SlangSD: A Sentiment Dictionary for Slang Words

SlangSD: A Sentiment Dictionary for Slang Words:

“SlangSD is the first sentiment lexicon for slang words, which provides over 90,000 slang words/phrases and their sentiment scores, ranging from “Strongly Negative”, “Negative”, to “Neutral”, “Positive” and “Strongly Positive”. We collect slang words from Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com), which is the largest crowdsourced online dictionary of slang words. The sentiment score is estimated automatically based on existing sentiment words, word-to- word similarity, and the word usage in social media.”

ja-dark: Someone actually read Urban Dictionary? That may be braver than reading comment sections, even the comments on IG or YT. Give them a medal.

New sequence learning data set

New sequence learning data set:

“A new benchmark data set for sequence learning has been made available. It’s based on the well known MNIST handwritten digit data set; all 70000 images have been thresholded and thinned, and based on the resulting 1-pixel-width skeleton of each digit, using a TSP solver, hypothetical stroke sequences were then inferred to produces stroke sequences that could have generated the digit.”

The Appropriately Messy Etymology of ‘Kluge’

The Appropriately Messy Etymology of ‘Kluge’:

Computer science lingo, on its way to becoming mainstream, has a way of picking up legendary origin stories…

The pronunciation of “kludge”—it rhymes with subterfuge and ice luge, not nudge and fudge—hints at its alternate spelling, “kluge,” which is still commonly used among programmers. The discrepancy may also offer hints as to the earliest uses of the word, which, like “bug,” has its own thicket of folklore to untangle.

“It’s, um, complicated,” the linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer told me in an email. “The short answer is that the word was originally spelled ‘kluge’—derived from the surname Kluge, in turn from German klug, ‘clever…’

ja-dark: See also Gary Marcus’ book, which I’ve referenced here and there.

Language as skill: Intertwining comprehension and production

Language as skill: Intertwining comprehension and production:

A chunk can be viewed as a computational procedure that maps, in either direction, between individual words and sequences of words (Christiansen & Chater, in press). The same viewpoint applies across linguistic levels. From this perspective, the chunkatory is not an abstract dictionary of words and phrases with their phonological and semantic properties. Instead, it is a set of bi-directional, incremental procedures, which map between lower level units and chunks composed of sequences of those units.

Similarly, the grammar of the language can be viewed as nothing more than a set of incremental procedures mapping, in both directions, between sequences of linguistic units and semantic representation. A chunk created in comprehension is immediately available for use in production, and vice versa. There is no need for abstract knowledge of the language, aside from the linguistic structure that is generated through chunking operations. Hence, there is no need to postulate an abstract “knowledge of language,” independent of language processing operations. Language is viewed as a skill, and language acquisition is viewed as a case of skill learning, rather than a sui generis process of inductive inference, in which an abstract grammar is putatively inferred from observed linguistic data.

Decoding the stream of perceptual or linguistic information must occur in real-time; learning the structure of that input cannot involve “reflection” on previous raw data, which is almost immediately obliterated; and learning to respond to input involves learning a skill, rather than developing a theory. This perspective makes it difficult to see how the brain could acquire abstract linguistic knowledge (e.g., Chomsky, 1965); and, in any case, the tight coupling between speech input and output processes implies that there would be insufficient time to consult such knowledge in real time linguistic interactions, even were it available.

Thus, we speculate that learning a language should be viewed as acquiring a perceptuo-motor skill, rather than learning an abstract theory of language structure. It is interesting to wonder how far the same considerations may apply more broadly: how far can we understand our interactions with the physical world, or other people, as generalized perceptual-motor skills, most likely with tightly coupled representations between perception and action, rather than applications of “naive physics” or “theory of mind”?

Chomsky was wrong: English spelling is hard, U of A scholars say

Chomsky was wrong: English spelling is hard, U of A scholars say:

Chomsky wasn’t right — wait, how was that spelled again? Write, no, that’s not it … rite?

Perhaps we need a rite to figure out the right way to write right.

In any case, it seems Chomsky was wrong.

That’s the conclusion of a study titled “English orthography is not ‘close to optimal’ ” coming out of the University of Alberta. Specifically, the study disproves the linguist’s famous quote, where he said English orthography (spelling) was “close to optimal.”

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning:

❝ … research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.

This conclusion is important because the study of language plays a central role in diverse disciplines—from poetry to artificial intelligence to linguistics itself; misguided methods lead to questionable results. Further, language is used by humans in ways no animal can match; if you understand what language is, you comprehend a little bit more about human nature…

… evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

ja-dark: The old canard in response is to claim that UG/Generative Grammar/Chomsky’s theories were defined wrong due to ignorance of his brilliance/complexity, and therefore the evidence disproves nothing. The thing is, the evidence and theories we have now don’t really need to disprove nativist accounts, the evidence and soundness of reasoning speaks for itself–there’s nothing to be refuted from those stillborn nativist theories, only empty old rhetoric to be peeled away with articles like the above, allowing linguistics to properly join other disciplines and become an enlightening area of study for humanity.

Obscurantism wed with the abuse of intuition pumps is the hallmark of bad science; you see it in scientific racism and evolutionary psychology, also.

Japanese Sentence Shuffler (Anki add-on)

Japanese Sentence Shuffler (Anki add-on):

I put together this add-on as a result of this review, which I may have misunderstood but which reminded me of something I wanted to do anyway. It turns a Japanese sentence into a shuffled list of words, sans definitions.

Dear Anki add-on reviewer

To the Anki reviewer of the Sentence Shuffle and Gloss add-on who noted the length of definitions (Edit: actually it was the number of definitions the reviewer noted, so feel free to skip to the end of the post): Yes, this is a pain–very common words will have excessive definitions; over time I modified the add-on to that a well-spaced, bulleted list is the output, which helps, but I generally just ignore or backspace/edit the longer definitions when first studying the card, until I just have what’s relevant to the sentence.

Theoretically I could set a maximum length but you never know what might be useful.

This applies to the list as a whole, also–sometimes WWWJDIC doesn’t get all the words right, or parses them incorrectly.

For very common words, I tend to keep them all, because I generally only use this add-on’s output (the random list of vocab words and definitions) for output practice per the add-on instructions, so every word is important to have listed.

Actually, this does remind me that I meant to include a pure word list sentence shuffler option with this add-on, or perhaps create a separate add-on that just shuffles sentences’ words. Maybe I already did, I forget. Will look into it.

Edit 2: I can probably modify a previous add-on to create a new one that just lists the lexemes in random order without definitions. No idea if this is relevant to the above review.

Why An AI-Judged Beauty Contest Picked Nearly All White Winners

When computers learn human languages, they learn human prejudices too

Emoticons in ancient Egypt

His white suit unsullied by research, Tom Wolfe tries to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky

His white suit unsullied by research, Tom Wolfe tries to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky:

This article repeats Chomskyan errors and the silly old arguments for innatist views of language as if they’re facts and denies the chilling effects of Chomsky’s paradigms which were by far the dominant, majority view for ages, setting back linguistics for decades. States that Piraha has recursion like it’s a fact (it’s not, last I checked).

The main reason I’m linking is to laugh at the headline: Complaining about a lack of research in criticizing Chomsky? Does the author know anything about Chomsky? Chomsky does not care for research. It’s sort of what he’s known for. He makes empirically unfounded statements about language and dismisses research opposing his views. Wolfe easily could have bought his white suit from Chomsky, used yet entirely unsullied by research.

Easy to take shots at someone who is dismissive of evolution (I assume that’s what Wolfe does), but honestly Darwin’s an easy target (don’t get me started on the idea of sexual selection and applications of it to human psychology), and let’s make sure we differentiate between Chomsky and Darwin.

Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature

Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature:

This article uses computational modeling and large-scale pattern detection to develop a theory of global textual transmission as a process of turbulent flow. 

Specifically, it models stream-of-consciousness narration as a discrete set of linguistic features and rhetorical elements and uses this model to track the movement of this modernist technique across generic boundaries (from anglophone modernism to more popular genres) and linguistic ones (from English to Japanese). 

Oscillating between statistical models and moments of close reading, the article shows how a quantitatively scaled-up approach, rather than reinforcing an image of global textual flows as singular and monolithic, illuminates world literature as a system constituted by patterns of divergence in structure and of difference in sameness.

ja-dark: Interesting stuff; curious about what form the Japanese corpus was in, and what features of Japanese stream-of-consciousness may have been lost in translation (esp. in the transliteration). Doesn’t specify the corpus form, though it does note the types of features analyzed (e.g. personal pronouns, sentence length, type:token ratio, etc.), focusing on a higher level of abstraction.

Brain scans confirm that dogs understand what you’re saying, and how you say it

Brain scans confirm that dogs understand what you’re saying, and how you say it:

“Scientists have put dogs through brain scans to confirm what pet owners already suspected: Dogs not only comprehend the words we speak, but also how we say them.

The patterns of brain activity suggest that dogs process the words of their trainers much as humans do.

“There is a well-known distribution of labor in the human brain,” Attila Andics of Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University said in a news release. “It is mainly the left hemisphere’s job to process word meaning, and the right hemisphere’s job to process intonation. The human brain not only separately analyzes what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning. Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms.”

The findings, which are being published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, are based on functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.”

There’s Finally a Programming Language in Bengali Script, Thanks to ‘Potaka’ · Global Voices

There’s Finally a Programming Language in Bengali Script, Thanks to ‘Potaka’ · Global Voices:

A group of Bangladeshi programmers have created a programming language written entirely in Bengali script. It’s called Potaka (Flag), and it’s aimed at encouraging children whose first language is Bengali to get interested in programming.

About 220 million people in the world actively use the Bengali (also known as Bangla) writing script, making it the sixth most used in the world. Potaka is the first stable programming language to utilize commands in Bengali and is available online for free. You do not need to download any software; just a web browser and an internet connection are required.

Adventures in NI: Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases

Adventures in NI: Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases:

“Meaning really is no more or less than how a word is used, so AI absorbs true meaning, including prejudice.  We demonstrate this empirically.  This is an extension of my research programme into semantics originally deriving from my interest in the origins of human cognition, but now with help from the awesome researchers at Princeton I’ve merged this with my AI ethics work, and also managed to pitch for cognitive systems approaches to AI.

LSD Can Mess With the Language Centers in Your Brain

Does Providing Prompts During Retrieval Practice Improve Learning?

PDF

Abstract:

The purpose of this investigation was to identify ways to prompt retrieval practice to make recall even more effective at producing meaningful learning… Practicing retrieval improved learning relative to the control on both types of questions; however, whether subjects practiced free or prompted retrieval did not matter for learning. Subjects rated prompted retrieval as less enjoyable and interesting than the other retrieval conditions. Results demonstrate practicing retrieval promoted meaningful learning, and that subjects’ initial retrieval success was highest when they used their own retrieval strategies during recall.

Excerpts:

“There are many different ways to design retrieval-based learning activities, but practicing free recall of information is an especially effective method. During free recall, students set aside their study materials and freely reconstruct as much of the material from memory as possible. 

Practicing free recall allows learners to construct their own organizational structure and then use that structure during retrieval practice, and past research has suggested practicing free recall may improve learning more than other forms of retrieval practice such as answering short-answer questions. 

In addition to promoting student learning, free recall is a relatively practical way to engage in retrieval practice because neither students nor teachers need to prepare additional materials. In addition, students do not seem to need training to engage in free recall. Students can simply set aside their textbooks or notes and practice freely recalling information.

Importantly, the present experiments also provide evidence that practicing retrieval improves higher-order learning. In both experiments, retrieval practice enhanced long-term retention higher-order questions though there were no discernable differences among the different forms of retrieval practice. Although some authors have questioned whether retrieval practice promotes complex learning, there is now a great deal of evidence showing that retrieval practice enhances performance on long-term measures of higher-order meaningful learning (e.g. e.g., Blunt & Karpicke, 2014; Butler 2011; Jensen, McDaniel, Woodard, & Kummer, 2014; Karpicke & Blunt, 2011; Smith & Karpicke, 2014; for a review see Karpicke & Aue, 2015). The present experiments contribute to the growing base of evidence demonstrating that retrieval practice enhances long-term complex learning.”

ja-dark: For more on free recall, ‘idea units’, and ‘facts and concepts’, see here and here.

They also note the ‘episodic context’ (PDF) theory, which feels poorly explained such that it overstates the case of reinstating prior context if taken literally (I know I don’t remember each previous learning session when I pass Anki cards, for example):

“The second thing that needs to occur for retrieval practice to be effective is that students need to reinstate the prior context during retrieval (Karpicke & Zaromb, 2010; Karpicke et al., 2014; Lehman, Smith, & Karpicke, 2014). In other words, students need to think back to a previous time when they learned information and retrieve what they remember from the context. There is some evidence that reinstating the prior context is the mechanism by which retrieval practice improves learning (Lehman et al., 2014). If a retrieval-based learning activity is to be effective it must include this important element.”

At this point, the overstated version feels like a pet theory they’re emphasizing to oppose the ‘elaborative encoding’ theory for retrieval practice’s effectiveness.

A powerful way to improve learning and memory

A powerful way to improve learning and memory:

The movie “Inside Out” (2015) takes us inside the mind of its young protagonist, an 11-year-old girl named Riley, and depicts memory in a way that is sure to resonate with many people. In Riley’s mind, her memories are objects — globes colored with emotions — that are stored in a mental space, just as physical objects are stored in a physical space. When Riley experiences an event and creates a new memory, a new globe is produced in her mind, rolling down a ramp like a ball returning in a bowling alley. When Riley re-experiences a past event, a globe is placed in a projector and events are replayed, projected on a screen in her mind. Cognitive psychologists refer to the mental processes involved in the creation of new memories and the recovery of past memories as encoding and retrieval, respectively.

The depiction of the mind in “Inside Out” follows centuries of thought on how mind and memory work. Throughout history, scholars have used a common metaphor to talk about memory: The mind is a vast storehouse or space; memories are objects stored in that space; and retrieving a memory is akin to searching for and finding an object in a physical space (Roediger, 1980). To learn something new, according to this view, the challenge lies in getting knowledge “in” one’s mental space. Getting it back “out” when needed is important, too, but learning is usually identified with the encoding of new knowledge in memory. Retrieval is assumed to be neutral for learning; retrieval is needed to assess what a person has learned, but retrieval processes themselves are not thought to produce learning.

Recent advances in the science of learning and memory have challenged common assumptions about how learning happens. Specifically, recent work has shown that retrieval is critical for robust, durable, long-term learning. Every time a memory is retrieved, that memory becomes more accessible in the future. Retrieval also helps people create coherent and integrated mental representations of complex concepts, the kind of deep learning necessary to solve new problems and draw new inferences. Perhaps most surprisingly, practicing retrieval has been shown to produce more learning than engaging in other effective encoding techniques (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011). This approach, which recognizes the central role of retrieval processes in learning and aims to develop new learning strategies based on retrieval practice, is referred to as retrieval-based learning.

free eBook: Read PureScript by Example

free eBook: Read PureScript by Example:

“Functions enable a simple form of abstraction which can yield great productivity gains. However, functional programming in JavaScript has its own disadvantages: JavaScript is verbose, untyped, and lacks powerful forms of abstraction. Unrestricted JavaScript code also makes equational reasoning very difficult.

PureScript is a programming language which aims to address these issues. It features lightweight syntax, which allows us to write very expressive code which is still clear and readable. It uses a rich type system to support powerful abstractions. It also generates fast, understandable code, which is important when interoperating with JavaScript, or other languages which compile to JavaScript. All in all, I hope to convince you that PureScript strikes a very practical balance between the theoretical power of purely functional programming, and the fast-and-loose programming style of JavaScript.”

ja-dark: Cube Composer was written in this language.

Are 52% of words really not included in dictionaries?

Are 52% of words really not included in dictionaries?:

“In 2011, a remarkable article appeared in the journal Science that argued, based on a computational analysis of five million books, that “52 percent of the English lexicon—the majority of the words used in English books—consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references”. 

 Taken at face value, this might seem like an astonishing claim. Fifty-two percent of words in English written usage don’t appear in dictionaries! Take that, prescriptivists and lexicographers! We are the 52 percent! In this post, I would like to contextualize the article’s findings by taking into account a factor that most of the journalistic coverage written when the article appeared did not: namely, the presence of derivatives in the ‘dark matter’ lexicon. First, however, I would like to underline the meaning of the 52 percent by discussing the article’s stress on the word lexicon, especially in the context of a phenomenon (which the authors cite) called Zipf’s Law.”

Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics

Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics:

A fresh and fascinating look at the philosophies, politics, and intellectual legacy of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and controversial minds

Occupying a pivotal position in postwar thought, Noam Chomsky is both the founder of modern linguistics and the world’s most prominent political dissident. Chris Knight adopts an anthropologist’s perspective on the twin output of this intellectual giant, acclaimed as much for his denunciations of US foreign policy as for his theories about language and mind. Knight explores the social and institutional context of Chomsky’s thinking, showing how the tension between military funding and his role as linchpin of the political left pressured him to establish a disconnect between science on the one hand and politics on the other, deepening a split between mind and body characteristic of Western philosophy since the Enlightenment. Provocative, fearless, and engaging, this remarkable study explains the enigma of one of the greatest intellectuals of our time.

Chris Knight is currently senior research fellow in the department of anthropology at University College, London, focusing his research on the evolutionary emergence of human language and symbolic culture. He lives in London.

ja-dark: Release date in a few days. Will keep an eye out for this one. ^_^

You can read a 2004 paper by Knight of the same name using this DOI at whatever site you like.

“Yojijukugo”: The Compressed Poetry of Four-Character Idioms

“Yojijukugo”: The Compressed Poetry of Four-Character Idioms:

The aesthetic pleasures of four-character phrases, as compared with other proverbs, lie in their exquisite balance. They can be broken down into two pairs of characters, which often apply repetition and contrast to create a heightened effect. The phrase 一喜一憂 (ikki ichiyū) expresses the emotional turbulence of reacting to a changing situation: “one joy” is followed by “one sorrow” and vice versa. Similarly, the phrase 一進一退 (isshin ittai) conveys a stalemate: “one step forward” and “one step back.”

The Dead Are Returning Home and It’s Time to Party in Japan

The Dead Are Returning Home and It’s Time to Party in Japan:

“Every year in mid-August, Japan observes Obon (お盆), the Festival of the Dead, when the dead return to the ancestral home for several days to spend time with the living. Obon typically occurs on August 15 throughout most of Japan. In 2016, August 15 occurred on a Monday, and combined with a new holiday, Mountain Day, on Thursday, August 11, people across the country were able to take a five-day weekend. Many families returned to the countryside to observe Obon.

Bon dances (盆踊り, Bon Odori) are also held all over Japan, as well. These dances are typically held in neighborhood gathering places, such as Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, public plazas, and even the parking lots of supermarkets.

Many people celebrating upload photographs and videos of their local Bon dances to Instagram.”

Computational and Inferential Thinking:  The Foundations of Data Science

Computational and Inferential Thinking:  The Foundations of Data Science:

❝Most important decisions are made with only partial information and uncertain outcomes. However, the degree of uncertainty for many decisions can be reduced sharply by public access to large data sets and the computational tools required to analyze them effectively. Data-driven decision making has already transformed a tremendous breadth of industries, including finance, advertising, manufacturing, and real estate. At the same time, a wide range of academic disciplines are evolving rapidly to incorporate large-scale data analysis into their theory and practice.

Studying data science enables individuals to bring these techniques to bear on their work, their scientific endeavors, and their personal decisions. Critical thinking has long been a hallmark of a rigorous education, but critiques are often most effective when supported by data. A critical analysis of any aspect of the world, may it be business or social science, involves inductive reasoning — conclusions can rarely been proven outright, only supported by the available evidence. Data science provides the means to make precise, reliable, and quantitative arguments about any set of observations. With unprecedented access to information and computing, critical thinking about any aspect of the world that can be measured would be incomplete without the inferential techniques that are core to data science.

The world has too many unanswered questions and difficult challenges to leave this critical reasoning to only a few specialists. However, all educated adults can build the capacity to reason about data. The tools, techniques, and data sets are all readily available; this text aims to make them accessible to everyone. ❞

ja-dark: More and more these days I feel like data science should be the foundation of universal computational education, rather than ‘learning to code’ or ‘computational thinking’. It’s a good framework for all those things, but also maths, statistics, and an ecosystem of tools. Has the benefit of a concrete approach without the baggage of racism and sexism, also. Feels fresh and diverse and practical and aesthetically inspiring, all at once. It’s also very open to integration with the humanities and other domains in very specific ways.

I also think PLT (programming language theory) should be part of the foundations. I mean prior to almost anything else outside perhaps of very basic coding intros, but maybe with basic coding intros integrated into it instead of preceding it. Maybe with Object-Oriented Design, etc. also integrated (along with the functional programming design that’s typically already present). I am very fond of Cay Horstmann’s materials on Java/Design, and I remember wishing that I’d found him and his work before anything else with regards to learning OO and Java and such.

Can 42 US, a free coding school run by a French billionaire, actually work?

Can 42 US, a free coding school run by a French billionaire, actually work?:

Welcome to 42 US, a free coding school, which opened just last month. Even the optional dorms are free. (Good news: laundry is also free! Bad news: you have to pay the dorm $75 a week if you want two meals a day.) Admittedly, it sounds totally crazy.

Roz Chast

Photo



The CS Detective: An Algorithmic Tale of Crime, Conspiracy, and Computation

The CS Detective: An Algorithmic Tale of Crime, Conspiracy, and Computation:

Download Chapters 1-15 of The CS Detective for free!

“In this novel-meets-computer-science-textbook, private eye Frank Runtime hunts for the thieves who stole a trove of documents from the capital’s police station. He’ll use search algorithms to solve the mystery—and explain high-level computational concepts along the way.”
The Wall Street Journal

“If you’ve any interest in fun new twists on the detective genre, or you’re a computer science person wanting an easy way to learn about search algorithms, The CS Detective is for you!”
GeekDad

ja-dark: From Jeremy Kubica, who has posted free ‘computational fairy tales’ on a blog (also published as a book), such as this piece, and wrote Best Practices of Spell Design also. 

Similar.

Inside the Collaboration That Built the Open Source JupyterLab Project

Inside the Collaboration That Built the Open Source JupyterLab Project:

“Project Jupyter itself isn’t limited to just Python; in fact it makes the building blocks of science reproducible across more than 40 programming languages. The versatility of the project also opens its usability beyond programmers to data journalists.

The ‘computational narratives’ that Project Jupyter can create put source code, mathematical equations, text, graphs and visualizations, and other media into a live research paper that allows authors to show their work…

The new UI and workflow improvements will further the appeal of Jupyter Notebook to all researchers, but the newest users might come from the humanities…  

 According to Perez, it wasn’t until 2011 that usage of IPython notebooks started to grow beyond the scientific community. Today, it’s spreading quickly. ‘I know people in the humanities using Jupyter, and people using it in bioinformatics and finance. And areas of commercial data science, [like] journalism. BuzzFeed’s data journalists actually release sets of Jupyter Notebooks with articles that allows people to reproduce their work.’ “

CriteriEN and Voidness

Even though I wrote all those posts preaching about how spaced retrieval doesn’t require Anki or similar software, I’ve been practically living in Anki because my Void Anki (making everything opt-in) and especially my CriteriEN approach is just that awesome. I think CriteriEN (and associated add-ons) might be the best idea I’ve come up with using this persona. It has turned Anki from a chore to an absolute delight. Such a breezy, motivating experience now. 

Technically, my time has been divided between Anki and tutorials via Jupyter notebooks, but I’m considering streamlined ways to combine the two. Jupyter notebooks are so grand for learning/teaching, they are becoming a staple of coding-related educational practices. Well, they’re mostly concentrated around data science, machine learning, etc. in Python right now, but I suspect that will change in a big way soonish, especially with JupyterLab’s impending completion.

The above is my way of nudging you to try out CriteriEN/Void Anki if you haven’t already (and Jupyter).

I suppose the key effect (for me) of my non-software epiphanies about spaced retrieval and such is that it’s freed me up to fill my days with effective learning when I don’t have access to my main machine (I don’t use Anki on portable devices, they encourage too passive and rushed an approach to cards for me).

Effective, efficient learning has become the ecology, rather than a site within it.

"A black belt is only the beginning of learning."

“A black belt is only the beginning of learning.”

- Georges St-Pierre

People by Initials

People by Initials:

Search for people by initials. For instance, searching for ‘TA’ would give you results like Tadanobu Asano, Tadao Ando, Tex Avery, Theodor Adorno, &c.

Useful for mnemonics/method of loci.

Online Korean parsing tool

Online Korean parsing tool:

Somewhat useful; I prefer offline tools such as KoNLPy; the above online tool is rather laggy.

Creating machines that understand language is AI’s next big challenge

Creating machines that understand language is AI’s next big challenge:

“Noah Goodman’s office in Stanford’s psychology department is practically bare except for a couple of abstract paintings propped against one wall and a few overgrown plants. When I arrived, Goodman was typing away on a laptop, his bare feet up on a table. We took a stroll across the sun-bleached campus for iced coffee. “Language is special in that it relies on a lot of knowledge about language but it also relies on a huge amount of common-sense knowledge about the world, and those two go together in very subtle ways,” he explained.“

ja-dark: I suspect we’ll have computers using language very practically and fluently well before we have ‘real’ artificial intelligence (e.g. they will likely be able to pass one of those silly Turing tests robustly well before they achieve anything like animal intelligence–I say animal rather than human to emphasize that the difference is just a matter of degree, rather than kind).

You may not feel language deprived, but many deaf children are.

You may not feel language deprived, but many deaf children are.:
“This brief letter is in response to the open letter entitled “We Are Not Language Deprived” on Buzzfeed (https://www.buzzfeed.com/kerri9494/…).  …

I am a full ASL user now, I am just as much a participating member of the entire world as you are. The perception of ASL somehow removing deaf people from general society is flawed – this is “misleading and divisive rhetoric” as you claimed Nyle DiMarco was spreading in your first paragraph. Having a language foundation allows you to be a full participant in the world – whether it is spoken or signed.”

Related.

ja-dark: I liked this bit: “In actuality, sign language likely has benefits for everyone – including hearing children.” - Not long ago I posted this:  

The Secrets of Sherlock’s Mind Palace

The Secrets of Sherlock’s Mind Palace:

“But the method of loci doesn’t require a real location, at least according to research (PDF) from the lab of Jeremy Caplan at the University of Alberta in Canada. A couple of years ago, Caplan and colleagues tested out a variation on the mind palace. They had a group of people develop a palace using the conventional method, with a real building they knew. A second group explored a virtual building on a computer screen for five minutes and were instructed to place their memories inside that structure. When tested on their memories, the two groups of participants performed equally well at memorizing a list of unrelated words, and both were better than a third group that was not using the method of loci.

“It was always thought that you had to use places that you could easily visualize, that you spent a lot of time in, so you had a really rich representation of that space. But what we showed was that you didn’t actually need that,” says Eric Legge, lead author on the study.

It might also be possible to create a memory palace from a structure built entirely with the mind, says Christopher Madan, a co-author on the study. “It’s probably a bit harder than if you had a real place to use because it adds another thing to remember,” he says. But a person with a lot of complex information to remember, and maybe a particularly gifted mind, say that of a British sleuth, might be able to construct a palace tailor-made for that type of information.”

ja-dark: Quintilian noted ~2000 years ago that a memory palace can be a real or imagined place. Glad we finally got the research confirmation. ^_^

Macunx VR – Memory Palaces in Virtual Reality

Macunx VR – Memory Palaces in Virtual Reality:

Macunx is a VR platform for building memory palaces to learn huge amounts in short time and with full retention. 

By combining medieval memory techniques with modern technology, we are redefining the way we learn, understand, and retain information in our minds. 

Imagine knowing the periodic table in the same way you know the layout of your living room, or being able to recall a president or ruler with the same effortlessness of reaching for a mug when making a cup of tea.”

ja-dark: Looks interesting. Previously I noted some researcher-recommended Memory Palace stuff here.

Anki Add-on: Hangul Transliteration

Anki Add-on: Hangul Transliteration:

This link’s for an add-on which generates a romanized version of Korean words.

Anki Add-on: Jamo Decomposition (Korean)

Anki Add-on: Jamo Decomposition (Korean):

I started studying Korean recently and just threw this add-on together to try out the Korean version of a Japanese learning method I recently developed. Explanation in the link.

BubbleSort Zines Lure Teen Girls to Computer Science

natural language processing blog: Fast & easy baseline text categorization with vw

natural language processing blog: Fast & easy baseline text categorization with vw:

i’d use this just bc it has ‘vorpal’ in the name and isn’t branded by facebook

ipynbs: https://github.com/hal3/vwnlp

CriteriEN tweak

I’ve updated my CriteriEN study method to emphasize something I was undecided about before, which further streamlines it. 

After the initial session, there’s no separated Study/Encoding phase, only Testing. You still restudy/retest, but you do the restudy and retesting as you go through the testing.

That is, instead of going through failed cards at the end of a testing session, restudying and hitting Again, then retesting a few minutes later: When you know you’ve failed, you do your restudying using the back of the card before hitting Again and testing the next card, then when it reappears minutes later, which may be with cards you’re still testing, that’s your retest, with of course the aim being to pass it once (criterion level 1).

It’s more streamlined and is what I naturally gravitated toward, but I had this idea in my mind that you want to restudy/retest in batches, sort of repeating the initial session’s cycle of study/test phases.

You can still do that, but reviewing the studies, I think the integrated tweak might be more common. One thing I quite like about it is that it further enforces the habit of dealing with lapses immediately, one of the strengths of the criterion approach, and emphasizes the metacognitive, proactive aspect of the feedback and lapse as a learning experience, because in the same move as confirming the lapse, you are re-encoding the information that confirmed it, making it stronger. It becomes positive; it also encourages the habit of pausing and looking at the corrective feedback when flipping cards for reconsolidation (which works even when you pass), instead of rushing through.

A mindful tweak.

Anki Add-on: Typebox - Multi-Line Input Box

Anki Add-on: Typebox - Multi-Line Input Box:

Created by. Allows multi-line textarea. That one was on my to-do list whilst making my two ‘type answer’ add-ons but it must’ve slipped my mind.

This add-on’s a good fit for the Parsons Puzzles style cards I mention in blvk./geSH/: given shuffled lines of code, your task is to unshuffle.

Anki Add-on: Leech Dialog

Anki Add-on: Leech Dialog:

Someone created this add-on which gives you a more proactive chance to edit leeches as they occur; I haven’t used it, but if it works, then it should be a great fit with the strategy I recommend for CriteriEN–setting a low leech threshold and tagging them so you can make quality control adjustments to the card’s content.

How computer algorithms shape our experience of the real world

Your Brain Has A "Delete" Button--Here's How To Use It

Your Brain Has A "Delete" Button--Here's How To Use It:

BE MINDFUL OF WHAT YOU’RE MINDFUL OF

“And in fact, you actually have some control over what your brain decides to delete while you sleep. It’s the synaptic connections you don’t use that get marked for recycling. The ones you do use are the ones that get watered and oxygenated. So be mindful of what you’re thinking about.

If you spend too much time reading theories about the end of Game of Thrones and very little on your job, guess which synapses are going to get marked for recycling?”

Related:

Women 1.5 Times More Likely to Leave STEM Pipeline after Calculus Compared to Men: Lack of Mathematical Confidence a Potential Culprit

Women 1.5 Times More Likely to Leave STEM Pipeline after Calculus Compared to Men: Lack of Mathematical Confidence a Potential Culprit:

The substantial gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce can be traced back to the underrepresentation of women at various milestones in the career pathway. Calculus is a necessary step in this pathway and has been shown to often dissuade people from pursuing STEM fields… a lack of mathematical confidence, rather than a lack of mathematically ability, may be responsible for the high departure rate of women. While it would be ideal to increase interest and participation of women in STEM at all stages of their careers, our findings indicate that if women persisted in STEM at the same rate as men starting in Calculus I, the number of women entering the STEM workforce would increase by 75%.

ja-dark: Some computer scientists may find a use for some calculus to some degree, such as with neural networking as a supplement to linear algebra–and it’s not even required for the typical creative coder who wants to implement neural networks; zero reason for it to be a prequisite of any sort in degree programs, as opposed to a prerequisite for certain specializations further into programs, but even then:

Best to have maths integrated into computer science courses just as computer science courses should mostly be integrated into interdisciplinary programs (e.g. ‘CS+X’ or more like ‘X+CS’), just acquiring and using the math skills necessary to get things done rather than treating each math dependency as a monolithic series of foundational gatekeepers. But in the meantime, discrete maths and linear algebra should be the foundational math courses (also: statistics), definitely not calculus (lol). Amazed how backwards education remains in the 21c.

Frankly it doesn’t matter whether the ‘old guard’ are convinced about this–the world’s moving on and leaving calculus behind as an obstacle to the growth of computing as data science, machine learning, diverse education, etc., continues to evolve exponentially and bleed into the humanities and other disciplines.

See alsoCalculus apprehensions may steer women away from science careers

Related

Disrupting Meditation: Can An App Really Teach Mindfulness?

Which is better for novices, C++ lambdas or iterators? New research from Andreas Stefik’s group

Which is better for novices, C++ lambdas or iterators? New research from Andreas Stefik’s group:

ja-dark: I have to wonder whether the students hadn’t been exposed to iterators over lambdas in various forms over the years beforehand, despite the ‘low experience’ claims in the paper regarding the study population.

Of course, you can abstract that paradigm and think about how it’s leeched into other domains and thought processes over the years, biasing us, also.

Also, C++, really? ^_^

Why Students Don’t Like Active Learning: Stop making me work at learning!

Why Students Don’t Like Active Learning: Stop making me work at learning!:

“I enjoy reading Annie Murphy Paul’s essays, and this one particularly struck home because I just got my student opinion surveys from last semester.  I use active learning methods in my Media Computation class every day, where I require students to work with one another. One student wrote:

  • “I didn’t like how he forced us to interact with each other. I don’t think that is the best way for me to learn, but it was forced upon me.”

It’s true. I am a Peer Instruction bully.

At a deeper level, it’s amazing how easily we fool ourselves about what we learn from and what we don’t learn from.  It’s like the brain training work.  We’re convinced that we’re learning from it, even if we’re not. This student is convinced that he doesn’t learn from it, even though the available evidence says she or he does.

In case you’re wondering about just what “active learning” is, here’s a widely-accepted definition: “Active learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening to an expert. It emphasizes higher-order thinking and often involves group work.”

ja-dark: Normally Guzdial is on point, but here he’s pretty far off the mark. He seems confused about what constitutes active learning, perhaps? Forced spoken/social interaction is kind of an awful way to learn for most people, relative to actual active learning practices as we’ve seen described by Roediger, Bjork, Finn, et al. (see my ‘voidness’ posts for recent summaries).

I find it annoying to see someone misattributing social anxiety about inferior learning methods to laziness or poor metacognition (in this case).

Learning by explaining/teaching can be powerful, but it doesn’t require f2f interaction and isn’t as high on the list as spaced retrieval practice and the like. We can’t forget the affective nature of learning either, and imposing anxiety on relatively ineffective methods isn’t a good idea, IMO.

I actually think this ‘forced interaction’ method is one of the most conventional and harmful ‘teaching’ methods. I’m not sold on ‘pair programming’ either, they’re still working that out in research evidence; either way, at the very least, teachers should make sure that group work and the like is as low stress as possible, esp. for domains where you find a lot of introspective students. Offhanded ‘get in groups’ instruction is the worst.

Low stress good, low effort = bad. We want frequent, low stakes, desirably difficult active learning practice.

Reminds me of research on how ‘gaze aversion’ (e.g. avoiding eye contact) helps people think by removing the cognitive and emotional load of face processing, etc., so teachers who get caught up in forcing students to make eye contact are missing the point. Likewise abstract doodling while listening helps improve recall. Speech is so bad for conveying information, people need all the help they can get when forced into speech-based learning scenarios, really.

I blame it all on lecturing. Lectures are a terrible way to teach, and causes scenarios and misguided thinking such as above. Although ironically this approach is supposedly a reaction to the passive inferiority of lectures, I think perhaps they weren’t busting out of the paradigm enough.

A laid back, opt-in discussion-based approach for grad students is as far as I can imagine ‘classroom time’ being useful, myself. Better to make speech-centric classes/workshops/labs optional, period.

Starting to think all computer science should be taught in Jupyter ipynbs. ^_^

make the web ‘opt-in’

I wrote before about making Anki (spaced retrieval flashcard software) opt-in, rather than opt-out; I highly recommend taking a similar approach with browsing the web–or any form of information consumption, really–those old enough to remember what it was like to have to ‘dial up’ to be online, and then ‘log off’ later, many of them were slaves to television programming, radio, etc., so it’s a universal issue. Don’t let yourself be passively fed media, don’t try and keep up with every update due to ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out, as recently seen in the hit television show, Silicon Valley).

Actively choose to read what’s urgent, what serves your purposes, take the time to think about why you’re reading or watching what you do, how long it will take, whether it’s worth the investment, etc. Maintain your mental hygiene, curate, triage, etc. You are what you ‘eat’.

Easier said than done, but if you master this, you will be much happier.

I’m not confident in tools that constrain your browsing habits, I think this has to be a simpler, internal choice. (Reminds me of how Rushkoff came up with the idea of a digital sabbath, then renounced it as it wrongly frames the choice to 'detox’ as a deprivation.)

A simple metric of your success might be that when you look back at what you ‘consumed’ online (which you should actually be able to do, if you’re successful and weren’t overwhelmed that day), most of it consisted of things you chose to read or watch or listen to, that you sought out, and that it helped you in some way, enlightened you or increased the ratio of your production to reception (if production or productivity is something that you find enriching).

Related.

See also: Study Guide for Program or Be Programmed (PDF) - Esp. the first commandment, ‘Do Not Be Always On’.

Neural networks are inadvertently learning our language’s hidden gender biases

extracting japanese files on windows 10

If you’re on Windows 10, you can’t use AppLocale to prevent gibberish from non-Unicode characters, but you can use Locale Emulator. Works a treat. Just extract the LE files to a folder, after installing open a 32-bit version of 7-zip (only works with 32-bit versions), right click the 7zFM exe file, go to Locale Emulator on the context menu and set up a Japanese profile, and you’re good.

(via Triangle of Power - YouTube) Maths notation is needlessly...



(via Triangle of Power - YouTube)

Maths notation is needlessly complex. It can and should be better

Making students learn to execute similar operations using three different kinds of notation – as in the case of exponents, logarithms and roots – is a bit like asking them to learn to say the same thing in three different languages for no good reason. With such counterintuitive and redundant standardised notation systems, it’s easy to understand why many students become overwhelmed by mathematics and choose to pursue fields where complex calculations aren’t necessary. This video by Grant Sanderson, who makes films under the moniker 3Blue1Brown, looks at how expressing exponents, logarithms and roots could be made simpler by using one elegant notation system, and makes a broader case for how maths could be made more accessible by developing cleaner – and perhaps even artful – notation.

Video by 3Blue1Brown

Google launches new API to help you parse natural language

Google launches new API to help you parse natural language:

Google today announced the public beta launch of its Cloud Natural Language API, a new service that gives developers access to Google-powered sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and syntax analysis…

The new Cloud Natural Language API currently supports texts in English, Spanish and Japanese.

ja-dark: The Japanese dependency parsing seems pretty standard (note their demo representation shows arrows from heads to dependents).

Hansjörg Mayer, from alphabet, ‘62-63



Hansjörg Mayer, from alphabet, ‘62-63

Running Python in a Browser Is More Awesome Than You Think

Running Python in a Browser Is More Awesome Than You Think:

ja-dark: https://trinket.io - Slick resource for sharing Python scripts with people who aren’t programmers. They just have to hit the Run button.

dataquest (like codecademy for pythonic data science)

dataquest (like codecademy for pythonic data science):

ja-dark: I can’t quite recommend paying for it, just based on the pricing and the amount of free resources out there, but the numerous free lessons on this site seem excellent extensions of Codecademy. Codecademy should have this kind of focused context instead of isolated tutorials using odd variables like “eggs”. Of course, it’s been a few years since I looked at Codecademy’s Python track, maybe it’s evolved? Not that it wasn’t a fine complement to Think Python.

In other news, firecode.io is promising–I like to think of it as a Codecademy-style sort of kata/koan practice site, but the tone is rather obnoxious (somewhat ‘brogrammy’) and the instructions, etc. need editing and cohesion.

Dataquest also has a slight ‘brogrammy’ aspect in that the data examples are all about drinking alcohol, football, etc., apparently, but that’s the extent of it. Really wish it was cheaper, I would definitely recommend it, then.

I’d like to see more sites work with nonprofits like Free Code Camp. Perhaps create discounts for those who want to be active in that area, though they’d have to be stringent about quality of work as FCC is in that regard. Nothing worse than the mentality of doing volunteer work as if it were legally required community service.

Save the Chinese Typewriter

Save the Chinese Typewriter:

“Our campaign is called “Save the Chinese Typewriter,” raising the question: Save it from what?

We are trying to “Save” the Chinese Typewriter – and the History of Modern Chinese IT – from misunderstanding and oblivion.

Every day, more than 1,000,000,000 people use one or another form of Chinese Information Technology – whether texting on their smart phones, running Chinese-language web searches, or simply creating a document in Word. What is more, China and Asia are now prime engines (and markets) of IT innovation – a part of the world that every company in Silicon Valley has its eyes on.

Despite the size and importance of Chinese IT, there has never been a museum exhibit dedicated to this critically important chapter in the history of technology - until now!

Why is it is important to know more about this history, though?

Well, for more than 200 years, all of the most powerful IT innovations have depended upon alphabets in order to function work: telegraphy, typewriting, computing, and more. For most of this history, people assumed that the only way China would become “modern” was to get rid of their non-alphabetic writing system altogether. Supposedly there was no other way.

Fast forward to the present, and it seems that China has defied such predictions: Chinese characters are alive and well, and East Asian countries like China, Taiwan, and Singapore are IT powerhouses.

What happened?

The answer to this question is one of the many fascinating stories contained in this museum exhibit - an exhibit that will capture the imagination of anyone with an interest in technology, world culture, China, language, and innovation.”

coding the matrix: intro to python - sets, lists, dictionaries, and comprehensions (pdf)

‘Talking Dictionary’ Transmits Language of Japan’s Indigenous Ainu People · Global Voices

‘Talking Dictionary’ Transmits Language of Japan’s Indigenous Ainu People · Global Voices:

“An online “talking dictionary” first launched in 2009 is attempting to preserve and pass on the Ainu language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Japan’s northeastern island of Hokkaido and Russian island territories to the north. According to UNESCO, there are eight languages in Japan that are critically endangered, and the Ainu language tops the list with the highest degree of endangerment.”

You Know You’re a Child of the 1970s and 80s in Japan When… · Global Voices

Cultivating parallel universes in Manifold Garden

Cultivating parallel universes in Manifold Garden:

“… Manifold Garden, an upcoming first-person puzzle game which challenges players to think outside the box – in a major way. If you’ve played Antichamber or Portal, you can get the general gist of how it plays: three-dimensional spaces, while initially seeming ordinary, unfold into complex, non-Euclidean structures like something out of an Escher drawing. Walls become floors. Pillars become staircases. The entire universe loops inside itself, an action in one plane affecting all identical planes outward into infinity.

Manifold Garden is, in short, a game that’s incredibly easy to grasp visually but nearly impossible to pin down in text. Many of its early levels are designed around a triple torus, in which the three dimensions we’re most familiar with – length, width, and depth – loop back around into themselves.”

ja-dark: Looks like a nice memory palace (I suppose that would be very Bleach/Inception).

"If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will..."

If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. 

Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.



- William H. McCraven

Retrieval-induced facilitation

Something you don’t hear about often enough is retrieval-induced facilitation (PDF), where testing yourself can improve recall of untested material, due to relational processing, etc. I last indirectly noted it here (it’s mentioned by the authors in the paper).

At present researchers are teasing out the specifics (vs. retrieval-induced forgetting, which until recently got all the attention), but one interesting finding from Bjork is the benefits of multiple-choice in this regard (recall from my recent posts that multiple-choice has been ‘exonerated’ and is a viable format for retrieval practice). 

At any rate, this topic re-occurred to me recently due to the benefits I’m experiencing by going over a random subset of some very old cards a few at a time (which I’m doing for only a fraction of the cards): just to jog my memory. It works wonders. Answering a single question triggers that Proustian flood. Anki card as Madeleine.

(Recall that relearning is easier than learning, you never ‘really’ forget, as Bjork has noted repeatedly.)

Effects of Immediate Recall Trial on One-Year Delayed Recall Performance in Rey Complex Figure Test

Effects of Immediate Recall Trial on One-Year Delayed Recall Performance in Rey Complex Figure Test:

This study aimed to examine the effects of the presence or absence of an immediate recall trial on university students’ (n = 39) performance on the one-year delayed recall test in the Rey complex figure test (RCFT). Participants were divided into two groups that took either one or two tests, respectively. In the first year, the participants in the two-test condition completed a copy trial and an immediate recall trial, whereas those in the one-test condition underwent the copy trial only. In the second year, all participants completed a delayed recall test. Those in the two-test condition showed significantly higher scores than those in the one-test condition on the one-year delayed recall test. Thus, we found that omitting the immediate recall trial caused a decline in performance on the one-year delayed recall test. The relevance of these findings to the relationship with testing effects (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006) was considered.

ja-dark: Even just a single test (in this study, they were shown a complex figure, had a brief 3 minute conversation, then were asked to draw the figure from memory)…

Yasujiro Ozu and the enigmatic art of the ‘pillow shot’

Yasujiro Ozu and the enigmatic art of the ‘pillow shot’:

Pillow Shot

“Ozu’s most important contribution to film language is his much-copied manner of cutting from a character’s sufferings to an unrelated still life – famously, in ‘Late Spring’, a vase. Far from diluting our emotional response, this intensifies it by giving us time to share the feelings unfolding on screen.” - via

ja-dark: Looking at the supercuts of these scenes on YouTube, interesting to relate this to dark kaizen, null media, etc. – the forced breaks/memory-flushing I’ve advocated during study sessions.

"Like a poet has to write poetry, I wake up in the morning and I have to write a computer program."

“Like a poet has to write poetry, I wake up in the morning and I have to write a computer program.”

-

Donald Knuth, ‘the first hacker of visual poetics

“Knuth knows he’s not really ready to solve a problem until he can think of it without using pencil and paper; his best ideas rise up from his subconscious while he swims.”

(via Code.org on Twitter: “The new tech ed standards by...



(via Code.org on Twitter: “The new tech ed standards by ISTE include computational thinking. https://t.co/fUyww3UZAW #CSforAll https://t.co/cTxeBx8r2O”)

ja-dark: Rhetorically, not sure I like the emphasis on tech-assisted methods as the end goal.

Here’s a quote from a couple years ago from the person who popularized computational thinking as an educational concept, emphasis mine: 

“Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution(s) in such a way that a computer—human or machine—can effectively carry out.

Informally, computational thinking describes the mental activity in formulating a problem to admit a computational solution. The solution can be carried out by a human or machine. This latter point is important. First, humans compute. Second, people can learn computational thinking without a machine. Also, computational thinking is not just about problem solving, but also about problem formulation.

Somewhat tangentially, from the first paper that started things off: 

“Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve…  Computational thinking is a way humans solve problems; it is not trying to get humans to think like computers… “

Of course, the ideal would be that for every case, it’s human or machine-friendly, but I suspect the human aspect might need more emphasis to counterbalance the assumptions about machine-orientation. In discussing computer programs, due to the machinic biases, we tend to need to focus on how to make them more readable for humans–even though we also obviously want them machine-readable.

I also like ‘computational thinking’ better than ‘algorithmic thinking’.

Anki deck updates

I added JDIC audio (where available) for the MPD deck and the MF (morphological families) decks.

Recall that you can use KWAT with this dictionary file to generate morphological families for kanji you learn.

Also remember that you can bulk add JDIC audio using the tools and process found and explained here.

Anki look ahead limit for filtered decks

I’ve noticed that if you set the look ahead limit very low in the main Preferences menu, it prevents Anki from showing you cards from the Study phase of CriteriEN for the Testing phase before the first step time is up. That is, if your first step is 10 min and you study, then hit Again for testing in 10 min, if you finish studying all other cards before 10 min is up, it shouldn’t show any cards till 10m passes, if you set the look ahead limit below 10m.

Low Stakes add-on note

This add-on created by the prolific and talented AnkiTest, I think, should let you bulk change the ease of old cards from the Card Browser: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2031109761

Useful for if you’re doing CriteriEN, in addition to Low Stakes.

Although I see one reviewer has tried this, already.

Edit: I’ve noticed that hitting Again for cards in Review when reviewing ahead in a filtered deck gives odd behavior–the Correct interval increases when it should stay the same–so I need to fix this. Sorry!

Edit2: n/m nothing to do with my addons.. I’ll need to investigate default Anki or other addons. 

Edit 3: Yes, this is definitely a default Anki behavior that is apparent when you don’t reset Lapsed cards–instead of having to avoid rebuilding filtered decks due to resetting, you have to avoid for the following: If you review a non-new card in a filtered deck with resched enabled, then hit Again and Rebuild, the Good button interval will keep increasing–the problem isn’t the reviewing ahead increase if you hit Good; I actually augmented this in the Low Stakes add-on. No, the problem is that the Good interval will keep increasing even when you just hit Again/Rebuild. This is because of a function that gets called each time (dynIvlBoost) you lapse/rebuild, which multiplies the interval each call; it has nothing to do with my add-ons but I will probably not stop obsessing till I fix it. However, the basic rule I’ve always followed doesn’t change: don’t rebuild Filtered decks till you finish the study/test cycles; combined with the quick reschedule add-on(s) noted here, there’s plenty of flexibility.

Edit 4: Okay, I activated the ‘another retreat’ option that I included in the first Low Stakes update a while ago, and it seems to prevent the weird behavior.

This Unusual Japanese Technique Will Radically Improve Your Presentations

This Unusual Japanese Technique Will Radically Improve Your Presentations:

PechaKucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) forces you to speak more concisely, precisely and clearly by allowing just 20 slides. Yup, 20 slides. Oh, and you only get 20 seconds to present each slide. An auto forward control ensures there’s no request for “next slide” or “please go back.” Also called a 20×20 presentation, PechaKucha gives you just 6 minutes and 40 seconds to deliver your presentation. Every second is precious which means you can radically tighten-up your presentation skills or fail. It’s high pressure, but it’s also a great learning ground.

Granted, not every presentation can be delivered in under 7 minutes. But practicing PechaKucha forces a new way of thinking that eliminates the excess and leads to shorter, more creative and more highly polished presentations. It’s helped me hone my keynoting skills and PechaKucha is also a great format for project reviews, presentations and internal meetings. But the real fun comes when you join one of the public events.

ja-dark: It’s bizarre to me that we still have things like presentations, lectures, etc.: that people use speech as anything more than a minor supplement to convey complex information, but the technique is interesting, nonetheless. 

Reminds of Paul Nation’s fluency practice exercises.

It’s interesting that they call it a Japanese technique. Why is it Japanese, precisely? I believe two non-Japanese people came up with it while in Japan, and I’m not sure it’s particularly popular in Japan.

The Oracle of Arithmetic | Quanta Magazine

The Oracle of Arithmetic | Quanta Magazine:

So Scholze worked backward, figuring out what he needed to learn to make sense of the proof. “To this day, that’s to a large extent how I learn,” he said. “I never really learned the basic things like linear algebra, actually — I only assimilated it through learning some other stuff.” …

After high school, Scholze continued to pursue this interest in number theory and geometry at the University of Bonn. In his mathematics classes there, he never took notes, recalled Hellmann, who was his classmate. Scholze could understand the course material in real time, Hellmann said. “Not just understand, but really understand on some kind of deep level, so that he also would not forget.” … 

Scholze avoids getting tangled in the jungle vines by forcing himself to fly above them: As when he was in college, he prefers to work without writing anything down. That means that he must formulate his ideas in the cleanest way possible, he said. “You have only some kind of limited capacity in your head, so you can’t do too complicated things.”

Core20k - Matsushita General-Use Vocabulary with Audio

Core20k - Matsushita General-Use Vocabulary with Audio:

I came across this corpus through the paper that the Top Phonetic Components v2.0 deck is based on–that is, the list of top phonetic components is based on how often readings, etc. occur in the words in the Matsushita corpus; I simply turned the spreadsheet into an Anki deck and bulk-added audio with cb4960′s JDIC Audio Extraction tool and the offline archive of JDIC audio files that he provided for us years ago.

Not every card has audio, as not every word at JDIC has audio and occasionally readings or kanji don’t match up. But I believe most of them do. ‘Most’ in this case refers to a percentage of 20,000, so that probably means hundreds or thousands don’t have audio. Oh well!

*Note that if you’re playing with the JDIC tool, cb4960 created this back in the days of Anki 1, so you don’t need the ‘text:’ in the sound field; however, it’s better to merge the reading column with the expression column with a tool like this, anyway, as it seems Anki won’t export your media if you just use the fields in the audio field. That is, for exporting with media, you’ll need to explicitly have [sound:かんじ - 漢字.mp3] in the audio field rather than [sound:{{Reading}} - {{Expression}}.mp3].

メッセージを絵文字で暗号化するMozillaのCodemojiは暗号の理解を子どもたちに啓蒙するキャンペーンの一環だ | TechCrunch Japan

メッセージを絵文字で暗号化するMozillaのCodemojiは暗号の理解を子どもたちに啓蒙するキャンペーンの一環だ | TechCrunch Japan:

English version of TechCrunch article: Mozilla’s Codemoji enciphers your messages with emoji for fun and profit

Predicate-argument structures: http://pastebin.com/NedR7EuM

Ex: 

これはMozillaの、絵文字を使った暗号だけど、“解読不能”に設定すると、誰にも読めない強力な暗号になるんだ。Mozillaはこれを、Codemojiと呼んでいる。 

これは (ID=“1” )    Mozillaの、     絵文字を (ID=“2” )    使った (pred o=“2”)    暗号だけど、 (pred s=“1”)    “解読不能”に (ID=“3” pred s=“3”)    設定すると、 (pred)    誰にも (ID=“4” )    読めない (pred s=“4”)    強力な (pred s=“5”)    暗号に (ID=“5” )    なるんだ。 (pred s=“1” io=“5”)

Previously with explanation. Made with this

Want to learn a new language? Get a partner and play this video game

Want to learn a new language? Get a partner and play this video game:

“Crystallize,” is a role-playing game in which the player guides an avatar through a virtual world in which all the characters speak the target language. The player must learn to communicate to make friends and get a job. The prototype version teaches Japanese, but versions could be made for any language, the creators said.

Nayr's Core 5000 Updated PAS Diagrams

Nayr's Core 5000 Updated PAS Diagrams:

In the above link are the predicate-argument structure diagrams and below are plain text sentences annotated with PAS information for a recent version of the deck. 

image

Here’s the import file–the frequency number is the first field, update fields when they match, allow html, map the second field to the diagram version and the third field to the plain text version. Unzip the diagrams into your collections.media folder.

image

Previously (Core 10k PAS diagrams).

Note that these sentences are from a combination of the ‘simulated public speaking’ section of the spontaneous Japanese corpus and written Japanese; so some of the sentences, which really ought to be annotated with the register (e.g. SP for spoken), threw off ChaPAS’ accuracy, I suspect. You can search here if you’re curious about the register: WB is for Web, SP for spoken, BK for books, NM for newspapers/magazines, OF for official documents.

Essay on 18th-century note taking

Essay on 18th-century note taking:

Matthew Daniel Eddy’s fascinating paper “The Interactive Notebook: How Students Learned to Keep Notes During the Scottish Enlightenment” is bound to elicit a certain amount of nostalgia in some readers. (The author is a professor of philosophy at Durham University; the paper, forthcoming in the journal Book History, is available for download from his Academia page.)

…  “Lecture notes,” Eddy writes, “as well as other forms of writing such as letters, commonplace books and diaries, were part of a larger early modern manuscript world which treated inscription as an active force that shaped the mind.” It’s the focus on note taking itself – understood as an activity bound up with various cultural imperatives – that distinguishes notebook studies (pardon the expression) from the research of biographers and intellectual historians who use notebooks as documents.

"Using a book, not reading it, makes us wise."

“Using a book, not reading it, makes us wise.”

-

Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586)

Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit.

First reade, then marke, then practise that is good,
For without vse, we drink but LETHE flood.

Are You in Despair? That’s Good

Are You in Despair? That’s Good:

Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely. This can make a difference in your life. In fact, there is growing scientific evidence that precisely tailored emotional experiences are good for youeven if those experiences are negative. According to a collection of studies, finely grained, unpleasant feelings allow people to be more agile at regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them…

My lab discovered emotional granularity in the 1990s. We asked hundreds of volunteers to keep track of their emotional experiences for weeks or months. Everyone we tested used the same stock of emotion words, such as “sad” and “angry” and “afraid,” to describe their experiences. However, we found that some people used these words to refer to distinct experiences — each word represented a different emotion concept — while other people lumped these words together as a single concept meaning, roughly, “I feel miserable.”

It was natural to think that people with higher emotional granularity were just better at recognizing emotional states in themselves, but our lab found that this was not what was happening. Your brain, it turns out, in a very real sense constructs your emotional states — in the blink of an eye, outside of your awareness — and people who learn diverse concepts of emotion are better equipped to create more finely tailored emotions.

This is why emotional granularity can have such influence on your well-being and health: It gives your brain more precise tools for handling the myriad challenges that life throws at you…

The good news is that emotional granularity is a skill, and many people can increase theirs by learning new emotion concepts. I mean this literally: learning new words and their specific meanings. If you weren’t familiar with the term “pena ajena” that I mentioned earlier, for example, you’ve now increased your potential for granularity. Schoolchildren who learn more emotion concepts have improved social behavior and academic performance, as research by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence shows. If you incorporate such concepts into your daily life, your brain will learn to apply them automatically.

Emotion concepts are tools for living. The bigger your tool kit, the more flexibly your brain can anticipate and prescribe actions, and the better you can cope with life.

micro-dictator


I recently mentioned the modified dictogloss. A traditional dictogloss is basically a task where you read/listen to a short Japanese passage (you can always generalize to other languages when I say Japanese), and then summarize/reconstruct it in Japanese.

I’ve been thinking of ways to do something similar, so discovering this interested me. Different possibilities include writing very short recaps, in Japanese, of Japanese media you consume. Which reminds of the ‘dictowatch’.

(Also consider Twitter/Tumblr micro-reviews or comments on Vine, etc.).

Really, Twitter/Tumblr/Vine/YT and the like are just generally useful sources.

After all, so much real language now is CMC, computer-mediated communication, with its mixture of spoken language and written language properties* (see also Senko Maynard on ‘fluid orality’), where arguments can even sometimes occur after verbs… *Although I think it’s better to look at it as written language becoming dynamic, rather than becoming more like speech.

With resources like Japanese the Manga Way which combine basics of the language with its informal usage, and the majority of media being the way it is, the notion of postponing ‘informal’ Japanese until you reach an ‘intermediate’ level doesn’t make much sense these days. Resources should describe the language that learners want to use, as it’s used, from the onset.

Anki Deck: Top Phonetic Components v2.0 (New Analysis, 119 entries)

Anki Deck: Top Phonetic Components v2.0 (New Analysis, 119 entries):

I have uploaded another Anki deck for the phonetic components, a superior one based on actual kanji usage in words, which consists of the most common and regular phonetic components in a corpus of 20k common words.

Research indicates phonetic components are surprisingly regular and useful, despite what you may have heard. I go over some of that here. Not enough to make learning readings with kanji worthwhile, but enough that a concise, “high percentage” (think Pareto principle) list can be useful to learn.

These can make attaching sounds to words easier, as you’ll already have the connection in place; it can make recognition easier, as readers first recognize whole characters/morphemes, but afterwards also activate subcomponents (semantic radicals, phonetic components) which are linked to submorphemic and phonological representations, which feed into and boost recognition. Similar to how radical knowledge helps recall and how kanji enhance speech processing, learning phonetic components can also aid recall of the kanji if you know the sound but can’t bring to mind the character, allowing a chance at remembering just a piece, which might trigger a cascade.

So for ja・ミニマル users, you don’t learn readings with kanji, you learn pronunciations incidentally with vocabulary, as readings are the least important aspect of kanji, and sound the least important aspect of written Japanese. But in the spirit of efficiency and maintaining that bridge between the independent, interacting written and spoken languages, it’s useful to supplement with this list.

The plain text version.

Worked examples in computer science

Worked examples in computer science:

The evidence suggests certain worked example techniques (primarily example-problem pairs and faded worked examples) are an improvement over standard problem solving techniques, in terms of learning time and performance on near transfer tests in novices. 

In situations where the student is not a novice, faded worked examples appear to improve performance and decrease learning time on near transfer tasks. In addition, techniques such as self-explanation prompts may promote far transfer as well if applied appropriately. 

Since much of the research involves well structured domains like Statistics, Physics and Engineering, it is likely that findings would transfer readily to the domain of Computer Science. 

However, further studies are required to confirm the effectiveness of pedagogies based on worked examples in the context of Computer Science. 

The use of faded worked examples with self-explanations has the potential to help students to learn more effectively, but the best order of fading problems is currently unknown Renkl et al. (2004). Future research into what steps should be faded first for a given problem in Computer Science would also help us understand how faded worked examples could most effectively be employed. 

ja-dark: I suspect a ‘fade’ or more like a quick drop after initial learning using simple expanding spacing (with corrective feedback after recall) is probably best, which is what I have advocated for math, etc., in Anki.

Previously

image

The Testing Effect Is Alive and Well with Complex Materials (PDF)

The Testing Effect Is Alive and Well with Complex Materials (PDF):

Van Gog and Sweller (2015) claim that there is no testing effect—no benefit of practicing retrieval—for complex materials. We show that this claim is incorrect on several grounds. First, Van Gog and Sweller’s idea of “element interactivity” is not defined in a quantitative, measurable way. As a consequence, the idea is applied inconsistently in their literature review. Second, none of the experiments on retrieval practice with worked-example materials manipulated element interactivity. Third, Van Gog and Sweller’s literature review omitted several studies that have shown retrieval practice effects with complex materials, including studies that directly manipulated the complexity of the materials. Fourth, the experiments that did not show retrieval practice effects, which were emphasized by Van Gog and Sweller, either involved retrieval of isolated words in individual sentences or required immediate, massed retrieval practice. The experiments failed to observe retrieval practice effects because of the retrieval tasks, not because of the complexity of the materials. Finally, even though the worked-example experiments emphasized by Van Gog and Sweller have methodological problems, they do not show strong evidence favoring the null. Instead, the data provide evidence that there is indeed a small positive effect of retrieval practice with worked examples. Retrieval practice remains an effective way to improve meaningful learning of complex materials.

See also:

The Status of the Testing Effect for Complex Materials: Still a Winner


Despite the methodological concerns described above, I quite like the emphasis on worked examples in Van Gog, et al.’s work. Personally I like to use spacing and testing as a supplement for more complex materials, based around the superior benefits and efficiency of worked examples: Anki becomes a sort of spaced reminder program that schedules and cues your worked example practice (working through a worked example is the template upon which initial learning and subsequent recall is based), which involves retrieval of memories (which as I’ve noted, is a learning process: you don’t recall perfect copies of what you learned from a pensieve, you reconstruct and alter them) followed by corrective feedback in Anki.

But alarm bells ring when new research with results that fly in the face of a century’s work start making claims promoting the same method very authoritatively (worked examples over testing). I do dislike it when researchers try to speciously tear down one great learning method to promote their pet method which they’re building their carerers on. Tearing down inferior methods, fine, but be honest and find where effective methods can be combined, and proceed from there to be minimalist and get the ratios right.

I look forward to more research comparing worked examples for complex materials to testing, because it would be fantastic if simply working through worked examples obviated the need for further elaboration of study techniques.

Gisting Japanese

Gisting Japanese:

This is the long-form, detailed explanation of a new approach I’m experimenting with as a rather large method overhaul. It’s not meant to entirely replace a self-study regimen, but I think it could be primary.

I’ll try and create resources and simpler explanations in the future. I just wanted to get everything out there.

New Anki Add-ons

I have uploaded some new add-ons; hopefully they don’t break (anything).

These are preliminary tools that will I think learners will find useful if they use the new learning method I’m about to spring on them. 

You can read the descriptions, but essentially in combination they allow you to to study short phrases or collocations as follows:

Let’s say you’re studying  学校を休んだ.


FRONT:

(Optional audio and/or reading: がっこうをやすんだ)

休学を校んだ  <- Note the kanji are out of order, but not the kana.

{skipped school}

# note the kanji listed below are also out of order

  • 休: {rest} {day off} {retire} {sleep} 
  • 学: {study} {learning} {science} 
  • 校: {exam} {school} {printing} {proof} {correction}

[Drag Text Here to Help Visualize]

BACK:

[Checks Accuracy of Dragged Text]

学校を休んだ


The jumbled kanji in the expression comes from the Kanji Jumble add-on; the shuffled list of kanji are from the Kanji Shuffle and Gloss add-on; you can now drag text into the Type Answer field using the Allow Drag and Drop add-on; normally the Type Answer field takes the cursor when the card is shown, but now the focus stays on the Show Answer button with the No ‘Type Answer’ Autofocus add-on, so you can still hit space immediately if you don’t need to drag or input text.


So in effect, the previous Kanji Scramble, Define, Shuffle let you study kanji and single words together; this allows you to study multiple words together. I feel this might be the best way to study such short phrases, the difficulty of the cue (Front) carefully modulated. If we just had the unscrambled words together without other information as a basic recognition card, it would be too difficult. Likewise a basic production card. So we can’t put one or the other on the same side, and we can’t put them both on the same side–normally.

By jumbling the kanji, we can create a middle ground. It’s simultaneously a recognition and production card, with the extra ease of meanings together with the phrase, offset by the jumbling and shuffling.

It’s either this or have known-unknown combniations, which gets extremely complicated. 

Anki Add-on: Kanji Scramble, Define, Shuffle

Anki Add-on: Kanji Scramble, Define, Shuffle:

I created this add-on so you can learn kanji and vocabulary together, instead of waiting. Description of add-on, method, and examples in the link.

Kanji get their meanings through usage as representatives of morphemes (small units of meaning) in words, so I think it’s best to learn kanji and their meanings this way as much as possible.

Reminder: Japanese characters are processed left-to-right on a basic perceptual level–as wholes (literally–see link references, e.g. [+]) once well-learned–then on various parallel levels linking the characters to the word forms and to the word meanings, falling back on morphemes that kanji represent for word meanings or radicals/audio for kanji meanings, as necessary.

Learning to read Japanese: an untainted view

ja-dark:

Let’s talk about reading Japanese, again. From a naive yet enlightened perspective.

Japanese written language, in terms of meaning, can be broken up into two layers: the subvocabulary layer, and the vocabulary layer.

English doesn’t have a subvocabulary layer, unfortunately, which means you have to memorize tens of thousands of phonetically arranged sequences made up of meaningless squiggles representing sounds, attaching meanings to each phonetic string over a long period of time. And often, these squiggle-sound sequences don’t even match the sound of the word! Even worse, you can never process these sequences as meaningful wholes: you always have to process each squiggle individually, primarily associating the squiggles with sounds, only then triggering their definitions.

With Japanese, you have a subvocabulary layer, which is very cool, because unlike the vocabulary layer, it basically consists of just a few thousand recycled ideas, each of which a given subvocab component directly represents, because the visual squiggles they’re made of are just complicated enough to be processed as uncomplicated wholes, once you learn them. This subvocab layer makes up most of the vocabulary layer, and the vocabulary, those squiggle-meaning strings, are extremely short, and they’re actually spelled according to the subvocab meanings, which combine to create the vocab meanings!

So if you know the subvocab, you can just stack the vocab on top of it. You don’t learn these all at once, either, waiting to learn vocabulary until you learn all the subvocabulary. You do it slice by slice, learning some subvocab here, some corresponding vocabulary there. You could learn them at the same time, but this isn’t very efficient. If you do that, it’ll be as hard as learning phonetic vocab, taking everything in at once, which is no picnic! It’s best to separate the layers and learn those subvocab slices a week or two ahead of the corresponding vocabulary slices.

What’s very handy is that Japanese subvocabulary is simpler to learn than English phonetic vocabulary, as the subvocab is entirely composed of a few hundred meaningful, recycled chunks, which are recombined a few chunks at a time. What’s funny and strange is that despite this, people who have learned tens of thousands of English squiggle-sound sequences sometimes think learning Japanese subvocabulary is hard.

Putting it all together, how do we learn Japanese vocabulary, since we have this subvocab layer to make things so much easier? Since you’re not a kid learning a language over the course of years, you obviously wouldn’t try to learn vocabulary words in any new language without using flashcards, as that, which research has shown, would take ages, stumbling through texts, glossing over errors and constantly looking up the same words, whereas someone who learned the vocab separately with an efficient method would have been reading and enjoying themselves during that time, fleshing out their vocab knowledge.

So why not use Anki, a system for spaced retrieval (SRS) flashcards, which are many times better than regular flashcards, giving you even more time to read and enjoy stuff? And guess what, we can use Anki for the subvocab also! This’ll go even quicker, so after weeks or months going a slice at a time, the subvocab can start boosting vocab all at once!

Reblogging this as a response to Ted Chiang’s sadly ignorant piece on Chinese characters. I haven’t read his fiction, and I’m not sure I would enjoy it, as I have a hard time enjoying the prose of alphabetic writers who have a ‘flat’ sensory view of written language (and don’t even understand that there’s a thing called written language). 

Written language, spoken language, and signed language all comprise the domain-general, multimodal system for making meaning in various ways; morphographic language is fundamentally different from phonographic. 

Thankfully, Japanese contains the best of both worlds: the connection to the limited spoken language vocabulary that precedes literacy through phonographs (kana), and the visual-semantic links (kanji/morphemes) conducive to written language vocabulary, which is where most of a literate person’s words are learned and where the most benefit to literacy is derived.

Also thankfully, only a handful of old-fashioned scholars and a derivative generation or two of their students still fail to read up on how language and writing works and instead insist on obsessing over etymology, phonology, etc.

As with leaving Chomskyan grammar behind, researchers have already moved on for the most part, now it’s just a matter of leaving the other old ways behind in education in favor of learning methods which properly address the properties of Chinese characters and implement techniques such as spaced retrieval.

If that happens, the frustrated complaints from learners who were indoctrinated in poor methods (e.g. rote handwriting) and ideas about Chinese and Japanese (e.g. phonocentrism) will fade and future learners will achieve literacy as easily and quickly as they should.

So we’ve addressed the literacy aspect of Chiang’s piece… what else. Simplified Chinese characters? Oh, right. The stuff about access to Classical Chinese literature freezing the culture or some nonsense. Well, I’m pretty sure alphabet users have the same level of access to classic literature, and that having access to written heritage encourages change, it doesn’t stifle it. Also, let’s not implicitly de-emphasize written language change, as phonocentrists are wont to do with their mistaken notion that language = speech and only sound-related changes are of import. That is to say, even if the word forms are perfectly maintained, written language is independent and won’t be frozen without the influence of spoken language.

Beyond that, of course cultural contexts and new forms of writing and literature change interpretations, as well, as we’ve implied above with regards to cultural evolution and access to literary heritage and historical records.

What next, will he talk about how kanji/hanzi make Chinese and Japanese people less creative?

Finally, in response to the last portion of Chiang’s piece, about the ‘misconception’ that characters directly represent ideas and that crisis means danger + opportunity… it’s a misconception that it’s a misconception, actually.

As for any possible ‘flat’ writing style he might have, perhaps someone can point out to him the stylistic advantages of mixed morphographic-phonographic writing.

It’s not Chiang’s fault, though, it’s the so-called ‘scholars’ who are quite ignorant about how language and literacy works on an empirical level according to actual modern studies, and bring their own biases into their ignorant, anecdotal teaching.

Human Git Aliases

Human Git Aliases:

“Stubbornly Refusing to Speak The Computer’s Language”

「断固としてコンピュータ言語を拒絶する」

Translated into Japanese here. I’ve posted a link to POSTD before, but I want to reiterate how a cool a site it is. Lots of translations into Japanese of interesting STEM stuff.

Although I suppose that translation above isn’t perfect. It doesn’t capture the formulaic sequence ‘speak the … language’. Feels like there should be a  話す in there somewhere.

What’s cool is that a lot of these are tutorials, so you have explanatory Japanese, embodied cognition, and soft monolinguality at play here.

"If writing is magic, grammar is the knowledge of how to cast a spell."

“If writing is magic, grammar is the knowledge of how to cast a spell.”

- David Didau

Instructed Second Language Vocabulary Learning

Instructed Second Language Vocabulary Learning:

Linking this older post for people doing Tadoku (extensive reading) right now; one of the rules is not looking up words, but this is somewhat incorrect. It’s true that you don’t want to interrupt the flow of reading and do want to make use of context, but you should definitely look up words and save them: the solution is to use pop-up glosses such as with Rikaisama or GoldenDict.  There’s also tools like jGloss

We need the deliberate, intensive component to complement the extensive, incidental component. Fast-mapping and slow-mapping. This applies to extensive listening, as well.

See also: The Four Strands

PS - I have a mind-blowing series of techniques and tools to discuss for prioritizing and streamlining media consumption as with the love of 多読, but it’s a big project that’s taking more time than I expected. Stay tuned.

Learned Field/Tag Anki Add-on Update

Learned Field/Tag Anki Add-on Update:

Oh dear, after my first update I forgot to indent the conditionals that filled the Learned field, which filled the field prematurely. Apologies to the 8 people who downloaded this who were affected. Thanks to inky for pointing it out.

Notepad++ constantly screws up Python indentation for me, but I keep using it because I always have it open. I actually just had to re-upload the fix twice b/c of that and my impatience.

I have just corrected the Notepad++ issue by going to Settings->Preferences->Tab Settings->Python->Replace by space (4).

"You can get a good deal from rehearsal, If it just has the proper dispersal. You would just be an..."

“You can get a good deal from rehearsal,
If it just has the proper dispersal.
You would just be an ass
To do it en masse: Your remembering would turn out much worsal.”

- Bjork
(Robert A. Bjork, that is.)

'Correct stroke order‘

One of my peeves is the obsession with stroke counts and correct stroke order for people learning the kanji, and the misguided advice for learners to focus on strokes.

First off, unless you’re a linguist or frequently use a dictionary which benefits from stroke count knowledge, don’t worry about stroke counts.

Also, stroke complexity is a relatively trivial issue for learners, as we stop seeing characters in terms of strokes as we learn them (we see them as subcomponents and then as wholes). Stroke complexity doesn’t slow us down when reading familiar characters.

Secondly, strokes are the least important aspect of learning the Chinese characters–subcomponents are the most imporant, and there is no proven ‘correct’ stroke order. For humans, there’s no demonstrably optimal path from first stroke to last stroke that facilitates memory and writing. The kanji and other writing systems have evolved for maximal legibility by children, written once and read many times, so the development and maintenance of a maximally economical method for producing characters has been more a matter of custom than evolutionary trait. The marginal returns for such production-oriented economy become more marginal as we move further into the digital era.

Any possible variations within that constraint can achieve optimal readability, within the limits of human motor ability. Only recognition software is sensitive enough to be influenced by an optimal mathematical path for stroke order. Variations are quite natural and do not matter as long as the end result is visually congruent with the established character appearance.

That’s for ‘correct’ or ‘official’ stroke order. Personalize your own if you want, but be consistent with it, so you can develop an internal motor sequence which will facilitate recall. That is, you want to become fluent in a stroke pattern so that it’s internalized and reduces the cognitive burden of recognizing and producing characters by partially offloading the workload onto complementary sensory processes. Humans are multimodal creatures.

To achieve that consistency, just pick an order and stick with it, reinforcing it with handwriting practice. The benefits are marginal compared to chunk-based strategies, as character subcomponents are the primary aspects that support learning and holistic processing of characters. In this sense, it can be easier to have a pre-existing stroke order presented to you, so that you don’t have to learn your own before being consistent with it, but this is a mere refinement, and if it becomes an obstacle to adhere to it, varying from it as you find your own stroke order is fine.

For a long time, researchers have pointed out to educators that the traditional focus on rote stroke order memorization is inferior to meaningful chunk-based learning, but as far as I know, rote handwriting practice is still sadly common.

I’ve discussed this before, how handwriting is useful but merely a supplement, something to practice a few times with spaced retrieval practice only when you feel fuzzy on details in characters, and how even just mentally tracing the strokes or using your finger in the air can be useful. But there’s also animated stroke order diagrams, they can trigger similar detail-oriented processes in the mind to aid recall, without handwriting. So in lieu of handwriting practice, for convenience these diagrams can be useful substitutes (e.g.).

Of course, it would be interesting if there was found for each kanji an optimal sequence for producing and reading it as quickly and memorably as possible, but demonstrating such an order would be merely a trivial refinement for learners. It only seems important due to the inferior learning methods relying on rote repetition of handwriting by strokes that misguidedly magnify it.

In sum, you should never grade yourself on stroke order when studying the kanji.

More on the holistic processing of characters.

Hantology: Hanzi Ontology

Hantology: Hanzi Ontology:

Not to be confused with Hauntology. ^_^

Links hanzi (Chinese characters) and I believe they may have extended it to Japanese kanji (where they differ) to SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology) so you can see the conceptual aspects of the characters, as remember, Japanese and Chinese are morphographic, the primary aspect of literacy is the direct visual connection of written characters to the small units of meaning (morphemes) they represent and combine with to form words (compounds).

SUMO query example: entity->physical->object->agent->organism->plant

Lots of papers, but here’s a PDF of one.

Rikaisama and Realtime Import for Chrome

cb4960 hasn’t made his amazing Firefox extension for Chrome, but it looks like you can make do with a Yomichan extension and AnkiConnect. Not sure if you can use Yomichan with Realtime Import.

For me, besides the audio, an essential feature I love about Rikaisama is ‘Super Sticky Mode’, which I discuss here.

I previously wrote about instant Anki card creation with Rikaisama and Real-Time Import here and here. My posts at Dark Japanese are getting rather dated, though.

By the way, if you want another EPWING dictionary for Rikaisama, I mentioned it rather under the radar in the past, but you can get the Japanese WordNet EPWING dictionary here. I recommend this version.

See also.

Outside the browser, GoldenDict is my go-to pop-up dictionary now. You can find many dictionaries for it here. Japanese is here and here, maybe elsewhere on that site.

KoNLPy: Korean NLP in Python — KoNLPy 0.4.4 documentation

KoNLPy: Korean NLP in Python — KoNLPy 0.4.4 documentation:

Excellent resource; don’t forget to check the other NLP tools linked on the page. Morphological analysis, parsing, spelling, proofreading, etc.

There’s a Korean is a constituency parser with a so-so F-measure when fitted with Korean.

Found a dependency parser called POSPAR/Sejong, nothing about it seems to work. Oh, here’s one using MaltParser, let’ see… This other called KorPar seems more of a proof-of-concept for Prolog.

I also found the KAIST dependency parser based on KNP. Requires SMA morphological analyzer. Another MA is Rhino.

There’s a Korean Propbank but it looks like it’s closed access, that’s a shame.

Retrieval practice over the long term: Should spacing be expanding or equal-interval?

Retrieval practice over the long term: Should spacing be expanding or equal-interval?:

If multiple opportunities are available to review to-be-learned material, should a review occur soon after initial study and recur at progressively expanding intervals, or should the reviews occur at equal intervals? Landauer and Bjork (1978) argued for the superiority of expanding intervals, whereas more recent research has often failed to find any advantage. However, these prior studies have generally compared expanding versus equal-interval training within a single session, and have assessed effects only upon a single final test. We argue that a more generally important goal would be to maintain high average performance over a considerable period of training. For the learning of foreign vocabulary spread over four weeks, we found that expanding retrieval practice (i.e., sessions separated by increasing numbers of days) produced recall equivalent to that from equal-interval practice on a final test given eight weeks after training. However, the expanding schedule yielded much higher average recallability over the whole training period.

CriteriEN Anki add-ons

CriteriEN

Low Key Anki: Pass/Fail -  

This is a slight modification of Dmitry Mikheev’s Again Hard add-on to make it Again Good. That is, there’s just two buttons, specifically Correct and Incorrect.

My lengthy rationale is here: Low Stakes Anki 

The idea is to make Anki reviews simpler, part of a criterion learning approach, as explained in the other add-on, Low Stakes Anki.

Low Stakes Anki: No Penalties or Boosting -  

This add-on I made to go with a 2-button add-on for Anki that I modified to give you only two options: Correct/Incorrect, meaning Good/Again. It’s part of a criterion learning approach

Assuming I didn’t screw up, this add-on overrides the Scheduler settings to remove the easy boost, hard penalty, lapse penalty, and ignore the multiplier for lapsed cards, so failing does not reduce or reset the intervals. It removes what I consider the fluff of adaptiveness that current SRS programs attempt in favour of simplicity, while we wait for breakthroughs in research for adaptive scheduling. 

See add-on page for more.   

CriteriEN (encrit v2.0)

This is an update to what was originally called encrit, a research-based strategy for reviewing Anki cards or spaced retrieval study in general. It’s essentially taking a commonsense approach and formalizing it.

A fundamental component of spaced retrieval studies that is often overlooked by the average learner who uses Anki or other software is the division of study sessions into cycles consisting of two phases: studying and testing, or memory encoding and memory retrieval. The # of cycles of these two phases depends on reaching a criterion level of what is typically one correct recall of each card; more than 3 correct recalls seems to be the maximum before you experience inefficient, diminished returns. See the work of Rawson and Vaughn esp. for more, but it’s present in nearly all research on spaced retrieval.

Previously, encrit used multiple learning/relearning sessions in the first 24h. This was overkill, I feel. Hence CriteriEN. Plus the name was dumb so I needed an excuse to change it to a slightly less stupid name.


So the outline of a study session is like so. Let’s say you sit down on a day to study for 30 minutes. You have a batch of new cards.

–Initial Session (e.g. Day 1):

—Study/Test Cycle:

——Study Phase: Look at the front/question (’cue’) and back/answer (’target’), use mnemonics, listen and repeat, write things out a few times, pop open an IDE and write some code or work through math formulae, etc. Set the studied cards aside (e.g. hit Again).

——Test Phase: This usually occurs 5-10 minutes after the Study phase. Look at the front/question (‘cue’) of a randomly presented card you studied, attempt to recall the back/answer (’target’). 

  • If you pass, schedule the card for the next session, as it met criterion level 1–one pass.
  • If you fail a card, study the answer again, and set it aside or in Anki hit Again, and a few minutes later test it again. Repeat this till you pass it once in this session.

–End Initial Session


–Next Session (e.g. Day 2-3)

  • Now these are ‘review’ cards, rather than ‘new’. 

——Test Phase: We start with the test phase, since we already encoded the card and want to learn through retrieval practice. Otherwise we repeat the above two bullet points: pass once or fail and restudy, then retest. Remember to wait a few minutes after reviewing the back of the card before testing, to flush recent memory. Also, remember that corrective feedback strengthens memories even when you pass, so try and look at the back of a card at least briefly before sending it on to the next session by hitting the Pass button.

If a failed card seems like it needs special attention, change the front of the card to make it easier somehow. Add audio, images, use a mnemonic, whatever. We want difficulty to be balanced between the Front and Back, with the Front slightly weak to give us desirable difficulty. That is, the stronger the cue, the easier the card, the weaker the cue, the harder the card, so we want to find that sweet spot.


–Next Session (e.g. Day 7-10)

Repeat the above.


We have a tad more work to do to set this up in Anki:

For lapsed card settings, you should set ‘new interval’ to 100% or at least more than 0 so that it’s not reset entirely (see below), set minimum interval to ~2 days, leave steps as 10 minutes.

So you’d just hit Again (1) to show yourself cards for restudy when relearning lapsed cards, wait 10 minutes, then retest. If you pass it, the card will go back to around its original interval, at least 2 days.

As far as I know, Anki doesn’t penalize the ‘ease’ of cards if you hit Again when in learning/relearning mode. It does keep resetting the intervals of failed cards, but I removed this behavior with the Low Stakes add-on.

For regular reviewing settings, change graduating and easy interval to 2 days, starting ease to 250-300%, make sure easy bonus is 100% (doesn’t do anything) just in case, leave the interval modifier 100% and max interval to default.


For optimal recall, from recent studies I’ve read, doing a single session on Day 1, then waiting a couple of days allows for a desirable level of difficulty (desirable difficulty is the catchphrase that represents why spaced retrieval is superior to cramming).

Keep in mind that the study phase is not the learning phase, with the testing phase merely assessing what you learned. This is how people mistakenly think of Anki–it tests things you already learned. Anki is a learning tool, not just a memorization tool. The primary learning element of this process is actually the testing phase. You learn facts and concepts better by testing than by passively studying them. The studying is just an initial encoding process that gets your foot in the door of the superior learning of testing. Testing is a learning process in that it involves the active reconstruction of knowledge which renders your memories plastic and amenable to change and augmentation. As long as you get corrective feedback, you don’t even need to study new information before testing to optimize learning it, that just makes things feel easier and makes up for any slacking you do encoding information with feedback. 


The tradeoff with this criterion constraint, provided we adhere to it, is that when we fail cards, we don’t have to reset them. Relearning is easier than learning, and re-study and re-testing to criterion refreshes and enhances the memory and allows us to place them back with the other passed cards. However, we can tweak things by tagging cards we fail multiple times as leeches and suspending them, then editing them to enhance our presentation (e.g. making the cue stronger to ease recall of the target) on the front of the card.

After all, this is a quality control issue, the quality of our memories, not a quantity issue. Rather than manipulating the timing of reviews, we need primarily to improve the quality of our encoding, changing our methods and presentation as needed, if needed (if a card becomes a leech through repeated failures).


I’ve noted in the past that a special algorithm that reads our minds is not only implausible, but unnecessary, because studies show that a very precise spacing is not necessary, you just need some kind of spacing. All that fetishistic talk about forgetting curves and indices and memory decay is really gratuitous. I know all about needlessly complicated learning methods, believe it or not.

However, though expanding and equal retrieval give equal results in the end, I’ve also noted that efficiency-wise, this means allowing your spacing to expand is better, because you can have fewer study sessions giving equal or superior results. More recent studies have shown that expanding retrieval gives higher average recall (if tested at a random point in time) than equal retrieval, so this is another reason to let the exponential improvements in spacing and recall grow naturally. But again, there’s no special algorithm or ultra-precise scheduling necessary.

The typical gap between the first handful of review sessions can be looked at most simply as (previous gap * 3). If the gap was 2 days, the next will be 6 days. If 6 days, then the next could be 18 days. At this point research I’ve seen from Pashler, et al. indicates you should have good retention for at least 54 more days, but more likely 6 months to a year. 

So you can look at sessions as being on Day 1, then 2 days later on Day 3, then 6 days later on Day 9, then 18 days later on Day 27, and from there the safe bet would be Day 81 ( Day 27 + (18*3) ), but you should have good recall for a long while afterward, as research has shown an interval of 21 days can give you a year’s retention. 


In this simple model, which is essentially just a binary pass/fail with criterion level [re]study/[re]test cycles, batches of cards will generally stay together, and we only need a few sessions (such as Day 1, Day 3, Day 9) for a card to become well-learned for the purposes of template reversal. We don’t actually need to grade our answers, we can just answer Correct/Incorrect.

In Anki, therefore, we only need two buttons, as this add-on achieves. I call it Low Key Anki. Either fail and study/test to criterion, or pass it according to the single established schedule. No need to make a mess of things by changing the schedule outside of pass/fail.

In fact, we can even tweak the settings to simplify passing and failing further, as with this add-on. I call it Low Stakes Anki.

So the gap between Anki and the ‘real’ materials we want to study becomes that much narrower, in terms of logistics.

Once you reach criterion 2-3 times, making the item familiar, you can transition the card type and/or feel comfortable going to sentences/media. 

Anki in its core form is really a fast-mapping process, fast-mapping vocabulary, grammar points, kanji, facts and concepts, math and programming procedures, etc. This is part of the larger extended mapping or slow-mapping process, where you flesh out your knowledge through exposure and context.

But recall that Anki isn’t a pensieve for holding memories, already-learned items, it’s for active learning through testing, a flexible HUD.

So for procedures, Anki is more of a scheduling reminder program that says ‘Hey, time to practice this math/programming task or motor skill for a while, here’s some useful information to practice it, let me know when I can schedule it for the next practice at a later date, by passing or failing it’. You can take as long as you need for these tasks.

But I digress. The point is, Anki is a scaffolding tool that gives us efficiently fast deliberate learning which allows us to continually ascend to the next layer of intuitive usage, so let’s make it a simple, streamlined process.

Anki Add-on: 'Learned' Field/Tag

Anki Add-on: 'Learned' Field/Tag:

I created an add-on to have a simple means to trigger selective card generation (such as reversing cards) in Anki. Explained here and in the add-on description.

Previously I went crazy with the Looper series, so this should be easier.

Edit: I fixed a silly mistake where I forgot to have the add-on check for a Learned field before it checked whether it was filled.

Radical Anki/SRS

Another teaser: I’ve been poring over the old and newest research lately to re-assess my previously radical ideas about Anki and spaced retrieval, and oh hell, I wasn’t radical enough. We’ve been doing spaced retrieval all wrong. Mostly you, but me, too. ^_^ Well, it still works well enough, obviously, but it’s overkill. We can get superior results with less effort and time. Lapses/failed cards, answer buttons, scheduling, wrong wrong wrong, way too complicated and resource-intensive. A serious overhaul is in order. Not sure how many add-ons and settings tweaks this will take. More soon. Sigh.

I’ve also radicalized content extraction, presentation, and integration with overall (non-Anki) study/usage. I tried changing one thing and here we are, so this will take some time… 

I decided to fumble through recording and uploading a video of...



I decided to fumble through recording and uploading a video of myself studying my Japanese vocabulary deck on Anki in Virtual Desktop, wearing an HTC Vive virtual reality headset and using an environment set at the famous Fushimi Inari Taisha (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto. 

The environment is an amazing ‘stereo cubemap’, not a flat 360º image, see here for the awesome creation story. The torii have the names of the creator’s family inscribed on them, which is apt considering corporeal torii at the Fushimi Inari shrine have the names of donors on them. The audio is a loop of a recording of the forest around the shrine that I found here.

image

Stereoview of Kitano Temple, Kyoto (via)

I simply created the environment by downloading the cubemap and converting it to a .vde file using VD’s environment editor. (Edit: I see the original creator uploaded it themselves recently.) I eventually figured out how to record this video using OBS. I set VD to mirror the window, then used that as a ‘Game Capture’ source in OBS so I could minimize it while recording. The bitrate could be higher, I realize in retrospect. The video pretty genuinely reflects what text looks like in VD to me with the default settings. Though you can’t see the SDE (which I hardly notice)/FOV (which I do notice, and is why I have to move my head to see all the text on the huge screen floating before me).

Originally I wanted to a show a video of a person peering outside their front door to see snow, rubbing their hands together, and then shutting the door and going inside to summery Japan to study Japanese.

Apologies for the erratic head movement, I wanted to show the environment (it’s actually 3D–e.g. the kitsune statues look like real objects–not a simple panorama, though you can’t tell unless you have a VR headset). I kept thinking I saw flickers of movement in the forest, hence the occasional jerks to glance off to the side during my reviews. The FOV is relatively low in current gen headsets so that you have to move your head to see wider areas rather than just flicking your eyes down, and I didn’t realize while recording how low my head/gaze was relative to the tops of the flashcards.

At the end I was spirited away. I have no memories of this. Be careful at the shrine! It exists in every dimension, even the virtual. Eventually torii will start showing up in the analog world.

Download Audio (Anki)

Just a heads up if you’re having issues with the Download Audio add-on for Anki, I had to edit the japanesepod.py (line 49) in the downloadaudio\downloaders\ folder and change the url within single quotes to http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic to get it working (the site changed domains).

"probability = (possibility)²"

“probability = (possibility)²”

- Nick Herbert

Individual Differences in Chunking Ability Predict On-line Sentence Processing (PDF)

Individual Differences in Chunking Ability Predict On-line Sentence Processing (PDF):

There are considerable differences in language processing skill among the normal population. A key question for cognitive science is whether these differences can be ascribed to variations in domain-general cognitive abilities, hypothesized to play a role in language, such as working memory and statistical learning.

In this paper, we present experimental evidence pointing to a fundamental memory skill—chunking—as an important predictor of cross-individual variation in complex language processing. Specifically, we demonstrate that chunking ability reflects experience with language…

Our results reveal considerable individual differences in participants’ ability to use chunk frequency information to facilitate sequence recall. Strikingly, these differences predict variations across participants in the on-line processing of complex sentences involving relative clauses.

Our study thus presents the first evidence tying the fundamental ability for chunking to sentence processing skill, providing empirical support for construction-based approaches to language.

Cognitive-Functional Approaches to the Study of Japanese as a Second Language

Cognitive-Functional Approaches to the Study of Japanese as a Second Language:

This innovative and original volume brings together studies that apply cognitive and functional linguistics to the study of the L2 acquisition of Japanese. With each article grounded on the usage-based model and/or conceptual notions such as foregrounding and subjectivity, the volume sheds light on how cognitive and functional linguistics can help us understand aspects of Japanese acquisition that have been neglected by traditionalists.

The 'Good Enough' Approach to Language Comprehension (PDF)

The 'Good Enough' Approach to Language Comprehension (PDF):

Ferreira and colleagues argued that the language comprehension system creates syntactic and semantic representations that are merely ‘good enough’ (GE) given the task that the comprehender needs to perform. GE representations contrast with ones that are detailed, complete, and accurate with respect to the input. In this article, we review the original argument for GE processing, and we present new evidence that supports the concept: first, local interpretations are computed, which can interfere with global ones; second, new findings based on the recording of event-related potentials show the use of simple heuristics rather than compositional algorithms for constructing sentence meaning; and recent studies show that the comprehension system has mechanisms for handling disfluencies, but they work imperfectly. We argue that the GE approach to language comprehension is similar to the use of fast and frugal heuristics for decision-making, and that future research should explore this connection more thoroughly.

ja-dark: Years ago I referenced this paper in the Dark Japanese Wordpress blog a couple times, the second time by comparing production to comprehension. 

I’m referencing this now in preparation for a great new method I think I’ve come up with, which is focused on the comprehension aspects of learning. It will probably become an alternate version of ja-pico, one that’s even simpler, in a sense.

For sentence comprehension cards, one thing I began advising was similar to sentence production cards: use only unfamiliar sentences that contain only familiar words. That is to say, the sentence is new to you (still +1 in that sense, for those who’ve used the i+1 idea), but all of its words are old. Thus the burden for both i+1 and o+1 sentence cards is purely on sentence processing, not learning vocabulary.

This new version of ja-pico will be different… (Hint)

Virtual Desktop on Steam

Virtual Desktop on Steam:

I’d been putting off trying it out with my headset as I thought text and video would not be clear, but I’m quite impressed by this. I think Anki reviews in virtual reality could be big, especially while sitting in virtual Japanese environments with ambient sounds. For text legibility, I find 115° and 2.0m distance on the virtual curved screen to be great. Now we just need 3D Japanese text…

Using CaboCha on webpages

It’s a bit messy but just discovered you can use CaboCha with cURL:

curl http://ir.yahoo.co.jp/jp/company/profile.html | cabocha

Nice! Seems obvious in retrospect. Still trying to get it working with Shift JIS, though.

述語項構造シソーラス Thesaurus of Predicate-Argument Structure

述語項構造シソーラス Thesaurus of Predicate-Argument Structure:

I’ve linked this in my previous posts on predicate-argument structures.

It seems to be what ASA uses for its semroles (semantic role labels). 

That is, for this sentence: 今日は大平洋高気圧で晴天が続きます, you’ll get the semrole  “ 場所(時)(点)” for the topic 今日は in relation to the predicate 続きます.

For ChaPAS, which is what I’ve been using, instead of the above thesaurus, it automatically uses CaboCha’s -n flag output (-n1) which gives you 固有表現–Named Entities. CaboCha’s use here is based on resources from IREX. You can find an explanation of IREX’s NE here.

image

So the sentence 太郎と花子は2003年奈良先端大を卒業した (ah, the infamous Tarō and Hanako) gives you:

* 0 1P 0/1 1.611603
太郎 名詞,固有名詞,人名,名,*,*,太郎,タロウ,タロー B-PERSON
と 助詞,並立助詞,*,*,*,*,と,ト,ト O
* 1 4D 0/1 -0.384814
花子 名詞,固有名詞,人名,名,*,*,花子,ハナコ,ハナコ B-PERSON ID=“1”
は 助詞,係助詞,*,*,*,*,は,ハ,ワ O
* 2 4D 1/1 -0.384814
2003 名詞,数,*,*,*,*,* B-DATE
年 名詞,接尾,助数詞,*,*,*,年,ネン,ネン I-DATE
* 3 4D 0/1 -0.384814
奈良先端大 名詞,固有名詞,組織,*,*,*,奈良先端大,ナラセンタンダイ,ナラセンタンダイ B-ORGANIZATION ID=“2”
を 助詞,格助詞,一般,*,*,*,を,ヲ,ヲ O
* 4 -1D ½ 0.000000
卒業 名詞,サ変接続,*,*,*,*,卒業,ソツギョウ,ソツギョー O
し 動詞,自立,*,*,サ変・スル,連用形,する,シ,シ O type=“pred” ga=“1” o=“2”
た 助動詞,*,*,*,特殊・タ,基本形,た,タ,タ O
EOS

So we see Tarō and Hanako as ‘person’, the year 2003 as the ‘date’ and Nara Institute of Science and Technology as the ‘organization’. The sentence I used for ASA would give 今日は as B-DATE.

B- and I- are from IOB2 notation and refer to the first and any subsequent parts of the NE chunkO means it’s ‘outside’ the NE chunk. So と isn’t part of the ‘person’ Named Entity 太郎 and は isn’t part of the ‘person’ NE 花子, while 2003 is the first part of the NE chunk for ‘date’ and 年 is the subsequent part.

It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well, so I may integrate this into future diagrams. Outside of my own purposes, having NE extraction is useful if you want to know what Japanese names to learn first (maybe use tips for name mnemonics I noted here).

How to automatically make your own pretty Japanese sentence diagrams (offline edition)

I’ve posted about various online tools here. Specifically dependency analyzers like CaboCha, and also ChaPAS, a predicate-argument structure analyzer.

image

Here’s a quick and dirty series of steps to do it on your own–works on Windows 7 64-bit (CaboCha, probably ChaPAS) and Windows 10 (CaboCha, ChaPAS) for me:

1) Install stuff.

  • MeCab and CaboCha. Download these and install per the instructions in that post.
  • MiKTeX. You’ll want to enable on-the-fly package installation. Add the MiKTeX /bin path to your System environment variables so you can run XeLaTeX from the cmd prompt (you can also select XeLaTeX in the drop-down menu in MiKTeX’s editor, TexWorks).
  • ImageMagick and GhostScript. Go into the ImageMagick folder after installation and make a copy of convert.exe. Rename the copy to imgconvert.exe as this is what the .tex files standalone package (which should download on-the-fly later on if it doesn’t come with MiKTeX) will look for to use these programs to create transparent .png files of the diagrams.
  • ChaPAS (chapas-0.742.tar.gz). This analyzes predicate-argument structures. This requires you to have CaboCha installed to run.
  • Python 2.7.x. Use this to run the below .py. 
  • Get this .py. It converts .txt files from CaboCha/ChaPAS into .tex files.
  • Java if you’re running ChaPAS instead of CaboCha.

2) Let’s experiment with ChaPAS. 

  • Copy a Japanese sentence, such as  風邪を引いていたので、私は学校を休んだ. Stick it in a .txt file (UTF-8) called input.txt.
  • Open up cmd prompt, navigate to the file’s directory or explicitly use the path, etc., and enter as follows:

type input.txt | java -jar c:\path\chapas.jar -I RAW > output.txt

This creates an output.txt in a format the .py file can read. It’s almost identical to CaboCha’s -f1 format.

For CaboCha instead of ChaPAS you can enter this first in the cmd prompt if you followed the System path instructions in the CaboCha post:

cabocha input.txt -o output.txt -f1

  • Next, enter this at the cmd prompt:

c:\python27\python.exe converter.py output.txt > output.tex

On Windows 7 you might need to run PowerShell ISE and run the .py with this:

c:\python27\python.exe converter.py output.txt | out-file output.tex -Encoding OEM

This will turn the .txt into a .tex file using TikZ dependency formatting. Then we need to use that .tex to create the image in .png format.

If you want to specify the output path for the .pngs, esp. if doing multiple files, you can replace the first line of the .tex file with this: 

\documentclass[convert={outfile=d:\jobname.png}]{standalone}

  • Run this at the cmd prompt (replace d:\ with whatever drive and/or folder you’re in):

xelatex d:\output.tex –shell-escape -aux-directory=d:\ -output-directory=d:\

  • Voila! You should have a handful of files, the important one being the .png.
  • You could put these three cmd prompt instructions on three lines in a .txt file and save as a .bat to automate the whole process.

Doing multiple sentences is more complex. I can barely remember how I did it. I’ll try to create a streamlined automated tool or method when I have the time. In the meantime, just know that the input.txt can contain many sentences, which will be turned into a single output.txt with many sentences, and a single output.tex with many complete tex-formatted sentences. From here you can use regex, file splitting, cmd looping, etc.

If you know Python and TikZ/LaTeX you can always mess around with the converter.py to create new versions to prettily represent the MeCab/CaboCha/ChaPAS results… that’s how I made the diagram in this post, by modifying the output of the original converter.py, though I’ve yet to incorporate those manual modifications into the .py itself.

Bonus: If you want the other forms of the diagrams as seen in other posts (with boxes, etc.), then you need the cabochatrees package from Hideki Isozaki, which is offline, but I’ve uploaded it here. The ‘quick and dirty’ way is to just unzip the files and use -f3 with CaboCha instead of -f1 as seen above, and use regex to wrap the desired .tex formatting code (different code for different diagram types) around the sentences in the -f3 (CaboCha XML) output.txt. Rename the file extension from .txt to .tex and run the .tex in the same folder as the cabochatrees.sty (navigate there in cmd prompt and use XeLaTeX as above). To get the code working I had to modify it as seen here

Identification of a network of brain regions involved in mathematics

Identification of a network of brain regions involved in mathematics:

“ … recent studies suggest that this network is already involved in identifying numbers by young children who are not yet at school, and that it is very ancient in evolution, as it is present when macaque monkeys recognise physical objects. This suggest that this network of brain regions exists prior to learning mathematics at school, and that it then develops with the education we receive. Indeed, researchers have found that the activation of regions of this network was amplified among mathematicians compared to non-mathematicians. This observation coincides with the theory of neuronal recycling, developed by Stanislas Dehaene, and which stipulates that advanced cultural cognitive processes, such as mathematics, recycle ancient evolutionary brain functions, such as a sense of number, space and time.

There is therefore a mathematical network in the brain, which is not that of language. This result is consistent with other observations, for example the fact that some children or adults, with a very poor numerical vocabulary, are able to perform advanced arithmetic, or that even some patients with aphasia[1] can still do calculation and algebra.

In the age-old debate about thought without language, mathematics has a special status. For some, such as Noam Chomsky, mathematical activity emerged in humans as a result of their capacity for language. Most mathematicians and physicists believe instead that mathematical thought is independent of languages, such as Albert Einstein who said that, “The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thoughts are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined.”

Previous pertinent posts via Dehaene:

Neural differences in processing of case particles in Japanese: an fMRI study

Neural differences in processing of case particles in Japanese: an fMRI study:

We conducted an fMRI experiment to investigate differences in brain activity during Japanese case particle processing among the nominative case ga, accusative case o, and dative case ni

The comparison among particles showed that brain activity associated with ni was significantly weaker than that of ga and o in the left MFG and left IFG. 

Furthermore, significantly greater brain activity was associated with ni relative to gain the right IFG. 

These findings suggest that the Japanese case particles ga, ni, and o are represented differently in the brain. As we used stimuli that lacked nouns or verbs, this study is limited to case particle processing. 

Therefore, our findings indicate that individual case particles have a distinct neural representation, and consequently, might play disparate roles in language processing.

More on predicate-argument structures for Japanese learning

I’ve played around with the different analyzers that show you the relationships between verbs and their complements (e.g. verb/object) since discussing the different tools you can use here.

I’ve gotten ChaPAS working and it fits the format from CaboCha that I’ve used to create pretty diagrams in the past (e.g.), so I think I can modify those diagrams easily enough, letting you really focus on the main aspects of sentences.

A quick tip on getting ChaPAS working (you need CaboCha installed), in cmd prompt write:

type input.txt | java -jar c:\path\chapas.jar -I RAW > output.txt 

Where the input.txt contains Japanese sentences (UTF-8). The output .txt will be in the -f1 CaboCha format. You can interpret it using the same instructions used for SynCha. Optionally include the -Xmx1g flag before -jar to adjust the max heap size.

Verbs are quite special, both in terms of structure–dependency grammar is built around the notion of verb centrality, where almost every sentence has a root verb–and also in terms of neural processing–more specifically ‘actions’/’events’ rather than ‘verbs’, as reading text that describes physical actions triggers our motor memories (so knowing the contextualized ‘actions’ in sentences [e.g. action and actor/object] is useful if you want to use this emphasis and/or design sets of embodied cognition style sentences for use in learning to ‘think’ in Japanese). See also this post on ‘heat’ as a verb and ‘thinking for speaking’.

So one thing I’m focusing on is creating a corpus of predicate-argument structures as they appear in, say, Core10k and other popular sentence lists. Basically a list of verbs and their arguments, possibly focusing on the ‘accusative (を)’ and 'nominative (が)’ relations, and in bunsetsu form. 

So 風邪を引いていたので、私は学校を休んだ could become:

  • 風邪を ←引いていたので (ACC)
  • 私は ← 引いていたので (NOM)
  • 私は ← 休んだ (NOM)
  • 学校を ← 休んだ (ACC)

The output from ChaPAS is as follows:

* 0 1D 0/1 4.309967
風邪 名詞,一般,*,*,*,*,風邪,カゼ,カゼ O ID="1"
を 助詞,格助詞,一般,*,*,*,を,ヲ,ヲ O
* 1 4D 0/4 -2.060937
引い 動詞,自立,*,*,五段・カ行イ音便,連用タ接続,引く,ヒイ,ヒイ O type="pred" o="1"
て 助詞,接続助詞,*,*,*,*,て,テ,テ O
い 動詞,非自立,*,*,一段,連用形,いる,イ,イ O
た 助動詞,*,*,*,特殊・タ,基本形,た,タ,タ O
ので 助詞,接続助詞,*,*,*,*,ので,ノデ,ノデ O
、 記号,読点,*,*,*,*,、,、,、 O
* 2 4D 0/1 -2.060937
私 名詞,代名詞,一般,*,*,*,私,ワタシ,ワタシ O ID="2"
は 助詞,係助詞,*,*,*,*,は,ハ,ワ O
* 3 4D 0/1 -2.060937
学校 名詞,一般,*,*,*,*,学校,ガッコウ,ガッコー O ID="3"
を 助詞,格助詞,一般,*,*,*,を,ヲ,ヲ O
* 4 -1D 0/1 0.000000
休ん 動詞,自立,*,*,五段・マ行,連用タ接続,休む,ヤスン,ヤスン O type="pred" ga="2" o="3"
だ 助動詞,*,*,*,特殊・タ,基本形,だ,ダ,ダ O
EOS

That’s the ugly CaboCha -f1 formatting behind the pretty diagrams I gave you. On top of this, ChaPAS adds the ‘type=pred’ stuff.

The o=“3″ next to 休ん means that the ‘pred’ (verb) points to the argument with ID=“3″, 学校, connected here by the case marker を (hence ‘o’). Likewise the ga=“2″ refers to the subject 私, ID=“2″, with the topic marker は here but in many cases, of course, it will be が.

As discussed for the above structure in this paper, there are joint arguments there that ChaPAS typically doesn’t deal with. That is, it correctly identifies 休んだ is connected to the argument 私は, but not 引いていた and 私は. This is because it’s based on the typical dependency information which links ‘I’ to ‘skipped’ but not ‘I’ to ‘caught (a cold)’. It’s a little more complicated to handle such instances. You’ll also sometimes get ‘type=noun’ with arguments, which is for ‘verbal nouns’ (e.g. 計画, ‘plan’), as explained here.

After modifying the .tex file generated from ChaPAS if doing a diagram version, I will end up with something like this:

image

For dative に I could always use green. I manually added and styled the PAS edges here based on the automatically created TikZ dependency file created by the converter.py I’ve linked in previous posts referenced above, but tweaking the .py would be easy enough. 

The actual .tex code, if you’re curious, looks like this.

A simpler version could combine the dependency and PAS edges:

image

At any rate, doing the simple list version, you could then see the frequency of certain PAS (predicate-argument structure) collocations in a group of sentences and focus on those. Or learn a pair and search for multiple sentences containing it to flesh out the knowledge of how to use certain verbs, esp. useful for production. I may reference this (+) for more possibilities.

Bonus: Another thing I’m working on is character-level (morpheme) part-of-speech annotation (annotating the kanji meanings). This so you can continue learning how to properly prioritize the most important aspect of Japanese (hint: it’s not sound) without being limited by the pre-annotated words in the MPD deck. I’ve been thinking about this since first posting about Joyce’s work but hadn’t realized this was something others were exploring.

Another possibility, both with PAS collocations and the character-level PoS tagging, would be ‘mad libs’ (fill in the blanks based on parts-of-speech). I’ve mentioned the ‘mad libs’ thing in the past.

Words, more words ... and statistics

Words, more words ... and statistics:

In all cases, Saksida and colleagues found that transitional probability was an effective tool for segmentation (49% to 86% of words identified correctly) irrespective of the segmentation algorithm used, which confirms TP efficacy. Of note, while both models proved to be quite efficient, when one model was particularly successful with one language, the alternative model always performed significantly worse.

“This cross-linguistic difference suggests that each model is better suited than the other for certain languages and viceversa. We therefore conducted further analyses to understand what linguistic features correlated with the better performance of one model over the other,” explains Saksida. The crucial dimension proved to be linguistic rhythm. “We can divide European languages into two large groups based on rhythm: stress-timed and syllable-timed.” Stress-timed languages have fewer vowels and shorter words, and include English, Slovenian and German. Syllable-timed languages contain more vowels and longer words on average, and include Italian, Spanish and Finnish. The third rhythmic group of languages does not exist in Europe and is based on “morae” (a part of the syllable), such as Japanese. This group is known as “mora-timed” and contains even more vowels than syllable-timed languages.

The absolute threshold model proved to work best on stress-timed languages, whereas relative thresholding was better for the mora-timed ones. “It’s therefore possible that the cognitive system learns to use the segmentation algorithm that is best suited to one’s native language, and that this leads to difficulties segmenting languages belonging to another rhythmic category. Experimental studies will clearly be necessary to test this hypothesis. We know from the scientific literature that immediately after birth infants already use rhythmic information, and we think that the strategies used to choose the most appropriate segmentation could be one of the areas in which information about rhythm is most useful.”

ja-dark: One of the reasons you want to avoid ローマ字 (Romanization) is to avoid messing up your pronunciation, by the way. See the papers by Bene Bassetti I listed here.

I’ve shared a lot of links to research about statistical learning, etc., in linguistics, which has taken us away from the unscientific ‘Chomskyan’ paradigms that academics and popular knowledge labored under for so long.

I’ve written about ‘suprasegmentals’/prosody here.

See alsoIs Chinese Special? Four Aspects of Chinese Literacy Acquisition that Might Distinguish Learning Chinese from Learning Alphabetic Orthographies 

“…  learning Chinese may strengthen both segmental and suprasegmental phonological sensitivity and even promote basic visual skills, potential cognitive advantages. “

Here’s a quote by Florian Coulmas I’ve referenced before to motivate you to ditch romaji when learning Japanese–kana doesn’t take long at all to learn:

Kana comes close to an ideal syllabary in several respects. With a small signary that is easy to learn it achieves a high degree of accuracy. Contextual variation of phonetic interpretation of the kana signs is minimal. By and large, each kana is always pronounced the same.  More than anything else this is thanks to the simple and regular structure of Japanese syllables which makes Japanese very suitable for syllabic writing.

The kana system epitomizes the principle of economy in the development of writing… the economic advantage of syllable writing… is not the same for all languages but depends in large measure on the syllable structure of the language in question. This is evidenced, on one hand, by the inferior phonetic fit of some syllabaries, … and, on the other, by the inferior economy of other syllabaries…

Few languages have a syllable structure that is simple enough to allow for the development of a system that is both economical and easy to interpret. Of the historically grown systems Japanese kana is the prime example.”

Losswords. A game of literary portions.

Losswords. A game of literary portions.:

Since I’m a fan of unscrambling kanji, sentences, and programs, I might as well link to this. A Japanese version could be interesting.

According to BoingBoing

“A group of successful indie game devs are kickstarting Losswords, a game whose premise is that players are the resistance in a totalitarian future in which books have been banned, and games are the only form of permitted entertainment: you keep literature alive by making games out of the great books of history. The game draws on Project Gutenberg’s public domain books for its raw texts.”

From the Kickstarter:

“The cool thing about Losswords is that as you are scrambling a passage, you are actually creating a word puzzle for other players. Losswords includes hundreds of books and thousands of passages taken from the books. But because the word puzzles you solve are made by other players as they Lossword a book, the game will generate millions of constantly changing games. Each time you play there will be new puzzles to play… new books to Lossword and solve.“

ChaPAS: Yet Another Japanese Predicate Argument Structure Analyzer

ChaPAS: Yet Another Japanese Predicate Argument Structure Analyzer:

I forgot to post about this resource. It gives you the verbs and complements, or more generally, predicates and arguments, of sentences; a more ‘normalized’ version of the dependencies and meanings. The dependency analyzer KN Parser can also do this. In a sense, the PAS (predicate-argument structures) gives the semantic dependencies where as normally we just get the syntactic dependencies (however, in order to really flesh this out, we need semantic role labeling, which ASA does but not the others–see below.)

Recall that in general, dependency grammar-based tools work best for Japanese due to its frequently omitted words and flexible word order, qualities which are problematic for other grammars reliant on stable constituency relations.

I’ve been rolling some ideas around in my head with regards to this PASA for several months now, but nothing fancy has come to mind. Perhaps simply another field that lets you more precisely focus on important relationships, with or without actual diagrams in the form of the arc diagrams I have shared before. Something like this, perhaps, with the dependency arcs on top and PAS info below (via):

image

I believe I had a nice idea but lost it in a particularly turbulent brainstorm.

Here’s another Scala version of a PAS analyzer called ASA for you to play with: http://150.46.242.211/asap (via) - Nice visuals: 今日は大平洋高気圧で晴天が続きます

image

If you want to know what I mean by more precise relationships, check out the sort of grayed out ‘semrole’ labels above (i.e.  [場所(時)(点)] , [原因] , and  [対象] ) and the info in the ‘raw’ tab in the demo.

You can download the ASA java jar here, instructions here.

Here’s another PASA called SynCha. (English) - These instructions apply to ChaPAS also, except I think for the ‘eq’/coreference resolution aspects.

I’ve been playing with ChaPAS as it’s the only one I managed to get working properly (too bad, I was looking forward to using ASA’s semroles), and will update with more soon.

'Algorithm’ for optimal learning of any batch of sentences

I think I’ve cracked a simple way to do this. I’m working out the pseudocode now but may update soon. 

Do what, exactly?

I’ve written the idea up before, elsewhere, and in part, coming up with it later informed my notion of ja-pico (which is the most compact program for self-directed Japanese learning I’ve come up with)… anyway it’s as follows:

Take a group of sentences you want to learn in their entirety. 

Extract the words… per sentence.

Extract the kanji… per word per sentence.

Learn the kanji for the words in each sentence, then learn the words, then the sentences, as in ja-pico.

The sentences would be ordered so that each successive sentence contains the minimum number of novel unique words beyond the total unique words of the previous sentences.

What we want to know is, given the set of sentences: which kanji, words, and sentences do we learn first at any given stage in order to have the optimal order? 

Where we define optimal in the sense of the Pareto principle or what Danaher defines as ‘high percentage’ BJJ techniques, we want the smallest amount of pieces that contribute the most to total learning of the set at any given stage.

Assuming steps 1: kanji, 2: vocabulary, 3: sentences, after step 0: preprocessing, then step 1 would lead to step 3 with minimal deviation and would lead to the most gain from the least investment.

We unlock steps by learning locked batches of items in the previous steps. Locked as in not fully known. Learn the kanji used in the most optimal locked batch of sentences’ words to unlock the words, learn the words to unlock the sentences, then learn the sentences. This batch was unlocked, so we repeat with the next most optimal locked batch.

To simplify this thought experiment and set aside prior knowledge, we might imagine a new learner starting from scratch. They decide to use the ‘ja-pico’ method linked above. Which means they select a batch of sentences, and they do it from let’s say, Core 10k. Where do they start when everything is locked/unknown? If we optimize a set of sentences selected from appropriate and interesting material, how do we optimize it according to the above definition?

The aim in this case is to learn the least number of kanji in any given unit of study time {that will boost learning of the most words [that would unlock the greatest number of expressions with entirely mature vocabulary which are used for o+1 sentence shuffling or spaced listening comprehension tasks]}.

I haven’t perfectly cracked it, because even once you get a method for ‘growing’ a list in an optimal order, you have to decide the root to start growing from which gives the most optimal path relative to other paths with different roots using the same method of ordering, but I think I’ve figured out a good idea for that. It doesn’t require information gain and entropy measures or set permutations or vector space similarity metrics, etc., either. Which makes me suspicious, actually.

25000 japanese sentences with diagrams - Pastebin.com

25000 japanese sentences with diagrams - Pastebin.com:

Updated the Core 10k deck in the above post to include randomized glosses (definitions for the words in each sentence presented out of order), using this add-on. I added an extra line-break for the definitions to make them easier to read. 

I also added a Production template where the shuffled words and the sentence meaning are on the front of the cards. So you can use them with the o+1 sentence unshuffling method, where to practice your output you unscramble sentences. The sentences should be new to you, but all the words in the sentences should be well-known. That is, the sentences should use vocabulary you know in new ways. This way the burden is only on the sequence which makes a meaning. Given the meaning and scrambled sequence of known words on the front of the card, your job is to put them in order so they make that meaning.

Programming and Programming Languages (free eBook)

Programming and Programming Languages (free eBook):

Many people would regard this as being two books in one. One book is an introduction to programming, teaching you basic concepts of organizing data and the programs that operate over them, ending in the investigation of universally useful algorithms. The other book is an introduction to programming languages: a study, from one level up, of the media by which we structure these data and programs.

Obviously, these are not unrelated topics. We learn programming through one or more languages, and the programs we write then become natural subjects of study to understand languages at large. Nevertheless, these are considered sufficiently different topics that they are approached separately. This is how we approached them, too.

We have come to realize that this separation is neither meaningful nor helpful. The topics are deeply intertwined and, by accepting that interleaving, the result is likely to be a much better book. This is my experiment with that format…

This book uses a new programming language called Pyret. Pyret is the outgrowth of our deep experience programming in and designing functional, object-oriented, and scripting languages, as well as their type systems, program analyses, and development environments.

The language’s syntax is inspired by Python. It fits the niche missing in computer science education of a simple language that sheds both the strange corner-cases (of which there are many) of Python while adding important features that Python lacks for learning programming (such as algebraic datatypes, optional annotations on variables, design decisions that better enable the construction of development environments, and strong support for testing). 

Beginning programmers can rest in the knowledge they are being cared for, while programmers with past acquaintance of the language menagerie, from serpents to dromedaries, should find Pyret familiar and comfortable.

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Halloween Analysis (Computational Complexity)

Halloween Analysis (Computational Complexity):

In Predicting Growth, we introduced the idea of big-Oh complexity to measure the worst-case time of a computation. As we saw in Choosing Between Representations, however, this is sometimes too coarse a bound when the complexity is heavily dependent on the exact sequence of operations run. Now, we will consider a different style of complexity analysis that better accommodates operation sequences…

Before we proceed, we should give this analysis its name. Formally, it is called amortized analysis. Amortization is the process of spreading a payment out over an extended but fixed term. In the same way, we spread out the cost of a computation over a fixed sequence, then determine how much each payment will be. 

I have given it a whimsical name because Halloween is a(n American) holiday devoted to ghosts, ghouls, and other symbols of death. Amortization comes from the Latin root mort-, which means death, because an amortized analysis is one conducted “at the death”, i.e., at the end of a fixed sequence of operations.

ja-dark: Heh.

Teaching Algebra through Computer Science

Teaching Algebra through Computer Science:

Unlike most programming classes, Bootstrap uses algebra as the vehicle for creating images and animations, and is designed from the ground up to be aligned with National and State standards for algebra. Bootstrap also builds in a pedagogical approach to solving Word Problems called the Design Recipe. Students solve word problems to make a rocket fly (linear equations), respond to keypresses (piecewise functions) or explode when it hits a meteor (distance formula). In fact, this same technique has been successfully used at the university level for decades.

Unlike Java, Python, Scratch or Javascript, functions and variables behave exactly the same way in Bootstrap that they do in your child’s math book (learn more about the algebra-programming connection by watching our video, co-produced with Code.org). By shifting classwork from abstract pencil-and-paper problems to a series of relevant programming problems using an appropriate language, Bootstrap demonstrates how algebra applies in the real world, using an exciting, hands-on project.

See also: Convergent Cognition

Resugaring (programming language theory)

Resugaring (programming language theory):

As a programming language researcher I love syntactic sugar, and you should too. It splits a language into two parts: a big “surface” language that has the sugar, and a much smaller “core” language that lacks it. This separation lets programmers use the surface language that has all of the features they know and love, while letting tools work over the much simpler core language, which lets the tools themselves be simpler and more robust.

There’s a problem, though (every blog post needs a problem). What happens when a tool, which has been working over the core language, tries to show code to the programmer, who has been working over the surface?

Sometimes you want to see exactly what a program is doing in all its gory detail (along the same lines, it’s occassionally helpful to see the assembly code a program is compiling to), but most of the time it would be nicer if you could see things in terms of the syntax you wrote the program with!

So we built a tool that does precisely this. It turns core evaluation sequences into surface evaluation sequences. We call the process resugaring, because it’s the opposite of desugaring: we’re adding the syntactic sugar back into your program.

Abstract from the paper:

Syntactic sugar is pervasive in language technology. It is used to shrink the size of a core language; to define domain-specific languages; and even to let programmers extend their language. Unfortunately, syntactic sugar is eliminated by transformation, so the resulting programs become unfamiliar to authors. Thus, it comes at a price: it obscures the relationship between the user’s source program and the program being evaluated.

We address this problem by showing how to compute reduction steps in terms of the surface syntax. Each step in the surface language emulates one or more steps in the core language. The computed steps hide the transformation, thus maintaining the abstraction provided by the surface language. We make these statements about emulation and abstraction precise, prove that they hold in our formalism, and verify part of the system in Coq. We have implemented this work and applied it to three very different languages.

Objects first in programming education

I must concur with this paper (PDF) and this one (PDF) that teaching object-oriented programming first seems better than procedural. The first paper is written by Kölling of BlueJ and Objects First with Java.

“The path to object-orientation through procedural programming is unnecessarily complicated. Students first learn one style of programming, then they have to “un-learn” the previously learned, before we show them how to do it ‘right’…

… many people view object-orientation as just another language construct that can be taught after control structures, pointers and recursion. This is a serious mistake. 

Object-orientation is an underlying paradigm that shapes our whole way of thinking about how to map a problem onto an algorithmic model. It determines in fundamental ways the structure of even simple programs. It cannot be “added on” to other language constructs; rather it replaces the fundamental structure of procedural programming. Because of this, we firmly believe that object-oriented concepts should be taught from the very beginning.”

Then again, I also sort of think functional programming and programming language theory should form the foundation of a computer science regimen. I suppose Scala is the popular one to use to introduce functional programming.

I think Scheme and the ‘Wizard Book’ were used for this in the past. Though no longer. (See also)

Although I see nothing wrong with a very basic intro to computational thinking and control flow, etc., through resources like Codecademy or Light Bot.

Related:

Model-driven Programming

Reflections on the Teaching of Programming: Methods and Implementations

An Examination of Layers of Quizzing in Two Computer Systems Courses

An Examination of Layers of Quizzing in Two Computer Systems Courses:

This paper investigates the impact of layers of quizzing on student performance on subsequent tests and the final exam. 

The first layer of quizzes are on-line “pre-quizzes” designed to prepare students for follow-on classroom discussions. 

The second layer quizzes are short “post-quizzes” that are given during class time after discussing questions about the material covered by pre-quizzes. 

A study involving fifteen semesters of data and 348 students indicated that students performed better on tests and the final exam with this quizzing strategy compared to a more traditional homework based approach. 

These results agree with the body of research that indicates that testing enhances learning. 

Significantly, we found an 8 point pass rate increase on the Computer Systems I final exam and a 10 point pass rate increase on the Systems II final.

ja-dark: The Systems courses in question use the (in)famous CSAPP book. 

The quizzes are frequent (weekly) and low-stakes (5-15% of course grade), just as the spaced retrieval practice research indicates they should be. 

They are also incorporated into the ‘just in time teaching’ approach where difficulties in quizzes are used to guide the focus of lectures. 

They can be retaken x number of times with immediate corrective feedback, also essential. 

Lastly, the questions, which consist both of simpler ‘facts’ (e.g. defining words) and ‘concepts’/procedures (e.g. converting from C to assembly) can be re-used–lest we lose sight of the spacing effect alongside the testing effect (hence spaced + retrieval).

The Man Who Says Things In A Very Roundabout Way - Monty...



The Man Who Says Things In A Very Roundabout Way - Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor - FloydAdding this to the ‘music...



Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor - Floyd

Adding this to the ‘music good for C programming’ list.

Addendum: SRSing and Lectures

In my last bitter post on classes and SRSing, I noted that in some cases it’s just too hard and impractical to study to learn, using the most optimal methods, and you have to just study to get good grades, postponing the real learning for later.

Namely by focusing on lectures rather than textbook readings or lecture slides, as lectures contain just the right amount of relevant information to get good grades, since most professors’ lectures tend to hew closely to their graded materials, despite the inferiority of speech as a medium for conveying large amounts of complex information.

Despite the inferiority of lectures, if you type up notes while listening to lectures with an eye for converting the information to a format appropriate for spaced retrieval practice (e.g. Anki flashcards), specifically a cue/target format (front of a card, back of a card), this might mitigate the problem somewhat.

It might be tempting to write notes by hand, since handwriting increases learning, but handwriting is best used as a supplement to your main learning method, and the note-taking isn’t the optimal main learning method, retrieval practice in Anki is (in addition to the utility of other forms of active practice, like projects). So instead, if viable, save the handwriting for flashcard reviews (similar to writing out kanji during reviews), and just type up the notes quickly, focusing on efficiently salvaging something useful from the otherwise relatively ineffectual lectures.


What I imagine might be a good system is prioritizing lectures, listening (and if you have weekly video of lectures as many universities offer on their blackboards/D2L for distance learning students, it’s easier to ‘rewind’/pause, etc.) and typing up notes in a cue/target format, focusing on the aspects of the lecture that expand on slides, seem specific to your class (i.e. a particular version of an algorithm that might be used on exams/assignments), or which might not be easily found elsewhere (some sort of insight from the professor).

The lecture slides can supplement this (provide the basis for cards in the future), and of course Google or other sites can flesh things out also, if you find a better tutorial or shortcut elsewhere. Be your own Half-Blood Prince in the latter, case. 

A lot of time can be saved if you ask yourself “Do I need to type up everything they’re saying or is it already written down better somewhere else?” (If the answer is ‘somewhere else’, you can just sketch it out as a reminder for a later Google search and copy/paste the superior explanations from the results).

Meanwhile, assignments might be best linked to textbook readings in addition to lectures. That is, you can refine what you read and extract from textbooks, if anything, to just what reflects the information discussed in lectures and is useful in completing assignments.

As far as the cue/target format goes, you can generally think of things in terms of idea units, facts and concepts, the same as with textbooks. Facts can generally be compacted to a single “Define X?” “X is Y.” exchange, while concepts tend to be stretched across multiple sentences, and can either be whittled down to multiple fact-like cards, or turned into short-answer questions.

The whole idea of taking cue-based notes with various strategies is old, but is usually used to make up for the inferiority of lecture-based instruction and the lack of spaced retrieval practice being integrated into classes. 

Translating spoken lectures into your own words by hand is not a good learning method. 

A far better means of learning and teaching is to provide students with pre-converted materials to study in spaced retrieval format so they can spend their time studying effectively rather than converting information so they can then study effectively, and instead of class time being used for taking notes on spoken lectures, use it for active learning in various forms, Q&As and discussions or quizzes on the pre-converted SRS materials, etc.. Even watching the professor do live-coding can be useful…

But everything should be focused on getting students to encode information (getting it in one’s head to be recalled later) that’s in a cue/target format, and then retrieve that information on a spaced schedule. Having an extra ‘encoding’ phase during lectures where students have to labor to get the information and convert it for retrieval is unnecessary. The encoding should be similar to the format you’ll be retrieving information in, and allow for a quick transition to retrieval practice afterward.

The other important thing is worked examples, and corrective feedback. All questions should have answers and should demonstrate how one goes from question to answer. The most effective learning comes from studying worked examples that have questions and answers, then testing oneself on what was studied by showing the questions and trying to answer, then checking the answers and making adjustments from there.

Note this isn’t the same as being given information broadly in lectures or texts and then later being tested on it. For cued recall, you want the initial information and the way that information is retrieved to be in a cue/target format. The extra step of ‘conversion’ to that format distracts from the main learning techniques. It’s difficult to learn using the main techniques when so much time is spent preparing materials in order to use those techniques, especially when time constraints, unclear presentations, an externally imposed pace, and grades and tuition costs are factored in.

So: prepare clear material that can be used for spaced retrieval practice and share it so others don’t have to waste the time and can get to real learning!

The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point

The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point:

The key to instilling a growth mindset is teaching kids that their brains are like muscles that can be strengthened through hard work and persistence. So rather than saying “Not everybody is a good at math. Just do your best,” a teacher or parent should say “When you learn how to do a new math problem, it grows your brain.” Or instead of saying “Maybe math is not one of your strengths,” a better approach is adding “yet” to the end of the sentence: “Maybe math is not one of your strengths yet.”

The exciting part of Dweck’s mindset research is that it shows intelligence is malleable and anyone can change their mindset…

… people may have a growth mindset, but a trigger that transports them to a fixed-mindset mode. For example, criticism may make a person defensive and shut down how he or she approaches learning. It turns out all of us have a bit of both mindsets, and harnessing the growth one takes work.

Bonus: Nurturing Growth Mindsets: Six Tips From Carol Dweck

Don’t use mindsets to label students (or yourself).

Dweck said she’s been disappointed to hear that some teachers have used a student’s mindset as an excuse, saying things like “that child can’t learn; he has a fixed mindset.”

“We used to say kids don’t have the ability. Now we’re saying they don’t have the mindset? I think it’s protective. It’s our way of saying ‘It’s not my fault that child isn’t learning.’”

What Predicts Children's Fixed and Growth Intelligence Mind-Sets? Not Their Parents' Views of Intelligence but Their Parents' Views of Failure

What Predicts Children's Fixed and Growth Intelligence Mind-Sets? Not Their Parents' Views of Intelligence but Their Parents' Views of Failure:

Children’s intelligence mind-sets (i.e., their beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or malleable) robustly influence their motivation and learning. Yet, surprisingly, research has not linked parents’ intelligence mind-sets to their children’s. 

We tested the hypothesis that a different belief of parents-their failure mind-sets-may be more visible to children and therefore more prominent in shaping their beliefs. 

In Study 1, we found that parents can view failure as debilitating or enhancing, and that these failure mind-sets predict parenting practices and, in turn, children’s intelligence mind-sets. 

Study 2 probed more deeply into how parents display failure mind-sets. 

In Study 3a, we found that children can indeed accurately perceive their parents’ failure mind-sets but not their parents’ intelligence mind-sets. Study 3b showed that children’s perceptions of their parents’ failure mind-sets also predicted their own intelligence mind-sets. 

Finally, Study 4 showed a causal effect of parents’ failure mind-sets on their responses to their children’s hypothetical failure. 

Overall, parents who see failure as debilitating focus on their children’s performance and ability rather than on their children’s learning, and their children, in turn, tend to believe that intelligence is fixed rather than malleable.

Changing language mindsets: Implications for goal orientations and responses to failure in and outside the second language classroom

Changing language mindsets: Implications for goal orientations and responses to failure in and outside the second language classroom:

This study examined how priming an entity language theory (i.e., the belief that language intelligence is fixed) or an incremental language theory (i.e., the belief that language intelligence can be improved) can orient language learners’ goals and, in turn, influence their reactions in failure situations and their intention to continue learning the language…

The results showed that in the incremental condition, learners more strongly endorsed learning goals regardless of their perceived language competence, and in turn reported more mastery-oriented responses in failure situations and stronger intention to continue learning the target language. 

In contrast, in the entity condition, learners who perceived themselves having strong language skills endorsed performance-approach goals and in turn reported more helpless-oriented responses and fear of failure. 

The implications for language learning inside and outside the classroom are discussed, including possible strategies that language educators can use to promote incremental theories to support their students’ motivation and resilience in failure situations.

Does IQ Really Predict Job Performance?

Does IQ Really Predict Job Performance?:

Many non-cognitive factors are known to jointly influence test performance and job performance such as to possibly yield such correlations. Levels of self-confidence, stress, motivation, and anxiety, and general physical and mental vigor, all affect cognitive test and job performances that will, therefore, tend to correlate (Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009; Dweck, 2008; Richardson & Norgate, In press). In addition, “macrosocial differences in the distribution of economic goods are linked to microsocial processes of perceiving the self” (Loughnan et al., 2011, p. 1254).

Turning the usual argument on its head, we suggest that inter-correlation of scores among such a diversity of tests actually suggests common noncognitive factors in operation. In other words, the “general factor” is (at least partly) an affective rather than a cognitive one. Factors of cognitive and affective preparedness could also explain the enigmatic Flynn effect (of rise of average IQ scores across generations), which cannot be explained by a general cognitive factor (Nisbett et al., 2012). However, the effect is readily explained by the demographic swelling of the middle classes in developing societies and the joint effects of better cognitive and affective preparedness (self-confidence, motivation, etc.)…

What we actually have are scores from a predictor of nebulous identity correlated with ratings for a seemingly discrete construct that is turning out to be equally slippery. In other words, very strong conclusions are seemingly being drawn from correlations between two under-specified constructs.

Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue

Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue:

… in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out.

They’ve called on the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to put together a panel of experts across the biological and social sciences to come up with ways for researchers to shift away from the racial concept in genetics research.

“It’s a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it’s a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it’s a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from,” said Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.

Softly, softly: genetics, intelligence and the hidden racism of the new geneism

Softly, softly: genetics, intelligence and the hidden racism of the new geneism:

Crude and dangerous ideas about the genetic heritability of intelligence, and a supposed biological basis for the Black/White achievement gap, are alive and well inside the education policy process but taking new and more subtle forms.

Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the paper analyses recent hereditarian writing, in the UK and the USA, and highlight a strategy that I term racial inexplicitness; this allows hereditarian advocates to adopt a colorblind façade that presents their work as new, exciting and full of promise for all of society.

The paper is in two parts: the first exposes the racism that lies hidden in the small print of the new geneism, where wildly misleading assertions about genetic influences on education are proclaimed as scientific fact while race-conscious critics are dismissed as ignorant ideologues. 

The second part of the paper sets out critical facts about the relevant science, including the difference between the mythic and real meaning of heritability; fundamental problems with the methodology of twin studies; the little-known history of IQ test score manipulation; and the continuing use of a stylistic approach that Howard Gardner characterized as ‘scholarly brinkmanship’.

Spaced Retrieval Practice Increases College Students’ Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematics Knowledge

Spaced Retrieval Practice Increases College Students’ Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematics Knowledge:

A major challenge college students face is retaining the knowledge they acquire in their classes, especially in cumulative disciplines such as engineering, where ultimate success depends on long-term retention of foundational content. 

Cognitive psychologists have recently recommended various techniques educators might use to increase retention. 

One technique (spaced retrieval practice) involves extending opportunities to retrieve course content beyond a customarily short temporal window following initial learning. 

Confirming the technique’s utility requires demonstrating that it increases retention in real classroom settings, with commonly encountered educational content, and that gains endure into subsequent semesters. 

We manipulated spaced versus massed retrieval practice in a precalculus course for engineering students and followed a subset of students who proceeded into a calculus class the following semester…

Within-subjects, students retained spaced content better than massed content in the precalculus course. Between-subjects, students for whom some retrieval practice was spaced, compared to those for whom all practice was massed, performed better on the final exam in the precalculus class and on exams in the calculus class. 

These findings suggest that spaced retrieval practice can have a meaningful, long-lasting impact on educational outcomes. 

Caveat to SRSing for school

In the past I’ve described all the ways you can apply spaced retrieval practice, which is the most efficient learning and memorization method psychology has discovered in the past 125 years so, to education. The key is frequent, low-stakes testing rather than infrequent, high-stakes testing.

I’ve also lamented that education uses outdated methods, namely they don’t design courses in a way that is suitable for spaced retrieval software (e.g. Anki).

So in most cases you are forced to take on the burden of optimal learning not just on your own, but in a contest with inferior learning. The time you spend trying to make flashcards from course materials so that you don’t cram and forget as soon as a class is over is time the educational system wants you to spend cramming for exams, which primarily test your ability to cram for exams.

Still, with the tips I’ve given, you can pull it off… in most cases.

With the caveat that if you’re on the quarter system or taking summer classes or just generally swamped, it becomes quite difficult to pull it off. 

You have exams and assignments to be graded on in the short-term where you must efficiently get the information relevant to get good grades (rather than to learn subjects well). 

This takes place within the inferior lecture-based model, which traps you in a Goldilocks problem where:

  • a) lecture slides give too little relevant information (because they’re just launchpoints for the lectures, not transcriptions of the lectures), 
  • b) textbooks give too much relevant information so you end up studying endlessly and hoping that some fraction of it applies to what you’re tested on, or 
  • c) you listen and labor to extract information from spoken lectures, which give just the right information most relevant to graded items (the info in lectures is what you’ll be tested on in most cases). With the ‘bonus’ that speech is a poor medium to convey large amounts of complex information.

(Source)

So my new recommendation is that for these classes at least, it’s better to just give in and study to get good grades rather than study to learn.

This works out in the end, because you’ll pick up enough basic things despite the educational system working against true learning that you can ‘relearn’ more efficiently afterward, using the foundation you gained through classes.

As I’ve stated before, research shows that relearning is easier than learning.

Between MOOCs and SRSing, the days of spending huge chunks of our lives taking classes and months and years later saying (’I actually studied that extensively but quickly forgot it, oh well, that’s just how things are’) are past, despite the obsolescence of trad education (which is still useful for the resources and certificates in this institution-driven, certificate-based world).

These days with Coursera and Udemy and MIT’s OpenCourseWare, there are many free options to retake classes and apply proper learning methods for long-term retention. And the process will be smoother once you’ve got a degree under your belt and the basic framework established. Oh, and you’ll have developed the skill of extracting information from speech, useful because so many people rely on this inferior medium as the primary means to convey complex information, rather than leaving it as a supplement to written information.

Anyway, that’s my bitter recommendation. If it’s killing you to use optimal learning methods because the system is just too hard to work against, then just surrender and study for the tests and postpone the real learning for later. You won’t be any different than 99% of people, who haven’t heard of spaced retrieval, but you’ll be able to quickly relearn using the efficient methods and make up for lost time.

Still, it’s rather ironic. Without the constant high-stakes exams on lecture information which promote temporary learning, you could use efficient spaced retrieval techniques to learn all that textbook information in the same amount of time, and learn it permanently, rather than short-term. So the textbook information is only ‘too much’ in the confines of the conventional framework.

It’s kind of like if in the original Goldilocks story, there were actually thermal containers and a microwave to get the temperatures just right, but she had to eat the worst-tasting porridge because they were locked away and it was the only viable option she had. ^_^

Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine

Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine:

ja-dark: I would just like to note that this tool can be used as a hacky way to automatically convert hastily typed out equations into pretty images, if you don’t feel like using LaTeX or Word’s equation editor, etc. It’s sort of important not to slack off on making equations presentable.

So if for example, you were working out information gain, the entropy of attributes, etc., and didn’t want to screw up because you got lazy and made a mess, like a friend of a friend’s dog did once, you could just paste that mess into Wolfram Alpha’s search bar and hit Enter and it would clarify things for you.

So if you were to paste this into Wolfram Alpha: (17/33 * (-10/17 * log2(10/17) - 7/17 * log2(7/17)), and hit Enter, it would give you this a few seconds later: 

image

From there you could copy/paste the gif into Word or into Anki or make some adjustments and hit Enter again, etc. 

Semi-related, since the Wolfram Language powers Wolfram Alpha:  

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Japanese-language Wikipedia entries top 1 million

Japanese-language Wikipedia entries top 1 million:

The number of Japanese-language articles on Wikipedia has passed the 1 million mark, eclipsing Japan’s most well-known printed encyclopedia and growing by more than 100 entries per day.

The Japanese version of the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia was inaugurated in 2001 following the launch of the prototype English site the same year. The Japanese venture hit milestones of 100,000 entries in 2005, half a million three years later and 1 million in January this year.

Japanese ranks 13th in entry volume, following Vietnamese, among the nearly 300-language varieties of the Wikipedia world funded by the U.S. nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. English has the most extensive coverage with more than 5 million items.

Japanese publisher Heibonsha Ltd. said its 34-book World Encyclopedia has 90,000 entries.

The Blackness of Meme Movement

Japanese for All Occasions: Mastering Speech Styles from Casual to Honorific

Japanese for All Occasions: Mastering Speech Styles from Casual to Honorific:

I was going to post a review for this book but honestly there’s not much to write that wasn’t already said in the above description, except to say that for ~$15 you get a good deal.

It’s essentially an expansion of the kinds of things Japanese the Manga Way goes into, going into a bit more detail and giving more examples for these different situations and styles. The notes for the examples are short and sweet, and the examples don’t mess with people’s learning by using romaji, it’s all kanji and kana, with furigana for all the kanji.

The text–both Japanese and English–is big, clear, and readable. The formatting is simple (e.g. underlines for relevant sections of sentences) and monochromatic. I’m not fond of how the Japanese dialogue, English translations, and notes are separated (e.g. all Japanese, all English, then the notes), but I suppose they didn’t want to weave it all together for fear of clutter. I mean, the notes do specifically reference the Japanese items they refer to, so you don’t have to constantly flip back and forth or anything.

The problems at the end of each lesson are production-oriented (“What would you say to so-and-so if… “) and have answers at the end of the book.

There are illustrations but nothing all that useful.

It comes with an audio CD for everything; the recordings are high quality and feature a variety of expressive male and female speakers. My only problem with the CD format is that it’s not easily converted into Anki cards, but thankfully the programmer-god cb4960 has an audio tool that can probably deal with that.

Scrambling Japanese sentences

As you know if you’re a regular here, one of my favourite ideas is unscrambling Japanese sentences as a ‘comprehensible output’ task. In fact, unshuffling/unscrambling in general is my thing, for kanji, sentences, and even programming. I came up with it on my own, honest, but it turns out it’s not uncommon in second language learning tasks and assessments. It’s already known in programming, also, they’re called ‘Parsons problems’.

At any rate, the method I generally recommend is full scrambling of sentences–words and particles*. If you’re a regular here you have also heard of the basic units of expressions, bunsetsu–Japanese ‘phrases’ that consist of one or more content words followed by zero or more function words, e.g. a subjective noun followed by the particle が could be a bunsetsu. In this case, the particle ga would be a ‘nominative case marker’.

Anyway, I had been considering the possibility of using a dependency parser’s bunsetsu chunking to create a new scrambling tool where instead of scrambled words and particles, we’d have just scrambled bunsetsu, resulting in fewer chunks.

But I just stumbled across this paper (PDF) co-authored by Brian MacWhinney (try searching Dark Japanese or Ja-Dark for my references to MacWhinney, who is awesome), titled Second Language Processing in Japanese Scrambled Sentences, which suggests that it’s quite easy to process sentences that are scrambled when the chunks include case markers (which are used as cues for ‘thematic assignment’ [see here for a bit on ‘thematic clusters’).

So now I’m torn. However, the point of the paper seems to be that “L2 learners can acquire this processing strategy at native-like levels, regardless of their L1 backgrounds”, so maybe such a tool could be used for learning that skill. A tool for learning to parse sentences into bunsetsu by training you to ‘notice’ bunsetsu through an output (reconstructive) task. I’ll have to muse more on that. Or perhaps rather than a tool I could just create a deck from the 25k bunsetsu-parsed sentences I’ve already collected in these resources I posted. I would simply need to scramble those resources and add the results to a field to be placed on the front of a card…

Also, in that paper, they use ‘in-line’ scrambles, rather than enumerated…

*Technically the particles tend not to be included in practice as a cue with the shuffled list of words when using the Anki ‘shuffle’ add-on, you’re expected to recall them on your own and you can modulate how strictly you grade yourself on getting particles right or wrong, accordingly.

Adventures in Narrated Reality

Adventures in Narrated Reality:

I had been worried because, as I once heard Allison Parrish say, so much commentary about computational creative writing focuses on computers replacing humans—but as anyone who has worked with computers and language knows, that perspective (which Allison summarized as “Now they’re even taking the poet’s job!”) is highly uninformed.

When we teach computers to write, the computers don’t replace us any more than pianos replace pianists—in a certain way, they become our pens, and we become more than writers. We become writers of writers.

If we employ machine intelligence to augment our writing activities, it’s worth asking how such technology would affect how we think about writing as well as how we think in the general sense. I’m inclined to believe that such a transformation would be positive, as it would enable us to reach beyond our native writing capacities and produce work that might better reflect our wordless internal thoughts and notions. (I hesitate to repeat the piano/pianist analogy for fear of stomping out its impact, but I think it applies here too.)

In producing fully automated writing machines, I am only attempting to demonstrate what is possible with a machine alone. In my research, I am ultimately striving to produce devices that allow humans to work in concert with machines to produce written work. My ambition is to augment our creativity, not to replace it.

Another ambition of mine is to promote a new framework that I’ve been calling Narrated Reality. We already have Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), so it only makes sense to provide another option (NR?)—perhaps one that’s less visual and more about supplementing existing experiences with expressive narration. That way, we can enjoy our experiences while we’re having them, then revisit them later in an augmented format.

ja-dark: A lot of good information here for people interested in the topic. The article would be shorter without the author’s resume, but the autobiographical nature allows one to realize the possibilities of transitioning into or incorporating creative coding into one’s repertoire.

The Need for Cognitive Computing

The Need for Cognitive Computing:

Cognitive systems differ from current computing applications in that they move beyond tabulating and calculating based on preconfigured rules and programs, according to Feldman. Although they are capable of basic computing, they can also infer, and even reason.  

One such system, CustomerMatrix, came about as a result of a combination of expertise in big data analytics and “clear customer frustration with overcoming the two biggest derailing influences of traditional BI (Business Intelligence) projects: lack of data access and poor user adoption,” says Guy Mounier, co-founder and CEO of the company CustomerMatrix. He believes those challenges have always limited the ability of innovation teams to deliver successful business outcomes for business stakeholders.

The CustomerMatrix system combines machine learning, semantic, and natural language processing (NLP), he says.  The platform does a lot of upfront work with data from a multitude of sources that is structured and unstructured, as well as internal and external.  The goal, he says, is to find the complex connections between the data, in a process known as Knowledge Engineering.

Machine-Learning Algorithm Identifies Tweets Sent Under the Influence of Alcohol

Machine-Learning Algorithm Identifies Tweets Sent Under the Influence of Alcohol:

Hossain and co’s work is based on two breakthroughs. The first is a way to train a machine-learning algorithm to spot tweets that relate to alcohol and those sent by people drinking alcohol at the time. The second is a way to find a Twitter user’s home location with much greater accuracy than has ever been possible and therefore to determine whether they are drinking at home or not.

The team began by collecting geotagged tweets sent during the year up to July 2014 from New York City and from Monroe County on the northern border of the state, which includes the city of Rochester. From this set, they filter all the tweets that mention alcohol or alcohol-related words, such as drunk, beer, party, and so on.

They then used workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service to analyze the tweets in more detail. For each tweet, they asked three Turkers to decide whether the message referred to alcohol and if so whether it referred to the tweeter drinking alcohol. Finally, they asked whether the tweet was sent at the same time the tweeter was imbibing.

Students as teachers effective in STEM subjects

Students as teachers effective in STEM subjects:

Since 2011, peer-led team learning (PLTL) has been researched at Syracuse University with introductory biology classes functioning as the lab. Through the program, students who have successfully completed the class are invited back the following year to act as peer leaders for incoming students. This cycle of student partnerships has revealed impressive results among the participants, with marked improvements in students’ grade performance and course completion in gateway courses, which is critical when trying to retain more students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors.

“Simply put, active learning puts the responsibility for learning on the learners,” explains Wiles, who also holds appointments in the departments of science teaching and Earth sciences. “The peer leader is not a teacher nor a tutor. Rather, they are an integral member of the student team with a responsibility for facilitating the group effort toward solving problem sets to which they have not been given the answers.”

The recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minority students into the STEM fields has become a growing priority across many college campuses in the United States. Reflecting on that goal, the researchers hope that the promising results of this multiyear study will encourage the peer-led model to become more widely implemented among first-year students, ultimately broadening participation in STEM fields and diversifying the scientific community.

See also the ‘preparing to teach’ section of the second paper here on improving memory retention, which I discussed a bit here. It’s somewhat related to why production is more potent than recognition for learning.

Related:

Why sexual harassment is worse than other types of abuse online: Women gamers think about sexual harassment even when they're offline

Why sexual harassment is worse than other types of abuse online: Women gamers think about sexual harassment even when they're offline:

For one, sexual harassment seemed to bother them more than general harassment. “They don’t forget about sexual harassment. The abuse that women experience online stays with them and has a real-world impact. They withdraw from the game and continue to think about what happened.”

In addition, women who perceived that gaming companies didn’t do enough to stop sexual harassment were more likely to withdraw from playing.

“Gaming companies do drive women away when they don’t take an active stance against online sexual harassment,” Fox said.

Results showed that women coped with sexual harassment online in some of the same ways they deal with abuse in real life: avoidance, denial that it’s a problem, seeking help and blaming themselves.

But they also use a coping strategy that is not often available in real life: gender masking. They make sure their avatars are not female. Some players reported choosing masculine or neutral user names.

Related: Online harassment in virtual reality is ‘way, way, way worse’ — but can devs change that?

In VR, a player can do much more than send a death threat over text. Minority Media developed a multiplayer prototype to understand what harassment looks like with VR technology, and found players can abuse the presence afforded by virtual reality to get right up in the faces of others.

“They can lean in and touch your chest and groin and it’s really scary,” Harris said. As part of his experiment to figure out the depths of VR harassment, the designer played his MMO prototype with an unsuspecting woman. Their gameplay session was shown to the audience with a short video that left the room in stunned, dismayed silence.

ja-dark: If that article accurately describes the developer’s ‘unofficial experiment’, that was incredibly unethical.

It’s ironic, I’ve seen people who spend most of their time trying to ‘affect’ others with words online and praising how scary and thrilling VR games can be with ‘presence’ dismiss being affected by abusive words online and dismiss the possibility of VR harassment being scary and thrilling due to presence.

There’s also the common ease that ‘majority’ members have of dismissing the things that minorities find abusive. They have the luxury of being unaffected and of ignoring ‘other’ perspectives. It reminds me of people who think that homosexuals shouldn’t be offended when ‘gay’ is used as an insult. Those people had the luxury of not experiencing that vulnerability and don’t have to think about where the use of ‘gay’ as an insult came from and what it means to have it circulating alongside homophobia.

But it really shouldn’t be surprising that when hatred and violent urges are personally communicated to human beings using any medium, it’s abusive. We are continually trying to extend ourselves online using technology, stretching out our ‘selves’ to make contact with others. Our identities are malleable illusions to begin with, and each little aspect we create online becomes a part of that illusion. What happens to those aspects happens to ‘us’, however compartmentalized.

Another point to consider is the contrast: we become used to certain constraints of contact and habituate to them. No one is very bothered by being shot in a first-person shooter (though close-range melee attacks can become quite jarring). Rather than expecting everyone, including minorities, to expect abuse as an aspect of online interaction to be habituated to, we should moderate ourselves–and each other.

Which Japanese Convenience Stores Attract the Most Insects? One Student Decided to Find Out

Which Japanese Convenience Stores Attract the Most Insects? One Student Decided to Find Out:

A middle school student in Japan’s rural Mie Prefecture noticed it was easy to find and collect insects at local convenience stores. He then decided to launch a school research project to determine just which convenience store attracts the most insects.

And, in insect-loving Japan, his research project has become a hit on social media…

According to Fundo, a website that reports on social media in Japan, the student was interested in how lighting and illuminated signage at various convenience stores attracted insects.

He found that bluish fluorescent lights attracted insects; convenience stores where outside signage illuminated less light on the blue end of the spectrum attracted fewer insects than convenience stores that did.

The student determined that Circle K’s signage typically emitted more blue light, thereby attracting more insects.

ja-dark: Somehow reminded of a poem by Nabokov I saw in the book Nabokov’s Butterflies years ago:


almost crimson in comparison

with the deep blue of the sky,

and, dangling from a cluster, palpitating,

the swallowtail, a gold-winged guest, grew tipsy,

while, blindingly, the wind was swaying


How WeChat Is Extending China’s School Days Well into the Night

How WeChat Is Extending China’s School Days Well into the Night:

Since Tencent launched WeChat in 2011, the app has pervaded Chinese life. The company reported that it had 650 million monthly active users as of the end of last September. In a society that places paramount importance on academic success, WeChat has quickly become intertwined with education, tapping into a particularly Chinese cultural dynamic and in some cases exploiting it…

Experts agree that the messaging app is intensifying the round-the-clock pressure that already pervades China’s education system. “It infringes on students’ privacy and affects the development of their character,” says Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of 21st Century Education Research Institute. “We should be clear about the ways in which this technology platform can be used.”

ja-dark: Not the first time we’ve seen Chinese education take a good idea and ruin it with extremes–handwriting, for example, is useful for learning Chinese characters (though of minor use relative to other study methods which make learning them quick and easy), but you only need to occasionally write characters a few times to get optimal benefits, whereas Chinese children are forced to write them endlessly.

Aaron Swartz さんのエッセイ、“Theory of Change” の日本語訳です

Aaron Swartz さんのエッセイ、“Theory of Change” の日本語訳です:

A theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?” A decrease in the defense budget: how does one achieve that?

変化の原理は行動の原理とは正反対の進めかたをする。達成するゴールから逆に、具体的な進展を、自分でできるところまでさかのぼっていくんだ。変化の原理 を進めるには、おしまいから始めて、こう自問しつづける。「具体的には、これはどのように達成されるのか?」 防衛費の削減、これはいかにして達成される んだい?

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names:

[This post has been translated into Japanese by one of our readers: 和訳もあります。]

John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters.  It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them.  John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

I have lived in Japan for several years, programming in a professional capacity, and I have broken many systems by the simple expedient of being introduced into them.  (Most people call me Patrick McKenzie, but I’ll acknowledge as correct any of six different “full” names, any many systems I deal with will accept precisely none of them.) Similarly, I’ve worked with Big Freaking Enterprises which, by dint of doing business globally, have theoretically designed their systems to allow all names to work in them. I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere.

So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.

31. I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it…

31. 用意した不適切な語のリストに名前がひっかかることはない。

Previously.

Real-Life Applications of Fuzzy Logic

Real-Life Applications of Fuzzy Logic:

“Almost all real-life applications of fuzzy logic involve the use of linguistic variables. A linguistic variable is a variable whose values are words rather than numbers…

In science, there is a deep-seated tradition of according much more respect for numbers than for words. In fact, scientific progress is commonly equated to progression from the use of words to the use of numbers. My counter-traditional suggestion to use words in place of numbers made me an object of severe criticism and derision from prominent members of the scientific community…

Underlying the concept of a linguistic variable is a fact which is widely unrecognized—a fact which relates to the concept of precision. Precision has two distinct meanings—precision in value and precision in meaning…

More concretely, when in fuzzy logic a word represents the value of a variable, the word is precisiated by treating it as a specified fuzzy set. This is the key idea which underlies the concept of a linguistic variable—an idea which opens the door to exploitation of tolerance for imprecision. Precision carries a cost. When there is some tolerance for imprecision, the use of words serves to reduce cost. Equally importantly, the use of words serves to construct better models of reality. This is what my prominent critics did not appreciate. There is a lesson to be learned.

In conclusion, a word about the methodology of computing with words (CWW). CWW is rooted in the concept of a linguistic variable. CWW opens the door to construction of mathematical solutions of computational problems which are stated in natural language. In coming years, CWW is likely to play an increasingly important role in origination and development of real-life applications of fuzzy logic.”

"Moving from computation with numbers to computation with words has the potential for evolving into a..."

“Moving from computation with numbers to computation with words has the potential for evolving into a basic paradigm shift—a paradigm shift which would open the door to a wide-ranging enlargement of the role of natural languages in scientific theories.”

- Lotfi Zadeh, “What Computing with Words Means to Me” (PDF)

"The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen."

“The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.”

- Douglas Rushkoff

Kanji Tilt Brush Ninja

In the past I came up with an app idea I called ‘kanji fruit ninja’.

Now that we have Ninja Trainer and Tilt Brush for VR (HTC Vive) I can imagine drawing kanji in 3D and having to ‘slice’ the final form closely enough to a template to get credit; perhaps getting rewards for speed. A new kind of handwriting tool.

The only annoying thing about tools like this hypothetical one is that they tend to over-emphasize stroke order. As I stated in the past, an official stroke order isn’t important for learning kanji. That is to say, subcomponent knowledge is more important than stroke order for kanji. Stroke knowledge only plays a minor role. There is no stroke order that’s ‘best’. You don’t have to slave over the official stroke order or memorize stroke counts. Just pick something that feels right to you and be consistent with it if you want some small benefit from having that motor memory. Writing systems evolved to be streamlined, not to be petty and make you memorize an official stroke order or to care about stroke counts.

Either way, I look forward to high tea in a virtual kanji pagoda.

Modality and Morphology: What We Write May Not Be What We Say

Modality and Morphology: What We Write May Not Be What We Say:

Abstract

Written language is an evolutionarily recent human invention; consequently, its neural substrates cannot be determined by the genetic code. How, then, does the brain incorporate skills of this type? One possibility is that written language is dependent on evolutionarily older skills, such as spoken language; another is that dedicated substrates develop with expertise…

The findings reveal that written- and spoken-language systems are considerably independent from the standpoint of morpho-orthographic operations. (PDF)

ja-dark: As I’ve repeatedly explained with sources, language is not speech and writing is not merely speech written down. Writing, speech, and sign are each independent, interacting mediums which comprise the system of language in different modalities (visual, gestural, aural) while using the same supramodal/amodal general areas of the brain in their own modality-specific ways. Written language, spoken language, and sign language each have their own properties as part of a continuum.

Because we haven’t yet evolved onboard abilities for written language (like vocal chords), and we don’t (yet) have the statistical learning opportunities for literacy as early and consistently as with speech, we tend to mistakenly think of speech as having a higher place. We confuse ‘primary’ as in ‘first’ with ‘primary’ as in ‘main’. Speech tends to be present first and writing usually integrates with speech, so many folks wrongly assume that speech is the necessary mechanism by which writing operates to communicate meanings. This bias is why for so long, sign language was not treated as ‘real’ language.

I have connected these topics with Japanese here. For Japanese literacy, the priority is the connection between orthography (specifically kanji) and morphological awareness.

Here are some excerpts from the paper:

“In this article, we consider the role of language modality at high levels of language processing, specifically examining morphological processing…

The findings reveal a brain that can neurally instantiate novel cognitive functions, such as written language, with considerable independence from the evolutionarily older functions and substrates from which they are likely to have originated.

For written language, this independence is not limited to sensorimotor levels; rather, it extends to higher levels of language representation.             

… the orthographic system can independently represent an abstract linguistic property such as grammatical category…

The morpho-orthography hypothesis proposes a word-production system in which (in addition to abstract or amodal semantic, syntactic and morphosyntactic operations) morphophonological and morpho-orthographic processes would operate over modality-specific, morphologically complex representations…

We conclude that the evidence reveals an orthographic system with high-level linguistic properties that can operate with considerable cognitive and neural independence from the spoken language system.

The presented evidence is consistent with results from the small number of previous reports indicating sensitivity to morphological structure in the written production system.

… the evidence we have reported reveals its capacity for the independent representation of linguistic information. This does not imply that the phonological and orthographic systems always function in isolation, because there is also evidence that both are active during production in either modality…

Presumably, the capacity for modality-specific orthographic processing at higher linguistic levels develops with increasing expertise and adds to the efficiency and speed of written word production. Understanding that the end state of the written production system involves orthographic representations and processes sensitive to the morphological structure of words is relevant for literacy instruction and rehabilitation…

Learning and rehabilitation experiences that target orthographic morphological structures and processes may contribute to developing the type and level of expertise of the adult writer…

…  the evidence presented here reveal[s] the brain’s capacity to instantiate linguistically sophisticated features of written language with considerable neural independence from evolutionarily older skills such as spoken language.”

The Ultimate Anime Space Opera Is Finally Getting A Western Release

The Ultimate Anime Space Opera Is Finally Getting A Western Release:

Forbes:

There are a few series that have always been thought impossible when it came to a Western release, either due to their complexity, obscurity or sheer size. In the case of Legend of the Galactic Heroes all three of those applied but Sentai Filmworks have recently announced that they will bring the series Westward in the near future.

Update: In addition to the anime being finally released in the West, Viz will also be publishing the original novels too. Starting in spring of next year.

ja-dark: This article is about the greatest series of all time, Legend of Galactic Heroes. The name sounds funny but trust me, it is the greatest. Note I didn’t say greatest anime series, I said greatest series.

You can also find episodes on Youtube… BTW, did you notice that bit about the novels being published in English, too? So far it looks like they’ve only released the first one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had Japanese copies in vertical and horizontal formats, with illustrations, in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI, to go with the English copies of this book?

An innocent, unrelated post that doesn’t connect back to this post at all.

Related: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/138827446872/re-uploads

jpdv - Japanese Dependency Vectors

jpdv - Japanese Dependency Vectors:

This is a tool for generating semantic vector spaces from Japanese text that has been parsed with the Cabocha dependency parser.

ja-dark: When I finally got Cabocha working on Windows 7 I excitedly wrote a post about how you can do it here. Hopefully it makes enough sense to be helpful. Cabocha was the primary tool I used to generate the thousands of sentence diagrams I have previously shared.

Here’s a paper on the topic: Dependency-Based Construction of Semantic Space Models

These posts from the tool author explain the jpdv project.

Excerpts:

It’s a program that generates dependency based semantic vector spaces for Japanese text. (There’s already an excellent tool for doing this with English, which was written by Sebastian Pado.)…

The software can now generate both context-based and dependency-based vector spaces for Japanese text that has been pre-parsed with CaboCha. It can also generate a similarity matrix for a given vector space using the cosine similarity measurement. 

See also: Distributional semantics

The ultimate culmination of learning Japanese is to translate...



The ultimate culmination of learning Japanese is to translate its subtle nuances in the UFC.

Get Superpowers with Anaconda

Get Superpowers with Anaconda:

Anaconda is a completely free Python distribution (including for commercial use and redistribution). It includes more than 400 of the most popular Python packages for science, math, engineering, and data analysis. See the packages included with Anaconda and the Anaconda changelog.

classics2: analicear: 松本和史-雨_音(2010) MATSUMOTO_Kazuhito-lain_so...



classics2:

analicear:

松本和史-雨_音(2010)

MATSUMOTO_Kazuhito-lain_sound(2010)

(via analicear)

雨音、しと、雨音、しとしと、憂鬱な滴が、しとしとしと、詩として溜まる。

moji: あの「とまれ」の路面標示サインを今まさに施工するという場面に遭遇した。「とまれ」のかたちに切り抜かれた厚さ3mmくら...





moji:

あの「とまれ」の路面標示サインを今まさに施工するという場面に遭遇した。
「とまれ」のかたちに切り抜かれた厚さ3mmくらいある白い革のパーツを丸の枠の中に目見当で配置、
微調整し、バーナーで焼き付け、定着させていた。  via mccclc

Guided Meditation Offers Relaxing Virtual Reality - PSFK

Guided Meditation Offers Relaxing Virtual Reality - PSFK:

Guided Meditation takes relaxation to high-tech levels with the immersive experience of virtual reality. In the app, you can virtually travel to tranquil locales such as a flawless tropical beach, a mesmerizing Japanese koi pond, breathtaking canyons under an endless blue sky or an enchanting forest. A soothing voice offers guided meditations with breathing exercises to complete the journey to relaxation.

ja-dark: This is coming to or is already available for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift CV1.

Previously:

10 Steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life

10 Steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life:

ja-dark: Savoring being the psychological methodology in research shown to improve psychological well-being, which in turn improves cognition, etc. Something else Bryant (source of the info below) emphasizes is that we’re not simply attending to positive sensations, but the key is being mindful of (meta-awareness) and savoring the positive affect they evoke.

2. Take a mental photograph.

Pause for a moment and consciously be aware of [good] things you want to remember later…

3. Congratulate yourself.

Don’t hesitate to pat yourself on the back and take credit for your hard work… Research shows that people who revel in their successes are more likely to enjoy the outcome.

4. Sharpen your sensory perceptions.

Getting in touch with your senses—or taking the time to use them more consciously—also flexes savoring muscles.

5. Shout it from the rooftops.

Laugh out loud, jump up and down, and shout for joy when something good happens to you…

People who outwardly express their good feelings tend to feel extra good, because it provides the mind with evidence that something positive has occurred.

6. Compare the outcome to something worse.

Boost positive feelings by reminding yourself of how bad things could be… For example, if you are late to work, remind yourself of those who may not have a job at all.

Comparing good experiences with unpleasant ones gives us a reference point and makes our current situation seem better…

7. Get absorbed in the moment.

Try to turn off your conscious thoughts and absorb positive feelings during a special moment, such as taking in a work of art.

9. Avoid killjoy thinking.

People who savor the positive sides to every situation are happier at the end of the day…

A 12-year-old girl is facing criminal charges for using emoji. She's not alone.

A 12-year-old girl is facing criminal charges for using emoji. She's not alone.:

As emoji and their relative the emoticon have rocketed from web slang to the unofficial language of the Internet age, the case is one of a growing number where authorities contend the cartoonish symbols have been used to stalk, harass, threaten or defame people. And that has left the police and courts wrestling with how to treat a newly popular idiom many still dimly grasp.

A grand jury in New York City recently had to decide whether 👮 🔫 represented a true threat to police officers. A Michigan judge was asked to interpret the meaning of a face with a tongue sticking out: :P. Emoji even took a turn in the Supreme Court last year in a high-profile case over what constitutes a threat.

Such thorny questions are likely to only increase with the recent announcement that Facebook was rolling out a series of five face emoji users can select to react to posts in lieu of its ubiquitous “like” button.

How to analyze linguistic change using mixed models, Growth Curve Analysis and Generalized Additive Modeling | Journal of Language Evolution

How to analyze linguistic change using mixed models, Growth Curve Analysis and Generalized Additive Modeling | Journal of Language Evolution:

When doing empirical studies in the field of language evolution, change over time is an inherent dimension. This tutorial introduces readers to mixed models, Growth Curve Analysis (GCA) and Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). These approaches are ideal for analyzing nonlinear change over time where there are nested dependencies, such as time points within dyad (in repeated interaction experiments) or time points within chain (in iterated learning experiments). In addition, the tutorial gives recommendations for choices about model fitting. Annotated scripts in the online Supplementary Data provide the reader with R code to serve as a springboard for the reader’s own analyses.

EC2 for Poets

EC2 for Poets:

Most people think they can’t run a server, but servers aren’t any more complicated than a laptop. The main difference is that a server is always on and always connected to the Internet.

EC2 for Poets is a tutorial that shows you how to set up a server in Amazon’s “cloud.” All you need is a net connection, credit card, and a basic understanding of how to use computers.

Initially, the goal for EC2 for Poets was to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people get through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The newest version is more than an experiment, it’s a platform for applications. We’re starting with the RIver2 news aggregator, an app that reads RSS feeds you’re subscribed to every ten minutes and posts the new items at the top of the list. It’s also a podcatcher and a photo aggregator, supports realtime updating and OPML reading lists.

And there are more apps you can install after getting your river up and running. A simple linkblogging tool. A photo archiver. An outline-based document management and collaborative system.

Each app is an instrument, together they form a symphony. The theme: A distributed publishing system operated by its users. This is, imho, the holy grail of the Internet. The goal we’re all marching towards. With EC2 for Poets, we’re getting closer.

Semi-related: Google Prediction API: a Machine Learning black box for developers

Death Is a High-Tech Trip in Japan's Futuristic Cemeteries

Death Is a High-Tech Trip in Japan's Futuristic Cemeteries:

Yumiko Nakajima, a woman in her 70s, is selecting her grave. But instead of choosing a hunk of stone in a regular, outdoor cemetery, she has her sights set on a glowing blue glass Buddha statue inside Ruriden—a small, futuristic charnel house belonging to Koukoko-ji temple in downtown Tokyo…

“It’s fate that I got introduced to this style of graveyard. It’s much more convenient,” said Nakajima, as the technicolor Buddha statues reflected off of her glasses, and her shopping bags rustled beside her. “I don’t want my relatives to go to the trouble of maintaining my tombstone when I’m gone.”

Code Is Political

Code Is Political:

Remember TrumpScript, the satirical Python-based programming language targeting the eponymous presidential candidate that popped up on the internet earlier this year? It’s unlikely that it will be used to write much software, but its quirks—including the tagline “Making Python great again” and the inability to run on computers in China and Mexico—resonated with those baffled by Donald Trump’s election-season pronouncements. When did coding become political speech?

As it turns out, TrumpScript is part of a broader phenomenon in which programming languages serve non-computational purposes.

Prior to TrumpScript’s release, a number of “esoteric” languages—Arnold C and LOLCODE, to name a few—surfaced, infusing blithe humor into computer code to create subcultural inside jokes. Concomitantly, and perhaps more surprisingly, artists and computer scientists have been revealing code as a political force, using its syntax, grammar, and orthography to encourage serious discourse about social change.

Should artificial intelligence projects die with their makers?

Should artificial intelligence projects die with their makers?:

There’s no good way to ask people if they think Twitter will outlive them.

I don’t mean any offense to Jack Dorsey and Co., but one must ask this awkward question when trying to find out programmers’ plans for their Twitter bots when they die.

Bots (for lack of a better term) are programs that use an application program interface (API) to post to or pull information from various services, and they’ve have become ubiquitous on Twitter. There are bots that sort pixels, suggest Marxist startup ideas, or behave more like teens than teens. Twitter said in a 2014 SEC filing that 23 million of its users were automated.

The people behind these artsy bots are a friendly, loosely-organized community of programmers, artists, journalists, and anyone else who feels like making bots. They’ve got hashtags, most prominently #botALLY; a roving Bot Summit which will take place in London this year; and a “botifesto” on Motherboard that describes the present and future state of bots.

As part of that future, botmakers must consider what will happen to their script kiddies after they die. When I emailed Darius Kazemi, a prolific internet artist and bot maker, about the question he quickly responded. “I think about this a lot,” he said.

This Is Your Brain on Nature

This Is Your Brain on Nature:

Strayer’s hypothesis is that being in nature allows the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center, to dial down and rest, like an overused muscle. If he’s right, the EEG will show less energy coming from “midline frontal theta waves”—a measure of conceptual thinking and sustained attention. He’ll compare our brain waves with those of similar volunteers who are sitting in a lab or hanging out at a parking lot in downtown Salt Lake City…

Motivated by large-scale public health problems such as obesity, depression, and pervasive nearsightedness, all clearly associated with time spent indoors, Strayer and other scientists are looking with renewed interest at how nature affects our brains and bodies. Building on advances in neuroscience and psychology, they’ve begun to quantify what once seemed divine and mysterious. These measurements—of everything from stress hormones to heart rate to brain waves to protein markers—indicate that when we spend time in green space, “there is something profound going on,” as Strayer puts it.

Inducing physiological stress recovery with sounds of nature in a virtual reality forest — Results from a pilot study

  • Stress reactions were induced with virtual reality TSST.
  • Virtual reality nature facilitated the recovery from stress.
  • Nature sounds combined with virtual nature activated the parasympathetic system.
  • Experimental studies on human-nature interactions may use virtual techniques.
image

ja-dark: Soon (a month or so till the HTC Vive releases), regular folks will be able to visit virtual locations that enhance us in various ways whenever we wish. As I state in the below link, I believe it’s not necessarily ‘nature’ per se, we should be able to deconstruct what environmental attributes give the research effects and instill them in other types of locations.

See also: Attention Restoration Theory

Apple’s “Code = Speech” Mistake

Apple’s “Code = Speech” Mistake:

Where does this leave us, then, when we’re considering the regulation of code by the government? The right question to ask is whether the government’s regulation of a particular kind of code (just like regulations of spending, or speaking, or writing) threatens the values of free expression. Some regulations of code will undoubtedly implicate the First Amendment. Regulations of the expressive outputs of code, like the content of websites or video games, have already been recognized by the Supreme Court as justifying full First Amendment treatment. It’s also important to recognize that as we do more and more things with code, there will be more ways that the government can threaten dissent, art, self-government, and the pursuit of knowledge.

This Brain-Reading Tool Can Teach You A New Skill In No Time

This Brain-Reading Tool Can Teach You A New Skill In No Time:

The BACh system measures something called “cognitive load,” which is a fancy term for how much mental exertion is required to learn something new. The traditional method for learning the piano is one hand at a time. Once a student can get through a line on the right hand, they move on to the left hand. But there’s no way to tell how hard their brain has to work to get through that line. Some people might breeze through it quickly, and their cognitive load is low, which means they’re truly ready to move on. Others may have to work really hard, so their cognitive load is heavy, and they’re at risk for mental exhaustion. “That could indicate that they’re overloaded and you need to decrease the amount of information,” Yuksel explains…

Based on blood flow, BACh can tell how hard a student’s brain is working, and only releases a new line of music once the learner’s cognitive load is light…

(PDF)

ja-dark: I’ve tried to feature cognitive load into SRSing before in the basic sense, by using measures of average dependency distance and lexical density to organize Japanese sentences.

See also: Applying Cognitive Load Theory to Generate Effective Programming Tutorials

Previously: MIT Gives Us Superpowers (Virtually)

TensorFlow for Poets

TensorFlow for Poets:

When I first started investigating the world of deep learning, I found it very hard to get started. There wasn’t much documentation, and what existed was aimed at academic researchers who already knew a lot of the jargon and background. Thankfully that has changed over the last few years, with a lot more guides and tutorials appearing.

I always loved EC2 for Poets though, and I haven’t seen anything for deep learning that’s aimed at as wide an audience. EC2 for Poets is an explanation of cloud computing that removes a lot of the unnecessary mystery by walking anyone with basic computing knowledge step-by-step through building a simple application on the platform. In the same spirit, I want to show how anyone with a Mac laptop and the ability to use the Terminal can create their own image classifier using TensorFlow, without having to do any coding.

Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy Typography



Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy Typography

SRSing Happiness

SRSing refers to ‘spaced retrieval’; e.g. using Anki or Supermemo, etc. It doesn’t require those digital flashcards, however.

I’ve been quite interested in increasing psychological well-being and some of the methods in psychology involved are about building habits and accumulating embodied memories, ‘installing good facts’, by savoring them for at least 10 seconds to help transfer from short-term to long-term memory.

At any rate, of course this got me thinking, spaced retrieval is by far the most powerful learning/memorization technique psychology has discovered in the past century or so that is also counterintuitive and therefore widely underused. And as the research I’ve linked before shows, its superiority applies to all types of memory, not just names and dates. And as the research I’ve linked has also shown, SRS tools like Anki aren’t just for studying material you’ve already learned, the biggest benefit is actually the active learning process of encoding and reconstructing knowledge that you do through systems like Anki.

So now I have a perhaps silly idea for an Anki ‘Happiness’ deck, where each day you create 5-10 cards of ‘good facts’ you thought of/experienced (e.g. the feeling of warm water and pure white surrounding glistening soap bubbles as you wash dishes), and take 15-30 seconds to really meditate on them per ‘review’. I’m thinking you could just create a single template for every card, “enter good fact here”, sort of, where you actually type in (this process will be part of the memory encoding itself) the idea for every card/positive thing. You otherwise treat the deck as normal. The idea for ‘being present’ (a savoring technique discussed in previous posts under the limitless tag), in card-form, isn’t to obsess over recalling these facts, but recycling them (you want to develop the skill of dishabituating, e.g. see the same lovely thing every day as if for the first time) as you focus on the positive affect they generate.

However, in terms of recalling specifics, perhaps most pertinent for spaced retrieval digital flashcards is one of the main ‘savoring’ techniques, positive mental time travel (positive MTT). Looking forward to positive events, or reminiscing about past events positively. So you’re saving these things in the positive ways you framed them, or reaffirming positive outlooks. Recall that spaced retrieval is considered an active learning process. The reason is that each time we retrieve memories, we render them ‘plastic’, make them amenable to change, and can strengthen them. Hence spaced retrieval is always an active reconstruction process. You can modify or recycle them. Cards as a kind of guided meditation.

By the way, another aspect of positive mental time travel perhaps not noted in the earlier links, esp. when future-oriented, is:

In fact, savoring can be used to connect you to the past or future, argues Bryant. This can be done by remembering a good time and recreating it, or imagining a time in the future when you will look back with good memories.

“If you’re working hard on a project, take the time to look at your accomplishment,” she says. “Look at your experience and tell yourself how you’re going to look into the future with this—tell yourself, ‘This is such a good day, and I know I’ll look back with good memories.”” - via

Also, the typing aspect I mentioned can be the expressive writing technique known to enhance mindful reappraisal ability.

At any rate, this is as far as I’ve thought about it, and the idea isn’t to interrupt the daily, continuous ability for mindful savoring, but to use a tool that takes advantage of how the brain works to ensure an optimal minimal outcome, making this into an active project rather than a neat habit that you try to create but quickly forget about. Especially as creating the cards each day would require recalling and retrieving ‘good facts’ in addition to the noticing and appreciating you did earlier, further encouraging the transfer to long-term memory such that you grow a network of positives to counteract our innate negativity bias as you develop a daily steady-state of well-being.

Other template types in Anki might be categories taken from these 10 steps.

Also, imagine how nice it will be to have a huge collection of little positive prose pieces you wrote that changed your brain and life for the better. A surprising collection of good things that you otherwise would have taken for granted.

Online mental hygiene

So ‘savoring’ is “the use of thoughts and actions to increase the intensity, duration, and appreciation of positive experiences and emotions”; this is one of the mental jiu-jitsu techniques for increasing cognitive performance I advocate, after discovering that a body of research actually backs it up, by improving psychological well-being using those researched techniques.

It’s using neuroplasticity and the malleability of emotions and hacking your own brain to overcome the obsolescent ‘negativity bias’ we evolved that unless countered, forces us to attend more to the bad than the good in order to enhance survival amongst ancient predators.

I’ve been posting the research explaining the strategies and results, including everyday advice from folks like Rick Hanson, but it occurs to me that two good techniques for people who spend so much time reading and viewing material online is to ‘savor’, really notice and appreciate, positive comments online.

Instead of automatically scanning for idiotic comments or tweets that repulse you on a visceral level, scan for positive comments and make your appreciation of them more intense and long-lasting. It doesn’t have to be a manic, obsessive habit, just “removing your smog-covered glasses” and making a reasonable acknowledgment of an exhibition of cleverness or wisdom, perhaps, for a few moments (long-enough to ‘encode’ it) that you really feel, really integrate into your perceptions. If you don’t see any for a particular post, perhaps write one, even if anonymously (show that not everyone who is anonymous and thus not accountable acts like a douchebag).

The idea is that instead of ignoring the 9 positive things and getting annoyed by the 1 negative, you start to balance out those numbers over time. (Think about how celebrities on Twitter will ignore millions of fans tweeting them but will respond to a handful of trolls, what a shame that is–or maybe it’s a good thing and will kill off celebrity culture by exposing them as human beings like their fans.)

There’s a false negative norm online caused by the innate negativity bias in humans that compounds the issues of a vocal minority reveling in a lack of accountability, such that we create a horrible, idiotic cultural niche in comments sections; use that negative norm and the contrast it creates to dishabituate yourself from the way you take the non-negative things for granted and treat positive things like precious gems. Or something. If this sounds wishy-washy, remember, this is all Science Approved™. (See previous posts under the ‘limitless’ tag.)

Do the same thing for positive news articles and such. Instead of letting yourself be spoon-fed a constant stream of rubbish by news organizations that assume the negativity bias means they should always harp on bad news for the most clicks from readers, acknowledge that every day something awesome happens and look for it and savor it.

Of course, this doesn’t even touch on reframing/reappraisal: perhaps analyze what led people to go astray in their comments and how the bad reminds you to be more positive or simply ‘better’, for example. Revel in the inspiration you might take to really hone your own knowledge in the face of arguments with unpleasant people. Spin out fantastical what-ifs that lead to a revolution where everything is candy and rainbows. Oh dear, this happiness stuff is really getting to me.

Finding at least one funny video a day and having a good laugh might be nice, also.

In hand with this is simply being more metacognitively aware, more self-conscious and selective, in how you use this amazing resource we take for granted.

Positive emotion regulation and well-being: Comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies

Positive emotion regulation and well-being: Comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies:

PDF: http://sites.uclouvain.be/ilab/index.php/download_file/view/213/82/

ja-dark: Positive emotion regulation and improving well-being is very useful for improving cognitive performance. This paper has a very nice breakdown of various ‘savoring’ techniques for increasing positive affect. With a more formal language than what you might find in a self-help book.

Some excerpts:

Be Present, by deliberately directing attention to the present pleasant experience. Both correlational and experimental studies have shown that this strategy is linked with the increased intensity and frequency of positive emotions.

Positive Mental Time Travel (Positive MTT) by vividly remembering or anticipating positive events – two abilities that are very closely related. Indeed, both cross-sectional and experimental studies have shown that positive MTT predicts happiness.

Savoring is something that Rick Hanson recommends doing at least 6 times a day, for 10 seconds or so to help transfer from short-term to long-term memory. The crucial thing when savoring is to learn to recognize continually the 99% of existence that is or can be pleasant, or is simply neutral, rather than paying attention only to the negative. Life is by default non-negative, yet by default we see mostly negative. The skill to train is countering that, choosing to see things accurately.

Strategies I think are especially useful and which the research seems to most support are ‘being present’ while ‘avoiding distractions’ (which is ‘dampening’, the enemy of ‘savoring’), and positive mental time travel (both forward and backward) rather than negative mental time travel and fault-finding…

Remember, this is simply countering the overly negative bias all humans are born with and tend to perpetuate to extremes.

Tying this into positive reappraisal, I think you should make sure that when you have chains of thoughts that make you anxious (tying a small present problem into a potential catastrophe), that you always maintain awareness of how things can turn out well, or how you can turn around negative possibilities, or reframe things positively, and try to end on a high note rather than a negative. I’m reminded of athletes like Georges St-Pierre who practice visualization and always strive to end the visualization on a victory if they imagine themselves in a tough spot. Likewise if you are stuck on a memory, reframe it or reappraise it in a positive way leading to the present and on to the future. Be like George Costanza. I mean Georges St-Pierre.

So every negative is a tool to make you happier. Bring on the tragedy! No, wait…

Did that Seinfeld video make you laugh? Behavioral Display is another technique the paper mentioned; this relates to research on the feedback loop you can create with facial expressions. Even better than smiling to feel happy I think would be trying to laugh at least once a day. I’m sure there’s research on positive affect and laughter as therapy.

I also think these techniques are easier once you are aware of the plastic nature of both the mind and emotions, as the bulk of emotions are social constructions built atop much simpler instinctual templates. Do what you want with them, and change your brain.

I never thought I’d say this, but there are some real gems at this Bulletproof Exec site via an interview with Rick Hanson (you can read the transcript).

  • “It’s taking off your smog-covered glasses rather than putting on rose-tinted glasses.“ - On how savoring is just countering the negativity bias, being realistic, rather than overly positive.
  • “Your brain takes its shape from whatever you repeatedly rest your mind upon.“ - On realizing the plasticity of the brain and maintaining the awareness to practice good mental/emotional hygiene.
  • “What do you want to grow inside yourself?” - I like this emphasis on a cumulative process leading to a steady-state of positive affect. That growth metaphor is something I recall Memrise using.

This paper sort of adds on to the above and relates it to mindfulness.

Here’s a bit more on savoring:

Math Anxiety: A Factor in Math Achievement Not to Be Ignored In

Math Anxiety: A Factor in Math Achievement Not to Be Ignored In:

(PDF)

Here we discuss a phenomenon known as math anxiety (i.e., negative feelings of tension and fear that many people experience when engaging in math) and the implications math anxiety carries for math success and STEM engagement. We begin by highlighting the most recent findings from research in psychology, education, and neuroscience on math anxiety. We then discuss the consequences of math anxiety as well as likely causes and promising remediations. We suggest that the initiatives currently underway to improve STEM involvement and achievement would benefit from educating current and future teachers, parents, and even students about math anxiety, its causes, consequences, and possibilities for amelioration.

A nice excerpt:

One reason that expressive writing may be effective is because it provides individuals with the opportunity to reappraise a potentially negative situation—for example, a math test (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011). When we view an anxiety-inducing situation as a threat, we tend to underperform relative to our abilities. Conversely, if we view that same situation as a challenge, then we tend to perform better (Jamieson, Mendes, & Nock, 2013; Maloney, Sattizahn, & Beilock, 2014). Expressive writing may help anxious individuals to reappraise their view of the upcoming math task—seeing it as an energizing challenge rather than as a demotivating threat. Consistent with this claim, Ramirez and Beilock (2011), who employed the expressive writing technique with test-anxious students, found that students whose writing showed more evidence of reappraising the upcoming test as a challenge showed the greatest benefit of writing. 

Physiological threat responses predict number processing

Being able to adequately process numbers is a key competency in everyday life. Yet, self-reported negative affective responses towards numbers are known to deteriorate numerical performance. Here, we investigated how physiological threat responses predict numerical performance. Physiological responses reflect whether individuals evaluate a task as exceeding or matching their resources and in turn experience either threat or challenge, which influences subsequent performance. We hypothesized that, the more individuals respond to a numerical task with physiological threat, the worse they would perform. Results of an experiment with cardiovascular indicators of threat/challenge corroborated this expectation. The findings thereby contribute to our understanding of the physiological mechanism underlying the influence of negative affective responses towards numbers on numerical performance.

Reappraising Threat: How to Optimize Performance Under Pressure

Competitive situations often hinge on one pressurized moment. In these situations, individuals’ psychophysiological states determine performance, with a challenge state associated with better performance than a threat state. But what can be done if an individual experiences a threat state? This study examined one potential solution: arousal reappraisal. Fifty participants received either arousal reappraisal or control instructions before performing a pressurized, single-trial, motor task. Although both groups initially displayed cardiovascular responses consistent with a threat state, the reappraisal group displayed a cardiovascular response more reflective of a challenge state (relatively higher cardiac output and/or lower total peripheral resistance) after the reappraisal manipulation. Furthermore, despite performing similarly at baseline, the reappraisal group outperformed the control group during the pressurized task. The results demonstrate that encouraging individuals to interpret heightened physiological arousal as a tool that can help maximize performance can result in more adaptive cardiovascular responses and motor performance under pressure.

More on the benefits of reappraisal/reframing:

This Incredible TED Talk Shows How Changing Your Perception Of Stress Could Save Your Life

This Incredible TED Talk Shows How Changing Your Perception Of Stress Could Save Your Life:

When Kelly McGonigal first told her audience that a belief in the harmful effects of stress — and not stress itself — was a serious health risk, many people laughed…

McGonigal is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University who gave a TED Talk last June that has racked up almost 4.8 million views on TED’s site and over a million views on TED’s YouTube page.

Related: Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Eudaimonic Meaning: A Process Model of Mindful Positive Emotion Regulation

Contemporary scholarship on mindfulness casts it as a form of purely nonevaluative engagement with experience. Yet, traditionally mindfulness was not intended to operate in a vacuum of dispassionate observation, but was seen as facilitative of eudaimonic mental states. In spite of this historical context, modern psychological research has neglected to ask the question of how the practice of mindfulness affects downstream emotion regulatory processes to impact the sense of meaning in life. To fill this lacuna, here we describe the mindfulness-to-meaning theory, from which we derive a novel process model of mindful positive emotion regulation informed by affective science, in which mindfulness is proposed to introduce flexibility in the generation of cognitive appraisals by enhancing interoceptive attention, thereby expanding the scope of cognition to facilitate reappraisal of adversity and savoring of positive experience. This process is proposed to culminate in a deepened capacity for meaning-making and greater engagement with life.

Previously: Reframing stress: Stage fright can be your friend

Mindfulness Increases Positive Judgments and Reduces Negativity Bias

Mindfulness Increases Positive Judgments and Reduces Negativity Bias:

The present research examined the relation between mindfulness and negativity bias, or the tendency to weigh negative information more heavily than positive. A randomized experiment compared a brief mindfulness induction to an unfocused attention control condition. Negativity bias was assessed with a subjective measure of optimism and pessimism and an objective measure of negativity bias in attitude formation…

Participants in the mindfulness condition demonstrated less negativity bias in attitude formation. That is, they correctly classified positive and negative stimuli more equally than those in the control condition.

Interestingly, the difference in negativity bias stemmed from better categorization of positives. Furthermore, those in the mindfulness condition reported higher levels of optimism compared to the control condition. Together, these results suggest that mindfulness increases positive judgments and reduces negativity bias.

Also: Does mindfulness attenuate thoughts emphasizing negativity, but not positivity?

The current research investigated whether mindfulness is differentially associated with thoughts that emphasize positive or negative valence.

In Study 1, trait mindfulness was inversely associated with negative rumination but unassociated with positive rumination, controlling for state affect.

In Study 2, participants completed either a mindful breathing meditation or a comparable control exercise, followed by a thought listing while viewing affective images. Compared to the control condition, the mindfulness condition listed proportionately fewer negative thoughts, particularly in response to negative images, and more non-valenced thoughts. The conditions did not differ in their proportions of positive thoughts.

These results suggest that mindfulness may attenuate thoughts that emphasize negativity but not those that emphasize positivity.

Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation

In the research reported here, we investigated the debiasing effect of mindfulness meditation on the sunk-cost bias. We conducted four studies (one correlational and three experimental); the results suggest that increased mindfulness reduces the tendency to allow unrecoverable prior costs to influence current decisions. Study 1 served as an initial correlational demonstration of the positive relationship between trait mindfulness and resistance to the sunk-cost bias. Studies 2a and 2b were laboratory experiments examining the effect of a mindfulness-meditation induction on increased resistance to the sunk-cost bias. In Study 3, we examined the mediating mechanisms of temporal focus and negative affect, and we found that the sunk-cost bias was attenuated by drawing one’s temporal focus away from the future and past and by reducing state negative affect, both of which were accomplished through mindfulness meditation.

ja-dark: I’ve posted about the negativity bias and how to correct it before (practically speaking, increasing positive affect vs. negative increases cognitive performance, hence this falls under the ‘limitless’ category of posts I submit.)

We can take things further with ‘savoring’, as Rick Hanson does with his ‘hardwiring happiness’ neuropsychology approach, another technique that overlaps with mindfulness and also with scientific evidence to support it. I’ll post about that next.

For more on scientific mindfulness meditation–the two techniques primarily being Focused Awareness and Open Monitoring, see here: https://darkjapanese.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/limitless-ii-scientific-meditation/

Also: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/tagged/meditation

“Hasta Mudra”: An interpretation of Indian sign hand gestures

“Hasta Mudra”: An interpretation of Indian sign hand gestures:

Abstract

Hasta Mudra - a Sanskrit word resembles as a hand gestures which are practiced individually or as a series of gestures flowing one into the next.

This paper gives glimpse of Indian Sign Language, its dialects and varieties and recent efforts in the direction of its standardization. Also a proposed methodology is discussed to recognize static single hand gestures of a subset of Indian sign language.

The present achievements provide the basis for future applications with the objective of supporting the integration of deaf people into the hearing society. The proposed recognition system aims for signer-independent operation and utilizes a single web camera for data acquisition to ensure user-friendliness. The goal is to create a system which can identify gestures of human hand and use them to convey information without the use of interpreter.

Conclusion

We had studied and outlined the Indian Sign Language. We have observed that in India mostly we are dealing with American or British sign language and again it is region specific and dialect varieties. So there is indeed necessity to deal with the recognition problem so that the proposed system will benefits the deaf people of India. Thus, the proposed approach will be useful and will have a sufficient amount of accuracy to recognize a static hand sign gesture. This also will reduce the database size by standardizing the orientation of hands using the idea of invariant rotation and scaled gesture.

Japan's curious passion for the business novel - BBC News

Japan's curious passion for the business novel - BBC News:

… the information in business novels is often very well-sourced, according to critic Makoto Sataka, who helped define the emerging genre when he wrote a book about it in the 1980s…

“I found that writing about companies in Japan was a taboo. You can’t write the truth in the media,” he says.

The bigger the business, the harder it is to criticise, Sataka says, as they have well-run public relations departments that do “a great job” to block any critical reports before they are published…

In his spare time, Makoto Sataka began to go rooting through boxes at the back of bookshops. They were full of cheap paperbacks, which people had read once and thrown away. But in these books, Makoto Sataka, felt like he was finally getting the real story.

“I found that there was no truth in factual stories. But in fiction, there was,” he says.

ja-dark: Relatedly, in terms of fiction framing nonfiction, there’s also Moshidora and those Manga Guides. (That Moshidora link is entirely innocent, btw. Nothing hidden there. Or here.)

Elsewhere we have The Phoenix Project, an English-language IT business novel about topics like continuous delivery and DevOps.

MIT Gives Us Superpowers (Virtually)

MIT Gives Us Superpowers (Virtually):

We all dream of having the power to fly, to levitate objects, or to see through clothes walls. Now, a new project called PsychicVR, by MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group, makes it possible, if you’re willing to settle for wielding these powers in cyberspace.

Their system combines an Oculus Rift headset with a Leap Motion controller, so that the user can both look around in 360 degrees and see their own hands. But on top of this relatively common VR hack, the MIT team added a Muse headband, which reads electrical impulses from your brain. As a result, when you think harder, you can pull off superheroic feats across a series of scenes—seeing through walls like Superman, or igniting fire in your hand like the Human Torch…

“When the user is focused, they are able to make changes in the 3-D environment and control their powers,” the abstract explains. “Our system increases mindfulness and helps achieve higher levels of concentration while entertaining the user.”

Voynich Manuscript: word vectors and t-SNE visualization of some patterns | Terra Incognita

Voynich Manuscript: word vectors and t-SNE visualization of some patterns | Terra Incognita:

The Voynich Manuscript is a hand-written codex written in an unknown system and carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438). Although the manuscript has been studied by some famous cryptographers of the World War I and II, nobody has deciphered it yet.

The manuscript is known to be written in two different languages (Language A and Language B) and it is also known to be written by a group of people. The manuscript itself is always subject of a lot of different hypothesis, including the one that I like the most which is the “culture extinction” hypothesis, supported in 2014 by Stephen Bax.

This hypothesis states that the codex isn’t ciphered, it states that the codex was just written in an unknown language that disappeared due to a culture extinction. In 2014, Stephen Bax proposed a provisional, partial decoding of the manuscript, the video of his presentation is very interesting and I really recommend you to watch if you like this codex. There is also a transcription of the manuscript done thanks to the hard-work of many folks working on it since many moons ago…

My idea when I heard about the work of Stephen Bax was to try to capture the patterns of the text using word2vec.  Word embeddings are created by using a shallow neural network architecture. It is a unsupervised technique that uses supervided learning tasks to learn the linguistic context of the words. Here is a visualization of this architecture from the TensorFlow site

IBM Watson machine learns the art of writing a good headline

IBM Watson machine learns the art of writing a good headline:

Watson’s natural language processing and machine learning engine underpins a suite of language recognition, computer vision and data analytics services offered by IBM, and behind the scenes researchers continue to refine the smart system’s capabilities.

The latest breakthrough by the team working on Watson’s question and answering algorithms is to create a “state-of-the-art” system for automatically summarising documents.

The team used a deep learning approach, previously used for machine translation and to automatically caption videos, to produce short summaries of millions of English newswire reports.

Chicago just became the first US city to make computer science a core subject

Chicago just became the first US city to make computer science a core subject:

Today [02/24/16] Chicago becomes the first major city in the United States to announce it will make computer science a graduation requirement for all high schools after a vote by the School Board.

Every student deserves to learn how software and computers work and gain skills to help them pursue the best opportunities in any future career. At a time when computer science is only offered in a quarter of American schools — with black and Hispanic students and girls especially underrepresented in the field as early as high school — this news is a major step in ensuring that every student in the nation’s 3rd-largest school district will leave school with a foundation for success.

Also: For Elementary Schools, the Search for an Ideal Coding Curriculum Is Far From Over

“I’m still looking for an elementary coding curriculum that has all of the following: effective, student-centric learning tools, an appropriate scope and sequence, useful formative and summative assessments and scalability. I’m looking for a slow and steady progression to create a solid foundation in computational thinking and computer science.”

We wouldn't be mourning lost languages if we embraced multilingualism

We wouldn't be mourning lost languages if we embraced multilingualism:

Language is central to what it means to be human. Each individual language reflects another way of talking about the world, another framework for solving communicative problems, another example of the cognitive capabilities of our species. Each language is also a repository of accumulated knowledge about the world; knowledge that is lost when languages are no longer spoken…

Some believe that language diversity is problematic, and that speaking one language produces harmony and unity. Interestingly, however, those who express this view seem to assume that it should be their language, English, that is chosen for this purpose. Would they feel equally strongly in favour of moving towards a single language if it were Mandarin, Arabic or Warlpiri?

The fact is that our mother language is intimately connected to our sense of self. It is the language in which we can fully be ourselves, where we feel most comfortable, where we can laugh and grieve and dream. This is why supporting people all over the world in speaking their own languages is so important…

The majority of people across the world speak at least two languages. Australia is proud of its multiculturalism. It’s time for us to catch up with the rest of the world and embrace multilingualism as well.

Using Effect Size—or Why the P Value Is Not Enough

Using Effect Size—or Why the P Value Is Not Enough:

In this paper, we target readers with little or no statistical background in order to encourage you to improve your comprehension of the relevance of effect size for planning, analyzing, reporting, and understanding education research studies…

Effect size helps readers understand the magnitude of differences found, whereas statistical significance examines whether the findings are likely to be due to chance. Both are essential for readers to understand the full impact of your work. Report both in the Abstract and Results sections.

Why It's Essential To Grow Indian-Language Wikipedias

Why It's Essential To Grow Indian-Language Wikipedias:

… there is a huge gap in the access to knowledge on the internet domain. Of a population of about 1.26 billion only about 15-18% people are connected online, largely from mobile devices. A tiny fraction of this population comprises the technical community. It would be useful to have a metric on the percentage of this community’s contribution to grow the languages of this country and its cultural heritage…

Maithili Wikipedia and Goan Konkani Wikipedia are the two Indian-language Wikipedias that have gone live in recent years. The world has seen how digital activism has brought a new life to the Hebrew language. There are a fairly large number of native speakers waiting out there to access knowledge in their own languages. Wikipedia could be a great tool for digital activism with openness and sharing.

Previously: Unless You Speak English, The Internet Doesn’t Care About You

Dentsu, MIT Create AI-Inspired Sites

Dentsu, MIT Create AI-Inspired Sites:

A new site, called “Finding Gifts with Sasha,” helps users choose gifts through conversations with a boy character. “At first, his gift suggestions may not be perfect,” Dentsu says, “but the system learns from the user’s feedback in the same way that children do in the course of their development.” Links to ecommerce sites are provided for the suggested gifts.

Before making its gift recommendations, Dentsu said, Sasha analyzes the profiles and comments posted on social media sites by both the user and the intended gift recipient.

Sasha also has the help of 200,000 pieces of “common sense” observations that were gathered into a database during two earlier phases of the project. The first, “Play a Quiz Game with Nadya,” used a girl character to gather common-sense suggestions from players. The second, “Poi bot,”  used a personalized robot character to automatically generate Tweets said to imitate each user’s distinctive communication style and way of thinking.

ja-dark: nadya.jp is an online word game used to collect data for ConceptNet.

Cast Spells, Summon Meteors & Unleash Your Inner Warlock

Cast Spells, Summon Meteors & Unleash Your Inner Warlock:

The road from prototype to polished demo involved a lot of testing and experimentation. “We started experimenting and tried possibly a dozens on gestures and spell selection schemes,” says Irakli Kokrashvili, co-founder and CEO of the Georgian studio. “We were inviting testers and observing their reactions, how they were trying to cast spells. We were pleased to see the joy and fun they were having throwing spells with bare hands.”

Previously. (My interest is in programming your own spells and tying them to finger gestures.) Being able to activate spells through sign language and incantations in a foreign language would also be nice.

Word learning under infinite uncertainty

Word learning under infinite uncertainty:

Language learners must learn the meanings of many thousands of words, despite those words occurring in complex environments in which infinitely many meanings might be inferred by the learner as a word’s true meaning.

This problem of infinite referential uncertainty is often attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine. We provide a mathematical formalisation of an ideal cross-situational learner attempting to learn under infinite referential uncertainty, and identify conditions under which word learning is possible.

As Quine’s intuitions suggest, learning under infinite uncertainty is in fact possible, provided that learners have some means of ranking candidate word meanings in terms of their plausibility; furthermore, our analysis shows that this ranking could in fact be exceedingly weak, implying that constraints which allow learners to infer the plausibility of candidate word meanings could themselves be weak.

This approach lifts the burden of explanation from ‘smart’ word learning constraints in learners, and suggests a programme of research into weak, unreliable, probabilistic constraints on the inference of word meaning in real word learners.

Is Chinese Special? Four Aspects of Chinese Literacy Acquisition that Might Distinguish Learning Chinese from Learning Alphabetic Orthographies

Is Chinese Special? Four Aspects of Chinese Literacy Acquisition that Might Distinguish Learning Chinese from Learning Alphabetic Orthographies:

Abstract

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here.

First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies.

Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that word building relies heavily on lexical compounding in Chinese makes morphological awareness particularly important for early reading development.

Third, two different scripts (simplified, traditional) have different characteristics and strengths and weaknesses in relation to teaching and learning Chinese.

Fourth, learning Chinese may strengthen both segmental and suprasegmental phonological sensitivity and even promote basic visual skills, potential cognitive advantages.

Collectively, these aspects of Chinese make it important to consider as a unique orthography for understanding universals and specifics in the process of learning to read and write.

How Google is using dead authors to improve its artificial intelligence

How Google is using dead authors to improve its artificial intelligence:

Google is teaching its artificial intelligence how to understand language by making it predict, and replicate, the works of famous dead authors.

The company is building systems that are capable of understanding natural language in the same way humans do, with the works of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and others currently being analysed…

Researchers training the deep neural network – using the work of authors from Project Gutenberg – fed the AI an input sentence and asked it to say what would come next. The network is given millions of lines from a “jumble” of authors and then works out the style of individual writers…

Initially the system didn’t know the identity of any authors, but still only got things wrong 17 percent of the time.

ASL Tutor: Teaching Sign Language with Leap Motion + Machine Learning

ASL Tutor: Teaching Sign Language with Leap Motion + Machine Learning:

We… decided to try to make something fun to demonstrate the sign language recognition we were able to implement. We wanted to make a language learning tool, something like Rosetta Stone for sign language. Given the amount of time we had left, we set our sights on a simple game that would reward players for making as many signs as they could in thirty seconds.

By 8:00am, we had something working. Our game would put up a picture of a sign and ask the player to mimic it. Once she had, she would be awarded 100 points and pick another sign for her to input.

How an eight-year-old boy invented a new word

How an eight-year-old boy invented a new word:

A few weeks back, primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one of her students, Matteo, used an unfamiliar word in a written assignment.

Matteo described a flower as “petaloso” (“full of petals”). The word doesn’t officially exist in the Italian dictionary, but grammatically it makes sense as a combination of “petalo” (“petal”) and the suffix “-oso” (“full of”).

The assignment got Aurora thinking - could the eight-year-old Matteo have invented a new word? With his teacher’s help, the student wrote to the Accademia della Crusca - the institution that oversees the use of the Italian language - to ask for their opinion.

Audio



"If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves."

“If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”

anki-addons by kanjiplusone: Heisig Filter

anki-addons by kanjiplusone: Heisig Filter:

Also here: “The purpose of this add-on is to filter your vocabulary (or sentence) deck to only the kanji you’ve already learned, allowing you to study vocabulary (and grammar) concurrently and incrementally while completing Remembering the Kanji.“

This looks like it might be a kind of Anki implementation of cb4960′s Kanji Word Association Tool: “Based on a user-provided list of kanji, this tool will generate a list of words that are associated with each kanji and ensure that each word consists only of kanji that you have already studied up to that point and kana.”

I uploaded some KWAT dictionaries here (quick dl).

A visual training tool for teaching kanji to children with developmental dyslexia

A visual training tool for teaching kanji to children with developmental dyslexia:

We developed a visual training tool to assist children with developmental dyslexia in learning to recognize and understand Chinese characters (kanji). The visual training tool presents the strokes of a kanji character as separate shapes and requires students to use these fragments to construct the character.

Two types of experiments were conducted to investigate the differences between the effects of the visual training tool and a traditional Japanese teaching method – shi-sha-ho, which consists of copying a visually displayed model – on developmentally dyslexic children’s kanji writing skills…

We found that the visual training tool was more effective than the shi-sha-ho for use with Japanese children with developmental dyslexia in learning kanji, both just after the experiment was completed and four weeks later… Participants’ retention of the target kanji was at least up to eight weeks. Results of the second experiment showed the visual training tool developed in the present study have shown the possibility of becoming a promising tool for children with developmental dyslexia.

ja-dark: I haven’t had a chance to look deeper into this research, I just stumbled across it, but the ‘reconstruct kanji’ thing is something I promote as the primary method of learning kanji, rather than Heisig stories. It’s the kanji parallel to the sentence reconstruction method I promote elsewhere.

There are two tools for doing this in Anki: the kanji decomposer add-on, and the Kanji Dark kanji deck. Given the kanji’s subcomponents and meaning, your task is to recall the kanji.

Just browsing through the authors’ other publications, it appears they’ve done some interesting research on the stereoscopic presentation of text, as well.

Previously.

Signed Names in Japanese Sign Language: Linguistic and Cultural Analyses

Signed Names in Japanese Sign Language: Linguistic and Cultural Analyses:

This article describes the types of signed names given and used by deaf users of Japanese Sign Language. Drawing from a dataset of 216 signed names, we identify and describe nine strategies for signed name formation. Notably, seven of these represent written Japanese surnames. We explain how language contact with written Japanese characters (kanji) and syllabograms (kana) gives rise to a distinctive set of naming strategies. We further discuss the culture of literacy in Japan that emphasizes the written forms of surnames and consider its influential role in Japanese deaf education when sustained contact between many deaf people made naming a central concern.

“Our analysis identified a total of nine JSL signed name formation strategies. Of these, two made exclusive reference to an individual’s physical traits or personal characteristics, while seven represented kanji characters in written Japanese surnames, either with or without descriptive elements…

The vast majority of signed names in the dataset—207 of 216 total names—were in some way associated with written Japanese surnames. This association could be established on a sign-by-sign basis since each sign in a single- or multi-sign name could be shown to map to a kanji character in the name bearer’s written surname. In some cases, a sign corresponded to a character by directly translating its meaning; in other cases, the sign referenced the shape of an associated character or its pronunciation. In the description to follow, we refer to this relationship between sign and character as the sign’s representing the character and call the class of signed names produced via this mechanism “representational” signed names. We identified a total of seven strategies for producing a representational signed name…

By far the most common strategy for representing a written name in the dataset was simply to translate the Japanese words signified by component kanji characters into JSL. A representative example is a signed name corresponding to the Japanese name Takakusa, composed of the kanji characters taka (高) “high” and kusa (草) “grass”. The Japanese words corresponding to the kanji characters are translated to their equivalent JSL signs—high and grass—to produce a signed name…

The second most common method of representing kanji in the dataset was to use signs that represent the shape of a kanji character on the hands. Such “character signs” are found not only in JSL but also in other signed languages in contact with Chinese-based writing systems… all documented character signs exploit the shape of the human hand and the configurations it can assume to iconically represent whole Chinese(-based) characters or recognizable portions of characters.

The use of character signs to form a JSL signed name is exemplified in the case of an individual whose Japanese surname, Sankoda, is composed of the kanji characters san (三) “three,” ko (小) “small,” and ta (pronounced “da” in this phonetic context) (田) “rice paddy.” This individual’s JSL signed name is a set of three corresponding character signs…

A single signed name in the dataset had a component produced using kuusho (空書) “air drawing.” Representing the shape of a character by drawing it in the air is a familiar practice in Japanese classrooms (hearing and deaf), where it is used to practice the writing of characters… It seems that this is not a robust signed name formation strategy at present among users of JSL.”

ja-dark: I wrote a little about Japanese names here. I discuss my pet theory that kanji create more of an influence of Japanese names on how they perceive each other than in other languages.

About 8% of the above paper’s dataset used fingerspelling, or yubimoji. I made a yubimoji Anki deck here. Here’s a site for learning Japanese Sign Language.

Other related posts:

Premises of an algebra of Japanese characters

Premises of an algebra of Japanese characters:

The Japanese language is made mostly of three characters sets: hiragana, katakana and kanji characters. Kanji characters are inherited from Chinese, and include thousands of glyphs. Characters, especially kanji, memorisation is thus an extremely challenging task for learners of the Japanese language, and even for native speakers who tend to forget the meaning or writing of uncommon characters. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel memorisation technique based on an algebra defined for these kanji characters. By reusing classic algebra notations, the learner is able to rely on acquired knowledge (numbers algebra) to support his/her memorisation of Japanese characters. In addition, we consider automatic processing and application of this algebra to low-spec systems, for instance embedded systems.

ja-dark: A fun premise, although it seems to come from the idea that kanji are intrinsically difficult due to the large amount of them, and the example of ‘natives sometimes have to look up kanji’ is used. A tainted perspective. Kanji are closer to words than letters of the alphabet–kanji primarily represent meanings rather than sound (i.e. sound is secondary), and those meanings mostly pair up to form words; we have endless numbers of words in our languages and have to look up words we don’t use often or are unfamiliar with, so it makes sense for kanji to be learned long-term with words rather than front-loaded by the hundreds or thousands. This is why I recommend methods where you learn kanji in batches and for each batch transition to a batch of words containing them. Example.

image

Machine Learning :: Cosine Similarity for Vector Space Models (Part III) | Terra Incognita

Machine Learning :: Cosine Similarity for Vector Space Models (Part III) | Terra Incognita:

“So, on the previous tutorials we learned how a document can be modeled in the Vector Space, how the TF-IDF transformation works and how the TF-IDF is calculated, now what we are going to learn is how to use a well-known similarity measure (Cosine Similarity) to calculate the similarity between different documents…

Practice Using Scikit-learn (sklearn)

* In this tutorial I’m using the Python 2.7.5 and Scikit-learn 0.14.1.”

(Code tutorial follows the above)

Deep or Shallow, NLP is Breaking Out

Deep or Shallow, NLP is Breaking Out:

Just as “Hello, World” may be the best-known general programming introductory example, Mikolov, who was then at Microsoft Research, also introduced what fast became a benchmark equation in natural language processing at the 2013 proceedings of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics, the king - man + woman = queen analogy, in which the computer solved the equation spontaneously…

… What is more, he said, the word2vec algorithm as used by Stitch Fix in production is not used on text.

“In our boxes we ship five items. and you can use word2vec here and say ‘given this item in that box, can you predict the other items?’” Moody said. “Word2vec doesn’t care if it’s a word or not a word, it’s just another token and you have to make that token similar to the other tokens. It’s almost like using the backbone of the word2vec algorithm to look inside someone’s closet and saying 'these things are very similar because they would all appear in the same sort of closet together.’”

In fact, he said, the company is starting to use analogical principles to go beyond text and synthesize the images of imagined new items from images of existing pieces of clothing—a process he said was “starting to get toward this hint of creativity. So if you think of these word vectors like king - man + woman = queen, we’re now exploring spaces between those data points, and that’s what we’re calling creativity —things that have never been seen before, but are really just somewhere in between all those other observations.”

Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute

Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute:

Some interesting links from this site:

Information Imbalance: Africa on Wikipedia

Scarcity of user-generated content may unfortunately lead to a vicious cycle where failing to reach a critical mass of representation could perpetuate certain countries’ positions on the periphery of the global knowledge economy.

Academic Knowledge and Language

This graphic highlights the dominance of the Anglophone sphere in academic publishing.

Mapping Article Length in Wikipedia

This map displays some fascinating patterns that aren’t readily apparent when just looking at the raw counts of articles. North America and Europe really stand out as glowing clusters of information. Interestingly, articles in North America tend to be longer than European ones… The contrast between the Japanese and Philippine archipelagos is also worthy of note. Although there are many more articles about Japan, those articles tend to be much shorter than articles in the Phillippines (Japanese articles also tend to be clustered around major transportation corridors).

Unless You Speak English, The Internet Doesn't Care About You

Unless You Speak English, The Internet Doesn't Care About You:

Facebook’s Free Basics program was controversial in India in large part because it limited the internet resources the digitally disadvantaged would have access to. Would it include access to domestic violence protection programs, or would it be a walled ghetto devoted to social media and online shopping? Language barriers can also force internet users into digital ghettos, or force them to forsake their mother tongue (and its culture) to escape them.

“The fact that a lot of groups have very little local-language content is problematic because it can contribute to a global homogenization of ideas and culture, and perhaps even knowledge itself,” said Mark Graham, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Related: The Topoi of E-Space, by Saskia Sassen, 1996

“There is no doubt that the Internet is a space of distributed power that limits the possibilities of authoritarian and monopoly control. But it is becoming evident over the last two years that it is also a space for contestation and segmentation. Further, when it comes to the broader subject of the power of the networks, most computer networks are private. That leaves a lot of network power that may not necessarily have the properties/attributes of the Internet. Indeed, much of this is concentrated power and reproduces hierarchy rather than distributed power.”

The Free Basics thing reminded me of this book: The Tentacles of Progress : Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940

“In this trenchant examination of a paradox of colonial rule, Daniel Headrick, author of the widely acclaimed Tools of Empire, shows how the massive transfers of technology–including equipment, techniques, and experts–from the European imperial powers to their colonies in Asia and Africa led not to industrialization but to underdevelopment. He argues that colonial rulers dissociated the geographic transfer of technology from its cultural diffusion by allowing only Europeans access to technical educations and discouraging non-European entrepreneurs. Examining the most important technologies–shipping and railways, telegraphs and wireless, urban water supply and sewage disposal, economic botany and plantation agriculture, irrigation, and mining and metallurgy–Headrick provides a new perspective on colonial economic history and reopens the debate on the roots of Asian and African underdevelopment.”

Cosine Similarity Calculator

Cosine Similarity Calculator:

This Cosine Similarity Calculator will teach you how to calculate the Cosine Similarity (a.k.a. how to calculate the Cosine Measure) of two vectors. Useful for both math homework and data mining.

The Cosine Similarity of two vectors is an arbitrary mathematical measure of how similar two vectors are on a scale of [0, 1]. 1 being that the vectors are either identical, or that their values differ by a constant factor.

The Cosine Similarity of two vectors (d1 and d2) is defined as:
cos( d1, d2 ) = dot(d1,d2) / ||d1|| ||d2||

Where dot(d1,d2) = d1[0]*d2[0] + d1[1]*d2[1] …
And Where ||d1|| = sqrt(d1[0]^2 + d1[1]^2 …)

ja-dark: For context see: tf-idf & cosine similarity and/or:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/dot-products-1.html

ja-dark on wordpress

ja-dark on wordpress:

I’ve backed up this tumblr on Wordpress; might be easier to navigate and search now; unfortunately many of the quoted passages in posts from 2015 onward have random line breaks inserted into them, no idea why the import did that.

"Probability is too important to be left to the experts."

“Probability is too important to be left to the experts.”

- Richard W. Hamming

"Probabilities are summaries of knowledge that is left behind when information is transferred to a..."

“Probabilities are summaries of knowledge that is left behind when information is transferred to a higher level of abstraction.”

- Judea Pearl

The Dos and Don’ts of Wikipedia Editing in the Undergraduate Psychology Classroom - Association for Psychological Science

The Dos and Don’ts of Wikipedia Editing in the Undergraduate Psychology Classroom - Association for Psychological Science:

In today’s technology-mediated world, George Miller’s call to “give psychology away” to the public has become ever more salient (Tomes, 2000). The APS Wikipedia Initiative has embraced this call by challenging APS members to improve the accuracy and accessibility of psychology-related content on Wikipedia. For instructors of undergraduate courses, the APS Wikipedia Initiative provides a context for students to write about psychological science for the widest possible readership using minimal scientific jargon. Given Wikipedia’s use of crowdsourcing to produce content, students also may find themselves engaged in discussions about psychological topics with other editors via “talk pages,” where Wikipedia content is negotiated. Wikipedia provides a unique place where students can learn to locate reputable source material, paraphrase key points from readings, organize their ideas coherently, and respond to feedback from others. Based on our experiences, we have created the following tips for making Wikipedia assignments more manageable for teachers to implement and more fruitful for students.

Related: Wikipedia Education Foundation

ja-dark: As part of the push for computational thinking and coding in education, the general notion of critical awareness of digital infrastructures advocated by folks like Douglas Rushkoff, I would like to see young students introduced to the knowledge construction process that goes into Wikipedia. People should understand how much of its content is a product of ‘regulars’ willing to spend enormous amounts of time protecting their contributions (similarly with the prevailing anecdotal ‘consensus’ advice given on sites like Reddit). There needs to be a seed planted for an extra critical eye, to prevent taking the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ for granted when growing up online. It can be pretty insidious.

Even in the future as AI/humans assist each other (incl. on Wikipedia) we’ll need to be aware of the potentially biased human contributions in the construction of the algorithms and the curated ‘training’ models used.

An Evaluation of Universal Grammar and the Phonological Mind

An Evaluation of Universal Grammar and the Phonological Mind:

The article begins by reviewing the history of views of the sources of language and moves on to underscore problems with the “man-in-a-can” view of language, one way that Universal Grammar might be characterized. It moves then to a detailed consideration of the problems that a language without recursion raises for UG and the attempts by UG theorists to answer these problems. Finally, the paper reviews in detail one of the most carefully argued proposals in the UG literature, the Phonological Mind thesis, rejecting this as failing to establish any strong arguments for UG. The conclusion is that if such a carefully worked out set of arguments for UG fails, then, a fortiori, many other weaker arguments are likely to fall through as well.

"The solution for the future is more likely to be in a community of peoples with an increased ability..."

“The solution for the future is more likely to be in a community of peoples with an increased ability to receive the spirit, to taste or savour the aroma of different dialects…

In this way, even those who never learn to speak another language fluently could still participate in its particular genius, catching a glimpse of the particular cultural universe that every individual expresses each time he or she speaks the language of his or her ancestors and his or her own tradition.”

- Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016), The Search for the Perfect Language (1993)

The Search for the Perfect Language

The Search for the Perfect Language:

ja-dark:

ja-dark:

Abstract: I will tell how the story given in Umberto Eco’s book The Search for the Perfect Language continues with modern work on logical and programming languages.  

“… [Eco’s] book talks about a dream that Eco believes played a fundamental role in European intellectual history, which is the search for the perfect language.

… knowing this language would be like having a key to universal knowledge. If you’re a theologian, it would bring you closer, very close, to God’s thoughts, which is dangerous. If you’re a magician, it would give you magical powers. If you’re a linguist, it would tell you the original, pure, uncorrupted language from which all languages descend. One can go on and on…

There are perfect languages, for computing, not for reasoning. They’re computer programming languages...

So this dream, the search for the perfect language and for absolute knowledge, ended in the bowels of a computer, it ended in a Golem.

In fact, let me end with a Medieval perspective on this. How would all this look to someone from the Middle Ages? This quest, the search for the perfect language, was an attempt to obtain magical, God-like powers.

Let’s bring someone from the 1200s here and show them a notebook computer. You have this dead machine, it’s a machine, it’s a physical object, and when you put software into it, all of a sudden it comes to life!

So from the perspective of the Middle Ages, I would say that the perfect languages that we’ve found have given us some magical, God-like powers, which is that we can breath life into some inanimate matter. Observe that hardware is analogous to the body, and software is analogous to the soul, and when you put software into a computer, this inanimate object comes to life and creates virtual worlds.

So from the perspective of somebody from the year 1200, the search for the perfect language has been successful and has given us some magical, God-like abilities, except that we take them entirely for granted.”

Reblogging my own post. RIP Umberto Eco.

Design Features for Linguistically-Mediated Meaning Construction: The Relative Roles of the Linguistic and Conceptual Systems in Subserving the Ideational Function of Language

Design Features for Linguistically-Mediated Meaning Construction: The Relative Roles of the Linguistic and Conceptual Systems in Subserving the Ideational Function of Language:

The linguistic system of any given language user, of any given linguistic system—spoken or signed—facilitates access to knowledge representation—concepts—in the conceptual system, which subserves this ideational function. In the most general terms, the human meaning-making capacity is underpinned by two distinct, although tightly coupled representational systems: the conceptual system and the linguistic system. Each system contributes to meaning construction in qualitatively distinct ways.

This leads to the first design feature: given that the two systems are representational—they are populated by semantic representations—the nature and function of the representations are qualitatively different. This proposed design feature I term the bifurcation in semantic representation. After all, it stands to reason that if a linguistic system has a different function, vis-à-vis the conceptual system, which is of far greater evolutionary antiquity, then the semantic representations will be complementary, and as such, qualitatively different, reflecting the functional distinctions of the two systems, in collectively giving rise to meaning. I consider the nature of these qualitatively distinct representations.

And second, language itself is adapted to the conceptual system—the semantic potential—that it marshals in the meaning construction process. Hence, a linguistic system itself exhibits a bifurcation, in terms of the symbolic resources at its disposal. This design feature I dub the bifurcation in linguistic organization.

As I shall argue, this relates to two distinct reference strategies available for symbolic encoding in language: what I dub words-to-world reference and words-to-words reference. In slightly different terms, this design feature of language amounts to a distinction between a lexical subsystem, and a grammatical subsystem.

ja-dark: Spoken or signed or written.

Text, Sentiment & Social Analytics in the Year Ahead: 10 Trends

Populating ConceptNet Knowledge Base with Information Acquired from Japanese Wikipedia

Populating ConceptNet Knowledge Base with Information Acquired from Japanese Wikipedia:

This paper presents a method of acquiring IsA assertions (hyponymy relations), AtLocation assertions (informing of location of objects) and Located Near assertions (informing of neigh boring locations) automatically from Japanese Wikipedia XML dump files.

To extract IsA assertions, we use the Hyponymy extraction tool v1.0, which analyses definition, category and hierarchy structures of Wikipedia articles.

The tool also produces information-rich taxonomy from which, using our original method, we can extract additional information, in this case AtLocation and Located Near type of assertions.

… Our method exceeded the baseline system considering both precision and the number of acquired assertions.

(PDF)

ja-dark: At present, Japanese ConceptNet is only 1/10 the size of English, according to the above authors.

And from the ConceptNet site:

“It would not adequately represent human knowledge if it didn’t contain other languages besides English, as well:

                   本            —                MadeOf           →              紙                 

本は紙でできている。    (A book is made of paper.)  

See also:

Twitter Is Not a Failure

Twitter Is Not a Failure:

“But becoming such a winner—even playing the startup game to begin with—condemns the founders of a company to chase growth above all else. That’s the core command of the highly accelerated digital economy.

This is why a company like Uber can’t simply be satisfied helping people get rides. It must instead establish a monopoly in the taxi business so it can “pivot” to another vertical such as delivery services, logistics, or robotic transportation. Airbnb can’t just help people find places to stay, but must colonize city after city and deregulate its entire sector. A social-media platform like Facebook must pivot to become a data miner; a messaging app like Snapchat must try to become a news service; even a giant like Google must accept that its once-inspiring stream of innovations pales in comparison to what it can earn as a new holding company, Alphabet.“

The Future Of Virtual Assistants Lies In Children's Stories and Shoes

The Future Of Virtual Assistants Lies In Children's Stories and Shoes:

“We really do believe that language is inextricable from human intelligence,” said Adam Trischler, a research scientist at Maluuba.

However, they’re not new to the race. The company currently provides basic natural language processing services that are deployed on more than 50 million mobile devices, including phones from large companies like LG.

They’re looking to train networks on stories written by humans, instead of documents found on the web, like Google is interested in doing.

Right now, they’re starting on children stories. By understanding where characters are located in time and space, and tracking narratives, the Maluuba team thinks they can translate this level of “thinking” into a virtual personal assistant that knows more about what the user wants, and is able to be more effective.

This is similar to the work Facebook has done with simplified stories from The Lord Of The Rings, and we’ve seen other programs learn to write simple stories, so the idea clearly has some merit.

However, Maluuba stresses that the stories they’re working with are much longer and actually written by humans (rather than Facebook’s machine-simplified story). By reading words written by humans, the algorithm would be better suited to the way humans communicate.

Should Computer Education Cover More Than Just Coding?

Should Computer Education Cover More Than Just Coding?:

ja-dark: I dislike the idea of idealizing code-schools to the point that we just churn out ‘code monkeys’, but do find that programming as a tool is not implemented enough in academic computer science education. You get some scattershot introductory work in a variety of languages across the curriculum which could perhaps be enhanced with a centralization toward a particular language threaded throughout CS program classes. I think Python would be ideal for this. It wouldn’t hurt to curtail the use of Java further… while leaving C and Lisp in classes such as systems/OS and PLT, respectively…

We also mustn’t equate computer science with programming. ‘Computational thinking’ as a promotional concept is what has spurred the top-down push for coding in education, I think.

Meanwhile, perhaps Udacity is on to something with its Nanodegree Plus program…

Sony Digital Paper

Sony Digital Paper:

I’ve noted the many ways actual handwriting is a great supplement to enhance learning.

After using the titular device for a while, I would just like to note (no pun intended) that this device, while expensive, is quite great. I do not regret the investment. If you want to go paperless, this is almost perfect. I still find my smaller Sharp devices useful, but the Sony tablet is my universal all-purpose replacement.

The battery life is pretty insane. I charge it so infrequently I almost forget how.

I sort of wish I still took paper notes in a notebook, so I could use this Japanese organizational hack.

Multiplayer VR and Cinematic Wizardry - Leap Motion Blog

Multiplayer VR and Cinematic Wizardry - Leap Motion Blog:

Another fantastic journey into wizardry is Spellbound. The main character is a wizard who casts a spell which goes awry, causing disastrous and unforeseen consequences. Using the Leap Motion Controller and Oculus Rift, you’ll be able to throw spells with varying force and speed to battle the unknown evils ahead.

A full bodied experience – Loop uses a Leap Motion Controller, Oculus Rift, and a treadmill. While walking through the landscape the code from the game itself will begin to float by. The goal of Loop is to educate the user on programming languages via direct interaction with the code used to construct the world you’re walking through. Read more about the upcoming project here project here.

ja-dark: You may recall me posting about a first-person game that teaches coding through magic before, called CodeSpells. You might also remember my popular (if I do say so myself) post about what I called nishinjutsu, Japanese finger-binary for reality hackers. Most recently the TV show ‘Magicians’ has a very finger-gesture oriented version of spellcasting.

I find it exciting that we’re entering a world where we’re going to actually be able to do something like this. Imagine fusing all these ideas, CodeSpells/ Spellbound’s programming conceits combined with associating algorithms/functions you write with chains of finger gestures that are integrated with hand-tracking technology, so you literally can compose and cast your own spells with your own gestural sequences/rituals and hack reality. Especially as we get closer to persistent ‘mixed reality’. Plus smart homes/IoT, etc.

I often compare programming and magic, language and magic, and kanji and magic, by the way.

Exposed! The Natural Mnemonics Hidden in Japanese Words

Exposed! The Natural Mnemonics Hidden in Japanese Words:

Changed the name of my old Anki deck to a clickbait headline, and prefaced the deck description with lame jokes. That’s right, I basically sold out.

There’s otherwise nothing new there if you’re already aware of my enlightened teachings, steeped in the mystical arts called ‘linguistics’ and ‘neuroscience’. I’m just posting it again because I’m so proud of my clickbait headline and lame jokes.

Anki add-ons update

I updated the add-ons for the Kanji Decomposer add-on and the Sentence Shuffle & Gloss add-on (these are both for Japanese). WWWJDIC had changed its domain, which I’d already corrected last month, but I didn’t realize it had altered the URL for the backdoor/API as well, so that’s fixed now.

Don’t be obsolete in your learning methods, use the cutting edge kanji and sentence ‘unshuffling’ methods I developed for learning Japanese a while ago. It’s too late for you to be bleeding edge, though.

Dear Anki add-on reviewer

Dear Anki add-on reviewer:

For the person who reviewed this Japanese part-of-speech tagging add-on and lexical density calculator, writing:

“I’ve been looking for a POS tagger for ages! I can’t thank you enough!!! My one complaint is about the time it takes to calculate. I tested with 50 cards, and it took quite a bit of time. I’d really like to do all 10,000 cards, but I’m worried it will take a year and/or break my Anki/computer… I’m gonna give it a try tonight though.

One suggestion: it would be nice if we could choose between the POS tagger and Lexical density calculator. I have no interest in the LD and wish I could just run the POS tagger to speed things up.

Thanks again!”

Here’s a PoS-tagging only version of the add-on, I am uncertain if it will noticeably increase the speed–I’m doubtful, which is why I didn’t separate the functions initially. Just save the paste as postLexical.py, back up the old one, and replace. The menu command will be ‘Get PoS’. No need for a 'Lexical Density’ Anki field, just the 'PoS’ one.

Previously:

Creating a Computer Voice That People Like

Creating a Computer Voice That People Like:

“When computers speak, how human should they sound?

This was a question that a team of six IBM linguists, engineers and marketers faced in 2009, when they began designing a function that turned text into speech for Watson, the company’s “Jeopardy!”-playing artificial intelligence program.

Eighteen months later, a carefully crafted voice — sounding not quite human but also not quite like HAL 9000 from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” — expressed Watson’s synthetic character in a highly publicized match in which the program defeated two of the best human “Jeopardy!” players.

The challenge of creating a computer “personality” is now one that a growing number of software designers are grappling with as computers become portable and users with busy hands and eyes increasingly use voice interaction.

Machines are listening, understanding and speaking, and not just computers and smartphones. Voices have been added to a wide range of everyday objects like cars and toys, as well as household information “appliances” like the home-companion robots Pepper and Jibo, and Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo speaker device.

A new design science is emerging in the pursuit of building what are called “conversational agents,” software programs that understand natural language and speech and can respond to human voice commands.”

"Omne ignotum pro magnifico est."

“Omne ignotum pro magnifico est.”

-

Tacitus (AD 56 – 117 AD)

“"Everything unknown appears magnificent.”

Turn-taking in Human Communication – Origins and Implications for Language Processing

Turn-taking in Human Communication – Origins and Implications for Language Processing:

Most language usage is interactive, involving rapid turn-taking. The turn-taking system has a number of striking properties: turns are short and responses are remarkably rapid, but turns are of varying length and often of very complex construction such that the underlying cognitive processing is highly compressed. Although neglected in cognitive science, the system has deep implications for language processing and acquisition that are only now becoming clear. Appearing earlier in ontogeny than linguistic competence, it is also found across all the major primate clades. This suggests a possible phylogenetic continuity, which may provide key insights into language evolution.

PDF

Related:

Meditation & Multitasking

Meditation & Multitasking:

“Can mindfulness meditation improve one’s ability to multitask? Jake Wobbrock, Al Kaszniak, and I designed an experiment to explore this question.

In an NSF-funded study, we recruited HR (Human Resource) managers in Seattle and San Francisco, and over eight weeks gave them either (a) training in mindfulness meditation; (b) training in body relaxation; or © no training (control group). Both before and after the eight-week period, participants were given a stressful, naturalistic multitasking test in an office setting. Their results were scored for accuracy, time to completion, number of task-switches, memory for tasks, and self-reported stress.

Briefly, the results were as follows:

  • The meditators experienced less negative emotion (stress) in the multitasking test after receiving training.
  • The meditators were also less fragmented in their work, switching tasks less often and spending greater time on task (without increasing overall test time).
  • Both the meditators and the relaxers showed improved memory for their tasks.

The published results are available in this article: “The Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training on Multitasking in a High-Stress Information Environment.”

Press coverage includes a column in USA Today and an op-ed piece in The New York Times.“

Previously: Gaming improves multitasking skills

See also.

Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot - Issue 33: Attraction - Nautilus

Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot - Issue 33: Attraction - Nautilus:

Meet Xiaoice. She’s empathic, caring, and always available—just not human.

simple_tfidf_japanese 0.1.3 : Python Package Index

The Scientists Who Are Deciphering 'Unreadable' Ancient Texts

The Scientists Who Are Deciphering 'Unreadable' Ancient Texts:

Easton is one of the only people in the world who knows how to resurrect these lost writings from obscurity, which means he frequently ventures to fascinating destinations in order to study rare manuscripts. As a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and one of the leaders of the Lazarus Project—an organization of specialists involved in deciphering historical documents with multispectral imaging—he has collaborated with scholars, scientists, and other specialists all over the world.

“That’s the best part,” Easton told me. “Meeting the people is the best part. They are so appreciative when you pull something out.”

These interdisciplinary teams are able to unlock these difficult texts by capturing them over a wide range of wavelengths. In much the same way that an X-ray image of the sky yields a different perspective on the universe than an infrared image, pseudocolor pictures of text can extract words that have been invisible to the naked eye for centuries. It’s like The Da Vinci Code, only with fancy cameras and better dialogue.

BinaryNet: Training Deep Neural Networks with Weights and Activations Constrained to +1 or -1

BinaryNet: Training Deep Neural Networks with Weights and Activations Constrained to +1 or -1:

We introduce BinaryNet, a method which trains DNNs with binary weights and activations when computing parameters’ gradient. We show that it is possible to train a Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) on MNIST and ConvNets on CIFAR-10 and SVHN with BinaryNet and achieve nearly state-of-the-art results. At run-time, BinaryNet drastically reduces memory usage and replaces most multiplications by 1-bit exclusive-not-or (XNOR) operations, which might have a big impact on both general-purpose and dedicated Deep Learning hardware. We wrote a binary matrix multiplication GPU kernel with which it is possible to run our MNIST MLP 7 times faster than with an unoptimized GPU kernel, without suffering any loss in classification accuracy. The code for BinaryNet is available.

Hold on! The ability to hold a grip predicts who has the willpower finish their schoolwork

Hold on! The ability to hold a grip predicts who has the willpower finish their schoolwork:

Stork and his co-authors looked at a group of 30 first-year university students, asking them their plans to engage in two tough challenges for students adjusting to university life: completing their school work and keeping up their exercise schedules. Both require high levels of self-control.

Next, they had them squeeze a grip-tester at half their own maximum power for as long as they could go, instructing them to “resist the temptation to quit.”

Four weeks later, they compared the students’ own projections to their actual results in getting their schoolwork and exercise done.

The researchers found that the students who had the greatest handgrip endurance were also those who worked hardest on their academic goals.

Conversely, those who let go earliest on the grip test were the least likely to resist the temptation to goof off, with implications for a wide range of other situations that demand self-discipline.

Poeppel’s “parts list” for language, and why there’s more to it than syntax

Poeppel’s “parts list” for language, and why there’s more to it than syntax:

This year’s Nijmegen lectures were given by David Poeppel on his work linking language processing to low-level neural mechanisms.  He called for more “muscular” linguists to step up and propose a “parts list” of linguistic primitives that neuro researchers could try and detect in the brain.  In this post, I cover the generativist answer to this, as proposed by Norbert Hornstien, who appeared as a panelist at the Nijmegen lectures, and why it bothered me (TLDR: I think there’s more to language science than syntax, and other areas can also draw up a “parts list”).

ja-dark: This post goes into recursion in the linguistic sense and a bit in the computer science sense also (esp. re: the stack data structure), both of which I’ve posted about under the recursion tag before.

"Indeed, it is always probable that something improbable will happen."

“Indeed, it is always probable that something improbable will happen.”

- Logan E. Bleckley (1827 - 1907)

1983's wonderful "Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners"

1983's wonderful "Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners":

Usborne’s 1983 classic Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners is an astounding book, written, designed and illustrated by Naomi Reed, Graham Round and Lynne Norman. It uses beautiful infographics and clear writing to provide an introduction to 6502 and Z80 assembler, and it’s no wonder that used copies go for as much as $600… I’d love to see this book updated for modern computers and reprinted.

ja-dark: Me too. Till then you can get the .pdf here.

image

Maybe one day there’ll be a Manga Guide to Assembly, illustrated by Shintaro Kago.

image


You can also freely read the old Commodore 64 ‘assembly for kids’ book.

See also.

Usborne Books Revival

Usborne Books Revival:

Usborne 1980s computer books

Many of today’s tech professionals were inspired by the Usborne computing books they read as children. The books included program listings for such iconic computers as the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, and are still used in some computer clubs today.

If you’d like to download a free copy of any of these books, just click on a cover.

image


Previously: Classic children’s books on coding reprogrammed for a new generation

“When it comes to children and computer programming, Lisa Watts wrote the book. In fact, she wrote and edited a whole series of them in the early 1980s as a key member of the team at publisher Usborne.

The books – from Introduction to Computer Programming and Machine Code for Beginners to Write Your Own Adventure Programs for your Microcomputer – provided a generation of children with their first taste of coding. Many of them grew up to be professional software and game developers.

Nearly a quarter of a century on, Watts is now head of digital for Usborne, and is playing an advisory role as the publisher prepares to return to the topic with two books for the children of 2015: Lift-the-Flap Computers and Coding, and Coding for Beginners Using Scratch.”

Note that Sweigart’s Python books noted in this post are based on these types of ‘80s books that many found so magical and enlightening as children.

"I think ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have..."

“I think ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.”

- David Bowie

The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion

The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion:

Abstract

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive.

We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations.

We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerge gradually by piggybacking on domain-general sequence learning abilities.

Evidence from genetics, comparative work on non-human primates, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that humans have evolved complex sequence learning skills, which were subsequently pressed into service to accommodate language.

Constraints on sequence learning therefore have played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of linguistic structure, including our limited abilities for processing recursive structure.

Finally, we re-evaluate some of the key considerations that have often been taken to require the postulation of a language faculty.

Previously: Learning Recursion: Multiple Nested and Crossed Dependencies

hiding URLs

Theoretically, you could put some links in a ‘paste’ at pastebin.com, which would give you pastebin.com/random_alphanumeric_string ….

Then you could create a shortened link to a news article using tinyurl, which by default gives you tinyurl.com/random_alphanumeric_string, but when you create the shortened link, you have the option to specify that random string, so it can actually be tinyurl.com/non-random_alphanumeric_string. The non-random_alphanumeric_string could be taken from the pastebin.com/random_alphanumeric_string…

Then when you link the article using the tinyurl link, people who are “in the know” can just take that non-random_alphanumeric_string and apply it to the pastebin.com domain, giving you:

pastebin.com/non-random_alphanumeric_string_from_the_tinyurl_link

You’d have to be really paranoid to do that, though. Especially if you coyly hint that you’ve hidden links, using the word “innocent” to describe them and going out of your way to say there’s nothing hidden there…

Innocent, unrelated post: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/138827446872/re-uploads

"Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will."

“Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.”

- Blaise Pascal

Computer Science, Meet Humanities: in New Majors, Opposites Attract

Computer Science, Meet Humanities: in New Majors, Opposites Attract:

Hannah Pho grew up playing the piano and went to a magnet high school for technology. When she applied to colleges and looked for programs that blended her seemingly disparate interests, she didn’t find many options.

She chose Stanford University, where she became one of the first students in a new major there called CS+Music, part of a pilot program informally known as CS+X.

Its goal is to put students in a middle ground, between computer science and any of 14 disciplines in the humanities, including history, art, and classics. And it reduces the number of required hours that students would normally take in a double major in those subjects.

Stanford isn’t the only institution looking to start such blended programs, says Janice Cuny, program director for computing education at the National Science Foundation…

Previously: 

re-uploads

Some file updates:

book-wise, the aim here is quality over quantity…

hint: the tumblr redirect in the urls makes it a little more difficult to find the ‘random’ strings specific to each tinyurl link (you know, the ones that look similar to pastebin.com’s random strings… )

innocent, unrelated post

Here's what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions

Here's what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions:

“ … writing code – and essays – is… the peak of a pyramid composed of innumerable sub-skills that are truly foundational and fundamental. You can’t write either without knowing something about spelling, grammar and structure. And these days, you can’t do either without knowing a little typing.

Knowing how to type is one of those skills that is improbably important these days… nearly every job today involves a little typing, and many jobs require a lot of typing. A once-esoteric skill has become ubiquitous and essential.

… typing is fundamentally old-fashioned…

There are other skills like this, skills that are notionally obsolete, based on old-fashioned ways of interacting with computers that are vestiges of more technical eras, but that are really, secretly indispensable if you want to get the most out of the modern world. One of my favourites is “regular expressions” (also called regex or regexp). These are short, fabulously useful commands that tell a computer how to tease apart long blocks of text and find words or phrases that match your criteria…

Regular expressions are part of the fundamental makeup of modern software. They are present, in some form or another, in every modern operating system. Word processors, search-engines, blogging programs … though it’s been decades since software for everyday people was designed with the assumption that users would know regexps, they still lurk in practically every environment we use.

I think that technical people underestimate how useful regexps are for “normal” people…

The reason technical people forget this is that once you know regexps, they become second nature. Any search that involves more than a few criteria is almost certainly easier to put into a regexp, even if your recollection of the specifics is fuzzy enough that you need to quickly look up some syntax online.

Knowing regexp can mean the difference between solving a problem in three steps and solving it in 3,000 steps. When you’re a nerd, you forget that the problems you solve with a couple keystrokes can take other people days of tedious, error-prone work to slog through…

So far as I can tell, no school ICT class yet bothers with them, despite the fact that regexps organise so much of our underlying infrastructure and can make such an enormous difference to the lives of everyday people, even those who don’t code.

If we’re going to teach kids to use PowerPoint and word processors as part of their core education, we should be teaching them regular expressions.”

Related: Regex Runner  (Pygame)

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python | Practical Programming for Total Beginners

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python | Practical Programming for Total Beginners:

“Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is released under a Creative Commons license. You can read it, in full, on this website…

Everyone should learn to code, but not everyone needs to become a software engineer or computer scientist. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is written for office workers, students, administrators, and anyone who uses a computer to learn how to code small, practical programs to automate tasks on their computer.

  • Have a folder with thousands of files that need to be renamed?
  • Need to look through thousands of rows in an Excel spreadsheet looking for ones to update?
  • Have to pull text off of several web pages?
  • Want to copy the data from hundreds of PDFs?
  • Have any tedious computer task that you wish you had an intern for?

Normally this would involve hours of mindless clicking and typing. But programming your computer to do it will save you time and effort.

Part 1 of Automate teaches total beginners with no programming experience the Python programming language. Part 2 will be of interest to seasoned developers as well: It covers several modules to extend basic Python skills. Python has a gentle learning curve yet is also used by professional software developers. You don’t need to know all the complexities of algorithms and syntax, you just want to write basic programs to automate mundane computer tasks. In the process, even total beginners will learn to use Python to control their computers without having to learn computer science. This is a practical programming guide for the rest of us…. “

Previously:

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist w/ Python 3: Interactive Edition

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python 2.x (Enhanced; Free eBook PDF)

Online Statistics Education: A Free Resource for Introductory Statistics

Online Statistics Education: A Free Resource for Introductory Statistics:

OnlineStatBook Project Home

Online Statistics: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Study is a resource for learning and teaching introductory statistics. It contains material presented in textbook format and as video presentations. This resource features interactive demonstrations and simulations, case studies, and an analysis lab.            

The Core Belief Keeping Marginalized Groups Out of Tech

The Core Belief Keeping Marginalized Groups Out of Tech:

Two ideas conspire to drive underrepresented groups from the field: the belief that innate ability and brilliance are required to succeed; and the belief that certain groups of people do not have that innate brilliance.

Related:

How do you feel, developer? An explanatory theory of the impact of affects on programming performance

How do you feel, developer? An explanatory theory of the impact of affects on programming performance:

Abstract

Affects—emotions and moods—have an impact on cognitive activities and the working performance of individuals. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processes, yet software engineering research lacks theory on affects and their impact on software development activities. In this paper, we report on an interpretive study aimed at broadening our understanding of the psychology of programming in terms of the experience of affects while programming, and the impact of affects on programming performance. We conducted a qualitative interpretive study based on: face-to-face open-ended interviews, in-field observations, and e-mail exchanges. This enabled us to construct a novel explanatory theory of the impact of affects on development performance. The theory is explicated using an established taxonomy framework. The proposed theory builds upon the concepts of events, affects, attractors, focus, goals, and performance. Theoretical and practical implications are given.

More: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HSIXSFIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

Previously: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/138326644257/there-are-hundreds-of-positive-emotions-that-have

An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax

An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax:

Andreas Stefik and Susanna Siebert: “An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax.” ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 13(4), Nov. 2013.

 Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a  significant barrier to novice computer science students in the  field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how  it varies across programming languages has not been carefully  investigated. For this article, we conducted four empirical studies  on programming language syntax as part of a larger analysis into  the, so called, programming language wars. We first present two  surveys conducted with students on the intuitiveness of syntax,  which we used to garner formative clues on what words and symbols  might be easy for novices to understand. We followed up with two  studies on the accuracy rates of novices using a total of six  programming languages: Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, Randomo, and  Quorum. Randomo was designed by randomly choosing some keywords from  the ASCII table (a metaphorical placebo). To our surprise, we found  that languages using a more traditional C-style syntax (both Perl  and Java) did not afford accuracy rates significantly higher than a  language with randomly generated keywords, but that languages which  deviate (Quorum, Python, and Ruby) did. These results, including the specifics of syntax that are particularly problematic for novices, may help teachers of introductory programming courses in choosing appropriate first languages and in helping students to overcome the challenges they face with syntax.

 “This paper is a follow-on to one we wrote about a couple of years ago that generated a lot of comments, many of them unpleasant. Stefik responded then, and he and Siebert have now followed up with several more studies… “

"All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation."

“All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation.”

- Benedict Evans

An Introduction to the Quorum Programming Language and...



An Introduction to the Quorum Programming Language and Evidence-Oriented Programming

Evidence-Oriented Programming

Programming languages should be designed with human factors as a primary concern.

Traditional programming languages have been designed predominately with technical concepts and machines in mind. While such concerns are obviously critical, human beings ultimately use such tools in the broad development community. In evidence-oriented programming, human factors evidence takes a first-class seat in the language’s design. All factors related to programming are considered, up for debate, and are subject to change if a community member shows rigorous evidence that another approach is better. This is true both for technical and human factors considerations. To our knowledge, Quorum is the first programming language to attempt this.

How does evidence-oriented programming work?

  • Quorum’s design is fixed, barring a new randomized controlled trial. Submitted claims will be examined by experts in potentially a variety of fields (e.g., statistics, experimental design, psychology, computer science).
  • Community members may submit changes to any aspect of Quorum’s design
  • For technical matters (e.g., bugs, efficiency improvements), changes are done through a separate process, in order to expedite any critical adjustments
  • For tool improvements to Quorum (e.g., debugger improvements, IDE improvements), rigorous evidence gathering still applies.

Related: Faith, hope, and love: an essay on software science’s neglect of human factors

When You Go Zero-Carb, Here's What Happens

When You Go Zero-Carb, Here's What Happens:

As you know if you read this tumblr regularly, I promote a ketogenic diet for general mental/physical improvement, part of my interest in improving our ability to learn in general. I find the mental and emotional benefits of keto, which is not a weight loss diet but simply a different way of eating, to be of primary interest. For related posts from me, see the ‘limitless’ tag (tongue-in-cheek reference to the film).

I stumbled across this recent negative article about keto. I will explain where it goes wrong.

First, in response to the headline: Ketosis is not ‘zero carb’–it’s less than 50 grams of digestible carbs a day.

Next:

“Ketones only become dangerous once that number hits 3.0 — and, if your body has its insulin under control (that is, if you’re not diabetic), you’re not likely to get anywhere close to that.“

No, 15-25 mM is dangerous–ketoacidosis levels.

1.0-3.0 is normal nutrtional ketosis and is not remotely dangerous. We maintain this by limiting carbs–the protein and few carbs we eat stimulate enough insulin to maintain these levels (insulin limits ketone production). By fasting (specifically no carbs or protein), you can get those levels up to 5-7 mM, which is fine but unnecessary for most people (if you’re doing keto for cancer, etc., then it becomes useful).

“Diabetics unable to control their insulin levels can enter a state called ketoacidosis, when the buildup of ketones causes the blood to become dangerously acidic, which in turn messes with your organs. (At this point, ketones spill over into the urine, giving it a characteristic fruity smell… )“

Diabetic ketoacidosis only occurs on a ketogenic diet when the pancreas is unable to produce insulin to regulate ketone production AND all insulin medication is withheld.

Also, ketones are excreted in the urine in the early stages of ketosis and a bit as keto is ongoing, not just ketoacidosis; this is harmless and occurs because it takes a little time for the kidneys to adapt and stop wasting ketones.

“To go keto is to enter starvation mode.”

No, it isn’t. Keto has nothing to do with how many calories you eat. Keto eliminates the non-essential macronutrient, carbs, replacing it with the essential macronutrient, fat. The very little glucose you need once you’re in a ketogenic state is easily met by dietary protein intake (via gluconeogenesis).

“And sure, shedding 12 pounds in a couple of weeks could decrease your risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, but is it worth putting your body under deliberate, long-term stress? “

Keto in itself doesn’t stress the body unless you don’t get enough sodium (an extra 1-2g/day on keto).

Some people abuse keto as a rapid weight loss diet (though most of the rapid weight loss is water), and excessively lower their calories. As with any diet used this way, high or low in carbs, this can cause problems.

I encourage anyone interested in learning about the natural, safe long-term ketogenic lifestyle to look into the work of Dr. Stephen Phinney and Dr. Jeff Volek.

The educational strategy that’s turning students into unimaginative robots

The educational strategy that’s turning students into unimaginative robots:

… when STEM students are discouraged from exploring the arts and creative pursuits, they’re unable to see the beauty in the work they do and lose interest in their fields, according to Kevin Knudson, a mathematician and professor…

“People think of math as crunching numbers. Mathematicians don’t use numbers. We look for patterns, and that takes creative thinking”…

Previously: Japan’s humanities chop sends shivers down academic spines

Related: Our Definition of Creativity is Killing Creativity

There are hundreds of positive emotions that have no direct English translation

There are hundreds of positive emotions that have no direct English translation:

“Lomas published 216 of these so-called “untranslatable” words in the Journal of Positive Psychology last week aiming to both “help expand the emotional vocabulary of English speakers” and “provide a window onto cultural differences in constructions of well-being”; the words are also neatly laid out on his website by theme.

Here are some of the loveliest, alongside translations by Lomas into their nearest-possible English definition:

  • Ah-un (Japanese): Unspoken communication between close friends
  • Að jenna (Icelandic): The ability to persevere through hard or boring tasks
  • Cafune (Portuguese): Tenderly running fingers through a loved one’s hair
  • Fargin (Yiddish): To glow with pride at the success of others
  • Gökotta (Swedish): Waking up early to hear the first birds sing
  • Gula (Spanish): The desire to eat simply for the taste
  • Iktsuarpok (Inuit): The anticipation felt when waiting for someone
  • Kreng-jai (Thai): The wish to not trouble someone by burdening them
  • Mbuki-mvuki (Bantu): To shed clothes to dance uninhibited
  • Querencia (Spanish): A secure place from which one draws strength
  • Santosha (Sanskrit): Contentment arising from personal interaction
  • Sarang (Korean): The wish to be with someone until death
  • Schnapsidee (German): An ingenious plan hatched while drunk
  • Seijaku (Japanese): Serenity in the midst of chaos
  • Sobremesa (Spanish): When the food is gone but the conversation is still flowing
  • Tarab (Arabic): Musically-induced ecstasy or enchantment
  • Toska (Russian): A wistful longing for one’s homeland
  • Uitwaain (Dutch): Walking in the wind for fun
  • Waldeinsamskeit (German): A mysterious feeling of solitude in the woods
  • Yuan fen (Chinese): A binding force impelling a destined relationship
  • Yutta-hey (Cherokee): Leaving life at its zenith; departing in glory.

Related:

Sidney Harris



Sidney Harris

Previously:...

Paul Haslinger’s (Tangerine Dream) score tracks from Halt and...

More music that I feel is good for C programming. I don’t know,...



More music that I feel is good for C programming. I don’t know, something about it makes me think of Halt and Catch Fire, Brian Kernighan, etc.

Probably because: “The whole drum patterns are coming from Ultrabeat … while the main arpeggiato is done using a Classic Arp sound from Rob Papen’s Albino 3. At the end i think what brought me to say about the track ‘yeah, this is cool. Let’s have it on the lp’ it was the fat baseline of Arp2600 and the 80′s brass from the Korg MonoPoly, both elements gives a touch of vintage fashion that i really love.“

The hot new job in Silicon Valley is being a robot’s assistant

The hot new job in Silicon Valley is being a robot’s assistant:

“I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.” So goes the joke every time artificial intelligence threatens to supersede humans in another job. Fast-food servers, pharmacists, paralegals and journalists are among the most recent targets.

But have we been thinking too much about the jobs such technology could take away, rather than those it could create? Now, ventures like Facebook’s digital personal assistant, M, suggest that “robot’s helper” might soon be a job description in many of our futures.

M is a new AI-fuelled digital assistant built into Facebook messenger. It can book your next hotel or flight, recommend a restaurant and reserve a table, purchase items for delivery or send news updates and reminders. Launched this summer, it’s currently being beta tested in the San Francisco area, assisting more than 10,000 Facebook users.

So what’s the high-tech secret sauce that makes M so good? Humans. Or, in Facebook parlance, AI trainers.

Ask M to recommend a local restaurant with good pad Thai and an AI trainer will review its suggestions before they’re sent back to you. Tell it to reserve a table for two, and the AI trainer may be the one to actually pick up the phone. Everything that M says is observed, validated or tweaked by a hired human being. “We’ve invented a new kind of job,” says Ari Entin, a Facebook spokesman.

This Babylonian Astronomy Text Changes History

This Babylonian Astronomy Text Changes History:

More than a thousand years before the first telescopes, Babylonian astronomers tracked the motion of planets across the night sky using simple arithmetic. But a newly translated text reveals that these ancient stargazers also used a far more advanced method, one that foreshadows the development of calculus over a thousand years later.

Sexism row prompts Oxford Dictionaries to review language used in definitions

Sexism row prompts Oxford Dictionaries to review language used in definitions:

Oxford Dictionaries has said it will review the example sentences it uses for the adjective “rabid” after being accused of sexism over its current example: “a rabid feminist”.

The dictionary publisher, part of Oxford University Press, was taken to task by the Canadian anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan, after he noticed that the word “rabid”, defined by the dictionary as “having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something”, used the example phrase “rabid feminist”. Oman-Reagan tweeted about it to the publisher, suggesting they change it.

Oman-Reagan, who is doing a PhD at the at Memorial University of Newfoundland, also highlighted other “explicitly sexist usage examples” in the dictionary; including “shrill” – defined as “the rising shrill of women’s voices”– and “psyche” – for which the example sentence is, “I will never really fathom the female psyche”. “Grating”, defined as “sounding harsh and unpleasant”, was illustrated with the phrase “her high, grating voice”, while the adjective “nagging” used the example phrase “a nagging wife”.

“Why does the Oxford Dictionary of English portray women as ‘rabid feminists’ with mysterious ‘psyches’ speaking in ‘shrill voices’ who can’t do research or hold a PhD but can do ‘all the housework’?” wrote the academic on Medium.

ja-dark: I believe the Oxford blog posted about its approach and how it might improve it. Much better than its earlier obnoxious tweets, I’d say. It makes sense to take a descriptive, quantitative, corpus-based approach to example sentences, but I’d agree that adding a qualitative human element to ensure a prevailing sentiment in the language used in the corpus doesn’t perpetuate any cultural bias it reflects is optimal, so long as the sense of the words are being properly expressed by their exemplars. Normativity is insidious.

For language learners especially, the affective and cultural aspects in example sentences are important. English learners are more likely to process sentences in bulk as they learn vocabulary, and thus more likely to be exposed to the prejudices implicit in sentences; and perception of a foreign culture and how it makes us feel affects learning progress.

Japan's humanities chop sends shivers down academic spines

Japan's humanities chop sends shivers down academic spines:

“It’s shocking,” says Sophie Coloumbeau, an English lecturer at Cardiff University. “The decision implies an extremely narrow, shortsighted and, I would say, mistaken view of what society’s needs are.”

Fiona Beveridge, head of the University of Liverpool’s School of Law and Social Justice, agrees: “I don’t think the future needs of society can be met only with Stem graduates. Cultural and creative industries will require students with humanities backgrounds.”

British humanities departments, already thought by many to be underfunded, are also facing problems of government perception. Education secretary Nicky Morgan raised tensions last year with her assertion that “the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the Stem subjects”.

The comment angered academics across the country, including Coloumbeau. “Morgan’s statement, and others like it, set up an unproductive opposition between the humanities and sciences,” she says. “It’s important to make sure such lazy generalisations don’t translate into government policy without being effectively challenged.”

ja-dark: The ancient debate continues. In this day and age, with access to resources and knowledge of learning methods and the lifelong plasticity of the brain, everyone can be a ‘Renaissance (hu)man’, like maestro Leonardo da Vinci. It’s perhaps more important than ever not to lose sight of this, amidst the (laudable and necessary) push for computer science in education. You’ll note many of my quotes and links are about the link between the humanities and computer science.

Creativity is an important aspect of STEM, after all. Especially if you think about the idea of thought experiments, invented narratives essential to the scientific process.

I like to think of the Humanities as a kind of meta model that surrounds the Sciences, theory surrounding applications. Even as the humanities are injected with essential new lifeblood from scientific practices and quantitative methods to enhance them, subjective and qualitative approaches augment the sciences, but the two domains don’t necessarily need to become fungible: as separate but complementary arenas, the humanities can create a space for planning and reflection outside the standard strictures which can bog down scientific processes, while STEM can continue to refine its technical specializations.

Related: “The research brought together in this forum showcases that East/West differences in creativity exist and can be studied systematically. We have proposed that an important explanation for differences is that social norms in the West encourage novelty and those in the East prioritize usefulness. This account fits the findings better than a trait account that portrays the Asian character as conformist or the Asian mentality as allergic to abstraction or analytic processing… “

Reading Narrative Fiction Reduces Arab-Muslim Prejudice and Offers a Safe Haven From Intergroup Anxiety

Reading Narrative Fiction Reduces Arab-Muslim Prejudice and Offers a Safe Haven From Intergroup Anxiety:

Abstract

Participants read a story about a counterstereotypical Muslim woman and were then asked to determine the race of ambiguous-race Arab-Caucasian faces. Compared to a content-matched control condition, participants who read the narrative exhibited lower categorical race bias by making fewer categorical race judgments and perceiving greater genetic overlap between Arabs and Caucasians (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, participants determined the race of ambiguous-race Arab-Caucasian faces depicting low and moderate anger. Emotion-related perceptual race bias was observed in the control conditions where higher intensity anger expressions led participants to disproportionately categorize faces as Arab. This bias was eliminated in the narrative condition.

How an AI Algorithm Learned to Write Political Speeches | MIT Technology Review

How an AI Algorithm Learned to Write Political Speeches | MIT Technology Review:

Is it possible for a machine to write these kinds of political speeches automatically?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Valentin Kassarnig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has created an artificial intelligence machine that has learned how to write political speeches that are remarkably similar to real speeches.

The approach is straightforward in principle. Kassarnig used a database of almost 4,000 political speech segments from 53 U.S. Congressional floor debates to train a machine-learning algorithm to produce speeches of its own.

These speeches consist of over 50,000 sentences each containing 23 words on average. Kassarnig also categorized the speeches by political party, whether Democrat or Republican, and by whether it was in favor or against a given topic.

Of course, the devil is in the details of how to analyze this database. Having tried a number of techniques, Kassarnig settled on an approach based on n-grams, sequences of “n” words or phrases. He first analyzed the text using a parts-of-speech approach that tags each word or phrase with its grammatical role (whether a noun, verb, adjective, and so on).

Tweets and Reddit posts give snapshot of our changing language

Tweets and Reddit posts give snapshot of our changing language:

Bootyful, cyw, scrims. Do you know these words? If not, you soon might. They are some of the fastest growing words from online niches around the world, as identified by new software that charts the rise of language online.

Bootyful, an alternative spelling for beautiful, has had a dramatic rise in usage on Twitter in South Wales. Cyw (coming your way) has become popular in the north of the country. Scrims comes from gaming forums, where it refers to practice sessions before competitive games.

The software that found these words was developed by Daniel Kershaw and his supervisor, Matthew Rowe, at Lancaster University, UK. Kershaw and Rowe took established methods lexicographers use to chart the popularity of words, translated them into algorithms, then applied them to 22 million words worth of twitter and Reddit posts.

Their goal is to peer into the niche portions of the internet, and chart novel language making its foray out into the mainstream. “If we see an innovation taking off on Reddit or Twitter, the question is what point is it going to appear in a newspaper,” says Rowe.

Kershaw and Rowe’s algorithms don’t just pick out frequently used words, but words that have gone through a sudden rise in popularity. This comes with some complications. The five fastest rising words in central London for the period they studied were all Spanish or Portuguese, unlikely to be reflecting the reality of London’s language scene.

Go players react to computer defeat

Go players react to computer defeat:
For decades, the ancient game of Go has stood out as the one board game that computers couldn’t crack. Played by tens of millions of people across Asia, its complexity and subtlety meant that Go’s top human players reigned supreme against the advance of artificial intelligence (AI).

Now, for the first time, a computer has beaten a human Go professional without the advantage of a handicap. AlphaGo, a program developed by Google’s London-based company DeepMind, bested European champion Fan Hui in five games out of five.

Nature asked Fan what it’s like to be beaten by a machine, and took predictions from other Go and AI aficionados about who will win when AlphaGo faces its ultimate challenge: playing against Lee Sedol, one of the game’s greatest players, in March.

ja-dark: I just posted about how a computer scientist recently cracked the calculation for how many possible moves there are in Go. Quite fascinating developments. However, before the inevitable freakouts about AI… something to keep in mind: I put it to you that humans have never played a game of Chess or Go against computers, much less won or lost. I will clarify in a couple paragraphs, but I first want to point out what I mean is related to Turing and Dijkstra’s quotes:

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. - Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002)

… the question, “Can machines think?” should be replaced by “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” … The… question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. - Alan Turing (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49:  433-460.

I linked to a good article on the fear of AI not long ago with some bonus links I intended to point out a certain disconnect. That is, we have bad models of our own consciousness, magically different in kind rather than degree from plants and animals, which we then impose on imaginary artificial intelligences.

Folks like Stanislas Dehaene, however, are clarifying our understanding of consciousness with his global neuronal workspace. We can think of it as there is no ‘unconscious’, only consciousness and self-consciousness, the latter a self-reflexive state that gives the illusion of an ‘I’ and seems stable and centralized but which is fed by an ever-changing flow of info from conscious brain activity, in turn able to selectively reflect back on that consciousness. Then there’s the bevy of nuanced, constructed and learned emotions we’ve layered on top of some ancient basic cortical templates, as described by Panksepp, a diverse range of invented feelings which we then assume are innate and dictatorial, so we end up reacting to them rather than proactively deconstructing and reconstructing them.

When we describe playing Chess or Go, what we’re describing is a game of wits between ‘strong AI’, err, I mean humans. That is, strategy games as we typically mean them are games of dueling intentionalities/metacognitive plans situated and embodied amongst general cognitive and affective states. But when a program beats a human at these games, it’s really a human that is using a tool created by other humans to defeat herself. AlphaGo isn’t playing Go, it’s solving problems computationally, as instructed by its programmers and constrained by the formal rules of Go and a human altering the possible board positions along with it.

Indeed, if we want these tools to solve problems for us as best they can, suiting our personalized needs, we mustn’t forget that there are people creating these algorithms, which have their own biases… We can’t let biased tech become a black box and get so much smarter about us while we get dumber about it, to paraphrase Douglas Rushkoff.

I already posted about how playing Go has various cognitive and emotional benefits. Note the optimistic reactions about learning from AlphaGo-like AI from the Go community in this post’s main link, similar to how children grow up able to train against chess programs. As this Turing-related paper notes: “… even though today’s machines may not be able to think, they can make us think and encourage us to strive for new insights and knowledge.“

After all, once you take an enlightened physicalist perspective on intelligence, you realize we’ll be augmenting ourselves as we augment AI, in fact it seems we may have to in order to continue pushing AI to new heights, bootstrapping each other, so to speak, so there will be no need to fear robot overlords. (I believe the British series Humans recently made this point; one interesting aspect of that show is the emphasis on the relationship between humans and non-sentient ‘synths’ that still exist in the ‘uncanny valley’, rather than sentient ones. To digress further, Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s Humans OST is rather good music for C programming.)

Meanwhile, outside of Go, on to videogames with procedural narratives as virtual reality is unleashed, we use AI to enhance those games, creating uncanny spaces to dishabituate us and allow us to more amenably manipulate our thoughts and emotions for constructive and/or recreational purposes (such as exposure therapy, reducing our biases, or learning to code).

"We ought to find some way we can achieve steady improvement instead of simply making new glitches."

“We ought to find some way we can achieve steady improvement instead of simply making new glitches.”

- Donald Rumsfeld (1932–201x)

Former Defense Secretary Marches Into New Territory: Videogames

Former Defense Secretary Marches Into New Territory: Videogames:

Mr. Rumsfeld can’t code. He doesn’t much even use a computer. But he guided his young digitally minded associates who assembled the videogame with the same method he used to rule the Pentagon—a flurry of memos called snowflakes.

As a result, “Churchill Solitaire” is likely the only videogame developed by an 83-year-old man using a Dictaphone to record memos for the programmers.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld was known for not mincing words with his memos. Age hasn’t mellowed him.

“We need to do a better job on these later versions. They just get new glitches,” reads one note from Mr. Rumsfeld. “[W]e ought to find some way we can achieve steady improvement instead of simply making new glitches.”

ja-dark: Checking the record books for 82- or 84- year-old men who used a Dictaphone to record memos for programmers.

EvoLang proceedings are now online

50 Years of Data Science (PDF)

50 Years of Data Science (PDF):

“To statisticians, the DSI [Data Science Initiative] phenomenon can seem puzzling. Statisticians see administrators touting, as new, activities that statisticians have already been pursuing daily, for their entire careers; and which were considered standard already when those statisticians were back in graduate school.”

LRB · Sheng Yun · Short Cuts: ‘Finnegans Wake’ in China

LRB · Sheng Yun · Short Cuts: ‘Finnegans Wake’ in China:

Many people are eager to know when Dai Congrong, the Chinese translator of Finnegans Wake, is going to produce the rest of the book. To date she has only published one third of her version and dropped no hints about when we might see the rest. A while back, quizzed by a reporter, she said: ‘May God give me the courage to finish it’ – which is surely a good call, even if you’re not a believer. Last month a journalist friend put the question again, and Dai simply replied: ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know any more than you do.’ That, too, seems reasonable, given the size of the task. There’s plenty of Finnegans Wake that I’d be stumped to put into Mandarin. Browsing at random: ‘The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonn-thunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.’ I’m not sure this is convertible into any language, even an Indo-European one, but Dai’s translation has been a hit in China, as the Western media reported widely at the time of publication…

Dai once told a reporter from Lifeweek: ‘I cracked every word and every sentence of the book, I found the logic linking the sentences.’ I don’t know how to take this. Is it possible that Finnegans Wake is really just a long message in code? 

ja-dark: Dai must’ve been a secret collaborator for this project which found the multifractal structure of FW’s sentences. I’ve joked in the past that it might be easier to translate Finnegans Wake into khipu. It might be the only medium for language possible to do it justice. FW has been famously difficult to edit ‘properly’ (related joke from House of Leaves) even in the original; there’s also the amount of dictation Joyce did in his later years as his eyes failed him. I believe Samuel Beckett was effectively his secretary at that point.

Natsume Sōseki, who “sought a world beyond that of linear, phonetic speech, a world where the meaning of writing was polysemic and radial”, is another author that faced difficulties with editing, as discussed in this book. His phonocentric pupils were embarrassed by his ‘mistakes’. His stylistic choices have been slowly restored over the years.

Some interesting thoughts on the philosophy of editing and authorial intention.

In an aforelinked post Joyce is quoted as wanting to contain all of Dublin in Ulysses; Sōseki has a somewhat appropriate quote:

「日本より頭の中の方が広いでしょう・・・・・・とらわれちゃだめだ。」 - ”Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don’t ever surrender yourself—not to Japan, not to anything.“

Japanese, which like Chinese is more visually and semantically oriented than English and other languages, allows for unique stylistic choices due to the multiscript, multimodal nature of the written language, as I’ve noted in many posts.

Ironically, I discovered there’s at least one instance of new wordplay being introduced through the Japanese written language in this translation of Neuromancer:

In the Japanese version, “artiste” is written as 凝り性 with アーティースト as its furigana. It visually ties the Japanese sense of a perfectionist with the phonetic use of the French loanword in that context.

Related:

Previously:

How to Design Programs (free eBook)

How to Design Programs (free eBook):

This document is the current, stable release of HtDP/2e.  It is updated in sync with semester breaks (summer, new years). It is thus well-suited for courses. In contrast, the current draft changes on a frequent basis; it should be consulted when people discover problems and/or errors in this document. If such flaws exist in both documents, please report them to the first author.

Released on Thursday, August 6th, 2015 12:20:27pm

Preface

“The purpose of this book is to introduce novice programmers to the systematic design of programs.  It also presents a symbolic view of computation, which explains the process of running a program via simple manipulations of its text.  As such, the book de-emphasizes the study of programming language details, the allusions to these strange things called stacks and heaps, the analysis of algorithmic minutiae, and the usual (mathematical) puzzles that substitute for programming knowledge in a typical first course.

Our design concepts draw on Michael A. Jackson’s method for creating COBOL programs and conversations with Daniel P. Friedman on recursion, Robert Harper on type theory, and Daniel Jackson on software design.

“Systematic program design” refers to a process that takes a complete novice from a problem statement to a well-organized solution in a step-by-step fashion.  Each step produces a well-defined intermediate product. When the novice is stuck, an instructor can inspect these intermediate products to diagnose your progress and recommend corrective actions—without any reference to the specific programming problem… “

"Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at..."

“Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.”

- Josh Wills

After 2,500 Years, a Chinese Gaming Mystery is Solved

After 2,500 Years, a Chinese Gaming Mystery is Solved:

“Go is an old game where, broadly speaking, players take turns placing white and black pieces on a board in an attempt to surround the most empty territory on the playing field. The earliest known reference to it dates back to China in the 5th century B.C., which means people were playing it along the shores of the Yangtze before the Parthenon cast its shadow over Athens. At once simple and complex, it’s known for the high degree of versatility its gridded playing surface offers, and for years—centuries, even—some players assumed the number of legal positions must be infinite on the game’s standard 19x19 boards. But that’s not exactly true, as computer scientist John Tromp revealed last week. There’s just a friggin’ lot of them.

Specifically, Tromp discovered this is the number of legal ways you can use the board’s 361 points with the black and white playing pieces and empty spaces:

2081681993819799846
9947863334486277028
6522453884530548425
6394568209274196127
3801537852564845169
8519643907259916015
6281285460898883144
2712971531931755773
6620397247064840935

That’s hardly the kind of thing you can figure out with pen and paper. As one Reddit user pointed out in reference to Tromp’s earlier work, that’s bigger than the total number of observable atoms in the universe.”

Previously:

The world's greatest literature reveals multifractals and cascades of consciousness

The world's greatest literature reveals multifractals and cascades of consciousness:

James Joyce, Julio Cortazar, Marcel Proust, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Umberto Eco. Regardless of the language they were working in, some of the world’s greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing fractals. Statistical analysis carried out at the Institute of Nuclear Physics… however, revealed something even more intriguing. The composition of works from within a particular genre was characterized by the exceptional dynamics of a cascading (avalanche) narrative structure. This type of narrative turns out to be multifractal. That is, fractals of fractals are created.

“Physicists… performed a detailed statistical analysis of more than one hundred famous works of world literature, written in several languages and representing various literary genres. The books, tested for revealing correlations in variations of sentence length, proved to be governed by the dynamics of a cascade. This means that the construction of these books is in fact a fractal. In the case of several works their mathematical complexity proved to be exceptional, comparable to the structure of complex mathematical objects considered to be multifractal. Interestingly, in the analyzed pool of all the works, one genre turned out to be exceptionally multifractal in nature.Fractals are self-similar mathematical objects: when we begin to expand one fragment or another, what eventually emerges is a structure that resembles the original object…

Multifractals are more highly advanced mathematical structures: fractals of fractals. They arise from fractals ‘interwoven’ with each other in an appropriate manner and in appropriate proportions. Multifractals are not simply the sum of fractals and cannot be divided to return back to their original components, because the way they weave is fractal in nature. The result is that in order to see a structure similar to the original, different portions of a multifractal need to expand at different rates. A multifractal is therefore non-linear in nature…

To convert the texts to numerical sequences, sentence length was measured by the number of words (an alternative method of counting characters in the sentence turned out to have no major impact on the conclusions). The dependences were then searched for in the data – beginning with the simplest, i.e. linear. This is the posited question: if a sentence of a given length is x times longer than the sentences of different lengths, is the same aspect ratio preserved when looking at sentences respectively longer or shorter?

“All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organization of the lengths of sentences… ”

… more than a dozen works revealed a very clear multifractal structure, and almost all of these proved to be representative of one genre, that of stream of consciousness.

"The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals,” says Prof. Drozdz.

The most multifractal works also included… Joyce’s Ulysses…

“It is not entirely clear whether stream of consciousness writing actually reveals the deeper qualities of our consciousness, or rather the imagination of the writers. It is hardly surprising that ascribing a work to a particular genre is, for whatever reason, sometimes subjective. We see, moreover, the possibility of an interesting application of our methodology: it may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another,” notes Prof. Drozdz.

Multifractal analyses of literary texts carried out by the IFJ PAN have been published in Information Sciences, a journal of computer science. The publication has undergone rigorous verification: given the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, editors immediately appointed up to six reviewers.”

ja-dark: Note that someone added an apostrophe for FW. Heh. For Joyce’s Ulysses at least, a fractal nature was deliberate, as observed by literary theorist Bell in the ‘90s: “Single episodes represent different ways of constructing the world. For the narrative techniques of individual episodes are successive microcosms of the whole. Each highlights a mode of perception which can then be recognised as a governing principle of the entire book.”

As Joyce said:

  • “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
  • Said in conversation with Frank Budgen, Zurich, 1918, as told by Budgen in his book James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (1934), ch. IV

Robert Anton Wilson has claimed that Gell-Mann got a ‘three quarks model’ (presumably for baryon?) from Finnegans Wake, (Gell-Mann has stated he got the word ‘quark’ from FW) and also that it’s a model for interconnectedness related to Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics. But I digress.

Photo



Shailja Patel

"I’ve long suspected that what our descendants will find quaintest about us is that we made..."

“I’ve long suspected that what our descendants will find quaintest about us is that we made distinctions of that sort. That they’ll be looking back and they’ll be going, ‘So strange they didn’t think Facebook was 'real’.’”

- William Gibson (about 15 minutes in, on primary vs. secondary experiences)

From around 15 minutes in here, when asked about ‘primary’ and...



From around 15 minutes in here, when asked about ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ experiences (e.g. meatspace vs. cyberspace). This is something I’ve thought a lot about over the years: what frustrated me the most was how peers would treat online messaging, etc. as an inferior mode.

So people communicating with you online might give you the physical equivalent of walking up to you, asking you a question, and after you’ve taken the time to answer them, they simply turn around and walk away without a look or word of acknowledgment. “It’s just email.” For them, it’s just a disposable mode. The ‘like’ button on social media sites is a nice addition that allows acknowledgment (of responses), a quiet valediction or winding down without perpetuating a chain of responses, and even that is rarely used from what I’ve observed, sadly. Friendships that don’t have a physical analog are also treated disposably.

When culture evolves such that people stop stagnating in their geographical cocoons, spoonfed by corporeal proximity, and truly embrace the conflation of these ‘modes’ (meat-/cyber- space), I suspect the absence of this bad etiquette in computer-mediated communication will be an early sign.

Database of synesthetic color associations for Japanese kanji

Database of synesthetic color associations for Japanese kanji:

“Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which certain types of stimuli elicit involuntary perceptions in an unrelated pathway. A common type of synesthesia is grapheme–color synesthesia, in which the visual perception of letters and numbers stimulates the perception of a specific color. Previous studies have often collected relatively small numbers of grapheme–color associations per synesthete, but the accumulation of a large quantity of data has greater promise for uncovering the mechanisms underlying synesthetic association. In this study, we therefore collected large samples of data from a total of eight synesthetes. All told, we obtained over 1000 synesthetic colors associated with Japanese kanji characters from each of two synesthetes, over 100 synesthetic colors form each of three synesthetes, and about 80 synesthetic colors associated with Japanese hiragana, Latin letters, and Arabic numerals from each of three synesthetes. We then compiled the data into a database, called the KANJI-Synesthetic Colors Database (K-SCD), which has a total of 5122 colors for 483, 46, and 46 Japanese kanji, hiragana, and katakana characters, respectively, as well as for 26 Latin letters and ten Arabic numerals. In addition to introducing the K-SCD, this article demonstrates the database’s merits by using two examples, in which two new rules for synesthetic association, “shape similarity” and “synesthetic color clustering,” were found. The K-SCD is publicly accessible (www.​cv.​jinkan.​kyoto-u.​ac.​jp/​site/​uploads/​K-SCD.​xlsm) and will be a valuable resource for those who wish to conduct statistical analyses using a rich dataset in order to uncover the rules governing synesthetic association and to understand its mechanisms.”

Do You Have To Attribute Stack Overflow Code?

Do You Have To Attribute Stack Overflow Code?:

StackOverflow is one of the most used of the programming problem solving sites and it has saved every programmer substantial amounts of time. There are even urban legends (perhaps not so far from the truth) about programmers who basically just work by copying and pasting chunks of code from StackOverflow.

Most of us have never thought for a moment about the status of code reuse on StackOverflow simply because it seemed like a non-issue. The question is asked the solution is provided and the code must therefore be offered for use - but Stack Exchange, the group behind all of the “Exchange” forums is in the process of attempting to clarify the situation and is creating a storm of user protests at the same time.

Related: Programming in a Socially Networked World: the Evolution of the Social Programmer

The Fairy Tales That Predate Christianity

The Fairy Tales That Predate Christianity:

“Tehrani and da Silva recorded the presence of each Tales of Magic to 50 Indo-European populations, and used these maps to reconstruct the stories’ evolutionary relationships. They were successful for 76 of the 275 tales, tracing their ancestries back by hundreds or thousands of years. These results vindicate a view espoused by no less a teller of stories than Wilhelm Grimm—half of the fraternal duo whose names are almost synonymous with fairy tales. He and his brother Jacob were assembling German peasant tales at a time of great advances in linguistics. Researchers were unmasking the commonalities between Indo-European languages (which include English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, and German), and positing that those tongues shared a common ancestor. In 1884, the Grimms suggested that the same applied to oral traditions like folktales. Those they compiled were part of a grand cultural tradition that stretched from Scandinavia to South Asia, and many were probably thousands of years old…

Tehrani and da Silva found that although neighboring cultures can easily exchange stories, they also often reject the tales of their neighbors. Several stories were less likely to appear in one population if they were told within an adjacent one.

Meanwhile, a quarter of the Tales of Magic showed clear signatures of shared descent from ancient ancestors. “Most people would assume that folktales are rapidly changing and easily exchanged between social groups,” says Simon Greenhill from the Australian National University. “But this shows that many tales are actually surprisingly stable over time and seem to track population history well.” Similarly, a recent study found that flood “myths” among Aboriginal Australians can be traced back to real sea level rises 7,000 years ago.”

Collocational Aid for Learners of Japanese as a Second Language (PDF)

Collocational Aid for Learners of Japanese as a Second Language (PDF):

Abstract

We present Collocation Assistant, a prototype of a collocational aid designed to promote the collocational competence of learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL). Focusing on noun-verb constructions, the tool automatically flags possible collocation errors and suggests better collocations by using corrections extracted from a large annotated Japanese language learner corpus. Each suggestion includes several usage examples to help learners choose the best candidate. In a preliminary user study with JSL learners, Collocation Assistant received positive feedback, and the results indicate that the system is helpful to assist learners in choosing correct word combinations in Japanese.

ja-dark: For the weighted Dice coefficient they use, see p.4 here (pdf).

Études for ClojureScript (eBook)

Études for ClojureScript (eBook):

Études for ClojureScript

See the github repository.

 From the Preface: What are Études for ClojureScript?    

     “In this book, you will find descriptions of programs that you can compose (write) in ClojureScript. The programs will usually be short, and each one has been designed to provide practice material for a particular ClojureScript programming area. Unlike musical études, these programs have not been designed to be of considerable difficulty, though they may ask you to stretch a bit beyond the immediate material and examples that you find  in most ClojureScript books or online references.      

   These études are not intended to introduce you to individual ClojureScript concepts. That ground is covered quite nicely by ClojureScript Koans, 4Clojure, and ClojureScript Unraveled. Instead, these études take the form of small projects that do something that is (somewhat) useful. They are much along the lines of the programming katas given in chapter 10 of Living Clojure by Carin Meier. If Koans, 4Clojure, and ClojureScript Unraveled ask you to write programs at the level of chemical elements, in this book you are constructing simple molecules.”

See also: Code Kata and Koans

A Clever Flowchart That Accurately Follows the Lyrical Pattern...

What the F-measure doesn't measure: Features, Flaws, Fallacies and Fixes

What the F-measure doesn't measure: Features, Flaws, Fallacies and Fixes:
The F-measure or F-score is one of the most commonly used single number measures in Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, but it is based on a mistake, and the flawed assumptions render it unsuitable for use in most contexts! Fortunately, there are better alternatives.

"You don’t know the power of words until you’re forced to serve a sentence."

“You don’t know the power of words until you’re forced to serve a sentence.”

- Saul Williams

"A hack is something that makes life easier. It is a shortcut. I hack by writing poetry. I’m..."

“A hack is something that makes life easier. It is a shortcut. I hack by writing poetry. I’m coding the decoding in poetry. I’m finding new codes and shorter ways to output ideas quicker through poetry — hacking ideas, hacking frames of thought and references… It doesn’t only belong to what we relate it to in terms of computers… There are all these ways of unwiring, rewiring, dewiring systems of thought and systems of being.”

- Saul Williams

Writing in English, Novelists Find Inventive New Voices

Writing in English, Novelists Find Inventive New Voices:

That same boat is carrying a lot of writers these days, most of them working in English, but others in French, German, Spanish, Japanese or even Dutch, enriching and expanding the literature of their host cultures. Some have left their native language behind after being displaced by political unrest or repression. Others have relocated and plunged into new cultures in a spirit of adventure, encouraged by the freer movement of people and ideas over the last quarter-century. A new literary diaspora has taken shape, propelled, as Isabelle de Courtivron has written in “Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity,” by “immigration, technology, postcolonialism and globalization,” powerful forces that have “dissolved borders and increased cross-cultural mobility.”

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?  [PDF]

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?  [PDF]:

We study the extent to which eminent scientists shape the vitality of their fields by examining entry rates into the fields of 452 academic life scientists who pass away while at the peak of their scientific abilities. Key to our analyses is a novel way to delineate boundaries around scientific fields by appealing solely to intellectual linkages between scientists and their publications, rather than collaboration or co-citation patterns. Consistent with previous research, the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases precipitously after the death of a star scientist (relative to control fields). In contrast, we find that the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases by 8% on average. These additional contributions are disproportionately likely to be highly cited. They are also more likely to be authored by scientists who were not previously active in the deceased superstar’s field. Overall, these results suggest that outsiders are reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive and that a number of barriers may constrain entry even after she is gone. Intellectual, social, and resource barriers all impede entry, with outsiders only entering subfields that offer a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of “foreign” ideas.

ja-dark: I wonder if this goes for prominent rhetoricians posing as scientists, as well.

"Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really..."

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”

- David Bowie

Data analysis of David Bowie's career turned into musical 'sonifications' (Wired UK)

Data analysis of David Bowie's career turned into musical 'sonifications' (Wired UK):

“To me Bowie represents something larger than any single person could possibly be. He also represents for me a representation of repeated cultural rejuvenation. So much pop culture is disposable. But he shows that it is not the people who are disposable but the image. Somehow he has managed to maintain enough of a mystery around himself that we never become bored of him,” Kirke told Wired.co.uk.

Kirke and Ware used statistical analyses of elements such as the changes in emotional content of David Bowie lyrics over the years, or the prominence of major and minor keys in his songs. These are then mapped onto musical features such as tempo, pitch and loudness and transformed into their own musical compositions. The aim was to show how Bowie’s oeuvre developed over time.

To analyse the emotional content, the pair use the ANEW database, a scientific database of emotionally-annotated words, which are given scores based on their emotional positivity (valence) and emotional physical intensity (arousal). “I created a database of Bowie’s lyrics going from The Laughing Gnome up to the end of the Tin Machine era. These were then searched for key emotional words. This is a simplified emotional analysis in the sense it doesn’t look at the context in which the words were used. But such non-contextual textual emotion analysis is not uncommon. The resulting valence and arousal measures were then low pass filtered in an attempt to find longer term patterns. To our surprise, we found a broader cycle as well as some shorter cycles in between.”

David Bowie — Japanese fashion icon

David Bowie — Japanese fashion icon:

Many of the costumes that Bowie wore throughout his career were created by Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto.

“This includes the hairdo of the era, the buzz cut-looking red, fringed fantasy that David Bowie wore, which was actually Kansai Yamamoto’s creation and originally inspired by traditional Japanese dolls and Kabuki wigs,” says Thian.

Bowie was introduced to Japanese culture in the 1960s by his dance and mime teacher, Lindsay Kemp. “[Kemp] actually was the first person to introduce Bowie to Japanese culture, theatre, music and gestures from the theatre and the onnagata.” Japanese onnagata are male actors who specialize in playing women’s roles in kabuki.

However, the onnagata may have been just one influence in Bowie’s own androgyny, says Thian. Bowie was also a practicing Buddhist in the 1960s. For a period of time, he considered joining a monastery and becoming a monk.

25,000 Japanese Sentence Diagrams (Anki decks)

25,000 Japanese Sentence Diagrams (Anki decks):

Here’s a re-up of a previous post; for sample images and information check out this Anki deck (which now has thousands of downloads; be like everyone else and download it too!). These diagrams give you a good sense of the flow of Japanese sentences, how to recognize and parse the fundamental units making up the sentences and how the parts relate.

In short:

image

The ‘arc’ sentence diagrams were created w/ the Japanese dependency parser CaboCha and XeLaTeX, using this Python script which converts CaboCha’s -f1 output into TikZ-dependency code, integrated w/ ImageMagick + GhostScript via the LaTeX standalone package. The ‘falls’ diagrams use the same tools, but with different LaTeX code and CaboCha’s -f3 (xml) output. The diagrams are transparent PNG files.

On bunsetsu; on ‘mean dependency distance’.

Many other posts on the topic can be found here (scroll down a bit): http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/tagged/grammar

How Peach’s Most Interesting Feature, the Hybrid Command Line, Is Becoming Mainstream Again

How Peach’s Most Interesting Feature, the Hybrid Command Line, Is Becoming Mainstream Again:

Shortly before the end of the workday last Friday, an app called Peach suddenly became the hottest social network among a small but influential coterie of digital media industry watchers. It’s tough to say precisely what Peach is. It’s a social network that lets users post all types of media, but feeds aren’t public, nor does it have an aggregate feed similar to a Facebook News Feed — every user is siloed.

Peach is fun to play around with, but mostly what it has going for it as a social network is that it’s not Twitter or Facebook. The one interesting thing about Peach is a feature that its makers — which include a co-founder of Vine — call “magic words.” Magic words are shortcuts that allow users to access new types of posting features. Typing “GIF,” for instance, lets users search for the appropriate media to post; “battery” offers a way for users to post their current charge percentage; “move” lets users access their phone’s motion tracking to post the number of steps or distance traveled.

“Magic words” are easy, and they feel fresh and new compared to the button- and menu-heavy interface for posting status updates to Facebook. But they’re about as old a user interface as you can imagine. Peach is the latest app to turn away from a pure GUI, a “graphical user interface” that relies on buttons and icons, and back toward a watered-down version of a CLI, the text-based “command line interface” that was the defining method of using personal computers until the 1980s…

Now that the computer most people use most often is carried in their pockets and doesn’t have a “desktop,” WIMP’s strengths are less important. And made a little more friendly looking and stripped of its connotations as a nerd’s power tool, text input is an even lower barrier to entry than any GUI: The only limit is your vocabulary. Now that computational power is available at a lower price than ever before, it’s possible to create pseudo-command-line systems with greater leeway for mistakes, and even the limited ability to “learn.” (In other words, you don’t need to learn a whole manual’s worth of commands to use it effectively.)

In the command line, you had to have your options memorized; in the GUI, you could browse the options. But in a new space of user experience, there is no clear set of options for interacting with software. There is, if software continues to track in this direction, no command that a computer won’t be able to process, and that will make them subsequently easier to use, and more vital than ever.

Photo



The blockchain will become our new signature (Wired UK)

The blockchain will become our new signature (Wired UK):

The blockchain could be a critical piece of infrastructure for governments to implement what we call “responsive open data”. Unlike today’s open data, responsive open data responds to the commands of citizens – when they want it, where they want it…

This is now possible because the blockchain is a public ledger of all previous transactions to which new transactions are added. As the blockchain grows, it becomes harder and harder to manipulate past transactions since the records of each are built on top of each other. This interdependence in the stacks of transactions gives permanent integrity to the recorded sequence of events and facts. It enables both the vital function of timestamping and, with the addition of digital signatures, the transfer of ownership without a third party like a government, bank or notary to confirm the transaction took place.

The Verbasizer was David Bowie’s 1995 Lyric-Writing Mac App

The Verbasizer was David Bowie’s 1995 Lyric-Writing Mac App:

“One of my favourite videos of David Bowie (I have a few) is a clip from the 1997 documentary Inspirations, directed by Michael Apted. Filmed during the production of Bowie’s 1995 album Outside, Bowie is sitting at a black Apple PowerBook, in front of a sentence randomizer app he designed for writing the album’s lyrics.

Bowie gestures to the screen: “It’s a program that I’ve developed with a friend of mine from San Francisco, and it’s called the Verbasizer.”

Demonstrating the program, he continues. “It’ll take the sentence, and I’ll divide it up between the columns, and then when I’ve got say, three or four or five—sometimes I’ll go as much as 20, 25 different sentences going across here, and then I’ll set it to randomize. And it’ll take those 20 sentences and cut in between them all the time, picking out, choosing different words from different columns, and from different rows of sentences.”

“So what you end up with is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other.”

(Hallo) Spaceboy,
You’re sleepy now
Your silhouette is so stationary
You’re released but your custody calls
And I want to be free
Don’t you want to be free
Do you like girls or boys
It’s confusing these days
But Moondust will cover you
Cover you

An excerpt of the lyrics from the song Hallo Spaceboy, off Bowie’s 1995 album Outside, which is said to have been mostly written with and inspired by the output of a piece of custom-made text randomization software.

The Verbasizer was a digital version of an approach to lyrical writing that Bowie had been using for decades, called the cut-up technique. Popularized by writers William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the technique relied on source literary material—a newspaper article or diary entry, perhaps—that had been cut up into words or phrases, and re-ordered into new, random, potentially significant meanings.”

Challenging ill-conceived dogma—A response [PDF]

Challenging ill-conceived dogma—A response [PDF]:

[NOTE: This, below, is a response article commissioned by the editors of Language. It was to appear as a response to six invited peer commentaries, in the March 2016 issue of Language, based on my 2014 book, The Language Myth. But the editors of Language declined to publish it. My open letter to the editors of Language, regarding their decision, is available here: http://www.vyvevans.net/OpenLetter.pdf. This response article is made available here as an open access statement concerning my response to some of the criticisms levelled at The Language Myth since publication.]

Special Report: Digital Humanities in LibrariesA new American...



Special Report: Digital Humanities in Libraries

A new American Libraries/Gale Cengage survey shows uncertainty and adaptation in this growing field

Regardless of a library’s particular approach, it is tempting to think of DH in terms of services to be offered or as a field to be supported with specific resources. While this is understandable, it also places libraries in the role of service provider at the exact moment when it is not clear what services would even be useful.

“Gale is looking at a range of support services, from cloud-hosting data all the way down to project-level support, and we’re trying to create a range of services to meet libraries at their individual point of need,” says Abruzzi.

Given the speed at which DH is evolving and the degree of ambiguity and uncertainty that surrounds it, it may be more productive—and more honest—to position the library as research partner that can explore new solutions with researchers rather than as a service provider that either has what a researcher is looking for or doesn’t.

Sidney Harris

Telepathy: 'Mind Reading' Computer Deciphers Words From Brainwaves

Telepathy: 'Mind Reading' Computer Deciphers Words From Brainwaves:

A team of scientists, led by Yamazaki Toshimasa, the Kyushu Institute of Technology’s brain computer interface expert, examined the brains of 12 men, women and children while they recited a series of words, recording their brainwaves while the subjects did so. They used an electroencephalogram, or EEG, as their method of identifying words in the Broca area of the brain.

The researchers said that the device is able to examine brainwaves to identify the syllables and letters of the Japanese alphabet, giving the device the ability to decipher words and phrases without them needing to be said aloud, according to the Daily Mail. They identified the Japanese words for “goo,” “par” and “scissors” with the computer before they were spoken.

Each syllable produced a specific bit of brain wave activity from the initial thought about the word to the act of speaking it, with the time frame of brain activity taking up to two seconds for each word. The researchers built a database of these brainwaves, allowing them to match them to words without the subject speaking them. The algorithms they developed could identify the Japanese words for spring and summer (“natsu” and “haru”), 47 percent and 25 percent of the time, according to a paper from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.

Single characters in the Japanese language were correctly identified almost 90 percent of the time. Additionally, the Japanese words for “will,” “one,” “turning,” and “do” were successfully identified around 80-90 percent of the time.

The study has opened up the possibility for people who have lost the ability to speak, or have become paralyzed to be able to communicate once more, according to Toshimasa. He also believes that the control of robots through brainwaves could become a reality, according to Nishinippon, a Japanese newspaper.

prostheticknowledge: A Book from the Sky 天书 Another Neural...







prostheticknowledge:

A Book from the Sky 天书

Another Neural Network Chinese character project - this one by Gene Kogan which generates new Kanji from a handwritten dataset:

These images were created by a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) trained on a database of handwritten Chinese characters, made with code by Alec Radford based on the paper by Radford, Luke Metz, and Soumith Chintala in November 2015.

The title is a reference to the 1988 book by Xu Bing, who composed thousands of fictitious glyphs in the style of traditional Mandarin prints of the Song and Ming dynasties.

A DCGAN is a type of convolutional neural network which is capable of learning an abstract representation of a collection of images. It achieves this via competition between a “generator” which fabricates fake images and a “discriminator” which tries to discern if the generator’s images are authentic (more details). After training, the generator can be used to convincingly generate samples reminiscent of the originals.

… a DCGAN is trained on a labeled subset of ~1M handwritten simplified Chinese characters, after which the generator is able to produce fake images of characters not found in the original dataset.

More Here

Search Engine History.com

Sherlock Holmes and Probabilistic Induction

Sherlock Holmes and Probabilistic Induction:

Soshichi Uchii, Kyoto University, Japan

“The rise and development of statistical method in the 19th century had a great impact on the theories of scientific reasoning, and de Morgan’s or Jevons’s theory is a newer theory of induction in this century. And such a change of methodology is clearly reflected in the popular stories of Sherlock Holmes, which were written in the late 19th century and early 20th century.“

"We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination."

“We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.”

-

Sherlock Holmes

“I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty. What seems strange to you is only so because you do not follow my train of thought or observe the small facts upon which large inferences may depend.“

Algorithmic Authors

Algorithmic Authors:

At Aalto University in Finland, Ph.D. student Eric Malmi has created a software program called DopeLearning that is capable of generating its own rap lyrics. Other promising NLG projects include companies like x.ai, which offers an artificial intelligence-driven calendaring service that provides users with a virtual assistant named “Amy Ingram,” who can arrange meetings for a user by sending email in a computer-generated writing style that is difficult to distinguish from that of a human assistant.

As NLG applications continue to evolve, developers may set their sights on more complex topics than sports and corporate earnings reports. Hammond and others have high hopes for the potential of NLG techniques to turn out high-quality, original journalism.

Moving beyond these kinds of just-the-facts news stories will require another conceptual leap in NLG application development, taking computer-generated writing beyond the realm of interpreting structured data sources and into the far messier world of interpreting free-form written material, much of it currently generated by human journalists. To bridge that gap, NLG software may need to start incorporating some of the text-parsing methods of its kindred discipline Natural Language Processing (NLP).

How Machines Write Poetry

How Machines Write Poetry:

FIGURE8 is what’s called a “case-based reasoning” system. When Harmon asks it to describe a certain noun, the program checks its internal library to see how other authors have described the same thing. What words did they use? What properties does the thing have? What actions can it take? Harmon has loaded up the program’s library with all the public-domain stories she could find. The program also has access to the internet.

Unlike most poetry programs, which stick to templates, FIGURE8 can learn new ways of composing a sentence from other writers. It can also infer the “unwritten rules” of language, Harmon says. For example, it’s learned that you can put two or three adjectives in a row, or add a sentence fragment to the beginning of a simple sentence. One of its first constructions was Like a pale moon, the garden lit up in front of him.

Like a human author brainstorming and revising, FIGURE8 generates many possible similes, then goes back to analyze what it’s written. It ranks all of its similes according to Harmon’s criteria of clarity, novelty, aptness and surprise. For example, if a web search reveals that no one has associated these two things before, FIGURE8 guesses that its simile might be unclear. If the two things share a major category—like the cherry and strawberry, both fruits—the simile gets a low score for surprise.

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of..."

“That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.”

- George Boole

Photo



“The Programming Language Called Classical Chinese”...



“The Programming Language Called Classical Chinese” by David Branner  

The Physical Origin of Universal Computing | Quanta Magazine

The Physical Origin of Universal Computing | Quanta Magazine:

“In 1985, the physicist David Deutsch took another important step toward understanding the nature of algorithms. He made the observation that algorithmic processes are necessarily carried out by physical systems. These processes can occur in many different ways: A human being using an abacus to multiply two numbers is obviously profoundly different from a silicon chip running a flight simulator. But both are examples of physical systems, and as such they are governed by the same underlying laws of physics. With this in mind, Deutsch stated the following principle. I’ll use his words — although the language is specialized, it’s actually pretty accessible, and fun to see in the original form:

Every finitely realizable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means.

In his book The Sciences of the Artificial, the polymath Herbert Simon distinguished between the sciences of the natural — such as physics and biology, in which we study naturally occurring systems — and sciences of the artificial, like computer science and economics, in which we study systems created by human beings.

At first glance, it seems that the artificial sciences should be special cases of the natural sciences. But as Deutsch’s principle suggests, the properties of artificial systems such as computers may be just as rich as those of naturally occurring physical systems. We can imagine using computers to simulate not only our own laws of physics, but maybe even alternate physical realities. In the words of the computer scientist Alan Kay: “In natural science, Nature has given us a world and we’re just to discover its laws. In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.” Deutsch’s principle provides a bridge uniting the sciences of the natural and the artificial. It’s exciting that we’re nearing proof of this fundamental scientific principle.”

Algorithms Example (Subset Sum by Dynamic Programming)



Algorithms Example (Subset Sum by Dynamic Programming)  

Why Solving America’s Math Problem Requires Less ‘Instructional’ Time

Why Solving America’s Math Problem Requires Less ‘Instructional’ Time:

But given that the high quality math “instruction” during my K–12 education had—unintentionally—simply trained me to carry out particular operations in response to predictable prompts, it’s understandable why I was terrified of the first simple algebraic proof I encountered during my freshman year of college in a Foundations of Mathematics course: Prove that the sum of two even numbers is always even. At the time, I didn’t remotely know how to begin constructing an argument and proof that would satisfy my professor, and no authoritative directions that prescribed how I should proceed had been provided.

This situation was an example of how my professor—whether intentionally or not—was using a principle of deeper learning. In contrast to “instruction,” deeper learning empowers students to design their own solutions to complex problems. It requires that students be given more time to make sense of problems, experience productive struggle, and think for themselves rather than merely trying to remember someone else’s complicated procedures, confusing mandates, and obscure formulas.

Bot Poetry at the SFPC

Bot Poetry at the SFPC:

On Friday, hidden away in the West Village, one block from the Hudson, the very necessary School for Poetic Computation showcased a quickly growing branch of digital literature: bot poetry. The event had been organized last minute by Allison Parrish to make up for Darius Kazemi’s official bot summit that was put off until next year…

What separates a bot from other generative literature became increasingly unclear, and the question was something like the red thread of the evening.

That “content” rather than “text” is an important point in Parrish’s definition was aptly demonstrated by the first entry, Casey Kolderup’s @OminousZoom. This twitter bot takes a stock photo and, in a series of four steps, zooms into a detail it recognizes as a face. The effect can be funny – like in the dramatic zoom meme (sans the punch line of contagious grimaces). However, the most interesting results were those in which the algorithm failed to find a face, bringing about an unresolved tension in the progression of details that assigns significance to, for us, insignificant structures. What is left is nothing but the sense of significance itself – it sees something, but we cannot know what or why…

Eli Stein, Creative Computing, 1983



Eli Stein, Creative Computing, 1983

How to Read Historical Mathematics

How to Read Historical Mathematics:

Writings by early mathematicians feature language and notations that are quite different from what we’re familiar with today. Sourcebooks on the history of mathematics provide some guidance, but what has been lacking is a guide tailored to the needs of readers approaching these writings for the first time. How to Read Historical Mathematics fills this gap by introducing readers to the analytical questions historians ask when deciphering historical texts.

Sampling actual writings from the history of mathematics, Benjamin Wardhaugh reveals the questions that will unlock the meaning and significance of a given text–Who wrote it, why, and for whom? What was its author’s intended meaning? How did it reach its present form? Is it original or a translation? Why is it important today? Wardhaugh teaches readers to think about what the original text might have looked like, to consider where and when it was written, and to formulate questions of their own. Readers pick up new skills with each chapter, and gain the confidence and analytical sophistication needed to tackle virtually any text in the history of mathematics.

  • Introduces readers to the methods of textual analysis used by historians
  • Uses actual source material as examples
  • Features boxed summaries, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading
  • Supplements all major sourcebooks in mathematics history
  • Designed for easy reference
  • Ideal for students and teachers

The Icosian Game

The Icosian Game:
“I have found that some young persons have been much amused by trying a new mathematical game which the Icosian furnishes, one person sticking five pins in any five consecutive points, such as abcde, or abcde’, and the other player then aiming to insert, which by the theory in this letter can always be done, fifteen other pins, in cyclical succession, so as to cover all the other points, and to end in immediate proximity to the pin wherewith his antagonist had begun.” — W.R. Hamilton, October 17, 1856

One day while walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin on his way to chair a meeting of the Royal Irish Academy he had a flash of inspiration and saw the solution of a problem that he had been working on for many years. Hamilton had been trying to extend the concept of complex numbers to higher dimensions. His solution became known as the quaternions…

In a famous act of mathematical vandalism, Dr. Hamilton carved the equations of the quaternions on Broome Bridge on the Oct. 16, 1843. This famous event has been commemorated with a visit to the scene of the crime on the Oct. 16 for many years.

Interdisciplinary project analyzes 'patchwriting' through math, computer science

Interdisciplinary project analyzes 'patchwriting' through math, computer science:
For writers and writing instructors, the concept of “patchwriting” — copying and lightly editing content in an attempt to reshape it as original thought — is a slippery slope.

Often perceived as something akin to plagiarism, the practice commonly shows up when students and writers attempt to patch together source material, slightly rearranging or substituting words in an effort to present it in their own voice.

But in recent years, James Lu, an associate professor in Emory’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, found himself taking a more expansive view of the controversial practice….

The goal, says Lu, is to produce both software tools to support patchwriting and understandings that may lead to an informed articulation of effective patchwriting methods.

He also seeks to learn more about the cognitive processes involved in patchwriting — why a writer may choose certain pieces of text, for example.

Working with colleagues and students in natural language processing, writing and ESL (English as a Second Language), Lu plans to examine the effects of patchwriting — including the quality of end products — and the potential benefits the practice may offer in the classroom, especially for writing and ESL students…

In an age of unrestrained text, the challenge is deciding how to negotiate it, Lu concluded.

積読 - “The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan,...



  • 積読 - “The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) and has its origins in a pun. Tsundoku, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as 積ん読. Tsunde oku means to let something pile up and is written 積んでおく. Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – meaning to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form tsundoku.” (via)

Related: abibliophobia - “the fear of running out of reading material”

NASA Technology Helped Create This Alien Typeface

NASA Technology Helped Create This Alien Typeface:

Coupled with a unique movable type set up that combines the 138 different glyphs into more possible configurations than stars in the known universe, and just as many unique prints, Ward calls Fe₂O₃ Glyphs “a kind of infinite art machine." 

"One can study only what one has first dreamed about. Science is formed rather on a reverie than on..."

““One can study only what one has first dreamed about. Science is formed rather on a reverie than on an experiment, and it takes a good many experiments to dispel the mists of the dream.”

- Gaston Bachelard

“hellos world” in arm assembly, as hand illuminated...



“hellos world” in arm assembly, as hand illuminated manuscript. - via

Semi-related:

A monk joins an abbey ready to dedicate his life to copying ancient books by hand. After the first day though, he reports to the head priest. He’s concerned that all the monks have been copying from copies made from still more copies.

“If someone makes a mistake,” he points out. “It would be impossible to detect. Even worse the error would continue to be made.”

A bit startled, the priest decides that he better check their latest effort against the original which is kept in a vault beneath the abbey. A place only he has access to.

Well two days, then three days pass without the priest resurfacing. Finally the new monk decides to see if the old guy’s alright. When he gets down there though, he discovers the priest hunched over both a newly copied book and the ancient original text. He is sobbing and by the look of things has been sobbing for a long time.

“Father?” the monk whispers.

“Oh Lord Jesus,” the priest wails. “The word is ‘celebrate’!”

Two Cognitive Functions That Machines Still Lack - Stanislas Dehaene

Two Cognitive Functions That Machines Still Lack - Stanislas Dehaene:

An operating system so modular that it can pinpoint your location on a map in one window, but cannot use it to enter your address in the tax-return software in another window, is missing a global workspace…

Future operating systems will have to be rethought in order to accommodate such new capacities as sharing any data across apps, simulating the user’s state of mind, and controlling the display according to its relevance to the user’s inferred goals.

Semi-related: The dumbing-down of programming

Human languages order information efficiently

Human languages order information efficiently:

Abstract:

Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these differences, human languages might constitute different `solutions’ to common pressures of language use. Using Monte Carlo simulations over data from five languages, we find that their word orders are efficient for processing in terms of both dependency length and local lexical probability. This suggests that biases originating in how the brain understands language strongly constrain how human languages change over generations.

Ada Lovelace Day Celebrations

Ada Lovelace Day Celebrations:

Inspired by Ada’s “poetical science” approach to her study of mathematics, we’ve made a Scratch project which shows how to create a poetry generating machine!

As well as helping to develop core skills such as planning, problem solving and collaboration, the project also introduces the following programming concepts:

  • Sequencing Instructions;
  • Variables;
  • Repetition (loops);
  • Lists, and random list items.

Children can complete this project in school, or at home. The project includes step-by-step instructions for creating a basic poetry generator, as well as challenges to consolidate learning and encourage exploration and creativity.

The project also includes volunteer notes explaining how to use the project, and a completed poetry generator to demonstrate to children.

Share your work:

We’d love to view and share a selection of the best Ada projects and poems. If children would like the chance of seeing their work shared on our social media sites, those with a Scratch account can upload their creations to the Scratch website, and tag them with ‘ALD15’. You can also share your children’s creations with us directly on Twitter by tweeting us @CodeClub.

Have a go at “Ada’s Poetry Generator” by visiting jumpto.cc/poetry.

We hope you’ll enjoy using these resources – please share them far and wide and help inspire more children to get excited about coding and Ada Lovelace Day!

Kajii Motojiro - Beneath the Cherry Trees

Kajii Motojiro - Beneath the Cherry Trees:

English translation of the short story by Kajii Motojiro; here’s the Japanese version; and here’s the Japanese audio.

For those who like the new anime 櫻子さんの足下には死体が埋まっている.

Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution

Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution:

Abstract:

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity.

A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like.

Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations.

We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800–2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts.

Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.

"Science is much more ‘sloppy’ and 'irrational’ than its methodological..."

Science is much more ‘sloppy’ and 'irrational’ than its methodological image.


科学はその方法論上のイメージよりもはるかに”ぞんざい”かつ”非合理的”なものである。



- Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)

Against the definition of types

Against the definition of types:

Programming languages are a fascinating area because they combine computer science (and logic) with many other disciplines including sociology, human computer interaction and things that cannot be scientifically quantified like intuition, taste and (for better or worse) politics.

When we talk about programming languages, we often treat it mainly as scientific discussion seeking some objective truth. This is not surprising - science is surrounded by an aura of perfection and so it is easy to think that focusing on the core scientific essence (and leaving out everything) else is the right way of looking at programming languages.

However this leaves out many things that make programming languages interesting. I believe that one way to fill the missing gap is to look at philosophy of science, which can help us understand how programming language research is done and how it should be done. I wrote about the general idea in a blog post (and essay) last year. Today, I want to talk about one specific topic: What is the meaning of types?

This blog post is a shorter (less philosophical and more to the point) version of an essay that I submitted to Onward! Essays 2015. If you want to get a quick peek at the ideas in the essay, then continue reading here! If you want to read the full essay (or save it for later), you can get the full version from here.

縦書き | Tumblr

縦書き | Tumblr:

Here’s a vertical Japanese theme for tumblr, although it will only look good if your tumblr is in Japanese.

I originally jokingly referenced this, but apparently a...



I originally jokingly referenced this, but apparently a neighbour died in the resulting fire, so the incident’s not so funny now.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_pwBQuINSA

mov is Turing-complete (PDF)

mov is Turing-complete (PDF): Abstract:

It is well-known that the x86 instruction set is baroque, overcomplicated, and redundantly redundant. We show just how much fluff it has by demonstrating that it remains Turing-complete when reduced to just one instruction.The instruction we choose is mov, which can do both loads and stores. We use no unusual addressing modes, self-modifying code, or runtime code generation. Using just this instruction (and a single unconditional branch at the end of the program to make nontermination possible), we demonstrate how an arbitrary Turing machine can be simulated.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: Metalinguistic Abstraction

… It’s in words that the magic is–Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest–but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. The real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what; the trick is to learn the trick.

… And those words are made from the letters of our alphabet: a couple-dozen squiggles we can draw with the pen. This is the key! And the treasure, too, if we can only get our hands on it! It’s as if–as if the key to the treasure is the treasure!

—John Barth, Chimera

Metalinguistic abstraction–establishing new languages–plays an important role in all branches of engineering design. It is particularly important to computer programming, because in programming not only can we formulate new languages but we can also implement these languages by constructing evaluators.  An evaluator (or interpreter) for a programming language is a procedure that, when applied to an expression of the language, performs the actions required to evaluate that expression.

It is no exaggeration to regard this as the most fundamental idea in programming:

The evaluator, which determines the meaning of expressions in a programming language, is just another program.

To appreciate this point is to change our images of ourselves as programmers.  We come to see ourselves as designers of languages, rather than only users of languages designed by others.

In fact, we can regard almost any program as the evaluator for some language… Seen from this perspective, the technology for coping with large-scale computer systems merges with the technology for building new computer languages, and computer science itself becomes no more (and no less) than the discipline of constructing appropriate descriptive languages.“

Learn how the Internet actually works

Learn how the Internet actually works:

The Internet is part of nearly everything we do on a daily basis. But do you know how it all works? From WiFi to IP addresses to HTML to keeping information safe online, there’s a lot of important stuff going on that most of us don’t have the opportunity to learn more about.

Today, I’m so excited to share our new video series, “How the Internet works.”

In six short, introductory videos, you’ll get an inside look into foundational concepts of everything from wires to websites, taught by guest lecturers including the actual “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, Tumblr founder David Karp, and creators on teams at Google, Spotify, XBox, Symantec, and more.

A Critical Review of the Notion of the Algorithm in Computer Science (PDF)

A Critical Review of the Notion of the Algorithm in Computer Science (PDF):

Abstract:           

We first review the development of the notion of the algorithm as a fundamental paradigm of mathematics. We then suggest a definition of computer science that distinguishes it from all other sciences and from mathematics. Finally we argue that the conceptual concerns of computer science are quite different from the conceptual concerns of mathematics and that the notion of the algorithm is and has been an inappropriate and ineffective paradigm for computer science. 


What is essentially a discipline of pure mathematics has come to be called “the theory of computer science” and the notion of the algorithm has been decreed to be a fundamental paradigm of computer science. The mathematical perspective, however, is the wrong point of view. It is asking the wrong questions. Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims and the mathematicians tools are not as appropriate as once supposed to the questions of the computer scientist. The primary questions of computer science are not of computational possibilities but of expressional possibilities. Computer science does not need a theory of computation, it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression.

Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression

Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression:

The Invocation Model of Process Expression argues that mathematics does not provide the most appropriate conceptual foundations for computer science, but, rather, that these foundations are a primary source of unnecessary complexity and confusion. It supports that there is a more appropriate conceptual model that unifies forms of expression considered quite disparate and simplifies issues considered complex and intractable. This book presents that this model of process expression is an alternative theory of computer science that is both valid and practical…

This model links the design and function of computer systems with the design and function of biological systems. Moreover, the author shows how changing your underlying assumptions sheds new light on dealing with such complex issues as concurrency, digital computers, and biological cells…

From:

Fant… contests the algorithmic formulations for computer science based on that of well-recognized luminaries such as Leibniz, Boole, Frege, Hilbert, and Godel. His basic argument is that mathematicians consider process independent of expression; whereas, computer scientists are primarily interested in expression, independent of process.

I tend to agree with this argument which resonates from a position espoused over 25 years ago by many, including simulation colleague G. Arthur Mihram, that mathematics (at least from a linguistic point of view) exclusively employs the declarative (third-person) style that is distinctly different from  programming languages built upon the imperative (second-person) form of expression.

“There, surrounded by different languages and...



“There, surrounded by different languages and nationalities, I suddenly came to the very simple question of ‘Who am I?'”

The Art of Taboo - Nobuyuki Oura

Artists have always used taboo and controversy to pose big questions about society. In the first episode of VICE Japan’s new series, "The Art of Taboo,” we focus on Oura Nobuyuki, who explains the meaning behind his highly controversial portraits of Japan’s Showa emperor, titled “Holding Perspective.”

Study finds tangible benefits for learners from Coursera's massive open online courses | InsideHigherEd

Study finds tangible benefits for learners from Coursera's massive open online courses | InsideHigherEd:

Unlike at colleges and universities, where students finish their studies and leave with a diploma, most learners who complete one of Coursera’s massive open online courses report benefits that help them in less measurable ways.

But results from a new report, billed as “the first longitudinal study of open online learning outcomes,” also suggests many learners credit MOOCs directly for pay raises, promotions, academic progress and more.

Specifically, the report corroborates previous findings that more learners are using MOOCs to further their careers than their education, and also that those from less-advantaged backgrounds are most likely to benefit from the courses. The full report, titled “Impact Revealed: Learner Outcomes in Open Online Courses,” appears in Harvard Business Review.

GitHub Open Sources a Tool That Teaches Students to Code

GitHub Open Sources a Tool That Teaches Students to Code:

“When I started in computer science, there wasn’t a whole lot of collaboration, there wasn’t a whole lot of teamwork. You worked by yourself. You didn’t talk to anybody,” Tareshawty says, before pointing out that he started just three or four years ago. “But I’m now using GitHub as a teaching assistant, and it has really changed the way that people think….it feels more like what we would do when working out in the [professional world].”

The problem, he says, is that sharing assignments in this way isn’t as easy as it could be. That’s why he built Classroom for GitHub, a tool meant to significantly streamline the process. Basically, it lets teachers invite students onto GitHub and create and share coding assignments through the service. Teachers can send a single URL to students, Tareshawty says. Once they click on it, they’re automatically set up to view, modify, and collaborate on code.

The tool dovetails with GitHub Education, a service that provides classrooms with free private code repositories where teachers and students can post code and collaborate.

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect:

Abstract

We examine a high-profile phenomenon known as the bouba–kiki effect, in which non-word names are assigned to abstract shapes in systematic ways (e.g. rounded shapes are preferentially labelled bouba over kiki). In a detailed evaluation of the literature, we show that most accounts of the effect point to predominantly or entirely iconic cross-sensory mappings between acoustic or articulatory properties of sound and shape as the mechanism underlying the effect. However, these accounts have tended to confound the acoustic or articulatory properties of non-words with another fundamental property: their written form. We compare traditional accounts of direct audio or articulatory-visual mapping with an account in which the effect is heavily influenced by matching between the shapes of graphemes and the abstract shape targets. The results of our two studies suggest that the dominant mechanism underlying the effect for literate subjects is matching based on aligning letter curvature and shape roundedness (i.e. non-words with curved letters are matched to round shapes). We show that letter curvature is strong enough to significantly influence word–shape associations even in auditory tasks, where written word forms are never presented to participants. However, we also find an additional phonological influence in that voiced sounds are preferentially linked with rounded shapes, although this arises only in a purely auditory word–shape association task. We conclude that many previous investigations of the bouba–kiki effect may not have given appropriate consideration or weight to the influence of orthography among literate subjects.

Previously: The sound symbolic nature of Japanese maid names

darkjapanese: I assume Kirby’s paper (the primary link) is referring to mental orthographic representations of words, which we know can influence speech perception and production (e.g.) Wonder how it relates to the Japanese paper above—the names in that paper were written in hiragana rather than kanji, and hiragana is the more traditionally ‘feminine’ script, more rounded than the angular katakana, but note that the names with obstruents in that paper used ‘ka’ which is a more angular kana: か. It’s very similar to its katakana version, カ. So all of the obstruent hiragana names have angular kana in them as compared to the sonorants. Thus: さたか、てすか vs. わまな、よもな.

Be It Resolved: Teaching Statements Must Embrace Active Learning and Eschew Lecture

Be It Resolved: Teaching Statements Must Embrace Active Learning and Eschew Lecture:

Last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science published a meta-analysis of 225 studies (see paper here). The conclusion appeared as the title of the paper, Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. There is increasing evidence that improved teaching reduces the achievement gap between disadvantaged and more advantaged students, e.g., in Biology (see paper here) and in Computer Science (see new paper here from ICER 2015).

Now, Nature has just published a paper (see it here), Why we are teaching science wrong, and how to make it right, which includes the quote, “At this point it is unethical to teach any other way.” Wired magazine’s article on the active learning papers (see link here) makes the connection more explicit: “The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General’s report on ‘Smoking and Health’ in 1964–-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing.”

It’s now a matter of science, not opinion. Active learning methods are more effective than lecturing. We should encourage use of active learning methods in our classrooms. The blog post linked here connects to resources for improved teaching methods in computer science. There are active learning methods that we can use even in large classes, like Peer Instruction (see PeerInstruction4CS.org).

Here is something concrete that we in academia can do. We can change the way we select teachers for computer science and how we reward faculty.

All teaching statements for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure should include a description of how the candidate uses active learning methods and explicitly reduces lecture.

Know Your Language: Coding Toil and Trouble with Shakespeare

Know Your Language: Coding Toil and Trouble with Shakespeare:

Among esoteric programming languages, Shakespeare is the precise opposite of Brainfuck. While the latter reduces syntax and structure to a few scraps of symbols, as far away from the adornments of English as possible, the prior reimagines code as lavish Shakespearean prose.

In fact, it requires it.

What could that possibly mean? Just what it says. A program written in Shakespeare looks like the text of a Shakespearean play, while also fulfilling all of the obligations of a Turing complete programming language; that is, given infinite memory and time, a Shakespeare program can be written that replicates the functionality of any program written in any other language.

Unsurprisingly, it began as a class assignment.

Are there some students who can't learn how to code? - O'Reilly Radar

Are there some students who can't learn how to code? - O'Reilly Radar:

But I don’t question any student’s aptitude to understand the basics.  Instead, I think it’s a function of assumptions and cognitive perspective — they haven’t yet learned how to discern the dynamics of this strange new environment, how even to ask the questions or perform the tests that would lead to such an understanding.  Sometimes when I’m describing the statements of a procedural program as though the student is constructing a kind of Rube Goldberg machine, I reflect that if students could see what was happening in their little code machines, if they could visualize the cause and effect of each piece, indeed if each little function and operator were rendered as a little wooden toy that accomplished one little task, they’d be far more likely to see the relationships between elements and eventually construct a solution.  After all, we all know how to play with toys!  

Fortunately, my observations are not new, and exploration of this kind is ongoing.  Studies and opinions on this topic are legion, and a quick review shows the depths already explored.  Mark Guzdial, a prolific contributor on this topic, asserts that “How we Teach Introductory Computer Science is Wrong” and exhorts educators to embrace active learning and eschew lecture.”  Marcia Linn and Michael Clancy argue that students should spend time reading code before beginning to write code.  Jens Bennedsen and Michael E. Caspersen argue that “process recordings” (videos) are far more effective than textbooks because the programming process is dynamic and is thus better suited to dynamic demonstration. Naseem Rahman, David Nandigam, and Sreenivas Sremath Tirumala offer the “coaching mindset” as a superior approach, taking into account the whole student, their perspective, and their inherent skill and knowledge already possessed.  

And, of course, we are currently witnessing new ways of approaching coding education through the interactivity of the Web.  Codeacademy and Khan Academy are two well-known examples.  Scratch from MIT can help children (and adults!) understand the cause-and-effect of code “assertions.”  Bret Victor, a former Apple UI designer, provides a fascinating look at how an interactive and visual coding environment could be designed in “Learnable Programming.”  

And my approach?  I am currently focusing on reading as well as writing.  My online students are offered a brief, focused video lesson that is followed by short exercises that allow them to apply the new concepts immediately.  There are two keys: first, the student is instructed not to guess, and if stumped, to review the solution carefully, including the annotations and explanation, and to make a note to try the same exercise again later.  Second, I offer frequent lessons on debugging. This involves reading and understanding error messages, testing each line before writing the next, and using print statements and the Python debugger to report on code execution as it happens.  Gradually, through both coding and review, more coding and more review, my students report lasting understanding based on experience.  

Previously:

Python 3.5 builds on strengths -- and borrows from Go

Python 3.5 builds on strengths -- and borrows from Go:

Developers for Python – the fifth most popular programming language according to the Tiobe index – now have several new features for performing asynchronous operations, matrix math, type hinting, and other functions.

Much of the functionality added to the newly released Python 3.5 echoes that of other popular languages, but that’s not to say Python has been heavily influenced by outside forces. Rather, most of the additions to Python 3.5 are meant to complement or enhance the work Python programmers are already doing…

Type hinting, another long-awaited addition to Python, provides an option for annotating variables (including function arguments) to indicate the type of variable in use…

Guido van Rossum, author of the Python language, has been a proponent of type hinting, but he has been equally adamant that the language not become statically typed in the manner of C or Go. The purpose here, as explained in the feature proposal document, is to make Python more amenable to offline analysis and “(perhaps, in some contexts) code generation utilizing type information.”

Anki and School: Workflow

In this tragic era where professors don’t provide spaced retrieval flashcards for their students, one thing for those who want to use an SRS for long-term learning (instead of just cramming, taking tests, and forgetting) is that it’s important to have a card creation and study workflow that doesn’t conflict with the pace and effort of the course.

One way to integrate these seemingly opposed areas is as follows: Assume you have a class with readings, homework assignments, a midterm and/or quizzes, and a cumulative final.

Do your readings and assignments and create cards, but don’t study them yet, just keep up the card creation based on readings and assignments, leaving the active work for that which is being officially graded and keeping up the course’s pace. The card creation will add an active layer to help retain the more passive reading. I would recommend doing the card creation in batches and sections, either chapter to chapter or week to week, if you find it too stressful to switch back and forth taking snapshots from PDFs and pasting into Anki, for example.

Then when you have quizzes/exams that are non-cumulative, study the relevant cards, or all of the cards  to that point. Using a method similar to my ‘encrit’ method where you restudy cards till they’re all passed and you pass them multiple times in the first day(s), and timed in the short period (perhaps start 7 days prior) before a given non-cumulative exam/quiz, you essentially get the benefits of cramming, but it’s part of a larger workflow whose endpoint is long-term retention.

Maintain the reviews, readings, assignments, and card creation, but the reviews on top of the coursework and card creation will be minimal overhead as the cards are spaced out and become easier once you’ve gone through the initial reviews and exams/quizzes; then when you reach the final cumulative exam, you will be more prepared than simple short-term cramming, with less effort.

Well, that’s the theory. Try it out.

Algorithms and Bias: Q. and A. With Cynthia Dwork

Algorithms and Bias: Q. and A. With Cynthia Dwork:

Algorithms have become one of the most powerful arbiters in our lives. They make decisions about the news we read, the jobs we get, the people we meet, the schools we attend and the ads we see.

Yet there is growing evidence that algorithms and other types of software can discriminate. The people who write them incorporate their biases, and algorithms often learn from human behavior, so they reflect the biases we hold. For instance, research has shown that ad-targeting algorithms have shown ads for high-paying jobs to men but not women, and ads for high-interest loans to people in low-income neighborhoods.

Cynthia Dwork, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, is one of the leading thinkers on these issues. In an Upshot interview, which has been edited, she discussed how algorithms learn to discriminate, who’s responsible when they do, and the trade-offs between fairness and privacy.

Study shows co-operative robots learn and adapt quickly through natural language

Study shows co-operative robots learn and adapt quickly through natural language:

A new study has shown how robots can learn and adapt quickly in their environments through natural language processing alone.

The study, Learning to Interpret Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog, was released as part of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Argentina this week.

The researchers of the study developed a dialogue agent for a mobile robot that can be put straight into a workplace environment and quickly learn to carry out delivery and navigation tasks to assist human workers without having to first be trained on a large corpus of annotated data.

Baidu explains how it’s mastering Mandarin with deep learning — > S C A L E

Baidu explains how it’s mastering Mandarin with deep learning — > S C A L E:

On Aug. 8 at the International Neural Network Society conference on big data in San Francisco, Baidu senior research engineer Awni Hannun presented on a new model that the Chinese search giant has developed for handling voice queries in Mandarin. The model, which is accurate 94 percent of the time in tests, is based on a powerful deep learning system called Deep Speech that Baidu first unveiled in December 2014.

In this lightly edited interview, Hannun explains why his new research is important, why Mandarin is such a tough language to learn and where we can expect to see future advances in deep learning methods.

“Our system is different than that system in that it’s more what we call end-to-end. Rather than having a lot of human-engineered components that have been developed over decades of speech research — by looking at the system and saying what what features are important or which phonemes the model should predict — we just have some input data, which is an audio .WAV file on which we do very little pre-processing. And then we have a big, deep neural network that outputs directly to characters. We give it enough data that it’s able to learn what’s relevant from the input to correctly transcribe the output, with as little human intervention as possible.”

A computer scientist is writing a book about programming for babies

A computer scientist is writing a book about programming for babies:

Eric Redmond, the creator of Computer Science for Babies, wants to teach young children about ones and zeros before they’re even one year old.

Boolean Logic for Babies, the first book in Redmond’s series of educational books for tiny humans, teaches these fundamental concepts with cartoon animals and simple language, helping kids understand “and,” “or,” and “not,” the basic logic at the heart of programming.

Teaching kids algebraic concepts so early might seem like a daunting task, but the cloth book is designed much like any other reading material for children just months old. It’s attached to a teething ring, with pages stuffed with crinkly material. Characters include penguins, kittens, and pandas. There’s no actual technology involved—it’s all about logic and reasoning…

Redmond created the book with help from teachers and educators in the Portland community. It’s based on research about early childhood development, including Mark Johnson’s “Functional brain development in humans,” and developmental milestones published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redmond also beta-tested the book with his daughter and other young children.

“From the technical side, I’m a computer scientist with a long track record of education, and broke down the minimal required knowledge that a baby could grasp, that cover the basics of computer systems,” Redmond said in an email.

Previously:

Sidney Harris



Sidney Harris

Do You Code? You Should Try This Font

Do You Code? You Should Try This Font:

Coders look for different things in a typeface than normal people do. While most of us choose a font for the character it imparts to our words (Baskerville for authority, Comic Sans for playfulness, and so on), programmers want a font that is clean, uniform, highly readable, and precise, just like good code. Monoid is a new font designed by Andreas Larsen that aims to do all the above, and more. An open-source font aimed at coders, Monoid has been designed, first and foremost, to be highly readable even when you’re scanning through ten thousand of lines of C++, looking for that one bug-causing typo.

Previously: FiraCode Font

Move over Shakespeare, teen girls are the real language disruptors

Move over Shakespeare, teen girls are the real language disruptors:

Hate vocal fry? Bothered by the use of “like” and “just”? Think uptalk makes people sound less confident? If so, you may find yourself growing increasingly unpopular—there’s a new wave of people pointing out that criticizing young women’s speech is just old-fashioned sexism.

I agree, but I think we can go even further: young women’s speech isn’t just acceptable—it’s revolutionary. And if we value disruptors and innovation, we shouldn’t just be tolerating young women’s speech—we should be celebrating it. To use a modern metaphor, young women are the Uber of language.

What does it mean to disrupt language? Let’s start with the great English disruptor: William Shakespeare…

A Non-French Speaker Won the French Language Scrabble Championship. How Is That Possible?

A Non-French Speaker Won the French Language Scrabble Championship. How Is That Possible?:

I was just innocently reminiscing about French. Here’s an interesting article about Scrabble players and visual word recognition.

By the way, for no clear reason I used TinyURL for this post’s main article on the non-French Scrabble player. What’s cool about TinyURL is that you can customize the URLs, theoretically making them look random when they’re not. They could look so random they resemble random Pastebin.com URLs!

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. If you want to make your own Japanese crossword and word search puzzles, relatedly, see this post.

This could have its cons, but I love it anyway.



This could have its cons, but I love it anyway.

"Theories, no matter how pertinent, cannot eradicate the existence of facts."

“Theories, no matter how pertinent, cannot eradicate the existence of facts.”

- Jean Martin Charcot

PyData Seattle 2015 | Presentation: Keynote: Data-driven Education and the Quantified Student

PyData Seattle 2015 | Presentation: Keynote: Data-driven Education and the Quantified Student:

Most analytics is based on log data in the Learning Management System
(LMS). This “learning in a box” model is inadequate, but the diverse
ecosystem of apps and services used by faculty and students poses a huge
interoperability problem.

The billion-dollar education industry of LMS platforms, textbook publishers and testing companies all want a part in the prospect of “changing education” through analytics. They’re all marketing their dazzling dashboards in a worrying wave of ed-tech solutionism.

Meanwhile, students’ every move gets tracked and logged,
often without their knowledge or consent, adding ethical and legal
issues of privacy for the quantified student.

Educating Data | MIT Technology Review

Educating Data | MIT Technology Review:

Information is captured from the moment each student arrives at school and checks in on an attendance app. For part of the day, students work independently, using iPads and Chromebooks, on “playlists” of activities that teachers have selected to match their personal goals. Data about each student’s progress is captured for teachers’ later review. Classrooms are recorded, and teachers can flag important moments by pressing a button, as you might TiVo your favorite television show.

The idea is that all the data from this network of schools will be woven into a smart centralized operating system that teachers will be able to use to design effective and personalized instruction. There is even a recommendation engine built in.

Code Poetry classes open for auditing!

Code Poetry classes open for auditing!:

For the first time, SFPC is opening a limited number of seats for our friends and community to audit individual classes. Interested participants will be able to sit in on a full class, which spans two evenings, each day starting at 6:30pm at Babycastles Gallery in Manhattan. They will also meet other students, artists and creative technologists who are pushing boundaries, learning, teaching and taking their personal projects to new levels with the help of the SFPC community.

Our summer program is tailor made for artists, writers and poets who want to learn to code or push the boundaries of what’s possible with text – it’s also for coders and technologists who want to incorporate narrative and poetry into their work.

It's Maori Language Week, so we're helping you brush up on your Te Reo

It's Maori Language Week, so we're helping you brush up on your Te Reo:

To mark Māori language week, we’re setting you a challenge.

Watch the Māori language video today, then take the quiz on what you’ve learned tomorrow.

Today’s video is all about greetings. Pay close attention and look out for the quiz - as well as your next video - tomorrow.

Ketogenic Diet in Neuromuscular and Neurodegenerative Diseases

Ketogenic Diet in Neuromuscular and Neurodegenerative Diseases:

An increasing number of data demonstrate the utility of ketogenic diets in a variety of metabolic diseases as obesity, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes. In regard to neurological disorders, ketogenic diet is recognized as an effective treatment for pharmacoresistant epilepsy but emerging data suggests that ketogenic diet could be also useful in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer, Parkinson’s disease, and some mitochondriopathies.

Although these diseases have different pathogenesis and features, there are some common mechanisms that could explain the effects of ketogenic diets.

These mechanisms are to provide an efficient source of energy for the treatment of certain types of neurodegenerative diseases characterized by focal brain hypometabolism; to decrease the oxidative damage associated with various kinds of metabolic stress; to increase the mitochondrial biogenesis pathways; and to take advantage of the capacity of ketones to bypass the defect in complex I activity implicated in some neurological diseases.

MODELING THE EVOLUTION OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

MODELING THE EVOLUTION OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES:

by Sergi Valverde and Ricard V. Solé

Summary

Is cultural evolution similar to biological evolution? In our paper Punctuated Equilibrium in the Large-Scale Evolution of Programming Languages (Journal of Royal Society Interface, in press), we have studied the natural and almost biological evolution of programming languages, which have deeply marked social and technological advances in the last 60 years. Technological change is very difficult to study because there is no established framework. Network theory allows us to analyse their historical connections and provides a systematic way of reconstructing phylogenetic networks. Our method can be extrapolated to other cultural systems and consistently captures the main classes of artificial languages and the widespread horizontal design exchanges, revealing a punctuated evolutionary path.  

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What Is Code? If You Don't Know, You Need to Read This

What Is Code? If You Don't Know, You Need to Read This:

Why do people construct and then give away free languages? Well, the creation of a good computer language is the work of an apex programmer. To have produced a successful language is acknowledged as a monumental effort, akin to publishing a multivolume history of a war, or fighting in one. The reward is glory.

Changing a language is like fighting that war all over again, and some languages have at times been trapped in a liminal state between their old, busted selves, and their new, promised version. Perl 5, released in the mid-1990s, was a language uniquely suited to the World Wide Web, and it grew as the Web grew; Perl 6 was supposed to be better in every way, and a redesign began with grand pronouncements in 2000. But after 15 years of people working continually and often for free on a project they consider in the public interest, there’s still no official Perl 6. (Latest ETA: Christmas 2015.)

The Python language community, keenly aware of the Perl community’s problems, decided to make necessary but difficult changes to the language as part of the transition from Version 2 to Version 3. They would modernize, clean up rough edges—but avoid grand reinventions. Development of Python 3.0 started in 2006; the first working version came out in 2008; and in 2015, the transition is ongoing.

Making a new language is hard. Making a popular language is much harder still and requires the smile of fortune. And changing the way a popular language works appears to be one of the most difficult things humans can do, requiring years of coordination to make the standards align. Languages are large, complex, dynamic expressions of human culture.

A little known hack from Japan to get your notebook organized

A little known hack from Japan to get your notebook organized:

I still often find myself using the humble notebook to jot down valuable ideas, especially when I’m on the go.

However notebooks are hard to organize your ideas. You either split your notebook into several sections for each ‘category’ and end up wasting valuable pages in the quieter sections or you just write your ideas as they come along making them hard to find later on.

If this sounds familiar then you are going to love this little hack I was taught here in Japan by a friendly salariman. It’s a little messy, and not something I’d use all the time but for the right subject could come in handy.

Taxonomic vandalism and the Raymond Hoser problem

Taxonomic vandalism and the Raymond Hoser problem:

In addition to naming well over 100 supposedly new snake and lizard genera, this individual has also produced taxonomic revisions of the world’s cobras, burrowing asps, vipers, rattlesnakes, water snakes, blindsnakes, pythons, crocodiles and so on. But, alas, his work is not of the careful, methodical, conservative and respected sort that you might associate with a specialised, dedicated amateur; rather, his articles appear in his own, in-house, un-reviewed, decidedly non-technical publications, they’re notoriously unscientific in style and content, and his taxonomic recommendations have been demonstrated to be problematic, frequently erroneous and often ridiculous (witness the many new taxa he has named after his pet dogs; I’m not kidding, I wish I was).

In short, the new (and really terribly formulated) taxonomic names that this individual throws out at the global herpetological community represent a sort of taxonomic vandalism; we’re expected to use these names, and – indeed – they’re supposedly officially valid according to the letter of the law, yet they besmirch the field, they litter the taxonomic registry with monstrosities, and they cause working herpetologists to waste valuable time clearing up unnecessary messes when they really should be spending their time on such areas as conservation, biological monitoring, toxicology and the documentation of ranges and environmental preferences.

The Life Cycle of Programming Languages

The Life Cycle of Programming Languages:

“New programming language communities are “graded” on how cutting-edge they are: our pattern-matching capabilities associate white men with the cutting edge, especially if they’re talking about monads…

Each new programming language is a little rebellion. Any new language or framework must differentiate itself from existing projects — if I already know Backbone, Ember’s gotta sell me on why it’s better enough to justify the learning curve. Even when new technologies’ marketing isn’t as overtly oppositional as Rails’ was, they call by their very nature: come over here, where the grass is greener. All software is broken, and most working engineers spend their days running up against their frameworks’ failures; young open source projects promise to fix these failures by implementing radically different paradigms.

Technical affiliations, as Yang and Rabkin point out, are often determined by cultural signaling as much or more than technical evaluation. When Rails programmers fled enterprise Java, they weren’t only fleeing AbstractBeanFactoryCommandGenerators, the Kingdom of Nouns. They were also fleeing HR departments, “political correctness,” structure, process, heterogeneity. The growing veneer of uncool. Certainly Rails’ early marketing was more anti-enterprise, and against how Java was often used, than it was anti-Java — while Java is more verbose, the two languages are simply not that different. Rails couldn’t sell itself as not object-oriented; it was written in an OO language. Instead, it sold itself as better able to leverage OO. “

Rigid origami vertices aka Why you can't fold a paper bag

Rigid origami vertices aka Why you can't fold a paper bag:

“You’re probably familiar with folding paper bags. You know, the small ones for lunches or the large ones for groceries? They have a triangular folding pattern on their sides that lets them either fold flat or open up into a brick shape. Five sides of the brick are covered by the paper of the bag, and the sixth top side makes an opening that you can put things into.

But did you know that you can’t actually open these bags or fold them up again purely by folding? To change them from their folded to their unfolded state, or vice versa, you also have to bend and twist the paper in the regions between the folds…

I have a small part in a new preprint analyzing this phenomenon, “Rigid Origami Vertices: Conditions and Forcing Sets” (with Abel, Cantarella, Demaine, Hull, Ku, Lang, and Tachi, arXiv:1507.01644). Even paper bags are too complicated, so we simplify the situation by looking at folding patterns formed from a flat sheet of paper by a set of creases that all meet at a single vertex. When does such a pattern have a continuous folding motion that starts from its flat state and uses all the creases while avoiding any bends between the creases? It turns out to be necessary and sufficient for the pattern to contain what we call a “bird’s foot”. This is a configuration that has folds of both types (mountain and valley), such that for at least one of these two types of folds, the convex hull of the folds has the vertex in its interior. There are four different ways of doing this: there can be three mountain folds separated by angles that are all less than π together with a single valley fold, four mountain folds on two crossed lines together with a single valley fold, or the same things with mountains and valleys swapped. Extra folds are ok, as long as one of these patterns is in there somewhere.“

I’m expecting a lot of nice animation of Japanese text in...



I’m expecting a lot of nice animation of Japanese text in Aquarion Logos.

Keto Japan • /r/ketojapan

Keto Japan • /r/ketojapan:

日本に住んでいる方(日本人と外国人)の糖質制限ダイエット情報、リソース、レシピ、などのsubredditです。

使われている英語の単語などでわからない言葉があれば気軽にきいてください。

日本語だけでもいいのでどんどん投稿してくださいね。

A subreddit for people living in Japan following a ketogenic diet to post resources in English or Japanese, tips about Japanese products that are keto friendly, as well as recipes and other banter.

Previously:

How NASA Broke The Gender Barrier In STEM

How NASA Broke The Gender Barrier In STEM:

The notorious lack of women in leadership roles in STEM seems to run rampant everywhere—everywhere except NASA, an administration that not only puts women at the helm, but continually gives them a platform to drive the larger conversation around the need for more women in the sciences.

Case in point: Dr. Ellen Stofan serves as the chief scientist of NASA. Deborah Diaz is NASA’s chief technology officer for IT. Teresa Vanhooser runs one of NASA’s largest facilities in the U.S. responsible for building rockets.

Dr. Tara Ruttley manages the science programs aboard the International Space Station. For the first time, half of an astronaut class consists of women. And now, through the convening of a new user community called Datanaut Corps, NASA is unlocking opportunities for women entrepreneurs in the tech and maker communities to use the agency’s infinite gigabytes of open data to pioneer space-inspired data science.

NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations

NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations:

NASA’s New Horizons mission is returning to normal science operations after a July 4 anomaly and remains on track for its July 14 flyby of Pluto.

The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter “safe mode” on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter.

ja-dark: Remotely programming machinic agents we created and sent into space, to other planets. That’s where we are right now. Disappointing for astronauts, perhaps, but what a thrill to be a NASA programmer, right? (Except… )

Related: Amnesia on Mars: NASA Opportunity Rover’s Memory is Failing Yet Again

The Search for the Perfect Language

The Search for the Perfect Language:

Abstract: I will tell how the story given in Umberto Eco’s book The Search for the Perfect Language continues with modern work on logical and programming languages.  

“… [Eco’s] book talks about a dream that Eco believes played a fundamental role in European intellectual history, which is the search for the perfect language.

… knowing this language would be like having a key to universal knowledge. If you’re a theologian, it would bring you closer, very close, to God’s thoughts, which is dangerous. If you’re a magician, it would give you magical powers. If you’re a linguist, it would tell you the original, pure, uncorrupted language from which all languages descend. One can go on and on…

There are perfect languages, for computing, not for reasoning. They’re computer programming languages...

So this dream, the search for the perfect language and for absolute knowledge, ended in the bowels of a computer, it ended in a Golem.

In fact, let me end with a Medieval perspective on this. How would all this look to someone from the Middle Ages? This quest, the search for the perfect language, was an attempt to obtain magical, God-like powers.

Let’s bring someone from the 1200s here and show them a notebook computer. You have this dead machine, it’s a machine, it’s a physical object, and when you put software into it, all of a sudden it comes to life!

So from the perspective of the Middle Ages, I would say that the perfect languages that we’ve found have given us some magical, God-like powers, which is that we can breath life into some inanimate matter. Observe that hardware is analogous to the body, and software is analogous to the soul, and when you put software into a computer, this inanimate object comes to life and creates virtual worlds.

So from the perspective of somebody from the year 1200, the search for the perfect language has been successful and has given us some magical, God-like abilities, except that we take them entirely for granted.”

Japan's Celebration Is Mesmerizing

Japan's Celebration Is Mesmerizing:

ja-dark: Loved the ending of this game in every way possible. Loved Miyama’s trademark penalty kick, also.

Timmins Public Library reverses decision on boys-only robotics event after girl's petition

Timmins Public Library reverses decision on boys-only robotics event after girl's petition:

ja-dark: An educational approach that caters to improving literacy by conforming to gender stereotypes for boys strikes me as stagnant. It’s rather a terrible idea, managing to exacerbate gender problems not just with literacy, but STEM.

Programs like the library’s boys-only program tend to be based on and perpetuate silly pseudoscientific claims about hardwired learning differences, claims that abuse neuroscientific findings which are themselves in a state of debate and flux but which generally point to more similarities than differences, and high, continuing levels of plasticity.

Related:

The Name of the Number

The Name of the Number:

Looks at the history and anthropology of the expression of numbers throughout the ages and across different cultures. It deals with the different ways that number representation has been structured, the history and prehistory of number concepts, and the evolution of numerical representation (in word and symbol). These themes are explored through the various expressions of number-concepts in different cultures in different places and times.

By Michael Deakin, of Function, a mathematics magazine.

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Tip: Anki warm-ups

I find that if you’re studying multiple topics that are at risk of interfering with one another but have potential to complement each other, reviewing sets of well-learned, due Anki cards specific to the current topic is a nice warm-up before you start studying new items. It’s also just a nice warm-up, period.

At any rate, saturating your mind with these topic-specific features then transitioning to the new stuff seems to clear away the interference and make space for any related areas (e.g. topic B) lurking in the brain’s background to complement the current area of focus (e.g. topic A). 

If you’re studying the cards by decreasing intervals or as above, they’re already well-learned, this is very motivating as well, a comforting ritual of triggering these intriguing pieces of information that stimulate your mind.

I think one supporting mechanism of this priming effect is the sense of familiarity and cohesion created by triggering a memory or residue of the context of originally studying/encoding the cards, and/or when you first created them.

The US’s most marginalized are disrupting power structures by learning how to code

The US’s most marginalized are disrupting power structures by learning how to code:
LGBT and other communities are using coding to get ahead.

"上手な毒の盛り方、それに必要なのが国語です。"

上手な毒の盛り方、それに必要なのが国語です。

- 殺せんせー (a pun on korosenai (殺せない, unkillable) and sensei (先生, teacher))

You may have seen this in the anime as: “Language is the key to an effective poisoning.”

ja-pico

Like ja-minimal, but simpler.

  1. Select a small set of sentences.

  2. Generate a vocabulary list for this set of sentences.

  3. Generate a kanji list for this set of words.

  4. Study the unlearned kanji until they’re well-learned.

  5. Study the unlearned words until they’re well-learned.

  6. Study the sentences until they’re well-learned.

  7. Repeat 1-6.

To expand these steps, refer to ja-minimal.

Key tips are: 

First Class Ticket by Osvaldas Grigas, the winner of 2013...



First Class Ticket by Osvaldas Grigas, the winner of 2013 Code.Poetry()

The poetry of executable code

“The emphasis on executable code reveals aesthetic possibilities of programming languages that blend form and function. Such poems are fascinating because they are variably accessible and inaccessible to readers, a function of their readers’ knowledge of programming languages and facility with poetry. They also provide means of expression in multiple ways: the visual aesthetics of the code on the page, an aural dimension if read aloud, and the output rendered by the code when compiled. Their possibilities for interpretation, then, are fragmentary, requiring negotiation on these many fronts to appreciate and understand.”

An unexecutable code poem by Mez Breeze The poetry of...



An unexecutable code poem by Mez Breeze

The poetry of unexecutable code

“In contrast to executable code poems, poems that don’t rely on executable code are not bound by the rules that constrain programming languages. Rather, they take advantages of the structures of code to represent the relationship between computational technology and human experience in symbolic ways. In doing so, these poems draw attention to the structural elements of computational technology that we may not see but are central to our experience of technology and of the world.”

Finding Japanese concgrams with WordSmith

Finding Japanese concgrams with WordSmith:

The headline’s a bit misleading, as I haven’t checked it myself yet, but you can apparently process Japanese texts in Wordsmith by inserting spaces between words. Wordsmith has a concgram feature, so theoretically you can generate lists of concgrams this way. Basically a concgram is a collocation (e.g. ‘government expenditure’) but it doesn’t have to be side-by-side or in a specific order (e.g. ‘government expenditure’ can be ‘government’s own expenditure’ or ‘expenditure of the government’).

You can use a tool like Mecab to add spaces to Japanese text for Wordsmith processing. This site allows you to do so in your browser. Write “-O wakati” (minus the quotes) for the configuration flags. You can also use this tool, TinySegmenter, replacing ‘|’ in your implementation. You can compare the different analyzers, Kakasi, Chasen, and Mecab, here. For the latter, you can also copy/paste the results… I quite like how Kakasi keeps many ‘function words’ (e.g. auxiliary verbs) together.

Ideally you’d focus on ‘content words’ (e.g. nouns, verbs), which can be identified with Mecab, but perhaps the Wordsmith results make this unnecessary to pre-filter.

Edit: It does work, but you must make sure to convert to Unicode in Wordsmith itself, in the Choose Texts dialogue, before building the tokens index. The function words being considered as part of the concgrams are problematic, creating many false positives, but perhaps there’s a filter in the concgram utility I haven’t looked at yet.

I get the impression the best results come from large corpora, as is the case with regular collocations.

J.H. Prynne

Select an object with no predecessors. Clip off its
    roots, reset to zero and remove its arrows. At each
repeat decrement the loop to an update count for all
    successors of the removed object ranking the loop body
at next successor to the array stack. Count back up
    left and right scan, test for insert loops using
0 0 as sentinel pair. Such as of figures in space,
    if (set if true) a product goto top list, an object
otherwise (if else) remaining the same. As a quantum
    (put > zero) parse to occupy inner sense more by
recursion count to null, and reset. Match for error
    to run output and restrict condition if at one
then also next. There is a bright blue light flashing
    over the exit plaque. Connect atonal floats via
path initial to hydrated silica screen occlusion ice
    batched out and bent through diode logic gates.

ja-dark: I suspect some of the source material is taken from Data Structures, Algorithms and Program Style Using C.

Previously - Learning new color names produces rapid increase in...

Jiro Yoshihara, Blue Calligraphic Lines on Dark Blue...



Jiro Yoshihara, Blue Calligraphic Lines on Dark Blue (1963)

Related: GUTAI: A Lesson in Japanese Art History

Is Computational Linguistics the New Computer Science for the Humanities?

Is Computational Linguistics the New Computer Science for the Humanities?:

A few months ago, Harvard’s J.B. Michel and Erez Lieberman-Aiden, along with colleagues from Google and elsewhere, made quite a splash with their cover article in Science on “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Along with the article, they released a new tool called the Google N-gram Viewer, that plotted word occurrences from the Google Books corpus. Suddenly, humanities scholars around the world were talking about n-gram this and n-gram that. N-gram graphs were used to trace everything from the rise and fall of political philosophies to the popularity of TV and movie stars.

Before that article came out, how many people outside the fields of linguistics or natural language processing knew what an “n-gram” was? I’m guessing that linguists and computer scientists working in Natural Language Processing/Computational Linguistics (NLP/CL) must be quite amused to see what was previously a fairly technical term in their discipline suddenly become a trending topic on social networks. N-gram t-shirts anyone?

But I think all this talk about n-grams is a good thing. Increasingly, the terminologies and techniques of NLP/CL are infiltrating the humanities in a big way and will become an important part of humanities research. Just as applied methods from computer science have become an integral part of research in biology, physics, and practically every other science, I believe we will see applied NLP/CL become a major driver for text-based humanities research. And just as today’s scientists must have a reasonably good understanding of these computer science-driven methods used in their home discipline, tomorrow’s humanists working with large bodies of text will need a firm grasp on methods that are currently within NLP/CL’s domain.

ja-dark: I talk about n-grams in the context of Japanese self-study here. Still waiting for concgram support in AntConc.

Where Sanskrit meets computer science

Where Sanskrit meets computer science:

What would make a study of Sanskrit useful to a student of Computer Science? “If a language has many meanings for a word, it is ambiguous, but when Sanskrit has many meanings for a word, it is rich!” says Dr. Ramanujan, who headed a project on ‘Computational Rendering of Paninian Grammar.’

The richness of Sanskrit comes from the fact that everything is pre-determined and derivable. “There is a derivational process, and so there is no ambiguity. You can explain everything structurally. There is a base meaning, a suffix meaning and a combination meaning. The base is the constant part, and the suffix is the variable part. The variables are most potent. With suffixes one can highlight, modify or attenuate.”

Two different words may denote an object, but you can’t use them interchangeably, for the functional aspect is what matters. For example you can’t replace ‘Agni’ with ‘Vahni,’ for ‘Agni’ has its own componential meaning.

An object may be denoted by the base. An object can have sets of relationships and interactions with other things in the world. For example, ‘Rama’, in relation to other objects, may be an agent of some activity or the recipient etc. “Even the interactions have been codified nicely and briefly. Clarity and brevity are the hallmarks of Panini’s work. His rule-based approach is his biggest plus point.”

Isn’t it true that in Sanskrit you don’t have to coin words for a new invention or discovery, and you can derive a word to suit the functionality of the object? “Yes. You have all the components with you to derive a word.

You can use multiple suffixes, if need be, to show the particular function of an object.”

ja-dark: When I first posted about this connection, I thought it was new, but apparently this belief in a strong link between programming/computer science and Sanskrit is a popular trend and one that folks are rather sardonic in dismissing.

Vikram Chandra discusses this topic in his book Geek Sublime. I recently quoted Chandra here.

Functional programming is about to go mainstream

Functional programming is about to go mainstream:

ja-dark: Seems to conflate reactive and functional programming, perhaps because: “It’s true that Reactive is close to functional programming, simply because global state modifications are a major liability in a reactive setting. So, Reactive programming naturally promotes a predominantly functional programming style. I expect that trend to continue.”

I suspect programmer-god overture2112 will be happy about this (overture2112 is the author of Morph Man and the sentence gloss plugin, which I turned into the sentence gloss shuffle plugin [for use with sentence output cards] thanks to method randomization advice and a coding tip from programmer-god cb4960).

Concurrent Correlates of Chinese Word Recognition in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Concurrent Correlates of Chinese Word Recognition in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children:

Abstract:

The aim of this study was to explore the relative contributions of phonological, semantic radical, and morphological awareness to Chinese word recognition in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children…

Semantic radical and morphological awareness was found to explain significantly more variance than tone awareness in predicting word recognition in DHH children.

This study has replicated previous evidence regarding the importance of semantic radical and morphological awareness in Chinese word recognition in hearing children and extended its significance to DHH children.

Previously. +

Semi-related.

Early stage visual-orthographic processes predict long-term retention of word form and meaning: A visual encoding training study

Early stage visual-orthographic processes predict long-term retention of word form and meaning: A visual encoding training study:

“ … meaning processes during reading are very dependent on a high quality representation of the orthographic form of the character…

There are several ways to support the acquisition of orthographic form in a nonalphabetic writing system. One is writing, a process that both directs attention to form and allows the possibility of a multi-modal (sensory motor plus visual) form representation. Another is visual chunking, an approach that explicitly teaches how to decompose a character into chunks that are functional orthographic units that repeatedly appear in different characters. In a previous study, the authors found that English learners of Chinese benefited from writing characters as they were first introduced to them. Their subsequent recognition of characters learned through writing was enhanced and produced brain activation patterns more similar to native Chinese speakers, compared with instruction that emphasized phonology. This finding is consistent with previous studies on native Chinese adults and children that orthography plays an especially important role in reading Chinese.

… Moreover, the enhancing effect of writing on reading may be general across writing systems…  Most relevant to our study, a recent study of adult learners of Chinese found that handwriting characters during learning produced greater accuracy in a subsequent lexical decision task and a semantic task than did pinyin-typing and reading-only conditions

The effect of writing may extend beyond the visual areas that support orthographic processing to a larger reading network that combines motor and visual-spatial memories… Because motor memories can last for a very long period of time, it is possible that the neural effects of well practiced writing include a long-lasting motor representation that serves recognition

visual chunking are encoding procedures that direct attention specifically to visual forms that could be functional in orthographic recognition processes. Such encoding procedures would reduce the complexity of visual forms and provide smaller orthographic units for encoding. For example, visual-chunking organizes strokes into chunks, defined as the basic stroke sequences used to compose radicals and characters. There are 560 basic chunks (stroke sequences) in Chinese, and 118 of them cover 80% of characters. Although some of these chunks make a radical, many are less than a radical. On average, a character contains 10.15 strokes character, whereas 98% characters are composed of 5 or fewer chunks, with 2.1 strokes per chunk. Thus, encoding visual chunks as part of character learning should dramatically reduce visual memory load.

Evidence suggests that native Chinese adults decompose characters into basic chunks in visual word recognition, especially when the characters are low frequency. There is reason to think that this intermediate unit of the chunk is optimal for learning, relative to the radical and the stroke. Radicals provide large units—a typical character has two radicals—that have significant stroke complexity—5.2 strokes per radical in average. In contrast, the stroke provides a minimal unit that allows no structure to reduce visual memory load. Although there have been suggestions that instruction using basic chunks may be effective for Chinese L1 and L2 learners, Chinese instruction for native speakers does not explicitly teach basic chunks…  Our study is the first to examine whether explicit visual chunking facilitates orthographic recognition in Chinese L2 learners…

Comparing writing and visual chunking, the evidence is that both can help to establish a high quality representation of orthography through attention to visual form… Accordingly, we compared the learning outcomes of visual chunking and writing instruction, compared with reading-only on English adult learners of Chinese, using ERPs as well as behavioral indicators…

… we speculate that visual chunking training fine-tuned the orthographic representation system of characters and that the restructured system can be applied to all characters, even novel ones, due to the overlap of chunks in different characters… visual chunking training draws more attention to the local features of the components of the character than passive viewing

writing training may lead to processing that includes greater visual attention to the elementary features of the character—sequences of strokes – and thus to greater sensitivity to these features during recognition… The increased visual attention may be due to the motor practice in the writing training. Previous fMRI studies have also found that writing training helps to establish a high-quality orthographic representation…  writing helps reading presumably because the increased visual attention to the visual features of letters/strokes, the critical component that is promoted by writing through motor practice leads to high-quality representation of orthography. Our results seem to suggest that this visual sensitivity can be generalized to other characters that were not learned through intensive writing training…

early stage visual processing indexed by P100 supports the acquisition of a visual representation that can support meaning and sound connections in long-term memory.

The coupling of meaning and sound recall with visual processing aligns with the assumption that a high quality orthographic representation is needed to support lexical identity in Chinese and in reading more generally. Even in alphabetic languages, where phonology is a strong support for reading, sensitivity to orthography is important for reading acquisition.”

ja-dark: I’ve pointed out how kanji have evolved to be easy to learn, and one aspect of this ease is the recycled chunks, packaging complex stroke sequences into simpler, larger parts, as you work your way up to holistic character-level processing. Methods that take advantage of chunking give learners a huge boost. I discuss how to implement this here. In my Kanji Dark deck, correlate ‘chunks’ as discussed above with ‘constituents’ or both radicals, phonetic components and other ‘junk kDNA’ [kanji DNA].

I’ve also pointed out that handwriting is not only important for reading, but that motor learning benefits from spaced/distributed practice. So you don’t have to write characters a million times to get the reading benefits, just write them out a few times while learning during Anki reviews, as a supplement. In fact, the above paper suggests that once you’ve done this for a certain foundational number of characters, it will generalize to new characters. So if you focus handwriting practice on individuated chunks through the Kanji Dark deck (e.g. kanji representative of each radical category, and/or perhaps those with the most constituents), that might be most efficient.

Most recently I procured a Japanese device called the Sharp WG-N20 for handwriting practice (handwriting’s benefits are for all manner of domains). It’s basically a Kindle/Boogie Board hybrid (appearance/battery of Kindle, functionality of Boogie Board). I must say I quite like it; the screen’s a bit dim and reflective, but the text shows up clearly, nonetheless. You can customize the backgrounds, and I find that a blank (unlined) background is best, because you’re not distracted by trying to focus on the hard-to-see lines, and can focus on the clear ‘ink’.

Japanese WordNet

Japanese WordNet:

Worth noting that the searchable Japanese WordNet is now hosted at the above link.

Don’t forget these Japanese WordNet Anki decks: 20k and 55k.

On why I love Japanese WordNet.

Language Magazine » Sex, Chocolate, and Vocab

Language Magazine » Sex, Chocolate, and Vocab:

Learning new words stimulates the same brain center as such long-proven means of deriving pleasure as having sex, gambling or eating chocolate, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology.

ja-dark: I posted a link to this research when it was first published but stumbled across it in my bookmarks so here it is again. If you’re reading this, I suspect you too adore the pleasures of collecting new words.

Netflix adds descriptive audio tracks after Daredevil snafu

Netflix adds descriptive audio tracks after Daredevil snafu:

Netflix hit a nerve last weekend when its new series Daredevil, which follows the sightless crimefighter’s early rise, premiered without a descriptive audio track for blind viewers. As The Mary Sue reports, that irony did not sit well with viewers, many of whom took to Twitter or Change.org to voice their displeasure. In response, Netflix has announced that, starting today, Daredevil will feature an additional descriptive track selectable from the language options menu. 

ja-dark: I’d wondered if they would take the opporunity for this series to explore a storytelling format that acknowledged the blind; I suppose not. It would’ve been interesting if the director, for example, had explored directing and editing the series as if for radio/audiobook, also.

The series did, however, feature the protagonist reading laptop documents with a refreshable braille display.

I have previously posted about braille here. Specifically about reading technologies, Japanese/Chinese braille, and the cognitive aspects of braille literacy.

RelatedWith great power comes great disability

Though these superhero characters are disabled, some feel they can’t really be categorised as positive portrayals because they are so fantastical.

“Characters like Daredevil have superpowers that compensate for their disability,” says graphic novelist Al Davison from Newcastle. “This is not realistic or fair.”

“We need more comic book characters who are believable representations of disabled people, rather than ones whose disabilities are negated by superpowers.”

Microsoft launches scheme to hire people with autism

Microsoft launches scheme to hire people with autism:

The company’s corporate VP for worldwide operations, Mary Ellen Smith, said in a blog post that the tech giant will begin a pilot program to hire people with autism to full-time positions. The scheme will begin with an offering of 10 places at Microsoft’s Redmond facility in the US.

ja-dark: I can’t help but think of the science fiction novel The Speed of Dark, written by Elizabeth Moon, who in addition to being a well-known sci-fi author, was the mother of an autistic child (now adult). The protagonist worked in bioinformatics with a group of autists sharing a department at a corporation.

Previously (on the autism-as-superpower myth).  Also. +

Related recent articles:

A new study by a linguistics professor and an alumnus from The University of Texas at Austin sheds light on a well-known linguistic characteristic of autistic children — their reluctance to use pronouns — paving the way for more accurate diagnostics.

Pronouns — words such as “you” and “me” in English — are difficult for children with autism, who sometimes reverse them (for example, using “you” to refer to oneself) or avoid them in favor of names….

“Our work suggests that the opacity of pronouns in English and other spoken languages is not at the root of the problem,” said Shield, a UT Austin Linguistics alumnus and lead author for the study. “We suspect, though more work is needed, that people with autism may differ in their experiences of selfhood.”

The power of believing that you can improve

The power of believing that you can improve:

“Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that’s why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I’ve wasted most of my life.”

Let’s not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with ‘yet’.

ja-dark: I had that same feeling once I learned about all this stuff ~5-10 years ago. Luckily, since I then/now knew that not even my brain was set in stone, it only motivated me to work that much harder and smarter to catch up to and surpass my hypothetical self that knew this all along.

The Code School-Industrial Complex

The Code School-Industrial Complex:

"When we learn to read, we also acquire a new way to learn. After learning to read you can use your..."

“When we learn to read, we also acquire a new way to learn. After learning to read you can use your new skill to acquire knowledge about various other subjects by reading books. It’s the same with learning to code. When you learn to code you can use your new skills and code to learn.”

- Mitch Resnick, creator of Scratch

Girls in IT: The Facts

Girls in IT: The Facts:

Computer Science, Education, Fog: Let me tell you what I know about gender and CS

Computer Science, Education, Fog: Let me tell you what I know about gender and CS:
I based the main arc of my presentation on a book chapter by Whitecraft and Williams that Greg Wilson of Software Carpentry was kind enough to forward to me. It’s an evenhanded look at much of the research in this area, including theories that are often out of favor in most places I frequent. It served as a great overview, though I felt it could have focused more on issues involving differences in prior programming experience pre-college and intimidation brought on by “nerdy strutting”. (Update: I just discovered a fantastic 2012 report by NCWIT that can also serve as a great overview. It covers cultural issues more comprehensively, with more recent research and more focus on the pre-college years.)

C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: Our perception of programming languages is influenced by our gender expectations

C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: Our perception of programming languages is influenced by our gender expectations:

“Surprising and interesting empirical evidence that language use is mostly gender-neutral. Our expectations about gender influence how we think about programming languages.  These perceptions help explain the prevalence of C and C++ in many undergraduate computing programs.

There is also a gendered perception of language hierarchy with the most “manly” at the top. One Slashdot commenter writes, “Bah, Python is for girls anyways. Everybody knows that PERL is the language of true men.” Someone else responds, “Actually, C is the language of true men…” Such views suggest that women might disproportionately use certain languages, but Ari and Leo found in their programmer surveys that knowledge of programming languages is largely equivalent between genders. Women are slightly more likely to know Excel and men are slightly more likely to know C, C#, and Ruby, but not enough to establish any gendered hierarchy.

via C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: How False Stereotypes Turn Into Technical “Truths” by Jean Yang & Ari Rabkin | Model View Culture. “

Related: The Night Watch

Google Scholar Button

Google Scholar Button:

ja-dark: Not sure why they removed Scholar from the links menus a while back, but it was very frustrating and I found myself using GreaseMonkey to fix it. If you’re on Chrome, this way might be ‘simpler’ (excluding Google simply putting the link back in the menus).

Code as a Second Language

Code as a Second Language:

Learning to code is being proposed by some as an alternative to learning a second language. Imagine having the choice: French, English or JavaScript. It’s an interesting concept, but could present problems if you’re, for example, traveling in Spain and order a bottle of fine Rioja with something like“function getwine(‘2 liter’,’house’){};”

Research on brain activity conducted with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may support a connection between foreign and computer languages. A person is placed in an MRI scanner, then asked to perform a task. As the task is performed, scientists observe what parts of the brain use more oxygen, which identifies the parts of the brain being used for specific tasks.

This research suggests that our brains respond to computer programming in the same way as performing music, verbal creativity, problem solving, memorizing, repeating actions, deduction or rhyming. Rhyming words like “weep”, “beep”, and “sleep” light up your brain the same way as“while (x > 1) { result = result * x; x--; }”.

More exciting, there is research to support the idea that exercising your brain is similar to exercising your muscles. Programming and speaking light up the same part of your brain, so it is possible that programming improves your speech. Given that, it’s quite possible that programming can help you develop other skills…

Related:

Causality in linguistics: Nodes and edges in causal graphs

Causality in linguistics: Nodes and edges in causal graphs:

Three Reasons LinkedIn Broke the Bank for Lynda.com

Three Reasons LinkedIn Broke the Bank for Lynda.com:
Teaching isn’t traditionally viewed as a high-paying career choice. But building software for teaching? That appears to be a little more lucrative.
At least it was today, when LinkedIn announced the $1.5 billion acquisition of online education company Lynda.com. It’s the online business network’s largest acquisition ever by a wide margin. The company paid around $175 million for Bizo last summer, the closest LinkedIn’s ever been to a billion-dollar acquisition until now.

ja-dark: I think speech w/ visual supplements is the worst way to teach anything and have never used Lynda despite having free access. I was going to write this post about how the visual text needs to take precedence so that learners aren’t forced to work at the speed that someone else talks, all that information restricted to the inferior linguistic medium of speech as opposed to text with its rapid ‘backlooping’ ability… 

But then, on a whim, I used my access to check out some of these videos, and I see they do actually use interactive transcripts, so, uh, nevermind. Go Lynda! So long as they have plenty of those types of videos, that is…

If you want to see how to create interactive transcripts/audiobooks for Japanese learning, etc., check out my earlier posts such as this

Related: Multimedia learning

Word (computer architecture)

Word (computer architecture):
In computing, word is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular processor design. A word is a fixed-sized piece of data handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bytes in a word (the word size, word width, or word length) is an important characteristic of any specific processor design or computer architecture.

ja-dark: I’ve always thought this an interesting term to use in this context.

"For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary..."

“For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.”

- W. H. Auden (1948)

Duolingo Adds Klingon to its Language-Learning Platform

Duolingo Adds Klingon to its Language-Learning Platform:

ja-dark: Stuff like this is fun I suppose and part of the push for multilingualism in the global, diverse community, but it feels to me as if language-learning self-study has been stagnating for years, the opportunities offered by the past 15-20 years of web and tech tool capabilities, and the insights provided from linguistic and psychological research squandered. I blame a mixture of guru blogs spreading outdated, harmful info (and creating toxic cults that poison communities) and fairly useless, but easy, apps and app-like sites. But I suppose they’re just meeting the demand for get-fluent-quick schemes.

The Tower of Babel, Codes that Changed the World - BBC Radio 4

The Tower of Babel, Codes that Changed the World - BBC Radio 4:

“More and more have come to think of it as the language of priests… it’s this arcane tongue that in the hands of an adept can do amazing things.” – Vikram Chandra

"When bleeding is beneficial, it should be performed in the spring."

“When bleeding is beneficial, it should be performed in the spring.”

- Hippocrates

Alan Turing's Hidden Manuscript: Notes On The Foundations Of Computer Science

Alan Turing's Hidden Manuscript: Notes On The Foundations Of Computer Science:

ja-dark: I’ve seen the figure £1m, I wonder how much of that will go to charity, and to what charity. The Washington Post mentioned inquiring about it a few months ago, guess they never heard back… I hope the majority of it goes to marginalized groups, and not to some privileged individual’s private profit, or to a discriminatory cause, etc.

Sidney HarrisSemi-related:Gaza man feels duped after selling...

Sorting Is Boring: Computer Science Education Needs to Join the Real World

Sorting Is Boring: Computer Science Education Needs to Join the Real World:
Every April, we at Girls Teaching Girls To Code hold a day-long event called Code Camp to introduce 200+ high school girls in the San Francisco Bay Area to computer science. Throughout the day, 40 women in computer science from Stanford University expose students to their first programming language, help them use their new skills on cool projects, and inspire girls to the wide array of careers in computer science…
As computer science students, we know why sorting is important because we see it being used everywhere. But from the girls’ perspective, we were just saying, “Here is a bunch of ways to sort a list.” So of course for them, sorting was boring.
The thing is, the majority of computer science classes teach not only sorting but also every other concept in computer science in exactly this way – by presenting various algorithms, explaining how they work, and expecting students to enjoy it. Introductory computer science education at universities tends to emphasize the technical aspects of programming, such as speed and efficiency. Assignments ask students to print out prime numbers or determine if a word is an anagram – certainly interesting and difficult, but not particularly useful. Only several semesters later do students study the interdisciplinary, real-world applications that motivated many of them to learn computer science at all.
This structure causes many students to give up on computer science early on…

Related quote: “Mathematics instruction should concentrate less on the low-level use of high-level ideas and more on the high-level use of low-level ideas.” - Uri Treisman, 1993

Related books: Algorithms UnlockedNine Algorithms That Changed the Future

If you want to play the sounds of a Japanese coffee shop in the...



If you want to play the sounds of a Japanese coffee shop in the background of whatever you’re doing, here you go. An mp3 version is here.

Think C: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (PDF)

Think C: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (PDF):

You’ve probably heard of the free eBook Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by now, and know as listed here that there’s a Java version, a C++ version, and an OCaml version…

What’s not listed there or really discussed anywhere that I can find is that there’s a version for plain old C. So, yeah, there’s that.

Also, don’t forget Zed Shaw’s free eBook Learn C The Hard Way.

You might be happier, if you’ve already learned Python with a similar book, to just use these ‘C for Python programmers’ guides…

Dual decomposition inference algorithm Two Knives Cut Better...



Dual decomposition inference algorithm

Two Knives Cut Better Than One: Chinese Word Segmentation with Dual Decomposition

There are two dominant approaches to Chinese word segmentation: word-based and character-based models, each with respective strengths. Prior work has shown that gains in segmentation performance can be achieved from combining these two types of models; however, past efforts have not provided a practical technique to allow mainstream adoption. We propose a method that effectively combines the strength of both segmentation schemes using an efficient dual-decomposition algorithm for joint inference. Our method is simple and easy to implement. Experiments on SIGHAN 2003 and 2005 evaluation datasets show that our method achieves the best reported results to date on 6 out of 7 datasets.

Anthony Ferraro | Hypothetical Beats (2015) | Artsy

Anthony Ferraro | Hypothetical Beats (2015) | Artsy:

An algorithm that converts other algorithms into music, Hypothetical Beats allows computer languages to sing. This lot includes a full-use license to a novel program that recognizes patterns in lines of code and interprets these as rhythmic sound.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Those who write computer programs might not generally consider themselves musical composers, but Anthony Ferraro begs to differ. Drawing on ideas first advanced by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and John Cage, as well as by the work of later “generative” music composers including Brian Eno and Richard James (a.k.a. Aphex Twin), Ferraro has devised Hypothetical Beats, an algorithm that converts other algorithms into music.

Hypothetical Beats does not directly translate bytes into notes. Rather, the program recognizes patterns in other codes and interprets these as rhythmic sound. Hypothetical Beats, Ferraro says, “grants any individual—coder or non-coder, musical or not—the ability to participate meaningfully and intuitively in the creation of music.”

Listen to Brian Kernighan’s Hello World algorithm expressed through Hypothetical Beats.

Coming to an art gallery near you: Software code

Coming to an art gallery near you: Software code:

The recent Algorithm Auction demonstrated the aesthetic value of programming code and a possible alternative to commercial funding for technologists.

We all know that software is an important part of everyone’s lives today given all of the things it now powers, from computers to thermostats. But can the programming logic and code behind software be admired not just for its functionality, but also for its aesthetic qualities? Based on the results of a recent art auction, the answer seems to be “Yes.”
The Algorithm Auction, described by its organizers as “the world’s first auction celebrating the art of code,” was held last month. It was organized by Ruse Laboratories with proceeds benefiting the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and featured lots consisting of, well, software code.
The basic motivation behind it, as Ruse co-founder Fernando Cwilich Gil told me via email, was to foster a patronage type of system, as exists in the art world, to support the work of technologists. “The traditional VC model works for many technological ideas, so long as they have a purely commercial application,” Cwilich Gil wrote. “But for many other worthy ideas the current system stifles, disfigures or ultimately kills their essence. Finding the right patron is a powerful alternative that can benefit all parties, but most importantly, advances the idea itself.”

Patrice Bäumel - SchizophreniacThis song reminds me of Halt and...



Patrice Bäumel - Schizophreniac

This song reminds me of Halt and Catch Fire.

Other fitting songs: Ken Ishii - Seiun; Robert Babicz - A Girl from Jupiter; Gai Barone - Mr. Slade

Related: Music to get you into the coding groove

Computational Linguistics Reveals How Wikipedia Articles Are Biased Against Women

Computational Linguistics Reveals How Wikipedia Articles Are Biased Against Women:

But there are other signs of a more insidious gender bias that will be much harder to change. “We also find that the way women are portrayed on Wikipedia starkly differs from the way men are portrayed,” they say.

This conclusion is the result of first studying the network of connections between articles on Wikipedia. It turns out that articles about women are much more likely to link to articles about men than vice versa, a finding that holds true for all six language versions of Wikipedia that the team studied.

More serious is the difference in the way these articles refer to men and women as revealed by computational linguistics. Wagner and co studied this counting the number of words in each biographical article that emphasize the sex of the person involved.

Wagner and co say that articles about women tend to emphasize the fact that they are about women by overusing words like “woman,” “female,” or “lady” while articles about men tend not to contain words like “man,” “masculine,” or “gentleman.” Words like “married,” “divorced,” “children,” or “family” are also much more frequently used in articles about women, they say.

The team thinks this kind of bias is evidence for the practice among Wikipedia editors of considering maleness as the “null gender.” In other words, there is a tendency to assume an article is about a man unless otherwise stated. “This seems to be a plausible assumption due to the imbalance between articles about men and women,” they say.

Metaphors of linguistic knowledge: The generative metaphor vs. the mental corpus

Metaphors of linguistic knowledge: The generative metaphor vs. the mental corpus:

How do we conceptualize language knowledge? A view which has dominated academic linguistics for at least half a century is that knowledge of a language can be partitioned between a lexicon and a syntax (i.e. a dictionary and a grammar book), whereby the lexicon lists the basic building blocks (prototypically, words) of a language, the syntax lists the rules whereby the basic units can be combined.

Some of the more problematic aspects of this view are addressed. An alternative model is then proposed, namely, that language knowledge can be thought of in terms of a “mental corpus”. A person’s present knowledge consists of accumulated memory traces of previous linguistic experience. The benefits of the mental corpus model, as well as some objections, are discussed.

Interesting quote:

“My medium-term project is to work on the idea of the mental corpus as a metaphor for language knowledge. I want to get away from the idea that a language can be represented as a list of words (the dictionary) and a list of rules for combining words (the syntax, or grammar book). Instead, I’m exploring the idea that knowledge of a language consists in accumulated memory traces of previous encounters with the language. These, together, constitute the said “mental corpus”. Throwing in a few more components, I would see the mental corpus as being multimedia in nature, comprising not just acoustic but also visual and all sorts of contextual information. It would also have a hypertext format, in that accessing any single entry in the corpus would provide links to many other kinds of entry.”

Sharp may spin off LCD unit, seek investment from Japan government-backed fund

Sharp may spin off LCD unit, seek investment from Japan government-backed fund:

Loss-making Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp may spin off its LCD panel business and seek funding for it from the government-backed Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), a source familiar with the plan said on Sunday.

The Nikkei business daily earlier reported that the LCD unit, which supplies displays to smartphone and tablet makers, will be spun off in the current fiscal year and that INCJ could invest 100 billion yen ($840.3 million) in the new entity.

The source said Sharp, as part of its restructuring plan, wants to keep a majority in the LCD unit, and that details of an INCJ stake have not been decided.

A Sharp spokesman, while confirming the company was considering various reforms for its LCD business, said no decision had been made.

Sharp, on track for its third annual net loss in four years, has been trying to negotiate its second major bailout since 2012, with the company promising restructuring in return for new funds.

ja-dark: I’m glad I was able to buy this ‘Kindle for handwriting’ (as I’m calling it) before anything crazy happens to Sharp’s LCD stuff. They should have sold them outside Japan so people wouldn’t be stuck with the Boogie Board and its dark background. But, in a country where the Attack on Titan anime’s second season is delayed till 2016 so they can make some random side projects, you can’t expect good business decisions.

Big-O Notation and the Wizards' War

Big-O Notation and the Wizards' War:

Years ago, a ferocious wizards’ war raged across the land. Initially sparked by a disagreement over the correct pronunciation of the word “elementary”, things quickly escalated. The battles lasted months, as the two sides fought to break the stalemate. Neither side could gain an upper hand. The strength of the two sides was almost perfectly matched, until a computational theorist shifted the balance of power forever…

That morning, Clare resolved to break the stalemate and end the war for good. So, she met with the commander of the closest faction. During a three hour meeting, she grilled him about the war’s progress. In the process, she learned how wizards thought about their spells. The interview ended with one, unmistakable conclusion: wizards knew nothing about computational complexity. Years of casting spells had made them lazy and inefficient.

Clare knew that the first side to relearn the importance of computational complexity would win the war. So, she called together all of the wizards from the faction for a tutorial at the local pub.

“Your problem,” she began. “Is that your techniques are inefficient.”

The wizards mumbled in protest. How dare this accountant lecture them on the art of casting spells? They threatened to transform her drink into oatmeal.

“But there is a solution!” Clare continued. “There is a new technique, called Big-O notation, that will shift the tides. This notation tells you how a spell scales as the size of the battle increases, allowing you to know which spell is most efficient. You simply ask: how many steps you need to cast a spell when facing N different enemies? Then you strip out all the constant factors and focus on just the parts that grow the fastest.”

“For example,” Clare continued…

Previously:

Ambient belonging: How stereotypical cues impact gender participation in computer science (PDF)

Ambient belonging: How stereotypical cues impact gender participation in computer science (PDF):

People can make decisions to join a group based solely on exposure to that group’s physical environment.

Four studies demonstrate that the gender difference in interest in computer science is influenced by exposure to environments associated with computer scientists.

In Study 1, simply changing the objects in a computer science classroom from those considered stereotypical of computer science (e.g., Star Trek poster, video games) to objects not considered stereotypical of computer science (e.g., nature poster, phone books) was sufficient to boost female undergraduates’ interest in computer science to the level of their male peers.

Further investigation revealed that the stereotypical broadcast a masculine stereotype that discouraged women’s sense of ambient belonging and subsequent interest in the environment (Studies 2, 3, and 4) but had no similar effect on men (Studies 3, 4).

This masculine stereotype prevented women’s interest from developing even in environments entirely populated by other women (Study 2).

Objects can thus come to broadcast stereotypes of a group, which in turn can deter people who do not identify with these stereotypes from joining that group.

Providing On-Line CS Teacher Education, Designed for Teachers

Providing On-Line CS Teacher Education, Designed for Teachers:
“I’ve written several times in Blog@CACM about computer science teachers. Successful computer science teachers have different knowledge and skills than software developers, or even general teachers (see post here). CS teachers need professional learning opportunities in order to develop their expertise and confidence, which increases their sense of identity as CS teachers, which improves their quality and retention (see post here). MOOCs have not been successful (so-far) in helping teachers to learn CS because of high drop-out rates (see post here).
For the last three years, my research group at Georgia Tech (http://home.cc.gatech.edu/csl/CSLearning4U) has been developing an ebook for teaching teachers about computer science – specifically, teaching the AP CS Principles (see http://apcsprinciples.org) curriculum using Python. This is an ebook designed explicitly for teachers’ needs:
  • It’s an ebook (not a class, not a video) so that it can be completed in small chunks that fit into a teachers’ life.
  • The structure of the book has little expository text or videos. Most of the ebook is a pattern of worked examples and practice exercises – lots and lots of them.
  • It doesn’t aim to teach software development. It aims to teach the reading and debugging skills that are most critical to what a successful CS teacher does.
  • The ebook includes pedagogical concept knowledge (PCK), the specific knowledge that CS teachers need to be successful teachers, like misconceptions that students typically make.
  • There is support for “book clubs,” groups of readers who can negotiate a schedule to push each other to complete.

I am pleased to announce the ebook is ready for release!

Please share this URL with any teacher you think might want to learn about teaching CS (especially for the AP CS Principles – see learning objectives here) in Python: http://ebooks.cc.gatech.edu/TeachCSP-Python/

Born in Yokohama City, Japan, Shoko Kazama was fascinated by...



Born in Yokohama City, Japan, Shoko Kazama was fascinated by drawings, especially Chinese characters and composing poems as a child. She studied calligraphy and passionately orchestrated the brushes, Japanese paper, and Chinese ink.

The unique richness, complexity and depth of Chinese characters coupled with the unpredictable nature of her material challenged her beyond her limits. Her works capture the vast real, of real to abstract universe, or somewhere in between.

石川九楊 (Ishikawa Kyuyo)“Ishikawa Kyuyo developed a new approach to...



石川九楊 (Ishikawa Kyuyo)

“Ishikawa Kyuyo developed a new approach to calligraphy. He transcribes canonical texts (literary, philosophical, or religious) originally composed during Japan’s middle ages, from the late twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and he uses Chinese characters and Japanese syllabary that he writes in an extremely eccentric manner. The characters are readable, given time, and they often act as puzzles for the viewer to figure out. The general forms and stroke order of each character are present, although they lose coherence by being elongated, attenuated, made extremely dense or nearly transparent. The rhythms of Kyuyo’s calligraphy evoke the mood and writing style of each text. Now living in Kyoto, Kyuyo has a sizable following.”

More.

Another Ishikawa…





Medieval Hackers

Medieval Hackers:

The people involved in translating both the Bible and the parliamentary statutes in late medieval England used the very terms of openness and access that hackers use today: they stress commonness, openness, and freedom. This book traces the striking similarity of vocabulary used by contemporary legal theorists and hackers and that of early translators… As modern hackers would say, in late medieval England the desire for sacred and secular law in the vernacular was “an itch that had to be scratched,” … for the common good.

… hackers are truly medieval, thanks to their relationship with the information commons… early attempts at information control resulted in the first articulations of hacker culture…

Punctum Books is Open Access.

Related

Sharp updates 'analog' handwriting tablet after surprising success

Sharp updates 'analog' handwriting tablet after surprising success:

ja-dark: Are you kidding me? I’ve been looking for a device that does precisely this for years, and it was always out, just in Japan? Meanwhile we’re stuck with the ‘Boogie Board’ or the $1k+ Sony digital paper. All I’ve been wanting was something purely for scratching out notes while studying hours a day, throwaway notes useful only in the moment… using a $250-$1000 tablet w/ a fuller OS and draining the battery every day just doing that is overkill, IMO. As is going through endless lead/ink and paper. I went paperless years ago and I don’t ever want to look back to the dark times when we were monkeys screaming at each other from trees and then scribbling our equations on slices of said trees.

image

Here’s a video demonstration of the Sharp WG-N20. There’s an S20 that seems to have extra stuff for a scheduling system, but it’s rather ugly.

It’s ironic that the article notes a handwriting culture in Japan, based around rote kanji memorization, when I’ve explained how simultaneously handwriting is overblown by traditionalists, and how handwriting is still essential for modern learning. That is, minimal, efficient usage of handwriting, e.g. for learning kanji, you write out kanji a few times during spaced retrieval practice to increase memorization through muscle memory. This use of handwriting for memory is all-around useful, however, such as for mathematics…

At any rate, this device seems essentially a Kindle but for writing/drawing, even down to the price. You can get these imported from Japan via Amazon.com for $100 (that includes shipping). The interface is entirely Japanese but the device is rather simple, plus here’s a translation of some stuff.

See all of my links to research and my explanations for the awesomeness of handwriting for learning here: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/tagged/handwriting

Python 3.5 to include ‘type hinting’

Python 3.5 to include ‘type hinting’:

Python creator Guido van Rossum’s proposal for static type-checking annotations is inching closer to reality, and the feature has taken on a new name: type hinting.

Back in August, van Rossum published a proposal on the Python mailing list recommending type-checking annotations as a valuable feature for the next version of Python to improve the performance of editors and IDEs, linter capabilities, standard notation, and refactoring…

Along with the proposal, the Python author also posted a more fully formed theoretical document, “The Theory of Type Hinting,” laying out the basics of the proposal summarizing gradual typing, notational conventions, general rules, pragmatics, and the types themselves. According to van Rossum, the entire runtime component proposal can be implemented as a single pure Python module, using square brackets for generic types.

Photo



Big O notation

Khan Academy: Algorithm Analysis

Khan Academy: Algorithm Analysis:

This is a particularly good tutorial, I think, on Big-O, theta, omega, etc., with interactive quiz questions. I’m personally not a fan of videos or anything that uses speech to convey information like this, even when supplemented with slides and such, so I’m glad to see these sorts of interactive texts at Khan Academy.

Previously.

This free book is also excellent. I would recommend these resources before Sedgewick’s Algorithms section introducing tilde notation, personally.

Then dive into CLRS, at least for the ‘master theorem’…

5 Reasons Architects Should Learn to Code - Arch Smarter

5 Reasons Architects Should Learn to Code - Arch Smarter:

A Beginner’s Guide to Big O Notation

A Beginner’s Guide to Big O Notation:

Big O notation is used in Computer Science to describe the performance or complexity of an algorithm. Big O specifically describes the worst-case scenario, and can be used to describe the execution time required or the space used (e.g. in memory or on disk) by an algorithm.

Anyone who’s read Programming Pearls or any other Computer Science books and doesn’t have a grounding in Mathematics will have hit a wall when they reached chapters that mention O(N log N) or other seemingly crazy syntax. Hopefully this article will help you gain an understanding of the basics of Big O and Logarithms.

As a programmer first and a mathematician second (or maybe third or fourth) I found the best way to understand Big O thoroughly was to produce some examples in code. So, below are some common orders of growth along with descriptions and examples where possible.

Previously: Determining Big O Notation | Dream.In.Code

Google 日本語入力 ピロピロバージョンA new way to input Japanese! The gorgeous...



Google 日本語入力 ピロピロバージョン

A new way to input Japanese! The gorgeous video for this device is subtitled in English and explains everything.

“It’s a device filled with dreams.”

Previously.

Related 1 & 2 & 3.

The Kazuraki glyph for 輪 (U+8F2A) shown overlaid on the...



The Kazuraki glyph for 輪 (U+8F2A) shown overlaid on the prototypical em-box.

Let’s talk about the Kazuraki typeface in particular, which has some interesting historical background. What was it about the calligraphic style of Fujiwara-no Teika that inspired you to use it as the basis of a modern typeface?

The calligraphy of Fujiwara-no Teika is very unique and charming. During that period [the late 12th century] it must have been a beautifully flowing style of writing… I believe that his characters are something like a font, as common and readable as a character design in the modern computer world, although computers did not exist in his age. Kazuraki is designed based on his writing style, and it was praised as the first fully-proportional Japanese font…

Can you talk a little about why it is so unusual for a Japanese typeface to be fully proportional?

… When typesetting started in Japan, they put all characters into a rectangular shape so that it would be easier to set. Printing characters are based on a rectangular design for this reason. Now, if you change this rule, using a rectangular design space to design characters, it means we lose the rules for lining up characters like we had before. It becomes difficult to control characters, and causes character collisions or undesirable spacing.

In case you missed my earlier recommendation for Noto Sans CJK...



In case you missed my earlier recommendation for Noto Sans CJK (aka Source Han Sans), here’s a reminder:

Interview with Ryoko Nishizuka, lead designer for Source Han Sans 

What is the biggest challenge you face when designing typefaces? What part of the work comes easiest to you?

Every typeface is a new challenge, and the kana in particular are quite difficult. Also, kana are difficult not only in their form, but also in that the expressions change in horizontal and vertical writing. But what I find easy is to remain persistent, and to continue this work for hours.

Original sketch by type designer Ryoko Nishizuka, who designed the new font.

Toolkits for the Mind

Toolkits for the Mind:

An Introduction to Genetics for Language Scientists

An Introduction to Genetics for Language Scientists:

Related: Language evolution: Constraints and opportunities from modern genetics (PDF)

Previously. +

Author’s blog post.

Domain generality versus modality specificity: the paradox of statistical learning (PDF)

Domain generality versus modality specificity: the paradox of statistical learning (PDF):

“In cognitive science, theories of SL have emerged as potential domain-general alternatives to the influential domain-specific Chomskyan account of language acquisition.

Rather than assuming an innate, modular, and neurobiologically hardwired human capacity for processing linguistic information, SL [Statistical Learning], as a theoretical construct, was offered as a general mechanism for learning and processing any type of sensory input that unfolds across time and space.

To date, evidence for SL has been found across an array of cognitive functions, such as segmenting continuous auditory input, visual search, contextual cuing, visuomotor learning, conditioning, and in general, any predictive behavior.

Here, we propose a broad theoretical account of SL, starting with a discussion of how a domain-general ability may be subject to modality- and stimulus- specific constraints.

We define ‘learning’ as the process responsible for updating internal representations given specific input and encoding potential relations between them, thereby improving the processing of that input.

Similarly, ‘processing’ is construed as determining how an input to a neural system interacts with the current knowledge stored in that system to generate internal representations.

Thus, knowledge in the system is continuously updated via learning.

Specifically, we take SL to reflect updates based on the discovery of systematic regularities embedded in the input, and provide a mechanistic account of how distributional properties are picked up across domains, eventually shaping behavior.

We further outline how this account is constrained by neuroanatomy and systems neuroscience, offering independent insights into the specific constraints on SL.

Finally, we highlight individual differences in abilities for SL as a major, largely untapped source of evidence for which our account makes clear predictions…

Within our framework, domain generality primarily emerges because neural networks across modalities instantiate similar computational principles.

Moreover, domain generality may also arise either through the possible engagement of partially shared neural networks that modulate the encoding of the to-be-learned statistical structure, or if stimulus input representations encoded in a given modality (e.g., visual or auditory) are fed into a multi-modal region for further computation and learning.”

ja-dark: Any time you see Morten Christiansen’s name on a paper, you can expect some next level sh*t.

Max Headroom: the definitive history of the 1980s digital icon

Max Headroom: the definitive history of the 1980s digital icon:

“On Thursday, April 4th, 1985, a blast of dystopian satire hit the UK airwaves. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was a snarky take on media and corporate greed, told through the eyes of investigative journalist Edison Carter (Matt Frewer) and his computer-generated alter-ego: an artificial intelligence named Max Headroom.

Set in a near-future where global corporations control all media and citizens are hopelessly addicted to dozens of TV channels, the movie follows Carter — working for the mysterious Network 23 — as he discovers that network executives have created a form of subliminal advertising known as “blipverts” that can actually kill. While tracking the story, Carter is flung into a barrier marked “Max. Headroom — 2.3m.” Desperate to maintain ratings with its star reporter, the network enlists a young hacker to download Carter’s mind and create a virtual version of the journalist. But things don’t go quite right. The result: the stuttering, sarcastic Max.

20 Minutes into the Future kicked off an extensive franchise, and Max became a singular ’80s pop culture phenomenon that represented everything wonderful and horrible about the decade. Max hosted music video shows; Max interviewed celebrities; Max hawked New Coke; Max Headroom became US network television’s very first cyberpunk series. Max was inescapable — and then almost just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone…”

"Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is..."

“Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.”

- Cory Doctorow

Where’s _why? What Happened When One of the World’s Most Beloved Programmers Vanished.

Where’s _why? What Happened When One of the World’s Most Beloved Programmers Vanished.:

I decided to try to learn computer programming.

Why? I understand, if imperfectly, the laws that control the physical world around me. Ask me why an apple falls to the Earth or why a cork floats in water or why electrons do not collapse into the nucleus, and I can at least attempt an explanation. But the virtual world I live in is a mystery.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For me, and for most of you, I suspect, the computer is just that: a glowing, magic box.

Learning to program would help demystify the technologies I use daily and allow me to even create some humble magic of my own.

From ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ (1993)

After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does.

They are incantations, in other words, and the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

And it’s precisely this logic that provides the real magic… not the fictive trappings of voodoo and shapeshifting and wizardry, but the conflation of speech and act that’s inevitable in any computer-mediated world… the increasingly wired world at large. This is dangerous magic, to be sure…

"There’s a traditional distinction between words… and deeds… computer programs..."

“There’s a traditional distinction between words… and deeds… computer programs transcend this distinction: They are pure language that dictates action when read by the device being addressed.”

- Robert Horvitz, “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?” (1990)

Admitting Defeat On K&R in Learn C the Hard Way

Admitting Defeat On K&R in Learn C the Hard Way:

I have lost. I am giving up after years of trying to figure out how I can get the message out that the way C has been written since its invention is flawed. Originally I had a section of my book called Deconstructing K&R C. The purpose of the section is to teach people to never assume that their code is correct, or that the code of anyone, no matter how famous, is free of defects. This doesn’t seem to be a revolutionary idea, and to me is just part of how you analyze code for defects and get better at making your own work solid.

Over the years, this one piece of writing has tanked the book and received more criticism and more insults than any other thing I’ve written…

… I will also tell people to never write another C program again. It won’t be obvious. It won’t be outright, but my goal will be to move people right off C onto other languages that are doing it better. Go, Rust, and Swift, come to mind as recent entrants that can handle the majority of tasks that C does now, so I will push people there. I will tell them that their skills at finding defects, and rigorous analysis of C code will pay massive dividends in every language and make learning any other language possible.

But C? C’s dead. It’s the language for old programmers who want to debate section A.6.2 paragraph 4 of the undefined behavior of pointers. Good riddance. I’m going to go learn Go (or Rust, or Swift, or anything else).

The original critique is here.

Related: Technosectarianism: Applying Religious Metaphors to Programming

“… the sacred object is the language and/or its syntax.

… a programming language does not “simply ‘represent’ some absent power but is endowed with the sacred”.

In a very real sense, programming languages no longer represent power, but actually contain that power, which makes them “sacred” to their practitioners.”

Snider's program marries literacy, computer science

Snider's program marries literacy, computer science:

Third-graders in Sheila Snider’s class at Eli Pinney Elementary School played Dr. Frankenstein last week.

The students used a coding program called Scratch to give lives to characters they created ranging from cats and snails to angels and cookie ninjas.

"In our standards this year there is an added technology piece," Snider said.

Simple coding was one part of the standards, so taking some knowledge learned during the Hour of Code project that has students learn about computer coding for an hour in December, Snider decided to start a project that marries literacy and computer science.

"I always thought it would be awesome if one of my book characters would come to life and I thought they would like it," Snider said.

Students created characters and wrote books about them, complete with drawings. Last week students spent time in the computer lab with David Herman giving their characters motions and voices…

"In an age of science, we disregard spells as a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations. But…..."

“In an age of science, we disregard spells as a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations. But… mathematics and the exact sciences have realized much of what ancient kabbalists or alchemists were… anticipating: today we *can* write symbols on paper, arrange them by esoteric rules, and thereby make them reflect on the tangible world..”

- Urs Schreiber, Laws of Type

Anki for School: Step Zero

You know my feelings about using Anki/spaced retrieval for school. It’s essential!

I have written many posts on how to use Anki for classes and learning in various disciplines: Starting with this long post, then continuing on to discuss using SRSing for math, shortcuts for said math usage, the relationship with textbooks, and more precise tips for said textbook usage.

If I could go back and do everything perfectly as if I always knew about SRSing, step zero would always be, before each semester/year (i.e. especially during the summer, with an eye on all semesters that year), to find out what books will be used in the upcoming classes, and go through them using the methods/principles described in previous posts to create Anki cards or other forms of SRS study objects.

It will save you so much overhead once you start lectures and assignments, plus the benefits are short-term effort—and slowness—for long-term badassery, so it’s best to get that short-term phase over with and start studying the cards soonest, entering the long-term benefits phase before the inevitable, obsolete mid-terms and exams (aka infrequent, high-stakes testing, the most useless kind)… You definitely don’t want to be spending each week trying to create a bevy of cards from textbooks and studying them while trying to do assignments on time and keeping an eye on the impending exams, if you can avoid it.

So I’d recommend looking at syllabi for previous semesters (online at many schools) and/or asking the professor (perhaps showing initiative… ) listed for the course and go through the relevant and/or significant areas of the books, reading and as you do so, create SRS study materials per the above shortcuts and tips I linked at the beginning of this post.

It boils down to: read through, paying attention to the emphasized terms and definitions and logical places in paragraphs that seem to define concepts, or areas and diagrams that illustrate them, as well as practice problems + solutions, and using snipping tools/screenshot tools to copy/paste them into Anki. You’ll find yourself becoming very efficient at parsing textbook information and paring down the most useful items to study or the most valuable practice to space out over time.

  • Note: There are countless sites you can find through Google searches for textbook names and “pdf” keywords, like bo*kzz.org or gen.lib.*.*, that legally and morally you definitely should not use to obtain these not-at-all overpriced textbooks to use as digital source material for your Anki cards and whathaveyou. I definitely recommend not visiting these sites, because that would be wrong. very wrong. Stay away!
  • Also, the trickiest thing when you create cards ahead of time is to not let yourself be intimidated or become disheartened by the unfamiliar information. Remind yourself it’s just progressively more difficult and you will soon progress to that point when you study earlier cards. You will become fluent in that information in a matter of weeks, parsing it will be like breathing… (Related: forest vs. trees)

Sidney Harris



Sidney Harris

"The art of reasoning is in truth only a well-constructed language. Algebra is a well-constructed..."

“The art of reasoning is in truth only a well-constructed language. Algebra is a well-constructed language, and the only one that is so.”

- Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) La langue des calculs (The Language of Calculations)

λ出没注意京都府(Manip; originally it’s a bear (熊), e.g....



 λ出没注意

京都府

(Manip; originally it’s a bear (熊), e.g. this.)

Previously, I exposed the secret connection between the Japanese language and computer science, using the lambda symbol.

Well, I assume the picture is a manip. Could be Kyoto has issues with functional programming.

"To understand a language means to be master of a technique."

“To understand a language means to be master of a technique.”

- Wittgenstein

マンガで分かるLisp (Manga Guide to Lisp)

Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices (PDF)

Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices (PDF):

The alarming projection that up to ninety percent of the world’s languages will become extinct by the end of this century has prompted a new sense of urgency among linguists and other language scholars to rush out and record the last utterances from the last speakers of ‘endangered languages’.

As the last speaker utters her/his last words, the ‘expert’ is there to record this important moment and preserve it for all time. Among the benefits from such preservation efforts is the ability to play back the recordings at any time in any place.

In popular media this process is described as ‘saving the language’ through recording and documentation. Unfortunately, these recordings are not living voices. Rather, they are zombie voices—undead voices that are disembodied and techno-mechanized. They are cursed with being neither dead nor alive. They become artefacts of technological interventions, as well as expert valorisations of linguistic codes.

Expert rhetoric compounds the problem by the use of metaphoric frames such as death, endangerment and extinction. Metaphors not only frame discourses of language endangerment, but they also frame and influence actions and interventions.

This essay critically evaluates the metaphors used by language experts to understand the unintended consequences for community members who are actively revitalising and reclaiming their languages. The essay also identifies key strategies used by community language activists to ignore existing metaphors, while creating new metaphors to potentiate new solutions to language death to promote emergent vitalities.

Sidney HarrisRelated: Prince Charles letters: what does a...

Iconicity: East Meets West

Iconicity: East Meets West:

ja-dark: Wow, that last sentence is really long. Note the editor, Masako Hiraga, whose work on the cognitive poetics of kanji I’ve excerpted before while trying to explain some of the differences between reading kanji vs. the kana/alphabet that phonocentrists have a hard time being aware of. Of course, I have referenced various works on the neuroscientific differences and the structural differences, but Hiraga’s work touches on the subtler aspects.

"If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan."

“If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.”

- Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming, 1982

“The cute, programmable, light-up wearable for everyone. An...

Computer Registersja-dark: Using Intel syntax; might’ve been...



Computer Registers

ja-dark: Using Intel syntax; might’ve been better for the author to use actual register locations for the joke, avoiding missteps with immediate operand syntax. Also, AT&T with its dollar sign sigils would’ve been appropriate. But let’s not nitpick. :)

That Priestly Language

“It is commonplace today tor programmers to stick exclusively to high-level languages and never look inside their machines. Alsing felt that they were missing something. He remembered learning assembly language

‘…  I could skip the middleman and talk right to the machine. It was great to learn that priestly language. I could talk to God… ’”

That Priestly Language

“It is commonplace today tor programmers to stick exclusively to high-level languages and never look inside their machines. Alsing felt that they were missing something. He remembered learning assembly language

‘…  I could skip the middleman and talk right to the machine. It was great to learn that priestly language. I could talk to God… ’”

PLE 2015: The 2nd Workshop on Programming Language Evolution

PLE 2015: The 2nd Workshop on Programming Language Evolution:

We are very pleased to confirm Bjarne Stroustrup will be our keynote speaker this year!

Programming languages tend to evolve in response to user needs, hardware advances, and research developments. Language evolution artefacts may include new compilers and interpreters or new language standards. Evolving programming languages is however challenging at various levels. Firstly, the impact on developers can be negative. For example, if two language versions are incompatible (e.g., Python 2 and 3) developers must choose to either co-evolve their codebase (which may be costly) or reject the new language version (which may have support implications). Secondly, evaluating a proposed language change is difficult; language designers often lack the infrastructure to assess the change. This may lead to older features remaining in future language versions to maintain backward compatibility, increasing the language’s complexity (e.g., FORTRAN 77 to Fortran 90). Thirdly, new language features may interact badly with existing features, leading to unforeseen bugs and ambiguities (e.g., the addition of Java generics).

This workshop brings together researchers and developers to tackle the important challenges faced by programming language evolution, to share new ideas and insights, and to advance programming language design.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Programming language and software co-evolution
  • Empirical studies and evidence-driven evolution
  • Language-version integration and interoperation
  • Historical retrospectives and experience reports
  • Tools and IDE support for source-code mining and refactoring/rejuvenation
  • Gradual feature introductions (e.g., optional type systems)

Previously: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Programming Language Evolution

Wittgenstein, Turing, and the “Finitude” of Language

Wittgenstein, Turing, and the “Finitude” of Language:

Abstract

I consider the sense in which language is “finite” for Wittgenstein, and also some of the implications of this question for Alan Turing’s definition of the basic architecture of a universal computing machine, as well as some of the vast technological, social, and political consequences that have followed from it.

I shall argue that similar considerations about the relationship between finitude and infinity in symbolism play a decisive role in two of these thinkers’ most important results, the “rule-following considerations” for Wittgenstein and the proof of the insolubility of Hilbert’s decision problem for Turing.

Fortuitously, there is a recorded historical encounter between Wittgenstein and Turing, for Turing participated in Wittgenstein’s “lectures” on the foundations of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939

Although my aim here is not to adduce biographical details, I think their exchange nevertheless evinces a deep and interesting problem of concern to both. We may put this problem as that of the relationship of language’s finite symbolic corpus to (what may seem to be) the infinity of its meaning.

Sidney Harris



Sidney Harris

"The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable ‘native speaker’ of..."

“The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable ‘native speaker’ of mathematical notation.”

- Kenneth E. Iverson, Math for the Layman (1999)

"By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more..."

“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.”

- A.N. Whitehead

"I think the first apes who tried to talk with one another decided that learning language was a..."

“I think the first apes who tried to talk with one another decided that learning language was a dreadful bore. They hoped that a few apes would work the thing out so the rest could avoid the bother. But some people write poetry in the language we speak. Perhaps better poetry will be written in the language of digital computers of the future than has ever been written in English.”

- J. C. R. Licklider (1961)

Forging a linguistic identity in the age of the Internet

Forging a linguistic identity in the age of the Internet:

Abstract

Today, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has made written communication a prevalent form of daily interaction through e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, text messages and the like.

As a consequence, languages (written and spoken) seem to be shaped more and more by the modalities of digital media and of an ‘instant communication response’ culture.

Linguistic identity, or the use of language to portray oneself as part of a community, is being shaped as well by the same modalities.

Traditionally, the way individuals and communities used specific forms of language in face-to-face situations shaped perceptions of identity (personal and communal).

Now, the question can be asked: Are these changing in the age of the Internet, when CMC has extended the concept of community in a global way?

This article will look at this question as it concerns linguistic identity in Italy, assessing its implications in the light of the traditional sociolinguistic study of language as a conveyor of identity.     

The future of identity      

Identities are products of social forces, adapting to them in various ways. As e-identities and r-identities merge there will be little awareness of the difference and an amalgam will result that will define the future course of identity formation.

… the online world may indeed be a brave new hyperreal world. Yet it has many of the same characteristics of the old world order, especially when it comes to fashioning identity.

In both the real and online worlds, identity has always been a matter of constructing oneself with the available resources. As Gelder has aptly put it, the Internet offers people ‘a realm where one’s yearnings for community can at last find their realization.’

In a McLuhanian sense, the Internet is a technological extension of our brains and thus our language faculty. If we find meaning in this hyperreal world, it is because we are part of it, literally.

This does not mean that many of the problems of identity have disappeared. They are still there, but they are negotiated differently. In a sense the Internet has provided the perfect medium for people to write themselves into existence, rather than taking their identity from historical channels.

Technology dictates the languages and the discourse forms in which we speak and think. If we do not use those languages, we will remain mute. And a mute identity is a nonexistent one; it reduces to raw consciousness

Why you need to start practicing emotional hygiene

Why you need to start practicing emotional hygiene:

Emotional hygiene may look like a funny term, but it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: practicing positive psychological hygiene. In other words, it’s keeping your mind clear of negative thoughts, much like you would keep your hands clean from germs. And it’s a vital practice in the workplace, especially in an organization like Pluralsight where we value “eternal optimism.” Creativity is a big part of the process for many of us, and it’s really hard to flex that creative knowledge if you’re dealing with any kind of emotional pain.

The role of stylistics in Japan: A pedagogical perspective

The role of stylistics in Japan: A pedagogical perspective:

This article surveys the history of English studies and education in Japan, paying special attention to the role of literary texts and stylistics.

Firstly, the role of literature and stylistics in Japan is discussed from a pedagogical point of view, including both English as a foreign language and Japanese as a native language.

Secondly, the way in which stylistics has contributed to literary criticism in the country is examined, with reference to the history of literary stylistics since 1980.

Finally, this article considers further applications of stylistics to language study in Japan, offering two examples: analysis of thought presentation in Yukio Mishima’s Megami, and the teaching of an English poem and a Japanese haiku to Japanese EFL students.

The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate that literature as language teaching material and stylistics as a critical and teaching method are significant not only in understanding English, but also in appreciating our own native language if it is not English.

Radical embodied cognition: an interview with Andrew Wilson

Radical embodied cognition: an interview with Andrew Wilson:

Cognitive psychology explanations are that behaviour is caused by internal states of the mind (or brain, if you like). These states are called mental representations, and they are models/simulations of the world that we use to figure out what to do and when to do it…

My approach is called radical embodied cognitive psychology; ‘radical’ just means ‘no representations’…

… whatever the brain is doing, it’s not building models of the world in order to cause our behaviour. We are embedded in our environments and our behaviour is caused by the nature of that embedding (specifically, which information variables we are using for any given task).

So I ask very different questions than the typical psychologist: instead of ‘what mental model lets me solve this task?’ I ask ‘what information is there to support the observed behaviour and can I find evidence that we use it?’. When we get the right answer to the information question, we have great success in explaining and then predicting behaviour, which is actually the goal of psychology.

파워업!!!

WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? “Calculus”

WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? “Calculus”:

… for decades now, learning calculus has been the passing requirement for entry into modern fields of study… Universities still carry on the tradition that undergraduates are required to take anywhere from one to three semesters of calculus as a pure math discipline. This is typically learning complex math concepts uncontextualized, removed from practical applications and heavily emphasizing proofs and theorems.

Because of this, calculus has become a hazing ritual for those interested in going into one of the most needed fields today: computer science. Calculus has very little relevance to the day-to-day work of many coders, hackers and entreprenuers, yet poses a significant recruiting barrier to fill in sorely needed ranks in today’s modern digital workforce…

Undergraduate computer science programs are starting to bounce back from a dearth of enrollment that plagued them in the early Internet era, but it could do a lot more to fill the ranks…

Calculus remains in many curricula as more of a rite of passage than for any particular need… holding it up as a universal obstacle course through which one must pass to program and code is counterproductive, yet the bulk of computer science programs geared towards undergraduate education require it. Leaving in this obtuse math requirement is lazy curricular thinking. It sticks with a model that weeds out people for no good reason related to their ability to program.

… What makes for good programmers? The ability to deconstruct complex problems into a series of smaller, doable ones. A proficiency to think procedurally on systems and structures. The ability to manipulate bits and do amazing things with them.

If calculus is not a good fit for these, what should replace it? Discrete math, combinatorics, computability, graph theory are far more important than calculus. These are all standard, necessary and immensely relevant fields in most modern computer science programs, but they typically come after the calculus requirement gauntlet…”

SFPC | School for Poetic Computation

SFPC | School for Poetic Computation:

SFPC is an alternative school for art and technology. We are striving to create a model of education based on collaboration between faculty and students. By participating you will be actively shaping an emerging culture of open source and transparent education.

You can read some articles about the kind of work that’s developed at SFPC: Yahoo Tech, video sketch of the final day at Seen in NY and also students’ reports on their time at the school can be found here: Ida, Lee.

ja-dark: These alternative coding-oriented schools like SFPC or the coding ‘boot camps’ are on to something with the condensed schedules (e.g. 8-12 weeks), I think. That’s why I’m torn on the quarter system (as opposed to semesters) used in some universities. On the one hand, it pushes you to learn to the best of your abilities, there’s no room for procrastination.

You accomplish much. On the other hand, with traditional academia, you end up with obsolete learning approaches like high-stakes, infrequent testing (e.g. exams) as opposed to the superior forms of learning psychology has shown us (e.g. spaced retrieval). This does not mesh well with brief terms, and encourages cramming, which reduces deep, long-term learning.

Sidney HarrisRelated: Study confirms monkeys can do math

"The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can..."

“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Multilingual Conceptual Access to Lexicon Based on Shared Orthography: An Ontology-Driven Study of Chinese and Japanese

Multilingual Conceptual Access to Lexicon Based on Shared Orthography: An Ontology-Driven Study of Chinese and Japanese:

In this paper we propose a model for ontology-driven conceptual access to multilingual lexicon taking advantage of the cognitive-conceptual structure of radical system embedded in shared orthography of Chinese and Japanese.

Our proposal rely crucially on two facts. First, both Chinese and Japanese use Chinese characters (hanzi/kanji) in their orthography.

Second, the Chinese character orthography is anchored on a system of radical parts which encodes basic concepts. Each character as an orthographic unit contains radicals which indicate the broad semantic class of the meaning of that unit.

Our study utilizes the homomorphism between the Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji systems, but goes beyond the character-to-character mapping of kanji-hanzi conversion, to identify bilingual word correspondences.

We use bilingual dictionaries, including WordNets, to verify semantic relation between the cross-lingual pairs.

These bilingual pairs are then mapped to ontology of characters structured according to the organization of the basic concepts of radicals.

The conceptual structure of the radical ontology is proposed as the model for simultaneous conceptual access to both languages.

A study based on words containing characters composed of the “口 (mouth)” radical is given to illustrate the proposal and the actual model.

It is suggested that the proposed model has the conceptual robustness to be applied to other languages based on the fact that it works now for two typologically very different languages and that the model contains Generative Lexicon (GL)-like coercive links to account for a wide range of possible cross-lingual semantic relations.

Towards a Cognitive Natural Language Processing Perspective

Towards a Cognitive Natural Language Processing Perspective:

The advances in artificial intelligence and the post-Google interests in information retrieval, in the recent decades, have made large-scale processing of human language data possible and produced impressive results in many language processing tasks.

However, the wealth and the multilingualism of digital corpora have generated additional challenges for language processing and language technology. To overcome some of the challenges an adequate theory of this complex human language processing system is needed to integrate scientific knowledge from the fields of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, in particular.

Over the last few years, emerging applications of NLP have taken a cognitive science perspective recognising that the modelling of the language processing is simply too complex to be addressed within a single discipline.

This paper provides a synopsis of the latest emerging trends, methodologies, and applications in NLP with a cognitive science perspective, contributed by the researchers, practitioners, and doctoral students to the international workshops in Natural Language processing and Cognitive Science (NLPCS).


Preparing Computer Science teachers is different than preparing software developers

Preparing Computer Science teachers is different than preparing software developers:

“Preparing teachers to teach computing is more than a matter of re-purposing existing courses for computer science majors.

The tasks, knowledge, and skills of a computing teacher in primary or secondary school are dramatically different than that of a software developer.

Computing teachers need pedagogical content knowledge, which includes awareness of common misconceptions, methods for diagnosing those misconceptions, and interventions to help students develop more robust conceptions.

The job of a software developer requires knowledge and skills that are irrelevant for a computing teacher. To meet the worldwide need for computing teachers, we must design new kinds of learning opportunities that address the requirements of teachers.

In this talk, I will present the findings from our studies of the best practices of successful computing teachers, and describe our efforts in finding new ways to support teacher learning about computing.

We find that our most successful teachers read and comment code all the time, but almost never write code. The most successful teachers know the content, but also know the most common misconceptions for that content.

We find that on-line learning is challenging for teachers to fit into their lives, but we can make learning opportunities that teachers will stick with if we emphasize activities that are lower-cognitive than just writing code on a blank sheet of paper.”

ja-dark: As an academic discipline, Computer Science is in its infancy. Earlier than infancy, really, it’s barely a gleam in Ada Lovelace’s eye. Currently there’s something of a ‘native speaker fallacy’ in CS education; there’s a lot of professors that are experts in the subject who are amateurs at teaching it, and who in their pedagogical ignorance often believe myths about natural talent. And just generally suck.

Thankfully there’s also a lot of smart experts such as Mark Guzdial who are thinking about the best ways to teach/learn CS, and their ideas are taking hold. Till then, just grit your teeth and do the best you can in any classes taught by terrible professors, or stick with self-study.

More on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in computer science:

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

“The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”

-

Richard Hamming (1962)

“Thus computing is, or at least should be, intimately bound up with both the source of the problem and the use that is going to be made of the answers—it is not a step to be taken in isolation from reality.”

See also: Early documentary on the computer revolution, Logic by Machine (1962)

Sidney Harris Currently: Dolphins use specific whistles as...

Playing Call of Duty has long-term learning benefits for the brain

Playing Call of Duty has long-term learning benefits for the brain:

ja-dark: Just make sure you play with a mouse and keyboard rather than a controller (like some kind of monkey still in love with the discovery of opposable thumbs, using them for everything even when it’s not practical. Controllers are so bad they build aim assist into the games, and players who want to play consistently well use special modifications and grips), and mute all the other players, or you’ll feel rather dumb in short order. Or you can wait till the FPX (first-person experience) genre overtakes the FPS (first-person shooter), though I’m not sure you’d get the same benefits…

Also, careful with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. If you mute other players, this combines with the fact that footsteps of the booted, armored soldiers sprinting on hard surfaces is nearly impossible to hear, yet the exo suit sounds (those things with the unlimited jets that let you hop and slide awkwardly into walls, ceilings and random outcroppings) can be heard from miles away, giving you an odd feeling of selective deafness.

Sidney Harris

The Same Name Puzzle: Twitter Users Are More Likely to Follow Others With The Same First Name But Nobody Knows Why

The Same Name Puzzle: Twitter Users Are More Likely to Follow Others With The Same First Name But Nobody Knows Why:

Back in 1985, a Belgian psychologist… began asking students to pick out their favourite letter from a pair or a group of three… he found that people were more likely to pick letters that appeared in their own name. So a Fred is more likely to pick an F than an M and a Jennifer more likely to pick a J than an L.

Since then, the so-called name-letter effect has fascinated psychologists…

Today, we get some new insight into this phenomenon… Kooti and co begin with a database of the 52 million Twitter users who joined the network before 2009 and the 1.9 billion links between them…

Men are up to 30 per cent more likely than expected to follow somebody of the same name.

And the effect is even stronger among women with the most common names: Jennifer, Jessica, Ashley, Sarah and Amanda. In this case, women are up to 45 per cent more likely than expected to follow somebody of the same name…

Previously:

Linguistic Mapping Reveals How Word Meanings Sometimes Change Overnight

Linguistic Mapping Reveals How Word Meanings Sometimes Change Overnight:

A similar change occurred to the word “mouse” in the early 1970s when it gained the new meaning of “computer input device.” In the 1980s, the word “apple” became a proper noun synonymous with the computer company. And later, the word “windows” followed a similar course after the release of the Microsoft operating system.

All this serves to show how language constantly evolves, often slowly but at other times almost overnight. Keeping track of these new senses and meanings has always been hard. But not anymore.

Today, Vivek Kulkarni at Stony Brook University in New York and a few pals show how they have tracked these linguistic changes by mining the corpus of words stored in databases such as Google Books, movie reviews from Amazon, and of course the microblogging site Twitter.

These guys have developed three ways to spot changes in the language…

A Practical Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis (free eBook)

A Practical Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis (free eBook):

The author, Cliff Shaffer provides a superior learning tool for those who desire more rigorous data structures and an algorithm analysis book utilizing Java. While the author covers most of the standard data structures, he concentrates on teaching the principles required to select or design a data structure that will best solve a problem. The emphasis is on data structures, and algorithm analysis, not teaching Java. Java is utilized strictly as a tool to illustrate data structures concepts and only the minimal, useful subset of Java is included.

Sidney Harris converse error



Sidney Harris

converse error

Sidney Harris ja-dark: Goldilocks as a hacker, inspiring boys....



Sidney Harris

ja-dark: Goldilocks as a hacker, inspiring boys. Another prescient response to the Barbie debacle?

Sidney Harris (1981) Original picture, Alice pushes through the...



Sidney Harris (1981)

Original picture, Alice pushes through the mirror, John Tenniel

ja-dark: Alice as a young scientist? Reminds me of feminist hacker Barbie vs. inept computer scientist Barbie.

Exercise Plus Fasting May Boost Brain's Neurons

Exercise Plus Fasting May Boost Brain's Neurons:

"We have evidence that exercise and probably intermittent fasting increase the number of mitochondria in neurons," said Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore…

… he hypothesizes that intermittent fasting may improve performance on cognitive tests and change neural network connections and markers of oxidative stress and inflammation.

The basic premise, presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, is that the stress of fasting and exercise helps the brain adapt and improve the energy flow of neurons. Specifically, fasting and exercise seem to increase the production of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), thought to be key in the growth and division of mitochondria.

"That seems to be important for BDNF’s effect on learning and memory," Mattson said.

See also: Does Intermittent Fasting Have Benefits? Science Suggests Yes

"Fasting alone is more powerful in preventing and reversing some diseases than drugs," said Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor of regulatory biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, and one of the co-authors of the article…

"Intermittent fasting helps the body to rejuvenate and repair, thereby promoting overall health," Panda told Live Science.

Previously: How fasting improves brain function

The Free Code Camp Blog: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code. My own.

The Free Code Camp Blog: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code. My own.:

… everywhere I looked, I saw evidence that I’d gone about learning to code in an absurdly masochistic way.

I’d spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis. I dabbled in every online course program imaginable, and started countless MOOCs. I don’t think I actually got something onto the internet without the guidance of a tutorial until month number five! This gave me the impression that programming was a Sisyphean struggle. I was convinced that the seemingly normal programmers I ran into were actually sociopaths who had experienced, then repressed, the trauma of learning to code…

Without further ado, here the big mistakes I see new coders make all the time:

  • Switching languages or frameworks frequently, or deluding themselves into thinking they can become proficient in all of them.
  • Personalizing their development environment with exotic tools, rather than more conventional tools that can be reliably used while collaborating with others
  • Trying to learn tools like Docker and Famo.us because they’re new and exciting, even though they haven’t yet mastered more fundamental technologies

If I had to summarize my do-as-I-say-not-as-did advice in one word, it would be: focus.

ja-dark: In language learning, after one chooses a language, ironically I’ve seen the opposite trend. Extremists using old-fashioned methods or simply moronic methods like ‘input only’/avoid using your first language/avoid grammar, etc. Usually because some guru with a blog told them to while asking for donations, and because the anecdotal advice/evidence fit the preconceived (ignorant) intuitions/preferences they had. I try to point those in the direction of Paul Nation’s Four Strands approach, which indicates it’s not a binary equation, one extreme vs. the other, efficiency vs. fun, etc. Likewise with programming, there’s research on a balanced approach.

Of course, from what I’ve seen, you really don’t have to worry about all that, and can simply spend a few months learning Ruby or JS and quickly get a job doing web design. :)

Sydney Harris (date uncertain; likely the ’60s-’70s)



Sydney Harris (date uncertain; likely the ’60s-’70s)

Could economics benefit from computer science thinking?

Could economics benefit from computer science thinking?:

Economists are sometimes content asking whether or not a banking system could be stable or a market could continue to grow. But they and other scientists could benefit from a computational view that asks not just whether the right conditions exist but also how hard it is to find them, according to a commentary published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The “how hard?” question is about computational complexity, says Christos Papadimitriou, a University of California-Berkeley computer scientist and the commentary’s author….

… under certain assumptions about the economy, free markets produce stable, socially optimal outcomes, in the sense that no one person can improve his or her lot without hurting someone else. Politicians and the occasional novelist have used that claim to promote an unregulated free market.

That makes sense if you don’t contemplate the problem any further, but thinking about markets in terms of computational complexity puts the problem in a different light. Finding an economic outcome that’s stable and benefits everyone is a lot like the evolution problem. It’s not the hardest problem to solve, but as the number of economic players grows, the problem gets exponentially harder — tough even for a computer to deal with.

That has an important consequence. “You can’t expect a market to get there because you can’t expect a computer to get there,” Papadimitriou says…

The Latent Structure of Dictionaries

The Latent Structure of Dictionaries:

Abstract:

How many words (and which ones) are sufficient to define all other words?
When dictionaries are analyzed as directed graphs with links from defining words to defined words, they turn out to have latent structure that has not previously been noticed.
Recursively removing all those words that are reachable by definition but do not define any further words reduces the dictionary to a Kernel of 10%, but this is still not the smallest number of words that can define all the rest.
About 75% of the Kernel is its Core, a strongly connected subset (with a definitional path to and from any word and any other word), but the Core cannot define all the rest.
The 25% surrounding the Core are Satellites, small strongly connected subsets.
The size of the smallest set of words that can define all the rest (a graph’s “minimum feedback vertex set” or MinSet) is about 1% of the dictionary, about 15% of the Kernel, about half-Core and half-Satellite, but every dictionary has a huge number of MinSets.
The words in the Core turn out to be learned earlier, more frequent, and less concrete than the Satellites, which are learned earlier and more frequent but more concrete than the rest of the Dictionary.
The findings are related to the symbol grounding problem and the mental lexicon.
(PDF)
ja-dark: Unfortunately the paper seems to be written by pseudoscientific linguists (e.g. linguists who believe in Chomsky’s unfounded, obsolete ideas about innate language capacities, universal grammar and infinite recursion, etc.)
But the dictionary analysis is very cool. I’ve had some similar ideas related to language learning (especially as regards algorithmic strategies for prioritizing words and sentences to learn/mine from), and only recently came to realize that sets, order relations, etc., could be used. I wonder how one might apply this to concept dictionaries and what I call soft monolinguality, also…
Edit: I seem to remember one of the paper’s authors as an obnoxious commenter on various language blogs, who kept reposting the same things, using the rhetorical weasel phrase ‘it turns out’ quite often. I recall one paper coming out that various blogs discussed, and this person reposted the same comment (note the response from Greenhill and the editor’s comment in red) disagreeing with it on literally every blog that referenced the paper. Judging by the sketchy wiki article edited/created by the same person, I’m guessing the symbol grounding ‘problem’ is another non-existent problem like the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.

Scientists Think Synaesthesia Is Something You Can Learn

Scientists Think Synaesthesia Is Something You Can Learn:

A recent experiment by conducted by the University of Sussex suggests it may be possible to learn to experience synesthesia, a rare condition that mixes up brain signals and leads people to hear colors or taste words. Researcher David Bor had volunteers read ebooks with 13 letters consistently written in a specific color. In addition, the volunteers spent 30 minutes every day associating the letters and colors, working on increasingly difficult tasks.

By week five of the nine-week course, many subjects were already seeing results, with nine out of fourteen reporting seeing the colors when reading all-black text. At the end of the experiment, the effects had become strong for most participants.

"The color immediately pops into my head," one of the subjects said of looking at road signs while driving, according to New Scientist. “When I look at a sign the whole word appears according to the training colors.”

Japan in $617bn 'fat finger' error

Japan in $617bn 'fat finger' error:

Japan’s stock markets were rattled after a trading error caused more than $600bn (£370bn) worth of orders to be made and then cancelled.

An anonymous broker entered an over-the-counter trade for 42 stocks before swiftly cancelling it on Wednesday.

The transaction affected huge volumes of shares in blue-chip stocks such as Toyota Motors, Honda and Nomura.

Japan’s Securities Dealers Association (JSDA) confirmed the mistake.

"A member company traded 42 issues at the off-exchange transaction at 09:25 on 1 Oct, 2014," JSDA said in an emailed statement. "This was, however, their error."

"After all of these reports were cancelled at 09:43, the revised correct report was made at 13:44".

The so-called “fat finger” mistake, which refers to a human error made by mis-typing a trade, was for an order worth more than the size of Sweden’s economy.

The top 10 words invented by writers

The top 10 words invented by writers:

An incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance. This eponym originated from the character Mrs Malaprop, in the 1775 play The Rivals by Irish playwright and poet Richard Brinsley Sheridan. As you might expect, Mrs Malaprop is full of amusing mistakes, exclaiming “He’s the very pineapple of success!” and “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile!” The adjective Malaproprian is first used, according to the OED, by George Eliot. “Mr. Lewes is sending what a Malapropian friend once called a ‘missile’ to Sara.”

What do we love about new words? | OxfordWords blog

What do we love about new words? | OxfordWords blog:
The lexicographers at Oxford Dictionaries keep watch on our collective neology and select a word—or words–of the year: a word that is both forward-looking and reflects the culture of the current year. From 2004 we’ve had chav, podcast, carbon-neutral, locavore, hypermiling, unfriend, refudiate, squeezed middle, the verb GIF, and selfie. And in the UK, which has somewhat different sensibilities, the list reads chav, sudoku, bovvered, carbon footprint, credit crunch, simples, big society, omnishambles and selfie. The Word of the Year for 2014 is vape, edging out the short-listed finalists slacktivism, normcore, contactless, bae, budtender, and IndyRef
Verbal magic tricks
I’m enamored of blends though, and I smile at the recollection of the first time I came across the word hangry in a tweet from a former student. To me blends are verbal magic tricks: words sawed in half and magically rejoined…

When I finished my book on the language of public apology I toyed with using the word regretoric in the title, but wiser editorial heads prevailed. The best blends have a playful punning to them, in which the remnants of the old words encapsulate the new meaning perfectly (the worst blends are like Frankenstein’s monster, like schmeat, a finalist in 2013.). I’ll leave it to you to judge the blends in this year’s finalists: slacktivism (from slacker + activism), normcore (from normal + hardcore), and budtender (from bud + bartender).

Ancient Coptic 'Handbook of Spells' deciphered

Ancient Coptic 'Handbook of Spells' deciphered:

Researchers have deciphered an ancient Egyptian handbook, revealing a series of invocations and spells…

Among other things, the “Handbook of Ritual Power,” as researchers call the book, tells readers how to cast love spells, exorcise evil spirits and treat “black jaundice,” a bacterial infection that is still around today and can be fatal.

The book is about 1,300 years old, and is written in Coptic, an Egyptian language. It is made of bound pages of parchment — a type of book that researchers call a codex…

The ancient book “starts with a lengthy series of invocations that culminate with drawings and words of power,” they write. “These are followed by a number of prescriptions or spells to cure possession by spirits and various ailments, or to bring success in love and business.”

For instance, to subjugate someone, the codex says you have to say a magical formula over two nails, and then “drive them into his doorpost, one on the right side (and) one on the left…”

Some of the language used in the codex suggests that it was written with a male user in mind, however, that “wouldn’t have stopped a female ritual practitioner from using the text, of course,” he said…

The style of writing suggests that the codex originally came from Upper Egypt. “The dialect suggests an origin in Upper Egypt, perhaps in the vicinity of Ashmunein/Hermopolis,” which was an ancient city, Choat and Gardner write in their book.

"To program is to understand."

“To program is to understand.”

-

Kristen Nygaard (1926–2002)

‘The process of describing the application domain in most cases provided a valuable insight into the modelled application domain itself. This led Kristen Nygaard to formulate one of his favourite messages:

“To program is to understand”. Programming should not just be considered a low-level technical discipline where it is just a matter of getting around the problem. A program should reflect an understanding of the problem domain.’

New course will connect computer science, humanities

New course will connect computer science, humanities:

Students seeking to learn the basics of computer science in the context of the humanities, the social sciences, or economics will now have an opportunity to do just that.

Computing in Context, a new interdisciplinary course open to Columbia College and School of Engineering and Applied Science students to be offered for the first time in the spring semester, aims to teach students programming and computer science logic within the context of their prefered discipline: English, history, or economics…

Hirschberg said that one of the issues Computing in Context hopes to address is how effectively computing tools and programming are used in the humanities.

“Sometimes you can use tools, but not really understand how they work,” Hirschberg said.

Jones echoed that sentiment, saying that one of the purposes of Computing in Context is to give students “an understanding about where these tools are striking and where they are limited.”

“I want to expand the audience in both ways,” Tenen said of his role in Computing in Context. “I want to bring literary theory—what we do here in this department—to a wider audience. And the other way around, I want to expose literary theorists and humanists to a measure of technical literacy.”

“They’re going to be producing maps and network diagrams, within weeks,” Jones added. “But those skills are going to be enduring.”

Richard Bartle: we invented multiplayer games as a political gesture

Richard Bartle: we invented multiplayer games as a political gesture :

Although Trubshaw wasn’t a fan of D&D, Bartle played a lot, buying a copy from Ian Livingstone’s Games Workshop store for £6.10 as soon as it was available in the UK. Trubshaw, who started the programming for MUD alone, originally planned to create a virtual world rather than a game. However, when Bartle got involved, he was already a keen computer games player and wanted participants to play together in a similar way to D&D. Consequently, when the first version of MUD uploaded to the university system in autumn 1978, it allowed multiple users to log into a mainframe and go on fantasy quests together…

“You shouldn’t have to be what the world defines you to be. You should be who you really are - you should get to become yourself. MUD was a political statement, we made a world where people could go and shed what was holding them back.”

Photo



IBM and the Holocaust

IBM and the Holocaust:

IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany — beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.

Only after Jews were identified — a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately — could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.

But IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company’s custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.

IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.

IBM and the Holocaust takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries — all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction.

Just as compelling is the human drama of one of our century’s greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit.

Only with IBM’s technologic assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust. Edwin Black has now uncovered one of the last great mysteries of Germany’s war against the Jews — how did Hitler get the names?

def vertical(n):    'prints digits of n vertically'    if n...





def vertical(n):
    'prints digits of n vertically'
    if n < 10:          #base case: n has 1 digit
        print(n)            #just print n
    else:               #recursive step: n has 2 or more digits
        vertical(n//10)     #recursively print all but last digit
        print(n%10)         #print last digit of n

Visualization of recursive function w/ active flow (top arrows; pushing frames onto stack) and passive flow (bottom arrows; popping frames from stack after base case is reached).

More on the above schematic: Copies model. This is the most viable mental model for understanding recursion in programming.

namespace, base case

The Effect of Dynamic Copies Model in Teaching Recursive...


The static copies model presented the entire recuisive process as overlapped windows along with step-by-step verbal explanation indented with the described window.


The dynamic copies model presented the recursive process as overlapped windows step by step along with the verbal explanation of the on-topped window.

The Effect of Dynamic Copies Model in Teaching Recursive Programming

Abstract:

The copies model of recursion was implemented in two versions of computer-based instruction (dynamic vs. static) in this study. For the immediate effects, dynamic copies model was more effective than static copies model in teaching recursion. High prior knowledge students performed better than low prior knowledge students no matter they were instructed with the dynamic or static copies model. For the delayed effects, ATI was found. High prior knowledge students benefited from the static copies model instruction more than from the dynamic copies model. In contrast, low prior knowledge students benefited from the dynamic copies model more than from the static copies model.

More on the copies model and other models.

Mental models of recursion revisited

Mental models of recursion revisited:

“Recursion is characterised by Kahney as “a process that is capable of triggering new instantiations of itself, with control passing forward to successive instantiations and back from terminated ones.”

The forward passing of control is called the “active flow” and the backward flow of control is called the “passive flow”. Mental models of recursion describe students’ understanding of recursion and a number have been discovered. These are listed below. The models that can be viable (those that allow correct prediction of program behaviour) are noted. The other models are not viable.

  • Copies Model: Identified by Kahney, this model is always viable. The active flow of recursion is shown, followed by a switch from active to passive flow once the base case is reached and then the passive flow is shown explicitly.
  • Looping Model: In this model, also identified by Kahney, recursion is seen as a form of iteration with the recursion terminating once the base case is reached. Neither the active flow nor passive flow is shown. This model is only viable for recursive algorithms where it is possible to evaluate the solution at the base case.
  • Active Model: This model was first described by Gotschi et al and demonstrates the active flow but not the passive flow. The solution is evaluated at the base case. In our work, traces are classified as active if there is no indication of the passive flow, either because the solution has been evaluated at the base case or because the student appears to have understood the passive flow (because of a correct answer) but has not written it down. This model is viable in some circumstances.
  • Step Model: This model shows that the student has no understanding of recursion, and it involves either execution of the recursive condition once, or of the recursive condition once and of the base case.
  • Return Value Model: This model indicates that the student believes values to be generated by each instantiation, stored and then combined to give a solution.
  • Magic or Syntactic Model: This model shows that the student has no clear idea of how recursion works, but is able to match on syntactic elements. Traces show active flow, base case and passive flow but with obvious errors demonstrating lack of understanding. Students with this model are close to the copies model but need more exposure.
  • Algebraic Model: Students have this model when they try to manipulate the program or algorithm as an algebraic problem.
  • Odd Model: In this model, many misunderstandings of various types are shown. The students with this model are not able to predict program behaviours.

To help our students understand recursion, we wanted to adapt our teaching to encourage the development of the viable copies model.”

See also:

Reading Lisp

“People who are just learning Lisp find the sight of so many parentheses discouraging. How is one to read, let alone write, such code? How is one to see which parenthesis matches which?

The answer is, one doesn’t have to. Lisp programmers read and write code by indentation, not by parentheses. When they’re writing code, they let the text editor show which parenthesis matches which. Any good editor, particularly if it comes with a Lisp system, should be able to do paren-matching. In such an editor, when you type a parenthesis, the editor indicates the matching one. If your editor doesn’t match parentheses, stop now and figure out how to make it, because it is virtually impossible to write Lisp code without it.

With a good editor, matching parentheses ceases to be an issue when you’re writing code. And because there are universal conventions for Lisp indentation, it’s not an issue when you’re reading code either. Because everyone uses the same conventions, you can read code by the indentation, and ignore the parentheses.”

The secret to understanding recursion

via: “Students learning about recursion are sometimes encouraged to trace all the invocations of a recursive function on a piece of paper… This exercise could be misleading: a programmer defining a recursive function usually does not think explicitly about the sequence of invocations that results from calling it.

If one always had to think of a program in such terms, recursion would be burdensome, not helpful. The advantage of recursion is precisely that it lets us view algorithms in a more abstract way. You can judge whether or not a recursive function is correct without considering all the invocations that result when the function is actually called.

To see if a recursive function does what it’s supposed to, all you have to ask is, does it cover all the cases?

(defun len (lst) 
    (if (null lst)
        0
        (+ (len (cdr lst)) 1)))

We can assure ourselves that this function is correct by verifying two things:

  1. That it works for lists of length 0.
  2. Given that it works for lists of length n, that it also works for lists of length n+1.

If we can establish both points, then we know that the function is correct for all possible lists…

This is all we need to know. The secret to understanding recursion is a lot like the secret for dealing with parentheses. How do you see which parenthesis matches which? You don’t have to. How do you visualize all those invocations? You don’t have to.”

Language and Recursion (2014)

Language and Recursion (2014):

As humans, our many levels of language use distinguish us from the rest of the animal world. For many scholars, it is the recursive aspect of human speech that makes it truly human. But linguists continue to argue about what recursion actually is, leading to the central dilemma: is full recursion, as defined by mathematicians, really necessary for human language?

Language and Recursion defines the elusive construct with the goal of furthering research into language and cognition. An up-to-date literature review surveys extensive findings based on non-verbal communication devices and neuroimaging techniques. Comparing human and non-human primate communication, the book’s contributors examine meaning in chimpanzee calls, and consider the possibility of a specific brain structure for recursion. The implications are then extended to formal grammars associated with artificial intelligence, and to the question of whether recursion is a valid concept at all.

Among the topics covered:

  • The pragmatic origins of recursion.
  • Recursive cognition as a prelude to language.
  • Computer simulations of recursive exercises for a non-verbal communication device.
  • Early rule learning ability and language acquisition.
  • Computational language related to recursion, incursion, and fractals
  • Why there may be no recursion in language.

Previously.

"Statistics is the grammar of science."

“Statistics is the grammar of science.”

- Karl Pearson (1857–1936)

Determining Big O Notation | Dream.In.Code

Determining Big O Notation | Dream.In.Code:

This is a subject many people are afraid of, or simply don’t get. At first, it seems to be mystical hocus pocus, but today I’ll show you a simple way to quickly get an estimate of the Big O of an algorithm/function… The idea here is to be able to look at loops, functions, and code in general, in a different light.

See also: Determining Big O Notation II

Diversity in Science Is Just Good Science

Diversity in Science Is Just Good Science:

There’s more than just a human cost to the lack of diversity in the sciences. Conducting experiments and talking about science with perspective limited to one group results in, if not bad science, then science with a low ceiling…

“Just as one cannot paint a picture (say of a scene) without taking a perspective, one can’t do science without also taking a perspective, one out of a very large set of potential ones,” Douglas Medin told me. “Each perspective can be true to the scene and unbiased, but different perspectives reveal different things.”

Medin is a psychology professor at Northwestern University, and he has been looking at what different cultural approaches bring to science.

He told me that often the problem with a field where the researchers are disproportionately white and male isn’t that the results of research are false. While the results of an experiment should, ideally, be reproducible by anyone anywhere, the questions that one asks, the hypothesis that one poses, and the conclusions that one draws are still going to be culturally informed. It’s just a fact of the human experience.

“Some research is biased but, in principle, since science is a social enterprise and we insist on it being public and subject to replication often individual bias is addressed by the ‘self-correcting’ nature of science,” he told me. “Sometimes the lack of scientist diversity does allow what one might call ‘cultural bias’ to enter in, as during the colonialist era when it was taken for granted by Westerners that other peoples were inferior.”

Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1966



Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1966

C for Python Programmers

C for Python Programmers:

This document is directed at people who have learned programming in Python and who wish to learn about C.

C’s “influence on Python is considerable,” in the words of Python’s inventor, Guido van Rossum. So learning Python is a good first step toward learning C.

ja-dark: It seems the standard now for computer science education to begin with an intro programming class using Python 3, then using C and/or Java for the code-related stuff in subsequent classes.

I previously posted Java for Python Programmers, so here’s this resource for C. It’s for Python 3, I believe.

Also: Going from Python to C (PDF) - “For this document, the version of Python is 2.6. The version of C that is discussed is the 1989 version, known as C89.”

Teaching Computer Science Better to get Better Results

Teaching Computer Science Better to get Better Results:

Here’s a reasonable hypothesis: We get poor results because we use ineffective teaching methods. If we want to teach CS more effectively, we need to learn and develop better methods. If we don’t strive for better methods, we’re not going to get better results.

A first step is to be more methodical with how we choose methods. In a 2011 paper by Davide Fossati and me (see here), we found that CS teachers generally don’t use empirical evidence when making changes in how we teach. We act from our intuition, but our students aren’t like us, and our intuition is not a good indicator of what our students need.

Next, we need to experiment with more methods. We want to get to a place where we identify known problems in our students’ understanding, and then used well-supported methods that help students develop more robust understandings. We probably don’t have a wide range of different techniques for teaching assignment, iteration, recursion, and similar concepts? We should try well-supported techniques like pair programming, peer instruction, or Media Computation (see CACM article on these). We should try to expand our techniques repertoire beyond simply grinding at code. We could try techniques like worked examples, Problets, CodingBat, games with learning outcomes like Wu’s Castle, multiple choice questions like in Gidget, the Parson’s Problems in the Runestone Interactive ebooks, or even computing without computers as in CS Unplugged.

Previously:

Is There a 10x Gap Between Best and Average Programmers? And How Did It Get There?

Is There a 10x Gap Between Best and Average Programmers? And How Did It Get There?:

Bossavit argues that the studies cited in support of the 10x claim are poorly done, with no replication of any result — an important part of any scientific claim. Part of what makes the studies poor is inconsistency. Just as it’s hard to tell what we mean by “better,” there is no clear way to measure programming “productivity.” Lines of code? Should it be more lines, or fewer lines that achieve the same objective? Or maybe more correct lines of code? Less time to completion? Less time to debug? He ends his discussion of the 10x claim with this statement:

The 10x claim is “not even wrong”, and the question of “how variable is individual programmer productivity” should be dissolved rather than answered.

I agree with his recommendation, but for a different reason.

None of the cited studies controlled for expertise or training. In other words, they might be comparing people with decades of experience to those newly hired. Even those studies that occur in classroom settings do not account for time spent developing expertise in computing outside the classroom (which we know from decades of studies can be sizable — see discussion here).

While there is little sound empirical evidence arguing for the 10x difference, I am not worried that there might be a magnitude of difference between the best and worst programmers. It’s simply the wrong question to ask. The important questions are: How did the best programmers get so good? Can we replicate the process?  

In any field, there is a difference between the best and worst practitioners. There is no reason to believe that the differences are somehow “innate,” that there are people who are born programmers. (I have made this argument before.) There is every reason to believe that we can design educational opportunities to develop the best programmers!

Previously: Anyone Can Learn Programming: Teaching > Genetics

Barbie Book Titled 'I Can Be a Computer Engineer' Tells Girls They Need A Man's Help To Code

Barbie Book Titled 'I Can Be a Computer Engineer' Tells Girls They Need A Man's Help To Code:

Previously: “Math class is tough!” Barbie

Related:

Clojure Spellbook

Clojure Spellbook:

Over the past year, the Clojure community came together to write a wondrous tome chock full of their collective knowledge. At over 70 contributors, 1600 commits and nearly 200 recipes, this is something special, folks.

Clojure’s very own crowd-sourced cookbook, Clojure Cookbook, is available now.

ja-dark: I rather dislike the term ‘cookbook’. No style.

Previously.

"When magical techniques begin to have actual effect, science is born."

“When magical techniques begin to have actual effect, science is born.”

- Salomon Reinach

A Graphic Novel That's Like Harry Potter, But With Computers Instead of Wands | WIRED

A Graphic Novel That's Like Harry Potter, But With Computers Instead of Wands | WIRED:

The premise of Secret Coders may sound familiar to fans of young adult literature: Two students discover a mysterious school hidden just beyond the limits of their humdrum lives, and are ushered into a world of secret knowledge and power that they never imagined possible. However, unlike Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, the school in this graphic novel teaches a form of magic that readers can learn right alongside the fictional students. That’s because they’re not learning how to levitate objects or charm mythical beasts—they’re learning how to code.

For Gene Luen Yang, the writer of Secret Coders, it’s a metaphor that reflects his own experiences learning computer programming as a child. “There’s something magic about coding, especially old-school coding,” he says. “When you type these words into this machine, something kind of magic, something kind of crazy happens…”

Secret Coders not only uses Logo but also touches on computer fundamentals like binary code (see preview above) and the three major ways that code is organized: sequence, iteration, and selection. By the end of Secret Coders, readers will learn them all, right alongside Hopper and Eni, not as something dry or rote, but something transformative.

"Learning to speak the language of information gives you the power to transform the world."

“Learning to speak the language of information gives you the power to transform the world.”

-

Peter Denning,

Association of Computing Machinery, former President

Best Practices of Spell Design introduces practical aspects of...



Best Practices of Spell Design introduces practical aspects of software development that are often learned through painful experience… Readers will discover the importance of comments in recipes, the value of testing potions, the dangers of poorly named ingredients, the wonders of code reviews in magic libraries, and the perils of premature optimization.

Designer publishes collection of developer-written ‘code...



Designer publishes collection of developer-written ‘code poems’

The poems are written in a variety of programming languages, including C++, HTML, C#, SQL, Objective C, Applescript and Java. They cover a range of topics including love, science, news, religion, maths, life, robots and poetry.

Black Perl

Black Perl :
BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time.
    open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);
write it, print the hex while each watches,
    reverse its length, write again;
    kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.
        unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),
sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");
    kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,
    values aside, each one;
        die sheep! die to reverse the system
        you accept (reject, respect);
next step,
    kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,
    wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";
    do it ("as they say").
do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).
return last victim; package body;
    exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,
    select (quickly) & warn your next victim;
AFTERWARDS: tell nobody.
    wait, wait until time;
    wait until next year, next decade;
        sleep, sleep, die yourself,
        die at last
# Larry Wall

RiTa: a software toolkit for generative literature

RiTa: a software toolkit for generative literature:

RiTa

  now with one API for Java, JavaScript, Node, & Android!

RiTa is designed to be an easy-to-use toolkit for experiments in natural language and generative literature. RiTa is implemented in Java and JavaScript with a single API and optionally integrates with Processing. It is free/libre and open-source via a GPL license.

Some of the features of RiTa include:

  • Text-generation via Context-Free Grammars and Markov-chains
  • Taggers for Syllables, Phonemes, Stress, Part-of-Speech, etc.
  • Modules for tokenization, verb conjugation, pluralization, and stemming
  • A user-customizable lexicon with a letter-to-sound phoneme generation
  • A standard set of ‘easing’ effects for animation & textual behaviors
  • Integration with Processing, ProcessingJS, and NodeJS
  • Runs in or outside the browser, with or without Processing (also in Android)
  • Integrates with (locally-installed) WordNet dictionary

Based on the RiTa library for Java, RiTaJS was developed to provide a seamless transition for those wishing to work with programmatic natural language natively in the web browser (in HTML5), as well as for those switching from Processing to ProcessingJS. For server-side applications, RiTaJS also runs as a Node.js module. The RiTa tools are currently implemented for English with a Spanish version under development.

jazz eyes These poems were generated by creating a concordance...



jazz eyes

These poems were generated by creating a concordance of the top 5% most frequently used words from Haruki Murakami’s 13 novels and curating them for inclusion via JSON with the RiTa HaikuGrammar sample.

ICM: Haiku Murakami - ITP Code Poetry Slam Submission

"The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You’re going to look like you have..."

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.

You’re going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.



- Gabe Newell, Valve

Fueled by Kickstarter, CodeSpells Moves from Research to Consumer Game

Fueled by Kickstarter, CodeSpells Moves from Research to Consumer Game:

CodeSpells is a 3D RPG that teaches coding by using magic spells to solve problems and it’s about to get its own mystical overhaul thanks to a successful funding campaign on Kickstarter.

The development not only shows how CodeSpells has built a solid following, but also highlights the growing push to expose children to the power of coding…

CodeSpells will be available to play soon. It was greenlit on STEAM early into the Kickstarter campaign and the alpha is planned for a release on STEAM next month.

ja-dark: Excellent to see the progress. Been interested in this game for quite a while, as those who read this microblog know.

Related.

Henry Martin, The New Yorker, 1971



Henry Martin, The New Yorker, 1971

Humans have innate grasp of probability

Humans have innate grasp of probability:

People overrate the chances of dying in a plane crash and guess incorrectly at the odds that a coin toss will yield ‘heads’ after a string of several ‘tails’. Yet humans have an innate sense of chance, a study of indigenous Maya people suggests. Adults in Guatemala who have never learned a formal number system or a written language did as well as formally educated adults and children at estimating the probability of chance events1, the researchers found.

"A god who discusses is lost."

“A god who discusses is lost.”

- “Un Dieu qui discute est perdu.” - Jules Michelet (1899) via Caroline Weber

The Surprisingly Short History Of The Plus Sign

The Surprisingly Short History Of The Plus Sign:

Before the 16th century, most math equations were written as metered verse. Thank god for graphic-design-inclined mathematicians.

“Until around the 16th century, most math was written in metered verse. For thousands of years, even the simplest of math equations was a word problem… A new book by Joseph Mazur… explores the surprisingly fascinating evolution of math as a visual practice.

Mazur writes that “mathematical symbols begin as deliberate designs created by mathematicians.” The plus sign, originally a shorthand for the Latin word for “and,” et, came about in the late 15th century. And intuitive though it seems now, it wasn’t easily adopted: It took another hundred years to gain popularity, and there was stiff competition between different cross-like symbols that all meant plus.

For instance, “The Maltese cross looks like a fan blade,” Mazur explains. to Co.Design.”It’s a beautiful thing when you see it printed. The only problem is, if you’re writing this stuff, you want to write it fast. On the blackboard, that will really slow you down.”

In 1557, Robert Recorde abbreviated “is equal to” to two long, parallel lines, birthing the equals sign to avoid repeating himself 200 times in his book Whetstone of Whitte

The adoption of universal symbols permanently changed the way people thought about mathematics.”

Is a Multilingual Mind Possible for the Japanese?

Is a Multilingual Mind Possible for the Japanese?:

Abstract:

Japan has been conceived as a highly monolithic and monolingual society by both the Japanese and others…

Japan has been devoted, by means of educational and administrative institutions, to integration of its people around the national language, Japanese, and Japanese culture.

…  Japan’s monolingual regime was thus brought into being, through political, societal and ideological circumstances. One could get by with Japanese language only in almost all places and situations. No one had to worry whether a customer, authority, employer, employee, neighbor or even stranger on the street might not understand Japanese. 

Dark sides of monolingualism began to reveal themselves with growing globalism, particularly since the 1980’s, although some were already recognized before.

One of the most familiar examples has been the modest English capacity of the Japanese… even now, in the midst of globalization with many contacts with foreigners, and many reasons to communicate with them, the people’s perpetual efforts to learn English have not brought notable results…

The problem perhaps is more deep-rooted.

Does a conceptual monolingualism underlay the Japanese mind?

In the presentation I will relate Japanese conceptual monolingualism to linguo-behavioristic phenomena, and consider if there are any signs of breakthrough in the present society out of the monolingual cul-de-sac.

Toward a Physics of Equations (PDF)

Toward a Physics of Equations (PDF):

Abstract:

Papers on diagrammatic reasoning often begin by dividing marks on paper into two basic classes: diagrams and sentences.

… symbolic expressions in algebra and arithmetic are frequently treated as diagrammatic or even pictorial depictions of objects and events—events that occur not in the content of the expression, but within the notation itself.

This evidence suggests that algebra is sometimes less a matter of rules and abstract syntax, and more a matter of constraints on the physical behavior and part-whole structure of notational things: an idiosyncratic notational physics, whose laws constrain the structure of proofs.

These considerations suggest that whether some marks are a diagram depends on exactly how a user engages them.

Mathematical symbols as epistemic actions (PDF)

Mathematical symbols as epistemic actions (PDF):

Abstract:

… humans are equipped with unlearned elementary mathematical skills.

However, formal mathematics has properties that cannot be reduced to these elementary cognitive capacities.

The question then arises how human beings cognitively deal with more advanced mathematical ideas.

This paper draws on the extended mind thesis to suggest that mathematical symbols enable us to delegate some mathematical operations to the external environment.

In this view, mathematical symbols are not only used to express mathematical concepts—they are constitutive of the mathematical concepts themselves.

Mathematical symbols are epistemic actions, because they enable us to represent concepts that are literally unthinkable with our bare brains…

Conclusion

Using mathematical symbols can be seen as epistemic actions, not unlike the use of other external tools in scientic practice, such as microscopes, particle accelerators and slide rulers.

As we have aimed to demonstrate with the examples of negative numbers and algebra, denoting mathematical operations by symbols enables us to treat such operations as if they were real entities.

Conceptual progress critically depends on the ability to use mathematical symbols as expressions of operations, a process that can be observed in the history of mathematics and in the minds of students.

Speaking Multiple Languages Routinely Exercises Your Brain

Speaking Multiple Languages Routinely Exercises Your Brain:

Bilingual speakers process information more efficiently and more easily than those who only speak a single language, and a new study… tells us that speaking more than one language is also good for the brain.

… the bilingual brain is constantly activating both languages and choosing which language to use and which to ignore. When the brain is constantly being exercised in this way, it has to work less hard to perform cognitive tasks.

“It’s like a stop light,” Marian said. “Bilinguals are always giving the green light to one language and red to another. When you have to do that all the time, you get really good at inhibiting the words you don’t need.”

… in the brains of people who are fluent bilinguals, both languages are “active” at the same time even if the individual is not conscious of this “double-language” function…

See also: Bilinguals have stronger, faster brains than the rest of us

One of the studies … observed strengthening neural connections between different parts of the brain in people who underwent language training... experimenters observed that parts of the brain that hadn’t previously connected much were creating stronger paths…

The building of stronger connections over time between regions of the brain implies that bilingual brains are “more resistant to damage,” said Li… The findings support the notion that language-learning can fend off dementia…
The deeper the understanding of the language, the stronger the brain’s regional connectivity…

EFF Calls On SCOTUS To Overturn Copyright API Decision

EFF Calls On SCOTUS To Overturn Copyright API Decision:

“In total 77 computer scientists made their opinion known to the court, and argued that the application program interfaces (APIs) should not be copyrightable. Signatories to the brief included five Turing Award winners, four National Medal of Technology winners and several members of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The signatories further included the designers of computer systems and programming languages that included AppleScript, AWK, C++, Haskell, IBM S/360, Java, JavaScript, Lotus 1-2-3, MS-DOS, Python, Scala, SmallTalk, TCP/IP, Unix, and Wiki…

Basically, the 77 computing experts – including some true industry luminaries – who filed a friend of the court brief asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on the case want to codify the free use/exchange of APIs that has been common in the industry for decades,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT. “In essence, they argue that APIs are the software equivalents of industry standards, like nut and bolt thread sizes, that simplify and ease the process of application interaction and integration.

“Oracle, on the other hand, believes that the Java assets and IP it acquired as part of the Sun purchase entitles it to copyright ownership of those technologies and payment from any company or developer that uses them…

It’s not unlike a wealthy individual or company purchasing a piece of land that locals have always freely and commonly used, then fencing the property and exacting a toll on anyone who wishes to cross it.

“… this code compiles and runs on Swift using the XCode 6...



“… this code compiles and runs on Swift using the XCode 6 beta.”

Swift fun fact #1: You can use emoji characters in variable, constant, function, and class names

Extended Euclid's Algorithm via Backward Recurrence Relations (PDF)

Extended Euclid's Algorithm via Backward Recurrence Relations (PDF):

Introduction

Given elements a and b Euclid’s algorithm is most useful for computing the greatest common divisor gcd(a, b), or when gcd(a, b) is invertible, computing the inverse… 

The second problem is usually solved via the familiar backward substitution method.

It seems less well-known that solving ax + by = gcd(a, b) can be performed more efficiently using a “backward” recurrence relation…

I shall argue that the backward recurrence relation method is both pedagogically more natural for students, and more efficient for hand computations…

Conclusion

The backward recurrence method was motivated by backward substitution which is taught to most students, and so is pedagogically preferable to the forward recurrence method.

From the point of view of hand calculations, the backward recurrence method requires half the effort, and students are less likely to make a sign error.

The forward method is good for computers when long computations are involved as the q’s need not be stored… This makes writing a computer program for the forward method slightly easier than the backward method.

ja-dark: In practice, it’s incredibly simple. You just make a tiny table and play with the rows and three columns. No idea how popular it is, but I suspect it’s still not well-known and that students find themselves using back-substitution, collecting terms, etc… I imagine finding this method in a textbook would be like discovering notes from the half-blood prince.

You can find a nice tutorial with step by step pictures and explanations here: ctrl+F for the sentence: Finding a linear combination using the backward recursion. Ikenaga has some thoughts on implementing the method via code algorithm at the bottom of the aforelinked tutorial page.

gcd(187, 102) = 17 = (2)(102) - (1)(187).

"Loneliness is failed solitude."

“Loneliness is failed solitude.”

- Sherry Turkle

Charles Addams, The New Yorker, 1971 Title: Computer...



Charles Addams, The New Yorker, 1971

Title: Computer reaper

Related? Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

Richard Taylor, The New Yorker, 1939 Context.



Richard Taylor, The New Yorker, 1939

Context.

Pāṇini grammar is the earliest known computing language (PDF)

Pāṇini grammar is the earliest known computing language (PDF):

Abstract:

Pāṇini's 4th century BCE Sanskrit grammar uses rewrite rules guided by an explicit and formal metalanguage. The metalanguage makes extensive use of auxiliary markers, in the form of Sanskrit phonemes, to control grammatical derivations.

The method of auxiliary markers was rediscovered by Emil Post in the 1920s and shown capable of representing universal computation.

The same potential computational strength of Pāṇini’s metalanguage follows as a consequence.

Pāṇini’s formal achievement is philosophically distinctive as his grammar is constructed as an extension of spoken Sanskrit, in contrast to the implicit inscription of contemporary formalisms.

For… this paper, ‘computing language’ means a formal calculus capable of representing universal computation according to the rules of some formal language whose rules are explicitly described through a metalanguage.

Philosophically, Pāṇini’s example shows that the differences between natural and artificial computing languages are much smaller than often thought… because the construction of computing languages is apparently just a continuation of natural language constructions by their own means.

Technosectarianism: Applying Religious Metaphors to Programming (PDF)

Technosectarianism: Applying Religious Metaphors to Programming (PDF):

Technosectarianism is a new term presented and discussed in this paper, and intended to represent the…  actions taken by programmers through their supposedly purely objective and technical interactions, which are driven more by religious-like concepts including orthodoxy, partisanship, apostasy, and heresy.

Applying the concept to any programming community, the sacred object is the language and/or its syntax.

… a programming language does not “simply ‘represent’ some absent power but is endowed with the sacred”.

In a very real sense, programming languages no longer represent power, but actually contain that power, which makes them “sacred” to their practitioners.

Executable Texts: Programs as Communications Devices and Their Use in Shaping High-tech Culture

Executable Texts: Programs as Communications Devices and Their Use in Shaping High-tech Culture:

Abstract:

This thesis takes a fresh look at software, treating it as a document, manuscript, corpus, or text to be consumed among communities of programmers and uncovering the social roles of these texts within two specific sub-communities and comparing them.
In the paper, the social roles of the texts are placed within the context of the technical and cultural constraints and environments in which programs are written.
Within that context, the comments emphasize the metaphoric status of programming languages and the social role of the comments themselves.
These social roles are combined with the normative intentions for each comment, creating a dynamic relationship of form and function for both normative and identity-oriented purposes.
The relationship of form and function is used as a unifying concept for a more detailed investigation of the construction of comments, including a look at a literary device that relies on the plural pronoun “we” as the subject.

The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning

The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning:

As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this…

Our results indicate that older adults’ performance on cognitive tests reflects the predictable consequences of learning on information-processing, and not cognitive decline. We consider the implications of this for our scientific and cultural understanding of aging.

Conclusion:

… we should note that human learning is not the product of just this one process: It is abundantly clear, for example, that learning is influenced by social as well as environmental factors, and that self-perception can exert a strong influence on what is actually learned from the environment.

Because of this, the ideas about “cognitive decline” we have critiqued here are likely to be exerting a strong, negative influence on the lives of many millions of older adults.

We hope this can change.

Formal models of learning and information processing offer practical as well as scientific insights, and a better, more widespread understanding of these ideas can help people manage their memories more effectively in the future.

At the outset, we noted that population aging is seen as a problem because of the fear that older adults will be a burden on society; what is more likely is that the myth of cognitive decline is leading to an absurd waste of human potential and human capital. It thus seems likely that an informed understanding of the cognitive costs and benefits of aging will benefit all society, not just its older members.

"Algebra, a language in which good writers are most scarce, because it is the most correct."

“Algebra, a language in which good writers are most scarce, because it is the most correct.”

- Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780)

Learning is not decline: The mental lexicon as a window into cognition across the lifespan (PDF)

Learning is not decline: The mental lexicon as a window into cognition across the lifespan (PDF):

Abstract:

As otherwise healthy adults age, their performance on cognitive tests tends to decline. This change is traditionally taken as evidence that cognitive processing is subject to significant declines in healthy aging. We examine this claim, showing current theories over-estimate the evidence in support of it, and demonstrating that when properly evaluated, the empirical record often indicates that the opposite is true.
 
To explain the disparity between the evidence and current theories, we show how the models of learning assumed in aging research are incapable of capturing even the most basic of empirical facts of “associative” learning, and lend themselves to spurious discoveries of “cognitive decline.” Once a more accurate model of learning is introduced, we demonstrate that far from declining, the accuracy of older adults lexical processing appears to improve continuously across the lifespan.
 
We further identify other measures on which performance does not decline with age, and show how these different patterns of performance fit within an overall framework of learning. Finally, we consider the implications of our demonstrations of continuous and consistent learning performance throughout adulthood for our understanding of the changes in underlying brain morphology that occur during the course of cognitive development across the lifespan.

Conclusion:

… we should reiterate why all this is important. In numerous studies, Carol Dweck and her colleagues have shown how people who believe that their abilities can be improved through hard work learn far better than those who think that their abilities are fixed.

Since it is clear from the findings we present here that people’s ability to learn stays with them at all ages, and from the work of Dweck and colleagues that thinking of ability as a fixed factor has an adverse influence on children and younger adults’ ability to learn, we can only shudder to think what the pervasive mythology of “cognitive decline” is doing to older adults’ ability to adopt a positive mindset, or to believe that their efforts can lead to improvement.

"Such is the advantage of a well-constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the..."

“Such is the advantage of a well-constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories.”

- Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827)

“It’s ok — Not everyone can be good at math” (PDF)

“It’s ok — Not everyone can be good at math” (PDF):

Introduction:

The idea that people’s areas of weakness should be accepted, as long as they focus on developing and maximizing their strengths, has become a prevalent one… One frequently encounters students embodying this idea when they claim, “I’m just not a math person” or “I’m a fuzzy, not a techie.” How do people come to simply accept themselves as having low ability in important fields of study?

Abstract:

Can comforting struggling students demotivate them and potentially decrease the pool of students pursuing math-related subjects?

In Studies 1–3, instructors holding an entity (fixed) theory of math intelligence more readily judged students to have low ability than those holding an incremental (malleable) theory.

Studies 2–3 further revealed that those holding an entity (versus incremental) theory were more likely to both comfort students for low math ability and use “kind” strategies unlikely to promote engagement with the field (e.g., assigning less homework).

Next, we explored what this comfort-oriented feedback communicated to students, compared with strategy-oriented and control feedback (Study 4).

Students responding to comfort-oriented feedback not only perceived the instructor’s entity theory and low expectations, but also reported lowered motivation and lower expectations for their own performance.

This research has implications for understanding how pedagogical practices can lock students into low achievement and deplete the math pipeline.

Mindset (excerpt)

“Recently, I got an angry letter from a teacher who had taken one of our surveys. The survey portrays a hypothetical student, Jennifer, who had gotten 65 percent on a math exam. It then asks teachers to tell us how they would treat her.

Teachers with the fixed mindset were more than happy to answer our questions. They felt that by knowing Jennifer’s score, they had a good sense of who she was and what she was capable of. Their recommendations abounded. Mr. Riordan, by contrast, was fuming. Here’s what he wrote.

To Whom It May Concern:
Having completed the educator’s portion of your recent survey, I must request that my results be excluded from the study. I feel that the study itself is scientifically unsound…
Unfortunately, the test uses a faulty premise, asking teachers to make assumptions about a given student based on nothing more than a number on a page…  Performance cannot be based on one assessment. You cannot determine the slope of a line given only one point, as there is no line to begin with. A single point in time does not show trends, improvement, lack of effort, or mathematical ability…
Sincerely, Michael D. Riordan

I was delighted with Mr. Riordan’s critique and couldn’t have agreed with it more. An assessment at one point in time has little value for understanding someone’s ability, let alone their potential to succeed in the future.

It was disturbing how many teachers thought otherwise, and that was the point of our study.”

"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with..."

“A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”

- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971

Fixed vs. Growth Mindset

Prospects for usage-based computational models of grammatical development: argument structure and semantic roles (PDF)

Prospects for usage-based computational models of grammatical development: argument structure and semantic roles (PDF):

Abstract:

The computational modeling of language development has enabled researchers to make impressive strides toward achieving a comprehensive psychological account of the processes and mechanisms whereby children acquire their mother tongues.

Nevertheless, the field’s primary focus on distributional information has lead to little progress in elucidating the processes by which children learn to compute meanings beyond the level of single words.

This lack of psychologically motivated computational work on semantics poses an important challenge for usage-based computational accounts of acquisition in particular, which hold that grammatical development is closely tied to meaning.

In the present review, we trace some initial steps toward answering this challenge through a survey of existing computational models of grammatical development that incorporate semantic information to learn to assign thematic roles and acquire argument structure.

We argue that the time is ripe for usage-based computational accounts of grammatical development to move beyond purely distributional features of the input, and to incorporate information about the objects and actions observable in the learning environment.

To conclude, we sketch possible avenues for extending previous approaches to modeling the role of semantics in grammatical development.

Jōyō kanji as core building blocks of the Japanese writing system

Jōyō kanji as core building blocks of the Japanese writing system:

Abstract:

The architecture of writing systems metaphor has special relevance for understanding the structural nature of the Japanese writing system, and, more specifically, for appreciating how the 2,136 kanji of the /jō-yō-kan-ji-hyō/* ‘List of characters for general use’ function as the core building blocks in the orthographic representation of a considerable proportion of the Japanese lexicon.

In seeking to illuminate the multiple layers of internal structure within Japanese kanji, the Japanese lexicon, and the Japanese writing system, the paper draws on insights and observations gained from an ongoing project to construct a large-scale Japanese lexical database system.

Reflecting structural distinctions within the database, the paper consists of three main sections addressing the different structural levels of kanji components, jōyō kanji, and the lexicon.

Division of labor in vocabulary structure: Insights from corpus analyses (PDF)

Division of labor in vocabulary structure: Insights from corpus analyses (PDF):

Abstract:

Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used and what information is available as input to language acquisition.

Analyses of such ‘big data’ have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of the sign: the long-standing assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is pronounced for early acquired words.

Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories—nouns and verbs sound differently from each other—affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences.

Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings.

We conclude by arguing in favor of including ‘big data’ analyses into the language scientist’s methodological toolbox.

See also: How arbitrary is language? (PDF)

Making Robots and Memories

Making Robots and Memories:

Jacob says “I have always appreciated Japanese as both a Language and as a culture, taking a Japanese language course every semester despite working on a double major in both Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. While I was doubtful of getting the chance to travel abroad, I found that Kyushu University offered the opportunity to do laboratory research, as well as take a few Computer Science related courses. I immediately saw this to be a huge advantage. My college is very small, so research opportunities are often few and far between. On the other hand, Kyushu University is renowned for its incredible robotics laboratories. I went through the long arduous process to study abroad, and to make a long story short, I find myself in Japan at this very hour.”

"My research is everything I dreamed it to be." commented Jacob. "I work in a massive ten story building in the mountains of Kyushu, tinkering away complex robots and vision systems. It’s truly unlike any opportunity I would have had if I had stayed at my university." Jacob is a research student at Kurazume Computer Vision Laboratory, where he works side by side with other Japanese students to make new and interesting breakthroughs.

"We all really have to work together. While it can be difficult being the only native English speaker in the lab, I know enough Japanese to get my point across. Despite a bit of a language barrier, they treat me like one of their own here. I help them correct their English presentations and papers, and they help me improve my Japanese. It’s just a great atmosphere."

For a Better Brain, Learn Another Language

For a Better Brain, Learn Another Language:

“The reason why we borrow words like savoir faire from French is because it’s not part of the culture [in the United States] and therefore that word did not evolve as part of our language,” says George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Speaking different languages means you get different frames, different metaphors, and also you’re learning the culture of the language so you get not only different words, but different types of words,” Lakoff told me.

But the benefits of speaking multiple languages extend past just having access to different words, concepts, metaphors, and frames…

Multi-linguals tend to score better on standardized tests, especially in math, reading, and vocabulary; they are better at remembering lists or sequences, likely from learning grammatical rules and vocabulary; they are more perceptive to their surroundings and therefore better at focusing in on important information while weeding out misleading information (it’s no surprise Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are skilled polyglots)…

“Cognitive traps,” or simple mistakes in spelling or comprehension that our brains tend to make when taking linguistic shortcuts (such as how you can easily read “tihs senetcne taht is trerilby msispleld”), are better avoided when one speaks multiple languages.

Multi-linguals might also be better decision-makers. According to a new study, they are more resistant to conditioning and framing techniques, making them less likely to be swayed by such language in advertisements or political campaign speeches. Those who speak multiple languages have also been shown to be more self-aware spenders, viewing “hypothetical” and “real” money (the perceived difference between money on a credit card and money in cold, hard cash) more similarly than monolinguals…

How the Education Community has Embraced Flat Design

How the Education Community has Embraced Flat Design:

Over the years, textbooks have adopted print trends – but they still largely focus on text first, small images and important facts and tidbits in the margins. This layout works well for students who learn in various styles since they can pick out usable information from the materials presented.

Computer science, however, doesn’t necessarily do well with this format. Coding and development relies heavily on syntax and the structure of lines of code, and this, in addition to the introduction of concepts that are foreign to many students, make for a difficult two-dimensional learning experience…

In the example above, flowcharts, line numbers, and comments are used in various colors to clearly differentiate and explain the concept being presented. One of the most important principles of flat design – visually pulling out important information and letting less important information take a back seat – is clearly exemplified here in a way that can be adopted beyond development textbooks and into many other areas of education…

Education is a natural space for flat design, because the underlying design principles and the objectives are inherently aligned. Whether it’s in digital education, traditional education or client education, materials should be created with these principles in mind so as to increase user understanding, ease the learning process, and provide a better user experience to everyone involved.

In Computers We Trust? | Quanta Magazine

In Computers We Trust? | Quanta Magazine:

A mustachioed, 62-year-old professor at Rutgers University, Zeilberger anchors one end of a spectrum of opinions about the role of computers in mathematics. He has been listing Ekhad as a co-author on papers since the late 1980s “to make a statement that computers should get credit where credit is due.” For decades, he has railed against “human-centric bigotry” by mathematicians: a preference for pencil-and-paper proofs that Zeilberger claims has stymied progress in the field. “For good reason,” he said. “People feel they will be out of business…”

But computer code is also fallible — because humans write it. Coding errors (and the difficulty in detecting them) have occasionally forced mathematicians to backpedal.

In the 1990s, Teleman recalled, theoretical physicists predicted “a beautiful answer” to a question about higher-dimensional surfaces that were relevant to string theory. When mathematicians wrote a computer program to check the conjecture, they found it false. “But the programmers had made a mistake, and the physicists were actually right,” Teleman said. “That’s the biggest danger of using a computer proof: What if there’s a bug?” …

“When Magma tells me the answer is 3.765, how do I know that’s really the answer?” Hanke asked. “I don’t. I have to trust Magma.” If mathematicians want to maintain the longstanding tradition that it be possible to check every detail of a proof, Hanke says, they can’t use closed-source software…

Alternative Logic

Three years ago, Vladimir Voevodsky, one of the organizers of a new program on the foundations of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., discovered that a formal logic system that was developed by computer scientists, called “type theory,” could be used to re-create the entire mathematical universe from scratch. Type theory is consistent with the mathematical axioms, but couched in the language of computers. Voevodsky believes this alternative way to formalize mathematics, which he has renamed the univalent foundations of mathematics, will streamline the process of formal theorem proving…

Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth

Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth :

Jeffrey O. Shallit, University of Waterloo: “Decision methods, automated theorem-proving, and proof assistants have been successful in a number of different areas: the Wilf-Zeilberger method for combinatorial identities and the Robbins conjecture, to name two. What do you think theorem discovery and proof will look like in 100 years? Rather like today, or much more automated?”

Don Knuth: “Assuming 100 years of sustainable civilization, I’m fairly sure that a large percentage of theorems (maybe even 38.1966%) will be discovered with computer aid, and that a nontrivial percentage (maybe 0.7297%) will have computer-verified proofs that cannot be understood by mortals.

In my Ph.D. thesis (1963), I looked at computer-generated examples of small finite projective planes, and used that data to construct infinitely many planes of a kind never before known. Ten years later, I discovered the so-called Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm by studying the way one of Steve Cook’s automata was able to recognize concatenated palindromes in linear time. Such investigations are fun.

A few months ago, however, I tried unsuccessfully to do a similar thing. I had a 5,000-step mechanically discovered proof that the edges of a smallish flower snark graph cannot be 3-colored, and I wanted to psych out how the machine had come up with it. Although I gave up after a couple of days, I do think it would be possible to devise new tools for the study of computer proofs in order to identify the “aha moments” therein.

In February of this year I noticed that the calculation of an Erdős-discrepancy constant—made famous by Tim Gowers’ Polymath project, in which many mathematicians collaborated via the Internet—makes an instructive benchmark for satisfiability-testing algorithms. My first attempt to compute it needed 49 hours of computer time. Two weeks later I’d cut that down to less than 2 hours, but there still were 20 million steps in the proof. I see no way at present for human beings to understand more than the first few thousand of those steps.”

Manipulating mindset to positively influence introductory programming performance

Manipulating mindset to positively influence introductory programming performance:

Abstract:

Introductory programming classes are renowned for their high dropout rates. The authors propose that this is because students learn to adopt a fixed mindset towards programming.
This paper reports on a study carried out with an introductory programming class, based on Dweck’s mindset research…
The study found that the mixture of teaching [growth] mindset and giving [growth] mindset messages on returned work resulted in a significant change in mindset and a corresponding significant change in test scores - improvements in test scores were found in a class test given immediately after the six-week intervention and at the end-of-year exam. The authors discuss the results and the strengths and weaknesses of the study…

From the paper:

In discussing this significant improvement in performance, we first note that the whole course is designed in such a way as to promote a growth mindset approach to learning. Since students can so easily and quickly get stuck when learning to program, it is essential that detailed feedback on progress be provided as early as possible on any student work…

Performance in a class test and the final exam of the course was better for those students who were taught [growth] mindset and who received the [growth] mindset message on their feedback sheet…
ja-dark: So many learners who have been shut out of everything from learning how to play the violin to learning to program because the ignorant promote stagnant, innatist beliefs. From gender-based to age-based to race-based to class-based and even handedness-based (left vs. right brain) dismissals. Amazing. Generations of victims, generations of lost potential.
At any rate, note the emphasis above on feedback. Corrective feedback is essential, especially for spaced retrieval practice. Every exercise/question used to learn should be part of a Question and Answer set. Ideally, you study the exercise and solution together first, and then test yourself on it, restudying the answer after each testing session to solidify your knowledge with this feedback.
For programming and mathematics, this includes mastering procedures (thus unintentionally memorizing specific answers when your goal isn’t rote learning of a formula is irrelevant, it’s whether and how well you can get to the answer by solving the problem using the creative application of various steps and formulae, and can transfer that ability to similar problems and mathematical objects, etc., that you evaluate).
One sad thing I’ve noticed about textbooks is, setting aside the half-assed curse, ‘left as an exercise’, how often they give students sets of useful, interesting exercises, but don’t provide the answers. The answers are instead included in instructor’s manuals. This is in service to the old-fashioned teaching methods which tend to hinder student learning in order to make institutional evaluation easier. Such a waste of a valuable resource. Millions of painstakingly developed and then discarded exercises and solutions for every field in textbooks worldwide, fractionally used to taunt and torment students instead of efficiently and enjoyably educating them.
There’s no good reason, learning-wise, to assign a problem to learners without access to a solution. Assigning problems without solutions ensures inordinate difficulty of testing during a developmental period without timely correction, and/or encourages short-term, passive restudy rather than active self-testing for long-term learning, as answers to similar exercises are either sought elsewhere (rendering the original problem a pointless difficulty) or the problem is simply discarded and explanations are read and re-read without any useful testing. Insult is added to injury when such things are graded, increasing the stakes.
Thankfully the cause is not lost, there are plenty of freely available exercises and solutions to be studied with the proper methods. You simply have to be motivated to find them and test yourself on your own, without reliance on external encouragement. Provided you’ve been made aware of the value of this process in the first place…
See the references here for more on feedback, including (relatively slightly) delayed feedback, and scaffolded, incremental feedback. Remember, even when you answer correctly, feedback after testing is useful to solidify your ability.
In addition to the previous study on in-class quizzes, it would be interesting to see Anki or a similar system incorporated into classes where card sets (sets of problems and solutions, which would include explanations—worked examples) are provided to students, who must study them to ‘maturity’, and then they’re tested on those same Q&A sets or sets based on the extremely similar procedures/patterns.
Evaluations are based not on whether you memorized the answers, but on whether you can demonstrate that you can get from point A to point B, even when A and B are variable within certain constraints.
In other words, the process would simply make the primary importance of frequent, low-stakes self-testing with feedback explicit and more essential to evaluating progress in the institutional manner, and would also emphasize the implementation of the spacing and testing effect in such a way that learner usage of systems like Anki would become commonplace in modern education, exponentially increasing learning and retention across the board.

猪脑子



猪脑子

Observation: forest vs. trees

I’ve noticed it seems like there’s an easy mode to slip into when you’re first reading a foreign language (formal or natural, e.g. math, programming, or Japanese, etc.). To take in the text as a whole, all those symbols, as a big alien mass.

There’s a sticky spot while learning where you’re still tempted to peer blindly around the dark forest, as it were, and feel lost, but you have enough knowledge that if you isolate specific trees with extra effort, you would navigate just fine.

So, be aware of this and try not to let your eyes glaze and take in the forest all at once, as your instincts tell you to (and which can be cool: ‘I’m learning this?! Badass.’). Maintain a regular effort to fixate immediately on particulars.

Related: Brief note on reading in Japanese (Thus in this case, after immediately focusing on those aforementioned particulars, you primarily focus on meaning, not sound. I want to add here to that post not to take the advice so literally that you fixate on kanji meaning at the *expense* of compound meaning. By which I mean the integration of individual kanji meanings into a pair like Chinese + Characters, etc.)

Anyone Can Learn Programming: Teaching > Genetics

Anyone Can Learn Programming: Teaching > Genetics:

The SIGCSE-members list recently had a discussion about whether students are born with programming ability (the so-called “Geek Gene”), or if effort leads to greater programming ability. As one correspondent put it:

Over the years, I have come to believe that those of us who can become successful programmers have different internal wiring than most in the population.

This is one form of the “Geek Gene” hypothesis — that students are either born with the ability to program, or they’re not. Teaching doesn’t have much to do with it. Raymond Lister has thought a lot about the “Geek Gene” hypothesis as described in an Inroads article, presented at ICER 2013, and studied in his award-winning paper (with co-authors Porter and Zingaro). In general, Raymond doesn’t see a reason to believe in the “Geek Gene.”

The “Geek Gene” hypothesis is widely held among computer science faculty. Clayton Lewis found in a survey in 2007 (see article here) that CS faculty who responded strongly disagree (77%) with the sentence: “Nearly everyone is capable of succeeding in the computer science curriculum if they work at it.” The CS students surveyed were far more likely to agree with the statement than the CS faculty!

In educational psychology terms, those that hold to the “Geek Gene” hypothesis have a fixed mindset, as opposed to a growth mindset. These are terms used by Carol Dweck to describe how students approach their studies. (See her webpage here, and a relevant Wikipedia article here.) Students with a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are fixed from birth. It’s a talent that either you got or you don’t. If fixed mindset students do badly on a test, they chalk it up to fate. “Guess I’m just not good at that — have to find a new field that I’m good at.” A growth mindset student believes that dedication and hard work can lead to greater success. A bad grade leads to the reaction, “I have to work harder next time.” There is significant evidence that a growth mindset leads to greater effort and achievement.

Fortunately, there are studies that show that we can teach a growth mindset. We can help students change from a fixed to a growth mindset. In fact, Quintin Cutts and his colleagues showed a successful intervention that improved computing students’ performance by encouraging a growth mindset (paper here). But that kind of intervention is not possible if the teachers themselves have the fixed mindset.

Related:

Mental rest and reflection boost learning, study suggests

Mental rest and reflection boost learning, study suggests:
  • M. L. Schlichting, A. R. Preston. Memory reactivation during rest supports upcoming learning of related content. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1404396111

Pleasure of learning new words

Pleasure of learning new words:

… researchers… have experimentally proved that human adult word learning exhibits activation not only of cortical language regions but also of… a core region of reward processing. Results confirm that the motivation to learn is preserved throughout the lifespan, helping adults to acquire a second language.

Researchers determined that the reward region that is activated is the same that answers to a wide range of stimuli, including food, sex, drugs or games.

"The main objective of the study was to know to what extent language learning activates subcortical reward and motivational systems," explains Pablo Ripollés…

"Moreover, the fact that language could be favoured by this type of circuitry is an interesting hypothesis from an evolutionary point of view," points out the expert…

  • Pablo Ripollés, Josep Marco-Pallarés, Ulrike Hielscher, Anna Mestres-Missé, Claus Tempelmann, Hans-Jochen Heinze, Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, Toemme Noesselt. The Role of Reward in Word Learning and Its Implications for Language Acquisition. Current Biology, 2014; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.044

Language learning by the numbers — and how you can come out on top

Language learning by the numbers — and how you can come out on top:

College course catalogues can be overwhelming. There are so many concepts to learn, so many worlds to explore, and so many professors to befriend, yet so little time to do it all. It’s no wonder, then, that learning a language sometimes sinks to the bottom of our list of priorities.

But it shouldn’t. Learning a language can advance our careers, our personal lives, our cognition, and our potential to make a positive impact on the world. Here’s why…

Algorithm Awareness | MIT Technology Review

Algorithm Awareness | MIT Technology Review:

Increasingly, it is algorithms that choose which products to recommend to us and algorithms that decide whether we should receive a new credit card. But these algorithms are buried outside our perception. How does one begin to make sense of these mysterious hidden forces?

The question gained resonance recently when Facebook revealed a scientific study on “emotion contagion” that had been conducted by means of its news feed. The study showed that displaying fewer positive updates in people’s feeds causes them to post fewer positive and more negative messages of their own. This result is interesting but disturbing, revealing the full power of Facebook’s algorithmic influence as well as its willingness to use it.

To explore the issue of algorithmic awareness, in 2013 three colleagues and I built a tool that helps people understand how their Facebook news feed works…

Related:

Doctor Who game to demystify computer science for children

Doctor Who game to demystify computer science for children:

Voiced by current Doctor Peter Capaldi, The Doctor and the Dalek is an online game aimed at six to 12-year-olds.

Players must solve puzzles through a series of commands - which teach the basics of computer coding and programming skills.

What Programming Can Learn From Literature

What Programming Can Learn From Literature:

It’s easy dismiss coding as a rote exercise — a matter of following rules. But natural language is subject to rules of its own: grammar, syntax, spelling. The best writers test these rules, bend them, or break them outright, and in doing so they keep the language alive. Programmers break rules too. When a good programmer breaks a rule, it’s not for effect — they’re trying to overcome an arbitrary convention that’s hampering their ability to express themselves. Software’s indebted to these programmers who are curious enough to experiment with language, because that’s how new patterns and techniques are conceived. So I wanted to apply the quirks and transgressions of the great authors to JavaScript, to see where that pushed the language…

In my book, I try to show the breadth of styles and sensibilities that can be expressed in code. Hemingway’s code is intentionally unsophisticated. He wants you to feel the awe of the Fibonacci sequence without him talking all over it. Shakespeare’s solution is a “calckulation in two acts employing the humorous logick of java-scripte” (with comments in iambic pentameter). Austen appears to seek the approval of the grammar pedants while winking furiously at those who can see beyond the artifice, Borges generates prime numbers by imagining long-limbed monsters climbing a staircase, Nabokov exploits the rotational delta between Terra and Antiterra to predict the next happy number, Tupac raps out his solution, and Kerouac… oh but now I see your eyes rolling…

Violin teacher Suzuki is the biggest fraud in music history, says expert

Violin teacher Suzuki is the biggest fraud in music history, says expert:

“I think it is one of the biggest frauds in music history,” said Mark O’Connor, a violin teacher and professional fiddler who has spent years delving into Dr Suzuki’s past. “I don’t believe anybody has properly checked his past.”

Mr O’Connor has detailed his allegations in a series of posts on his internet blog site. Under his latest posting, last week, entitled “Suzuki’s biggest lie”, Mr O’Connor has posted a page from the Berlin music conservatory where Dr Suzuki claimed to have studied. Mr O’Connor says the page shows that Dr Suzuki, aged 24 in 1923, was rejected after failing his audition.

Mr O’Connor writes “Shinichi Suzuki had no violin training from any serious violin teacher that we can find. He was basically self-taught, beginning the violin at the age of 18, and it showed. He was never allowed a position in any orchestra.”

ja-dark Who cares. The guru doesn’t matter, only whether the method is sound. I stress this for Japanese, but it doesn’t stop people from getting scammed by various language gurus.

I don’t expect better from the violin community, re: learning, based on the terrible advice and ignorance I see from its experts online.

Besides, everyone knows Stradivari is the biggest fraud. (Follow-up to that study.)

Photo



Photo



Examining the language of terrorist propaganda

Examining the language of terrorist propaganda:

New research out of Queen’s University could give insight into what terrorists are thinking. Professor David Skillicorn (School of Computing) analyzed language used in two jihadist magazines to gain intelligence about terrorist strategy…

Dr. Skillicorn’s research focuses on reverse engineering language to get access to the mental state that generated it. This latest paper is one in a series exploring how mental state affects language (e.g. influence in elections, deception in legal proceedings, and fraud in financial statements), and how language reveals mental state (e.g. jihadist language in Islamist forums).

Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution’: In Search...



Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution’: In Search of a Logo

“Others have incorporated umbrellas into the design of the Hong Kong flag, like this one by Sadie Lau. (The Chinese characters below it, 反弹, mean to bounce back or ricochet.)”

Related:

“How the language of revolt hides demonstrators’ true goals.”

Japanese university president laments exodus of women in science

Japanese university president laments exodus of women in science:

Only 10 percent of Japanese researchers are women, but of those researchers who leave the country, 60 percent are women.

Too many female scientists are leaving Japan because they do not feel they can get ahead in its “male-dominated” society, a senior university leader has said.

Michinari Hamaguchi, president of Nagoya University, one of Japan’s leading universities, said that he was deeply concerned by the exodus of talented female researchers to overseas institutions.

Hamaguchi, who is vice president of the Japan Association of National Universities, said that he was shocked to learn that 60 percent of the 24,000 Japanese researchers working overseas are women. “In our own country, only 10 percent of researchers are women,” he told an audience at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London last month.

The low proportion of female scientists may be explained by Japan’s “male-dominated, aggressive” society, which does not encourage women to play a full role in research or academia, said Hamaguchi.

Some women had a “minority complex” thanks to their cultural background and felt able to push on only when working overseas, he claimed. “Even if a Japanese lady has the same ability as a male researcher, they will sit back and stay quiet when the male is in the same room.”

Nagoya University wanted female researchers to use their time abroad to become more self-confident and then to play a further role in research on their return to Japan, Hamaguchi said.

The loss of female scientists is one of the reasons for Japan’s current economic malaise, he said.

ja-dark This was sort of the topic of a later episode of the jdorama Galileo in season 2, actually.

"I have proved it to be of no small use, when you lie in bed in the dark, to go over again in the..."

“I have proved it to be of no small use, when you lie in bed in the dark, to go over again in the imagination the outlines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things… this is certainly a praiseworthy act, and useful for impressing things in the memory.”

- Leonardo da Vinci, ‘Of studying in the dark’, Notebooks (1452–1519)

"A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive..."

“A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more.”

-

William James (1890)

"If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you..."

“If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.”

- Francis Bacon (1620)

Frequent Tests Can Enhance College Learning, Study Finds

Frequent Tests Can Enhance College Learning, Study Finds:

Grading college students on quizzes given at the beginning of every class, rather than on midterms or a final exam, increases both attendance and overall performance, scientists reported Wednesday.

The findings — from an experiment in which 901 students in a popular introduction to psychology course at the University of Texas took their laptops to class and were quizzed online — demonstrate that the computers can act as an aid to teaching, not just a distraction…

On the first day of their Psych 301 course in fall 2011, James W. Pennebaker and Samuel D. Gosling — who have taught it jointly for years — instructed all 901 students to bring a laptop to class, if they had one (they all did).

The students then learned why: They would be taking a short quiz in each subsequent class on their computer. The quizzes would be short and personalized — seven questions that the entire class would answer, and one tailored to each student, usually a question from another quiz that he or she got wrong.

In place of a final exam, grades were based on cumulative quiz scores.

ja-dark: Why many courses in universities still use midterms and finals is beyond me. Infrequent, high-stakes testing hinders learning. But that assumes idealistically that universities are primarily for learning.

At any rate, even better than the above scenario is to not require attendance at all, but I suppose some means of anti-cheating assurance is necessary.

For more on why frequent low-stakes self-testing is superior, see my other posts under the spaced retrieval tag. Don’t take my word for it, read the research I link which dates back over 125 years.

The good news is, if you use Anki (spaced retrieval software) properly regardless of what your university courses require, you will ace everything anyway. The bad news is, you will have to create and maintain materials and performance all on your own, which makes academia superfluous outside of basic resources and the bottom-line value of a certificate or degree. Not to mention the frustration of having people in authority over you using obviously inferior methods that you have to overcome.

If you ever encounter a professor that encourages the use of Anki and/or even provides Anki or spaced retrieval friendly materials, that professor is a keeper.

"The preference of seeing over understanding as a method of observation seems to me to be capricious."

“The preference of seeing over understanding as a method of observation seems to me to be capricious.”

- Alonzo Church,“The Need for Abstract Entities”, 1951

Alonzo Church: On ontological misogyny

Alonzo Church: On ontological misogyny:

Goodman says somewhere that he finds abstract entities difficult to understand. And from a psychological viewpoint it is certainly his dislike and distrust of abstract entities which leads him to propose an ontology from which they are omitted.

Now a misogynist is a man who finds women difficult to understand, and who in fact considers them objectionable incongruities in an otherwise matter-of-fact and hard-headed world. Suppose then that in analogy with nominalism the misogynist is led by his dislike and distrust of women to omit them from his ontology. Women are not real, he tells himself, and derives great comfort from the thought — there are no such things. This doctrine let us call ontological misogyny

Alonzo Church, 1958

Doing math with your body

Doing math with your body:

Previously:

Code the ode: Center for Digital Humanities marries technology and humanistic studies

Code the ode: Center for Digital Humanities marries technology and humanistic studies:

Sometimes, opposites attract.

Princeton senior Brian Lax is an English major, passionate about British literature. He is also passionate about computer science and is earning a certificate in statistics and machine learning. Determined to marry these two seemingly disparate parts of his academic experience for his senior thesis, he set out to track revisions of poems by W.H. Auden across time — using the computer as his chief research tool.

Working with his adviser, Meredith Martin, associate professor of English and director of the Center for Digital Humanities, Lax began his journey into the field of digital humanities.

"Digital humanities brings computational tools such as large-scale databases and text-analysis software to bear on traditional humanities scholarship," Martin said. "Because of the ability of computers to digest and store vast amounts of data, things that would have taken scholars an entire career to research, computers can now do in a month. Instead of digging through archives trying to find the answer, in collaboration with a computer scientist, the humanist can come up with ways of using existing or new tools to generate a lot of answers very quickly. This, in turn, helps humanists pose new questions… ”

"The next generation of humanists will need to be equipped not only with a classically humanistic framework — knowledge of the canon, styles of scholarly criticism and critical thinking skills — but also with the practical and intellectual tools of digital analysis," Martin said…

In the near future, Martin said, the center will be involved in collaborative projects internationally and on campus. One project in the Department of East Asian Studies will create a text database — a kind of complex dictionary — of Chinese characters and sounds, as well as hypertext versions (a text database system that contains links to other texts) of all pre-modern Chinese texts. The project will, for example, allow scholars to read one text and see the range of its intertextual relations with others.

Also planned is the establishment of an undergraduate certificate in digital humanities. “Undergraduates are really excited about digital humanities,” Martin said. “We’re trying really hard to support students like Brian Lax.”

Evolution of the Japanese Language: Dissing, Panicking and Riding a Cab

Evolution of the Japanese Language: Dissing, Panicking and Riding a Cab:

A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How To Write Proofs

A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How To Write Proofs:

On Tuesday, Leslie Lamport, who won computer science’s prestigious Turing prize in 2013, gave a talk called “How to write a 21st century proof” that started with the same observation my history class and I made: formulas are easier to read and parse than prose equations, so we have moved beyond prose equations when we write about math. So why do mathematicians insist on writing proofs in prose, the same way 17th century mathematicians did?

His method, which you can read about in more detail on his website (pdf), is a hierarchical structure that doesn’t seem entirely dissimilar from the two-column proofs that most of us learned in middle school or high school geometry class, although he points out that it can handle complex problems that would be unwieldy in that two-column format. Each line is numbered, and each assertion is justified with numbers referring to previous lines and assertions.

Video + Slides.

Pragmatics as the origin of recursion

Pragmatics as the origin of recursion:

Abstract:

There has been a recent spate of work on recursion as a central design feature of language and specifically of syntax.

This short report points out that there is little evidence that unlimited recursion, understood as centre embedding, is typical of natural language syntax. Nevertheless, embedded pragmatic construals seem available in every language.

Further, much deeper centre embedding can be found in dialogue or conversation structure than can be found in syntax.

Existing accounts for the ‘performance’ limitations on centre embedding are thus thrown in doubt.

Dialogue materials suggest that centre embedding is perhaps a core part of the human interaction system and is for some reason much more highly restricted in syntax than in other aspects of cognition.

Introduction

… the focal type of recursion—understood here as centre embedding—has its natural home in principles of language use, not language structure…

Discussion

It has been argued here that recursive embedding in syntax is not necessarily a prominent feature of languages—in some large class of languages… it is either not clearly evidenced or capped at a very shallow level. These languages provide no evidence, therefore, that a core element of language design is indefinite embedding of the kind produced by a context-free grammar.

On the other hand, whether or not languages have clear syntactic embedding, they always seem to make use of ‘pragmatic embedding’ as it were…

The two facts together suggest that ‘recursion’ understood propositionally (as relations between propositions) is not so much a universal property of grammar as a property of human psychology, most evident in language use.

Vahan Shirvanian, The New Yorker, 1969 Context: “One of the...



Vahan Shirvanian, The New Yorker, 1969

Context:

“One of the most significant developments in the computer industry during the 1960s was the perceived shortage of skilled ‘computer people’… ”

Richard Decker, The New Yorker, 1955



Richard Decker, The New Yorker, 1955

Mischa Richter, The New Yorker, 1958



Mischa Richter, The New Yorker, 1958

Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers (2nd Edition Update)

Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers (2nd Edition Update):

Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers is a textbook for a new kind of introductory prob-stat class. It emphasizes the use of statistics to explore large datasets. It takes a computational approach, which has several advantages…

This second edition of Think Stats includes the chapters from the first edition, many of them substantially revised, and new chapters on regression, time series analysis, survival analysis, and analytic methods. The previous edition did not use pandas, SciPy, or StatsModels, so all of that material is new.

ja-dark: In case it’s not clear, this book (and the code examples/data it uses) is free, as is the case with all of Downey’s great books.

Context:

Downey: A lot of it comes from my experience teaching at Olin College. All of our students take a basic programming class in the first semester, and I discovered that I could use their programming skills as a pedagogic wedge. What I mean is if you know how to program, you can use that skill to learn everything else.

I started with Think Stats because statistics is an area that has really suffered from the mathematical approach. At a lot of colleges, students take a mathematical statistics class that really doesn’t prepare them to work with real data. By taking a computational approach I was able to explain things more clearly (at least I think so). And more importantly, the computational approach lets students dive in and work with real data right away.

Previously.

Discrete Mathematics with Python (PDF)

Discrete Mathematics with Python (PDF):

Most recently I mentioned the benefits of combining math and programming here. Convergent cognition. This document goes over some of the basics of Python and shows how you can convert various things you might learn in a discrete mathematics class to programming.

It might seem like extra effort, and in the short term it is, but in the long term it’s worthwhile. Of course, you’ll see bits and pieces of these connections between discrete math and compsci in textbooks like Epp’s, but I believe the only book(s) entirely devoted to this sort of thing beyond the occasional pseudocode might be Downey’s (Think Stats and Think Bayes).

For more on the topic, see also: Discrete Mathematics through the eyes of a Python programmer

Warren Miller, The New Yorker, 1967 ja-dark: Reminds me of...



Warren Miller, The New Yorker, 1967

ja-dark: Reminds me of Yukawa Manabu from Keigo Higashino’s series Galileo; he is prone to suddenly writing out equations on any available surface when he solves a mystery using his physics genius.

Math wars: Rote memorization plays crucial role in teaching students how to solve complex calculations, study says

Math wars: Rote memorization plays crucial role in teaching students how to solve complex calculations, study says:

ja-dark: As with grammar, proceduralization via spaced retrieval is the way to go. See also this brief note on math in Anki (and the previous post linked therein).

Combining mathematics with programming aids in the thoughtful application of these internalized formulae to consider and solve problems in myriad ways. Designing algorithms. Detective work. And of course, programming makes mathematics concrete and interesting. Convergent cognition.

How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math

How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math:

… I’d flunked my way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science. In fact, I didn’t start studying remedial math until… age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I’d be Exhibit A…

When learning math and engineering as an adult, I began by using the same strategy I’d used to learn language. I’d look at an equation, to take a very simple example, Newton’s second law of f = ma. I practiced feeling what each of the letters meant—f for force was a push, m for mass was a kind of weighty resistance to my push, and a was the exhilarating feeling of acceleration. (The equivalent in Russian was learning to physically sound out the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.) I memorized the equation so I could carry it around with me in my head and play with it. If m and a were big numbers, what did that do to f when I pushed it through the equation? If f was big and a was small, what did that do to m? How did the units match on each side?

Playing with the equation was like conjugating a verb. I was beginning to intuit that the sparse outlines of the equation were like a metaphorical poem, with all sorts of beautiful symbolic representations embedded within it. Although I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, the truth was that to learn math and science well, I had to slowly, day by day, build solid neural “chunked” subroutines—such as surrounding the simple equation f = ma—that I could easily call to mind from long term memory, much as I’d done with Russian.

Productivity Hack Of The Week: Trick Yourself Into Accomplishing Your Goals

Productivity Hack Of The Week: Trick Yourself Into Accomplishing Your Goals:

Marketers have been using visual triggers forever. Ad campaigns like “Got Milk” make us associate certain environmental cues with their products—now every time we see a giant chocolate chip cookie we think, that would go great with some milk.

This tactic is both clever and surprisingly simple. In the broadest sense of the term, a trigger is something that causes something else to happen. So when advertisers group their product with a particular environmental cue, they’re expecting that cue that we see in our everyday lives to trigger our association with their product.

In the same way, we can use triggers to improve ourselves. By turning things we commonly see or experience into environmental cues we can remind ourselves of tasks and goals we want to accomplish.

[h/t: "Time To Get Trigger Happy"]

Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1970 Context: ACM 1970 “The First...



Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1970

Context: ACM 1970

“The First United States Computer Chess Championship was held from August 31 to September 02, 1970 at New York Hilton, New York City, New York, United States. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted the first major chess tournament for computers in 1970. The event was organized by Monty Newborn, who was at that time affiliated with Columbia University, New York City.”

See also:

“In 1970 the first all-computer championship was held in New York and won by CHESS 3.0 (CDC 6400), a program written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University. Six programs had entered the first Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) North American Computer Championships. The event was organized by Monty Newborn. The other programs were DALY CP, J Brit, COKO III, SCHACH, and the Marsland CP.” 

Chunking in Shogi: New Findings

Chunking in Shogi: New Findings:

Abstract:

In the past, there have been numerous studies into the cognitive processes involved in human problem solving…

Chase and Simon introduced the concept of chunking to explain why expert chess players perform so well in memory tasks. Chunking is the process of dividing a chess position into smaller parts that have meaning.

We performed similar experiments in Shogi…

… expert Shogi players can not only memorize the patterns of the positions but also recognize move sequences before and after the position.

The results suggest that other than the perceptual spatial chunks introduced in chess research, there are also chunks of meaningful move sequences. We call such chunks “temporal chunks”. Our research indicates that Shogi players become stronger by acquiring these temporal chunks.

Superhuman Japan: Knowledge, Nation and Culture in US-Japan Relations

Superhuman Japan: Knowledge, Nation and Culture in US-Japan Relations:

In times of heightened rivalry, we often try to find superior “others” so that we can motivate ourselves against an imagined future of decline.

During the Cold War, Americans and other nations in the West took advantage of being the underdog against the perceived superiority of the Soviet Union, especially by turning the Sputnik launch of 1957 into a lodestone for an educational renaissance.

As postwar Japanese power became increasingly threatening, American policymakers again tried to fashion Japan into another “Sputnik” to motivate American people.

This book explores 1980s “Bubble” Japan as a “Superhuman Other” in the consciousness of Americans, especially as reflected in popular culture and policy discourses. Making Japan into a Superhuman often resorted into the same stereotyping that invented Japan as a Subhuman.

It was difficult for many to see that America, Japan and other nations were actually sharing the same global economic circumstances affecting attitudes toward knowledge and nation.

Alfred Frueh, The New Yorker, 1958 Context: Sputnik Crisis -...



Alfred Frueh, The New Yorker, 1958

Context:

Sputnik Crisis - “The Sputnik crisis was a period of public fear and uncertainty in the United States in the wake of the success of the Soviet Sputnik program and a perceived technological gap between the two superpowers.[1] It was a key Cold War event beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. The Sputnik crisis led to the creation of NASA and the start of the Space Race. The term was coined by then-US President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Education programs were initiated to foster a new generation of engineers and support was dramatically increased for scientific research.[10] Congress increased the National Science Foundation (NSF) appropriation for 1959 to $134 million, almost $100 million higher than the year before. By 1968, the NSF budget stood at nearly $500 million.

Americans experienced a “techno-other void” after the Sputnik crisis and continue to express longing for “another Sputnik” to boost education and innovation. During the 1980s, the rise of Japan filled that void temporarily. Following the Sputnik crisis, leaders exploited an “awe doctrine” to develop knowledge “around a single model of educational national security: with math and science serving for supremacy in science and engineering, foreign languages and cultures for potential espionage, and history and humanities for national self-definition.” But American leaders were not able to exploit the image of Japan as effectively despite its representations of super-smart students and a strong economy.”

Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1965 Context: New Math - “New...



Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1965

Context:

New Math - “New Mathematics or New Math was a brief, dramatic change in the way mathematics was taught in American grade schools, and to a lesser extent in European countries, during the 1960s. The name is commonly given to a set of teaching practices introduced in the U.S. shortly after the Sputnik crisis in order to boost science education and mathematical skill in the population so that the perceived intellectual threat of Soviet engineers, reputedly highly skilled mathematicians, could be met.”

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman wrote in the essay “New Textbooks for the ‘New Mathematics’”:[4]

  • "If we would like to, we can and do say, ‘The answer is a whole number less than 9 and bigger than 6,’ but we do not have to say, ‘The answer is a member of the set which is the intersection of the set of those numbers which is larger than 6 and the set of numbers which are smaller than 9’ … In the ‘new’ mathematics, then, first there must be freedom of thought; second, we do not want to teach just words; and third, subjects should not be introduced without explaining the purpose or reason, or without giving any way in which the material could be really used to discover something interesting. I don’t think it is worthwhile teaching such material."

Mischa Richter, The New Yorker, 1965



Mischa Richter, The New Yorker, 1965

Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, 1960



Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, 1960

Computer science department sees record increase in female students

Computer science department sees record increase in female students:

According to Steve Herzog, coordinator of Undergraduate Programs, almost 25 percent of the incoming computer science freshmen are female…

Herzog said he thinks the increase in female students that has occurred the past two years will continue to grow as the CS department continues to adapt.

“It seems like having more women here helps create kind of a critical mass to attract more female students,” Herzog said. “I think it’s working, and we’re continuing our efforts we’re undertaking to get women interested in this field.”

Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1939



Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, 1939

How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

How to tell when a robot has written you a letter:

Or a human! The next Turing Test is … handwriting.

A few weeks ago I got duped by a robot. In the mail.

I was sifting through my dead-tree postal mail and tossing junk in the recycling bin. Nearly everything that arrives in my mailbox is junk, so I was tossing, tossing, tossing … until suddenly, whoops: A hand-addressed letter. This looked legit, so I ripped it open — only to find it was an oily invitation to take out a second mortgage on my home. I’d been fooled…

Boys with autism show certain grammar skills in study

Boys with autism show certain grammar skills in study:

Sony’s Jun Rekimoto Dreams Up Gadgets for the Far Future

Sony’s Jun Rekimoto Dreams Up Gadgets for the Far Future:

Inside Sony’s lab for utterly impractical electronic wonders

Rekimoto trained his own imagination early. He became fascinated by computers when he was growing up in Tokyo, and in 1971, at the tender age of 10, he went to a bookstore and purchased a textbook about programming. There was only one barrier to his learning: The personal computer didn’t exist yet, and a 10-year-old wasn’t likely to gain access to a university’s mainframe. So he wrote out his programs in a notebook and imagined the results. “I wrote them down like a mantra,” he says, “like magic words.”

IEEE Spectrum’s third editor, J.J.G. “Jerry” McCue, PhD, 1952



IEEE Spectrum’s third editor, J.J.G. “Jerry” McCue, PhD, 1952

"Once you see how important computing is for life you can’t just leave it as a black box and..."

“Once you see how important computing is for life you can’t just leave it as a black box and assume that somebody reasonably competent and relatively benign will do something right with it.”

-
Karen Spärck Jones (1935-2007)

How the Codemancer Kickstarter campaign became a success

How the Codemancer Kickstarter campaign became a success:

The Kickstarter for Codemancer was successfully funded at the end of May, and I learned a lot in the process.  I’d like to share as much of that as I can.

Previously: Codemancer: The Game that Teaches Programming

7 Brain Myths Completely Debunked In This Cool Video

7 Brain Myths Completely Debunked In This Cool Video:

ja-dark: I find the video a little unsatisfying, but it’ll do.

See also: Do People Only Use 10 Percent of Their Brains?

"It turns out though, that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time," Gordon adds. "Let’s put it this way: the brain represents three percent of the body’s weight and uses 20 percent of the body’s energy."

"There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t."

“There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

- Anonymous

Nishinjutsu: Japanese Finger-Counting for Reality Hackers

There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

If you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around binary, using embodied cognition can help: specifically ‘manumerical cognition’, and more specifically, counting on your fingers.

We’ve evolved to use spatial-numerical relations, and I’ve already discussed how adding a visuospatial soroban to your mental toolkit can help you with mathematics.

So naturally, why not improve your understanding of binary numbers using finger-counting?

Here's a basic explanation. Finger binary is based on the visual slotting of the 1s and 0s into powers of 2 (for more on conversion methods, see here, especially method two in each section).

image

You take those slots and represent them with your fingers.

Above, the raised fingers can be viewed as 1s. So in the above picture, the fingers are all added together (512 + 256, etc. all the way to 4 + 2 + 1), giving you 1,023, which in binary is 1111111111.

The unraised finger is a 0. So let’s say you lowered the finger representing 2, so the picture above would have the right index finger lowered, making it a 0. Visually that’s 1111111101. If we counted every finger but that one, we’d have 1,021, which is 1111111101 in binary.

By the way, the it’s been suggested that the Incan writing system (their civilization’s not an exception to the importance of literacy, as they weren’t illiterate, unlike what phonocentrists would have you believe), the khipu, is a 7-bit 3D binary system; this interesting article describes how the Polynesians also used binary and the import of such localized cultural evolution for insight into the diversity of numerical cognition. Binary is old school.

Keep in mind, in English-speaking countries, we tend to raise fingers to represent numbers, so the closed fist (no raised fingers) is zero, and as you can see above, that carries over into finger binary.

However, finger-counting differs by culture, even as it’s an important aspect of human embodied cognition. Here’s a paper explaining this in detail. Of course, there are other factors, e.g. situated cognition, contributing to differences, also.

At any rate, in Japan, lowered fingers represent numbers! So the open hand is zero. Thus, as you might have guessed, the raised finger is nothing, and therefore a 0 in binary (nishin [二進]), while the lowered fingers represent ones:

image

(via)

So the above would be 11011, or 27 (adding the 16, 8, 2, 1) in the non-Japanese style, and is 00100, or 4 (just the middle finger, representing the 4 slot) in the Japanese style.

Here’s another Japanese finger binary diagram counting from 0 to 31 on the right hand. In the past, I half-jokingly related yubimoji (Japanese finger-spelling) to mudras while discussing meditation. The below source also muses on the correlation of finger binary with mudra and the like.

image

Programming is magick.

So now we know what those esoteric Japanese practitioners are really up to with the kuji-kiri. The ninja are using hand seals to hack the machine code of reality. All that power in 10 bits. I mean 10 values. I mean 2 values.

Of course, the Japanese have evolved to use CADs now, but as Shiba Tatsuya or Itachi Uchiha will tell you, there’s something to be said for low-level expertise.

image

λ vs. 入

Visual proof of the secret connection between Japanese and Computer Science, the domains covertly imbricated via the sublayer of Chinese characters and lambda calculus.

Tellingly, 入 is radical #11; λ is the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet. In binary, 11 is 1011; renowned computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous for writing his EWDs. Here is a quote from EWD 1011:

“Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.”

"In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of..."

In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn’t social intelligence. It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t I.Q. It was grit.

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.



- Angela Lee Duckworth, “The Key to Success?

"They learned that the brain is like a muscle—the more they exercise it, the stronger it becomes...."

They learned that the brain is like a muscle—the more they exercise it, the stronger it becomes. They learned that every time they try hard and learn something new, their brain forms new connections that, over time, make them smarter. They learned that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence, but rather the formation of new connections brought about through effort and learning.

The idea that their intellectual growth was largely in their hands fascinated them. In fact, even the most disruptive students suddenly sat still and took notice, with the most unruly boy of the lot looking up at us and saying, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”



- Carol Dweck, “The Perils of Praise

"Our words can have a huge impact. Isn’t it time we told...



"Our words can have a huge impact. Isn’t it time we told her she’s pretty brilliant, too? Encourage her love of science and technology and inspire her to change the world."— Reshma Saujani, Founder of Girls Who Code

The United States has fallen significantly behind the rest of the world when it comes to the STEM subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Just as startling is that girls are even less involved in STEM majors and careers than their male counterparts, as women hold less than 25% of our country’s STEM jobs. Working together, let’s encourage more girls to get involved with STEM and choose careers that build a brighter future.

In addition to being the driving force behind programs that inspire, educate, and equip girls with the computing skills to pursue 21st century opportunities, Reshma is a featured MAKER and an inspiration to girls everywhere. Join or start a Girls Who Code club in your community at http://girlswhocode.com/clubs or hear more from Reshma at http://www.makers.com/reshma-saujani.

The Magic of Computer Science

The Magic of Computer Science:

“Behind great magic there often lies some interesting maths or computer science, buried in the secret of how the trick works. To be a good magician you need to know more than just the secret though. Great magicians also have a flair for cognitive psychology: they have a natural understanding of people. It turns out that computer scientists use the same psychology as the magicians in designing usable computer systems.

Intrigued? Read on.

You will learn how to do a bunch of tricks. It isn’t just magic though. All the tricks have links to computer science - and not just because of high technology. In fact high technology hardly comes in to our magic shows at all, though yesterday’s magic often becomes today’s technology. It is then taken for granted as the magic seeps away.

Download our free books on the Magic of Computer Science … or read it all (and more) online… ”

See also:

""[Computer science] is not really about computers — and it’s not about computers in the..."

"[Computer science] is not really about computers — and it’s not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes…

Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don’t really understand it very well, it’s very easy to confuse the essence of what you’re doing with the tools that you use.”



- Hal Abelson (1986)

Gardens as Crypto-Water-Computers

Gardens as Crypto-Water-Computers:

“ … a crypto-historical narrative of gardens as gigantic water computers.”

Related:

"Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating a problem and expressing its..."

“Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution(s) in such a way that a computer—human or machine—can effectively carry out.”

-

Jeannette M. Wing,

Computational Thinking Benefits Society (2014)

“Computational thinking is not just or all about computer science. The educational benefits of being able to think computationally—starting with the use of abstractions—enhance and reinforce intellectual skills, and thus can be transferred to any domain.  Science, society, and our economy will benefit from the discoveries and innovations produced by a workforce trained to think computationally.”

The Usage Game: Catering to Perverts

The Usage Game: Catering to Perverts:

Abstract:

I am sure most educated users of works on grammar and usage believe that they seek a sensible relationship in which they are treated like grownups and provided with authoritative information about Standard English.

There is a great deal of evidence, however, that what many of them really want is to be dominated, humiliated, and punished.

They yearn, they positively lust, to be forced to use their language in certain ways and to be disciplined for any transgressions.

One sign of this is that The Elements of Style, with its 105 pages of century-old maxims from Strunk and opinionated stylistic nonsense from White, far outsells Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, with its 978 pages of brilliant and clearly explained objective scholarship, about a century newer (and costing very little more).

This poses a dilemma for usage guide authors.

The advice of economics is of course to supply what the customer wants; but ethics may differ: usage guide authors find themselves in the role of pornographers serving a community of masochistic perverts.

Worse, if they dare to provide evidence refuting myths about grammatical correctness in English they are attacked for lowering standards and promoting anarchy.

I will review this problematic situation, and make some modest proposals about how the users of Standard English might be drawn out of their dark fantasy world into the daylight of mature and healthy linguistic behaviour.

Cool Code, Bro: Brogrammers, Geek Anxiety and the New Tech Elite

Cool Code, Bro: Brogrammers, Geek Anxiety and the New Tech Elite:

Story illustrating Quickselect algorithm

Story illustrating Quickselect algorithm:

More than a year ago, I answered a question on Stack Overflow about the Quickselect algorithm, which takes some unsorted data and finds the k-th smallest value (that is, the value that would be in position k if you were to sort the data). The person asking the question had seen multiple technical descriptions of the algorithm, but was looking for a simplified explanation that was not expressed as computer code. I tried to illustrate the algorithm in story form, and others seemed to like my story. The surprising part to me has been that votes continue to trickle in even today, and that this deliberately silly story is now my most upvoted answer. I suppose there’s a lesson in there somewhere…

You walk into a gymnasium containing 200 children. It is September 8th, so you have a burning desire to find the 98th shortest child. You know that you could line them all up from shortest to tallest, but that would take forever. “I know”, you think, “I could use QUICKSELECT!”

ja-dark: Okasaki also wrote a well-known book called Purely Functional Data Structures.

Related: Computational Fairy Tales

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz:

ja-dark: See also The Victorian Internet, which describes even earlier versions of historical hackers and crackers.

How to make cyberspace safe for human habitation

How to make cyberspace safe for human habitation:

Black Code reviewed by Cory Doctorow:

“Ronald Deibert’s new book, Black Code, is a gripping and absolutely terrifying blow-by-blow account of the way that companies, governments, cops and crooks have entered into an accidental conspiracy to poison our collective digital water supply in ways small and large, treating the Internet as a way to make a quick and dirty buck or as a snoopy spy’s best friend…

We live in a world made of computers: Our cars and houses are ultimately computers into which we insert our bodies; our bodies are increasingly full of computers such as cochlear implants. Everything we do today involves the Internet, everything we do tomorrow will require it. A responsible state has an obligation to approach Internet regulation with the gravitas due to the nervous system of the 21st century – but instead, it gets used as a toy for panopticon fetishists who think that all our problems will be solved when all the details of our lives are harvested and processed in the government’s data mills. Black Code is a manifesto for a 21st-century form of network stewardship, a sense of shared responsibility toward our vital electronic water supply. It’s a timely rallying cry, and sorely needed.”

ja-dark: This book is great inspiration to avoid blackboxing, which I previously mentioned here. It’s not just software/programming, but hardware as well.

Good thing computer science degrees often incorporate this ‘low-level’ infrastructural awareness to some extent.

But perhaps when calling for computational thinking to accompany things like reading and arithmetic, some early grade primer on networking, operating systems, interfaces etc., would also be good (as opposed to those university classes that teach you how to use a mouse).

» Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods

» Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods:

The researchers called this effect an “emotional contagion,” because they purported to show that our friends’ words on our Facebook news feed directly affected our own mood.

Nevermind that the researchers never actually measured anyone’s mood.

And nevermind that the study has a fatal flaw. One that other research has also overlooked — making all these researchers’ findings a bit suspect.

Putting aside the ridiculous language used in these kinds of studies (really, emotions spread like a “contagion”?), these kinds of studies often arrive at their findings by conducting language analysis on tiny bits of text. On Twitter, they’re really tiny — less than 140 characters. Facebook status updates are rarely more than a few sentences. The researchers don’t actually measure anybody’s mood.

So how do you conduct such language analysis, especially on 689,003 status updates? Many researchers turn to an automated tool for this, something called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application (LIWC 2007)…

Why would researchers use a tool not designed for short snippets of text to, well… analyze short snippets of text? Sadly, it’s because this is one of the few tools available that can process large amounts of text fairly quickly.

You might be sitting there scratching your head, wondering why it matters how long the text it is you’re trying to analyze with this tool. One sentence, 140 characters, 140 pages… Why would length matter?

Length matters because the tool actually isn’t very good at analyzing text in the manner that Twitter and Facebook researchers have tasked it with. When you ask it to analyze positive or negative sentiment of a text, it simply counts negative and positive words within the text under study. For an article, essay or blog entry, this is fine — it’s going to give you a pretty accurate overall summary analysis of the article since most articles are more than 400 or 500 words long.

For a tweet or status update, however, this is a horrible analysis tool to use. That’s because it wasn’t designed to differentiate — and in fact, can’t differentiate — a negation word in a sentence.1

ja-dark: It goes on. Facebook’s unethical research was bad enough, but the scientific incompetence shouldn’t be ignored, either. More good points in this comment, re: the journal’s policy for human participants, etc. I wonder if the original paper mentioned pretending to be feeling certain emotions via FB for various reasons (the nail that sticks out gets hammered down). Pennebaker, who is name-dropped in the above post, has done interesting research, by the way, such as ‘language style matching’ and The Secret Life of Pronouns.

See also (via):

Analyzing Facebook’s PNAS paper on Emotional Contagion: Nitin Madnani provides an NLPers detailed fisking of the experimental methods, with special attention paid to the flaws of LIWC (with bonus comment from Brendan O’Connor, recent CMU grad and new U Amherst professor).

Money Quote:

Far and away, my biggest complaint is that the Facebook scientists simply used a word list to determine whether a post was positive or negative. As someone who works in natural language processing (including on the task of analyzing sentiment in documents), such a rudimentary system would be treated with extreme skepticism in our conferences and journals. There are just too many problems with the approach, e.g. negation (“I am not very happy today because …”). From the paper, it doesn’t look like the authors tried to address these problems. In short, I am skeptical the whether the experiment actually measures anything useful. One way to address comments such as mine is to actually release the data to the public along with some honest error analysis about how well such a naive approach actually worked.

Facebook COO tells users she deliberately tried to upset: "We never meant to upset you"

Facebook COO tells users she deliberately tried to upset: "We never meant to upset you":

“It was poorly communicated,” Sandberg said. “And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”

Well, actually, in the case of a few hundred thousand users unwittingly included in the study, that’s exactly what Facebook intended to do. As part of the study, 300,000 Facebook users had their  News Feed changed to include more negative items, with the specific goal of upsetting them.

It’s a classic example of a non-apology meant to placate consumers without Facebook accepting any responsibility for its actions…

This wasn’t a simple tweak to News Feed’s algorithms. It also wasn’t an example of researchers using the data that companies like Facebook collect to improve their products or better serve advertisements. If the company had just given the researchers access to anonymized data that didn’t result from a product change made specifically to have an emotional effect on its users, or if it had asked for consent before experimenting on them, things would be a little different.

Put another way: This wasn’t analysis of existing data. I’m not suggesting that this study has made people more wary about the vast amounts of information companies like Facebook have amassed over the years. (They should be worried about that, but not because of this study.) It was a study in which Facebook had a hypothesis (that the News Feed can affect emotions) and a way to test it (changing the News Feed and seeing what happens). That is an experiment.

Related: How can people defend Facebook’s emotion-controlling experiment?

Ki injects Lisp into JavaScript

Ki injects Lisp into JavaScript:

JavaScript is getting another option for functional programming, called Ki.

Described as a “Lisp for your JavaScript,” Ki enables use of functional idioms and data structures — the persistent data structures of the ClojureScript compiler and related libraries — directly within JavaScript, said Luca Antiga, author of Ki and principal scientist at image analysis and data engineering vendor Orobix. “You can use Ki to develop an entire application, a module, a function or even parts of it, with minimal friction with respect to the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem.”

Lisp languages are recognized as a historical element of computing, but Lisp-like languages are exceptionally extensible, said Antiga. “Once you get past the parentheses, you realize that Lisp has essentially no syntax except the very bare minimum, and that bare minimum is very explicit.”

The field of technologies providing functional capabilities for JavaScript is growing. Ramda brings a functional library to JavaScript, as does Underscore. While praising Ramda and Underscore, Antiga said Ki makes functional JavaScript more expressive, thanks to its Lisp idiom, without the need for committing to a full-fledged language, platform, or ecosystem.

Free Online Clojure MOOC

Free Online Clojure MOOC:

A course that sets out to provide an introduction to functional programming using the dynamically typed language Clojure takes a very different approach to most MOOCs…

Thanks to Coursera, edX, Udacity and others we have become accustomed to the idea that when you sign up for a MOOC you’ll be watching videos and tackling multiple choice quiz questions to be marked by an autograder as a major part of a MOOC.

This is not the approach used in Functional Programming with Clojure

The course is taught in English and requires students to have basic programming skills, but no experience with functional programming is needed. To participate you must register for a GitHub account and you complete the course by forking GitHub repositories that contain the course materials and… solutions to [programming] exercises embedded in them.

The course, which is self-paced and appears to involve around 120 hours in total, starts with an introduction to Clojure; its syntax and development environment. It goes on to cover Clojure’s data structures and also goes through the basics of recursion and higher-order functions… ”

Regular Expressions for Japanese Text

Regular Expressions for Japanese Text:

“Regular expressions are extremely useful for matching patterns in text. But when it comes to Japanese Unicode text, it isn’t obvious what you should do to create regular expressions to match a range of Japanese characters. You can try something like [あ-ん] to match all hiragana characters—and you would be close—but it isn’t the best way to do it. Also, direct input of Japanese isn’t always an option…

… the following is a thorough list of different Japanese character classes and the various Japanese regular expressions that match those character classes. And further down, a few programming examples showing them in use.”

Programming in a Socially Networked World: the Evolution of the Social Programmer (PDF)

Programming in a Socially Networked World: the Evolution of the Social Programmer (PDF):

Abstract:

Social media has changed how software developers collaborate, how they coordinate their work, and where they find information. Social media sites, such as the Question and Answer portal Stack Overflow, fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to what we know about software development, covering a wide range of topics.

For today’s software developers, reusable code snippets, introductory usage examples, and pertinent libraries are often just a web search away.

In this position paper, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for software developers that rely on web content curated by the crowd, and we envision the future of an industry where individual developers benefit from and contribute to a body of knowledge maintained by the crowd using social media.

Why Japanese web design stands out from the rest

Why Japanese web design stands out from the rest:

Puzzle games can improve mental flexibility, study shows

Puzzle games can improve mental flexibility, study shows:

New research shows freshers struggle to remember basic A-level concepts

New research shows freshers struggle to remember basic A-level concepts:

ja-dark: Practice frequent low-stakes self-testing on a distributed schedule, people. Spaced retrieval. You’ll learn more effectively, do better on exams and retain the knowledge long-term.

The cultural background of the non-academic concept of psychology in Japan

The cultural background of the non-academic concept of psychology in Japan:

Abstract:

This study examined whether the non-academic concept of psychology among inexperienced Japanese students differed from the concept held by students of other countries.

In Japanese, psychology is referred to as 心理学, which includes the ideographic character 心, literally meaning heart. This fact led us to hypothesize that psychology will be disproportionately associated with emotion among Japanese students. Indeed, our findings among Japanese students produced a J-curve, indicating that our prediction was true…

Paper:

In Japanese, the word for psychology is 心理学, which consists of three kanji (Chinese characters). Because Chinese characters are essentially ideographic scripts, each character has its own meaning.

Furthermore, large portions of Chinese characters originated from pictograms. The word 心理学 consists of the characters 心, 理 and 学. Two of the kanji, 理 and 学, are unproblematic and refer to logic and academic discipline, respectively. However, 心 refers to the heart (the big red organ in the body) and originates from the pictogram representing the anatomical structure.

Although the term 心 is representative of the inclusiveness of the Japanese language and encompasses the heart, soul, spirit and mind, people may interpret it primarily to literally mean heart, particularly for beginners, unless they had a particular knowledge of academic psychology. The term 心 implies centre and core just as heart in English. However, this issue may not only be due to its dictionary definition; it may also be rooted in a deeper cultural background…

The word こころ is based on the Japanese traditional culture and is not related to the intellectual and rational mind, but rather, the whole heart (wholeheartedness). こころ is emphasized in a subject’s uncontrolled, natural emotional state…

… we suggest using マインド (mind) in katakana script representing only the English pronunciation as an exotic word for mind (it does not refer to meaning) rather than using こころ  in introductory education in Japan.

There are many katakana scripts in Japan, particularly computer terms (e.g., マウス for mouse). In fact, Japanese researchers in business science often use マインド to show that business managers’ mind translates as マインド rather than as こころ in the Japanese language.

If the top management of a certain company intends to merge with another company, it is understood that this decision is a matter of mind (マインド ) rather than of 心 in Japanese companies. However, Japanese psychologists are biased regarding the implicit theory of psychology because psychology indicates 心理学 .

People in Japan should be aware that 心 could be applied to bullied children in school but not to the president, who administers government policies; instead, マインド is applied to the president. 心 has an affinity for the person in a vulnerable state.

We suggest that people use the term マインド rather than 心 or こころ because マインド in katakana script is more familiar to the Japanese people. This approach might help not only students but also researchers to understand the difference between 心 or こころ and the mind and may help to encourage their awareness of this difference.

Previously:

The World Cup Flopping Ranking ja-dark: Japan failed to make the...



The World Cup Flopping Ranking

ja-dark: Japan failed to make the top 20. They don’t foul that often, either. When they do, it’s usually reactive. Ironically, if they followed the general trend of bad sportsmanship in football, they probably wouldn’t have been eliminated, yet I wouldn’t follow them.

‘Draft Day’ Insurance Ad Resonates After Soldier Shootings...



‘Draft Day’ Insurance Ad Resonates After Soldier Shootings

Virtually all men deemed of sound body and mind serve for about two years as enlisted soldiers or more in other capacities, making up a vast majority of South Korea’s 650,000 troops. Women don’t serve.

“What does military mean to the 20s in Korea?” asks the clip, which it answers as “a fear they should overcome one day … the most profound transition they experience” in their prime.

The clip, a commercial promoting insurer AIA Group Ltd., appears to capture the draft day of real-life conscripts. Sitting at a barbershop to have their heads razed, they are ambushed by emotional messages expressing love from their families on the mirror, drawing tears from the soldiers-to-be.

The video on YouTube has earned close to 1.5 million views in about three weeks.

A social media aggregation channel warned not to watch the clip in a public space, as it can cause men to cry.

Scaring The Japanese People With Radiation Is Criminal

Scaring The Japanese People With Radiation Is Criminal:

“Can Our Kids Hack It With Computers?”: Constructing Youth Hackers in Family Computing Magazines (1983–1987)

“Can Our Kids Hack It With Computers?”: Constructing Youth Hackers in Family Computing Magazines (1983–1987):

Abstract:

Building upon existing scholarship on media representation of hackers and the social history of personal computing, this essay positions U.S. families making sense of microcomputers in the mid-1980s as central to the history of hacking.

Archival material for this project consists of 74 issues of youth- and family-focused computing magazines of this era, within which discussions of hacking were frequent.

This essay maps an array of discourses about young hackers constructed in relation to hopes and anxieties about networked technologies. Besides connecting microcomputers to particular family ideals, these magazines also put forth a family-friendly notion of youth hackers.

While microcomputers entered the home with notions of hacking attached, I argue that family computing in turn shaped contemporary conceptions of hacking.

"Mathematics has as much to do with computation as writing has to do with typing."

“Mathematics has as much to do with computation as writing has to do with typing.”

- John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy

"When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we..."

“When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed.”

- Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed

The Next Renaissance (2008)

I wanted to post this excerpt from a 2008 keynote from Douglas Rushkoff; a lot of the stuff people talk about now, re: code literacy, often seems modeled on some memes he put out there.

“In Torah myth, Moses goes off with his father-in-law to write the laws by which an enslaved people could now live. Instead of simply accepting legislation and government as a pre-existing condition—the God Pharaoh—people would develop and write down the law as they wanted it. Even the Torah is written in the form of a contract, and God creates the world with a word.

Access to language was to change a world of blind, enslaved rule followers into a civilization of literate people. (This is what is meant when God tells Abraham “you will be a nation of priests.” It means they are to be a nation of people who transcend heiro-glyphs or “priestly-writing” to become literate.)

But this isn’t what happened. People didn’t read Torah—they listened as their leaders read it to them. Hearing was a step up from simply following, but the promise of the new medium had not been seized.

Likewise, the invention of the printing press did not lead to a civilization of writers—it developed a culture of readers. Gentlemen sat reading books, while the printing presses were accessed by those with the money or power to use them. The people remained one step behind the technology. Broadcast radio and television are really just an extension of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite.

Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new “personal” democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.

But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.

At the very least on a metaphorical level, the opportunity here is not to write about politics or—more likely—comment on what someone else has said about politics. The opportunity, however, is to rewrite the very rules by which democracy is implemented. The opportunity of a renaissance in programming is to reconfigure the process through which democracy occurs.”

"… there is no good code. Or, rather, there is no Platonic Ideal of Good Code. Like writing,..."

… there is no good code. Or, rather, there is no Platonic Ideal of Good Code. Like writing, there is no good code without context…

… like grammar, code is also rhetorical. What is good code and what is bad code should be based on the context in which the code operates…

… coding values that ignore rhetorical contexts and insist on inflexible best practices or platonic ideals of code should be CONSIDERED HARMFUL – at least to computers and writing.



-

Annette Vee

See also:

Ideologies of a New Mass Literacy

Related.

Understanding Computer Programming as a Literacy

Understanding Computer Programming as a Literacy:

Abstract:

Since the 1960s, computer scientists and enthusiasts have paralleled computer programming to literacy, arguing it is a generalizable skill that should be more widely taught and held.

Launching from that premise, this article leverages historical and social findings from literacy studies to frame computer programming as “computational literacy.”

I argue that programming and writing have followed similar historical trajectories as material technologies and explain how they are intertwined in contemporary composition environments.

A concept of “computational literacy” helps us to better understand the social, technical and cultural dynamics of programming, but it also enriches our vision of twenty-first century composition.

Making Programming Meaningful to Induce Passion for Broadening Computing (PDF)

Making Programming Meaningful to Induce Passion for Broadening Computing (PDF):
“Programming is the magic spark of computer science. Without programming, computer science is discrete mathematics. Without programming, computer “science” is the scientific study of a sophisticated machine running someone else’s programs.

Programming is the passion behind computer science.

Efforts to introduce computing without programming are inherently limited. We might be able to get students to think about algorithms or representations, but if students are going to use these ideas and progress in the study of computer science, they will have to program. What’s more, we want them to want to program!

The central research question that we are exploring here is: How do we induce passion for programming while simultaneously broadening participation in computing?

It’s pretty easy to induce passion among those students who are passionate about how mainstream computer science looks today. If you are excited about systems programming, about coding algorithms like sorting, and about manipulating data types, you are the kind who will easily become passionate about programming. We have to invent a meaning for programming that goes beyond the computer itself and is recognizable by our target audience…

To induce passion for programming among the many currently NOT in computer science, we have to make programming meaningful for them. Students must see that programming is a valuable activity, that is worth the cost of struggling to learn a foreign notation and the hours of practice to develop literacy and even virtuosity… ”

"The cantrip interface design pattern is the simplest of all. No input, no output, just an invocation..."

The cantrip interface design pattern is the simplest of all. No input, no output, just an invocation and a numeric exit status… The startx(1) program used to launch X is a complex example, typical of a whole class of daemon-summoning cantrips.

This interface design pattern, though fairly common, has not traditionally been named; the term ‘cantrip’ is my invention. (In origin, it’s a Scots-dialect word for a magic spell, which has been picked up by a popular fantasy-role-playing game to tag a spell that can be cast instantly, with minimal or no preparation.)



- Eric S. Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming

Why Disagree? Some Critical Remarks on the Integration Hypothesis of Human Language Evolution

Why Disagree? Some Critical Remarks on the Integration Hypothesis of Human Language Evolution:

Some choice excerpts:

… the follow-up paper seeks to provide empirical evidence for this theory and discusses potential challenges to the Integration Hypothesis… This is an interesting hypothesis (‘interesting’ being a convenient euphemism for ‘well, perhaps not that interesting after all’). Let’s have a closer look at the evidence brought forward for this theory…

As an empiricist, I am of course very skeptical towards… One could possibly rescue their argument by adopting concepts from Construction Grammar… but then again, from a Construction Grammar point of view, assuming a fundamental dichotomy between E and L structures doesn’t make much sense in the first place…

From a usage-based perspective… ‘an expression’s meaning consists of more than conceptual content – equally important to linguistic semantics is how that content is shaped and construed.’ (Langacker 2002: xv) According to the Integration Hypothesis, this ‘construal’ aspect is taken care of by closed-class items belonging to the E layer. However, the division of labor envisaged here seems highly idealized…

The idea that human language combines features of birdsong with features of primate alarm calls is certainly not too far-fetched, but the way this hypothesis is defended in the two papers discussed here seems strangely halfhearted and, all in all, quite unconvincing. What is announced as ‘providing empirical evidence’ turns out to be a mostly introspective discussion of made-up English example sentences… In addition, much of the discussion is purely theory-internal and thus reminiscent of what James has so appropriately called ‘Procrustean Linguistics’.

… the gap pointed out by Sverker Johansson in his contribution to the “Perspectives on Evolang” section in this year’s Evolang proceedings:

‘A deeper divide has been lurking for some years, and surfaced in earnest in Kyoto 2012: that between Chomskyan biolinguistics and everybody else. For many years, Chomsky totally dismissed evolutionary linguistics. But in the past decade, Chomsky and his friends have built a parallel effort at elucidating the origins of language under the label ‘biolinguistics’, without really connecting with mainstream Evolang, either intellectually or culturally. We have here a Kuhnian incommensurability problem, with contradictory views of the nature of language.’

… one could… see the Integration Hypothesis as deepening the gap since it entirely draws on generative (or ‘biolinguistic’) preassumptions about the nature of language which are not backed by independent empirical evidence. Therefore, to conclusively support the Integration Hypothesis, much more evidence from many different fields would be necessary, and the theoretical preassumptions it draws on would have to be scrutinized on empirical grounds, as well.

ja-dark: A sly nod to Frontiers' habit of publishing Hauser, too; there's another sly nod making the same point, and that Frontiers doesn’t have a great reputation for retractions, at Retraction Watch.

More on the aforementioned gap; and previously on pseudoscientific ‘biolinguistics’ (which, with the exception of a few papers published under the name, shouldn’t be confused with any kind of genuine bio-/empirical linguistics; they’re just using the name to mislead the ignorant, hoping that if they just start publishing papers using the name while ignoring the preexisting empirical research and instead acting as if Chomskyan beliefs are a given, no one will notice).

"… the question, “Can machines think?” should be replaced by “Are there..."

… the question, “Can machines think?” should be replaced by “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”

The… question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.



-

Alan Turing (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

Mind 49: 433-460.

Dijkstra brought up Turing’s point again in 1984 (at the latest):

The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Can machines make us think? In honor of Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) [PDF]

Can machines make us think? In honor of Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) [PDF]:

Abstract:

Alan Turing’s question “Can machines think?” motivated his famous imitation game, now commonly referred to as the “Turing test”. It was widely assumed that a machine that could pass this test must have intelligence. The construction of such a machine, therefore, was seen by many as the “holy grail” of artificial intelligence (AI).

For several decades, the Turing test had a tremendous impact on computer science and has stirred a wide range of philosophical debates. Today, however, the Turing test has nearly vanished from Al research agendas.

Here, we argue that the Turing test is still a timely and inspirational source for many researchers. Modern computing machinery is now an integral part in myriads of problem-solving processes, and it is believed that this powerful machinery has revolutionized the way science is done.

Computing machinery now even extends beyond the traditional silicon-based environment to encompass carbon-based, living organisms. This backdrop encourages us to suggest that there is a creative, bidirectional interplay between human intelligence and the increasing sophistication demonstrated by many computer-based applications and systems.

We suggest that even though today’s machines may not be able to think, they can make us think and encourage us to strive for new insights and knowledge.

Whenever this new knowledge is fed back into the various types of machines or unconventional computing environments, man and machines will become mutual beneficiaries rewarded with increasing levels of sophistication and intelligence.

Flowers for Turing Dr. Joseph Reddington wrote: “So this is...



Flowers for Turing

Dr. Joseph Reddington wrote:

“So this is what Alan Turing’s statue looks like right now… Each bunch of flowers (I expect there will be more later) was pledged by…

チューリングさん、102歳の誕生日オメデトウ!

via The Guardian ja-dark: Japanese kids speed calculating big...



via The Guardian

ja-dark: Japanese kids speed calculating big numbers with mental soroban (Japanese abacus; here’s an online version) while simultaneously playing shiritori (a Japanese wordplay game).

This is an illustration of the research which indicates that mastery of the abacus leads to the ability to use a ‘mental abacus’ for rapid calculations of large numbers, relying on visual rather than verbal memory (visuospatial sketchpad vs. phonological loop).

Stanford researcher explores whether language is the only way to represent numbers (PDF)

From another article:

Urawa Soroban Academy boss Chie Takayanagi says that whereas in the past soroban training had practical use, it remains popular because it brings other benefits that are still relevant, such as concentration and memorisation skills.

And it is also fun. Abacus calculation is treated like a sport…

For some teachers, like Mina Watanabe, the abacus is important in fostering a love of numbers.

Mina, who lives and teaches in California, said that American children find numbers harder to grasp than Japanese children because they see them as purely abstract, and this leads to many children hating mathematics. When you learn with an abacus, she added, you have a concrete representation of numbers, which makes them easier to understand.

From looking at the children doing their sums, I saw that the abacus also makes intuitive sense…

This fellow used the mental soroban to dominate his opponents in the Mental Calculation World Cup.

More:

Related:

ja-dark: The style of Japanese math classes has been metaphorically compared to ki-shō-ten-ketsu, an inductive Japanese narrative style. I link to papers making the comparison in the aforelinked post.

Amongst my previous math posts I mentioned the different calculation speeds that occur when different languages’ (e.g. Chinese) number words vary in length.

More on Japanese mathematics such as goroawase (mnemonics) and terminology.

There were more than 850 students in UW’s introductory...



There were more than 850 students in UW’s introductory programming class last quarter. Total enrollment in the past year was 2,700. Photo via Helene Martin.

Analysis: The exploding demand for computer science education, and why America needs to keep up

ja-dark: Freshmen jammed up, paced by beleaguered TAs, hunched over tiny desks. Hope they manage to learn something. Or in this case, finish the exam before the cramps start.

"A language is a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized...."

“A language is a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized. The question is rather: ‘how are these meanings expressed?’ This puts the forms of a language in a different perspective: as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves.”

- M.A.K. Halliday

Halliday on syntax

From Butler’s Structure and Function: Approaches to the simplex clause:

“Unlike most other linguists, Halliday tends to avoid the use of the term ‘syntax’. He gives two reasons for this. Firstly, since lexis is seen as simply the most detailed (or, in SFG terms, ‘delicate’) end of the grammar, ‘syntax’ is not a separate level from ‘vocabulary’. Secondly, Halliday’s non-use of the term ‘syntax’ is a way of rejecting the priority which has been accorded to this level in formal grammars, in favour of a central place for meaning in a functional grammar.

A language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized. The question is rather: ‘how are these meanings expressed?’. This puts the forms of a language in a different perspective: as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves. (Halliday, 1994)

Halliday also prefers not to posit a distinction between semantic and pragmatic types of meaning in his theory. Two reasons can be adduced for this. Firstly, Halliday clearly feels that the term ‘pragmatics’, like ‘syntax’, carries with it the baggage of its origins in philosophical approaches, with which his own more sociological approach is in contrast:

In formal linguistics, the term ‘syntax’ is used to replace ‘grammar’; this usage comes from the philosophy of language, where syntax is opposed to semantics (this is the context in which ‘pragmatics’ may come in as a third term). (Halliday, 1994)

Secondly, and more crucially, for Halliday all linguistic meaning is of an ‘inter-organism’ kind, so there is no need to distinguish between what a word or sentence means (semantic meaning), and what a speaker means by the utterance of that word or sentence (pragmatic meaning).”

"A language is not a system of linguistic acts; it is a system of meanings that defines (among other..."

“A language is not a system of linguistic acts; it is a system of meanings that defines (among other things) the potential for linguistic acts.”

- M.A.K. Halliday, The Context of Linguistics (1975)

When linguists talk mathematical logic

When linguists talk mathematical logic:

ja-dark: I almost feel bad for disgraced linguist Marc Hauser and colleagues, in their desperate attempts to save something of Chomsky from the realities of Science. And this is the cleaned up version. Lobina’s original paper was quite brutal.

Regarding the unfounded and typically unquestioned assumption of infinite recursion in linguistics, I suggest reading the excerpts from Learning Recursion linked below.

Previously:

"Chomsky had said that a language was a finite system generating an infinite body of text; I prefer..."

“Chomsky had said that a language was a finite system generating an infinite body of text; I prefer to reverse that principle and characterize a language as an infinite system generating a finite body of text, but replacing ‘infinite’ by ‘indefinitely large.’”

- M.A.K. Halliday, Linguistics as Metaphor (1997)

"Learning language is learning how to mean."

“Learning language is learning how to mean.”

- MAK Halliday

1,940 Joyo Kanji w/ Radical Decomposition (raw text)

1,940 Joyo Kanji w/ Radical Decomposition (raw text):

Here’s the import file to use if you want to update your kanji deck with radical decomposition, per this post.

These are the primary constituents of kanji, not strokes.

And again, you can tweak these (perhaps using parts lists from jisho.org instead) as you like, making sure they don’t give too much away. There’s no special official breakdown you must use. What matters is that you break the kanji into a few chunks so you can unify them into a single chunk through practice.

Dear Anki deck reviewer

To the person here who rated the Kanji Dark deck 3/5, saying:

Sort order not working

Hi,

This looks interesting but when I import to anki 2 and set it to review in the order added it starts off with the last radical in your list ie 水

Not sure how to make it reverse that - I tried a few ways but no luck. Any ideas?

ja-dark: Yeah, I have some ideas. It’s supposed to start off with 水, as it’s not last, it’s first: it’s the most common radical in the original Jōyō, with 水 as a character having the least # of strokes and constituent parts amongst kanji grouped by that radical; hence the Optimal Sort ID # for that card is 1. So you can study by order added, or use the ID field, in the browser. You know, everything I explained in the deck description.

Deconstructing and improving RTK (Remembering the Kanji)

Even if you’re not going to ditch RTK’s usual Anki decks for my deck, I recommend taking the radical decomposition field from my deck and adding it to the RTK deck you’re doing.

The decomposition field is a breakdown of the kanji into pieces; given the pieces and the keyword on the Front of cards, you reconstruct the kanji, which is placed on the back. For example, given the keyword “laundry” and the pieces ヨ, 氵, and 隹, you must come up with 濯.

Mnemonics aka Heisig stories thereby are de-emphasized and just used as supplements, as using conceptual representations for each ‘primitive’ becomes much less necessary.

To add the field, just export the Kanji Dark deck to .txt, then import it into Anki (have Anki set to ‘update existing notes when first field matches’), assuming that you’ve created in your RTK deck a new, empty Decomposition field; map the .txt’s kanji column to the RTK deck’s kanji field, and the decomposition column to the Decomposition field, ignore the rest (or make new fields and add those, too). There are 1940 Kanji Dark cards, so they’ll map to nearly all the RTK kanji, but not quite.

The rationale is… fairly complicated. After all, there’s still a lot of ignorance about how kanji work, the role they play in Japanese. So it’s kind of like having to reinvent the wheel, these methods, or having to explain the wheel should be round, not square. Plus I’m integrating this stuff with bleeding-edge self-study advice.

Learning a kanji is internalizing the placement of its pieces to form a whole, and internalizing its meaning, refining that understanding over time.

For RTK in the conventional sense, you’re using stories—verbal, conceptual representations of the kanji pieces—as a mnemonic, which you temporarily memorize so that you can, given a keyword, recall the whole kanji, using the framework of the mnemonic to scaffold the bottom-up visualization of ‘primitives’ into a whole; the stories, which are like captions describing pictures (the kanji, not the stories, are the pictures) fade over time, like dissolving stitches. We go keyword cue→kanji target because the kanji are the primary thing we want to learn.

This heavy usage of stories is actually unnecessarily difficult, making recalling the story essential to master the kanji, while you’re also trying to recall the kanji during reviews, and at the same time you want to forget the story over time as you internalize the character.

Yet mnemonics are very useful for helping you encode new information. So they shouldn’t be abandoned entirely…

So how to refine these keyword→kanji cards, while at least keeping the option of mnemonics open, and making these cards equally or more effective?

Recall that we’re connecting a meaning, approximated by a keyword (& we want the keyword to be in our best [e.g. native] language, so that it’s a transparent window onto the meaning it signifies), to the whole character. The character is more particular in meaning than the keyword, that meaning emerging through usage, but we’re not memorizing the meaning, per se, till we start learning words and getting a nuanced understanding of the morphemes (units of meaning) that kanji represent. (Putting such vocabulary on the back of kanji cards for feedback can be useful, but is sort of extraneous, adding noise, since we’re learning vocabulary later anyway.)

So we keep the keyword on the Front, as it retains its usefulness to start the general link between meaning and kanji.

But the keyword alone, since it’s imprecise, isn’t enough. Especially because we’re also trying to recall the contents and composition of the character at the same time.

So we have the meaning cue, but we also want a composition cue. We’ve already discussed the problems of the story/mnemonic; we don’t want to rely too heavily on recalling the mnemonic, and instead want to use it as a supplement.

We could try and put the stories on the front. But often the stories give away the arrangement of the kanji components. And if we put stories which don’t give away the arrangements on the front, then we’re left with English, etc. representations of the components’ approximate concepts, including made up concepts. That’s kind of half-assed, and it solidifies the mnemonics a bit too much: we want them to dissolve over time, remember?

So instead we cue the bottom-up reconstruction of the kanji with the randomized list of the kanji’s components, placed on the front. This constrains your choices in terms of what the content of the kanji is, without forcing you to translate that content from an obtrusive mnemonic or giving away the actual placement of its pieces: you must unshuffle the pieces, placing them correctly in the imaginary square the kanji is contained by.

So there you go, this unshuffle design reflects the natural process of learning kanji (subcomponents→meaningful whole) while maximizing that process with spaced retrieval. Lightly supplemented with mnemonics, the same way we can optionally supplement spaced free recall (when learning from texts) with conceptual mapping.

The decomposition doesn’t have to adhere precisely to the traditional breakdown of kanji into radicals and phonetic components, but you can use those to supplement your learning also, which is why I have made both a phonetic component deck and added radical information to Kanji Dark. As I mentioned on the deck page, sometimes the field has a variation of a component, or a larger chunk, and you can remove/replace these (jisho.org is a nice place to find alternative breakdowns). You can also make the decomp field a hint field, if you want the breakdown to be opt-in.

So really, RTK can be boiled down to tactics: keyword→kanji reviews w/ mnemonics, and I think Kanji Dark has a superior order and design overall; a superior order because RTK’s order is just one general example of an order to learn a set amount of kanji. There are better ways of ordering them, and customizable ones too, as I’ve explained elsewhere.

To reiterate: there are only two critical aspects for learning kanji: the combinations of its ‘primitives’ (not strokes) into a particular configuration, and its meaning.

As for its meaning, we use the keyword as a general placeholder, and we later slot in the real idea, the morpheme the kanji represents, when learning words.

Therefore, the truly critical thing is the subcomponents combining to form a particular character. The subcomponents are relatively few in number, and recycled a little at a time, so we don’t need to memorize them separately. They’re not our primary target in themselves, their combinations contributing to a whole are. Which means we don’t need to avoid them on the front of cards, or stick them on the back of Anki cards for retrieval practice. What we want to internalize, and thus recall/retrieve, are the configurations of these components.

So the most important thing for reviewing kanji cards is to cue that configuration, using the things that actually comprise it, the subcomponents. We don’t want to give away the configuration, so we just list them, in no particular order, on the front. Given that list, we visualize* the desired character, using the keyword as a trigger which holds a semantic link to the morphemes we’ll learn through words later.

*Don’t forget the benefits of handwriting: not for its own sake, but to memorize kanji. In this case, stroke order becomes important: not an official stroke order, but any order you settle on and are consistent with, to build an internal kinetic memory that augments your visual/spatial memory of the kanji.

Learning to read Japanese: an untainted view

Let’s talk about reading Japanese, again. From a naive yet enlightened perspective.

Japanese written language, in terms of meaning, can be broken up into two layers: the subvocabulary layer, and the vocabulary layer.

English doesn’t have a subvocabulary layer, unfortunately, which means you have to memorize tens of thousands of phonetically arranged sequences made up of meaningless squiggles representing sounds, attaching meanings to each phonetic string over a long period of time. And often, these squiggle-sound sequences don’t even match the sound of the word! Even worse, you can never process these sequences as meaningful wholes: you always have to process each squiggle individually, primarily associating the squiggles with sounds, only then triggering their definitions.

With Japanese, you have a subvocabulary layer, which is very cool, because unlike the vocabulary layer, it basically consists of just a few thousand recycled ideas, each of which a given subvocab component directly represents, because the visual squiggles they’re made of are just complicated enough to be processed as uncomplicated wholes, once you learn them. This subvocab layer makes up most of the vocabulary layer, and the vocabulary, those squiggle-meaning strings, are extremely short, and they’re actually spelled according to the subvocab meanings, which combine to create the vocab meanings!

So if you know the subvocab, you can just stack the vocab on top of it. You don’t learn these all at once, either, waiting to learn vocabulary until you learn all the subvocabulary. You do it slice by slice, learning some subvocab here, some corresponding vocabulary there. You could learn them at the same time, but this isn’t very efficient. If you do that, it’ll be as hard as learning phonetic vocab, taking everything in at once, which is no picnic! It’s best to separate the layers and learn those subvocab slices a week or two ahead of the corresponding vocabulary slices.

What’s very handy is that Japanese subvocabulary is simpler to learn than English phonetic vocabulary, as the subvocab is entirely composed of a few hundred meaningful, recycled chunks, which are recombined a few chunks at a time. What’s funny and strange is that despite this, people who have learned tens of thousands of English squiggle-sound sequences sometimes think learning Japanese subvocabulary is hard.

Putting it all together, how do we learn Japanese vocabulary, since we have this subvocab layer to make things so much easier? Since you’re not a kid learning a language over the course of years, you obviously wouldn’t try to learn vocabulary words in any new language without using flashcards, as that, which research has shown, would take ages, stumbling through texts, glossing over errors and constantly looking up the same words, whereas someone who learned the vocab separately with an efficient method would have been reading and enjoying themselves during that time.

So why not use Anki, a system for spaced retrieval (SRS) flashcards, which are many times better than regular flashcards, giving you even more time to read and enjoy stuff? And guess what, we can use Anki for the subvocab also! This’ll go even quicker, so after weeks or months going a slice at a time, the subvocab can start boosting vocab all together!

Making Short Anki Cards from Textbooks

This refers to what’s known in the literature as cued recall, often taking the form of a ‘short answer’ question.

I’ve decribed it before, but since I’ve been posting here about free recall and Anki dogma so much lately, I want to mention a simple way to help you make cards, which I extracted from research:

Go through a text and look for facts and concepts. Where a fact is “a piece of information… presented within a single sentence” and a concept is “a piece of information… abstracted from multiple sentences” (Butler, 2010).

Depending on whether the card is for a fact or concept and how you word them, the answers will vary in possible length, with concepts likely being longer. Examples:

“An example of a factual question is the following: “Bats are one of the most prevalent orders of mammals. Approximately how many bat species are there in the world?” (Answer: “More than 1,000 bat species have been identified.”)

In contrast, an example of a conceptual question is the following: “Some bats use echolocation to navigate the environment and locate prey. How does echolocation help bats to determine the distance and size of objects?” (Answer: “Bats emit high-pitched sound waves and listen to the echoes. The distance of an object is determined by the time it takes for the echo to return. The size is calculated by the intensity of the echo: a smaller object will reflect less of the sound wave and thus produce a less intense echo.”)” (Butler, 2010)

Remember, as I’ve stressed, it’s a myth that Anki cards have to be short and contain only one new piece of information. They’re not really ‘cards’, they’re just practice cues. So having longer answers is just as good, and emphasizes connections. Spacing schedules are not better if they’re precise nor does it even seem to matter if intervals between reviews increase or stay the same duration (though the fact that you can progressively and roughly increase intervals is very convenient), so you can just go by percentages when your answers contain more than a single atomic bit of information, and if you want to, you can create new cued recall cards for certain parts of answers if they become troublesome.

This notion of facts and concepts can also be applied when deciding how to break texts into idea units for free recall (e.g. if you want to try and remember 10 key ideas from a brief passage of text).

‘Brief’ Note on Learning from Textbooks

In this post I mentioned spaced retrieval for studying texts (e.g. learning stuff by reading passages from a textbook).

Specifically, I noted how there’s a lot of dogma based around the ideas that your Anki cards have to be brief, with only one new piece of information, and myths about how they are primarily for memorizing what you’ve already learned, not for learning itself. And how this is wrong. Sigh. So, so wrong. Skip to the end for quotes and studies, if you don’t want to take my word for it.

Free recall of a set is as good as breaking it up and studying by cued recall, sometimes better. By free recall I mean reading a text, then trying to recall as much of its key ideas as possible, evaluating yourself based on the percentage of target items you remembered. Cued recall is like a conventional Anki card with a short, specific question and answer.

This doesn’t even require Anki, or even spacing out free recall sessions through some other means, but it benefits from distribution (as opposed to massing/cramming), and Anki is a useful tool for scheduling practice sessions (e.g. On the Front: “Recall what you can from [insert heading/title of text]”). Perhaps have a hint telling you the number of items to remember.

So you should schedule your free recall sessions in Anki, rescheduling subsequent reviews based on the percentage of recalled items (using those easy/hard/etc. buttons), and emphasizing or creating separate, specific cued recall cards for any problem-items.

Since the aim is to use relatively short passages, you can place them on the back of the card, or just the list of stuff to remember, or page numbers/links, etc.

When you select and first study from a text/passage, you identify the desired/key idea units (often textbooks will identify these for you, placing them in bold, and/or even making a glossary).

Here’s a summary of some research, from the researchers:

“… we examined free recall of brief expository texts (Karpicke & Roediger, 2010). Subjects read brief texts and recalled them on free recall tests spaced according to different schedules. We examined the effects…

First, there is a testing effect: taking a single test after reading a text enhanced long-term retention more than reading the text and not testing.

Second, repeated testing (in the spaced retrieval conditions) enhanced retention more than taking a single test.

Third, testing with feedback (restudying the passages) produced better retention than testing without feedback.

However… there were no differences between expanding and equally spaced schedules of retrieval practice.”

Note the emphasis on corrective feedback. For that particular study, they gave students 4 minutes to read ~150 word expository entries from an encyclopedia, focusing on 20 idea units from each passage (which they decided, or ‘coded’, themselves).

When would you study with free recall instead of cued recall? To enhance the understanding of relationships connecting ideas, rather than disconnecting them as individual cards. Ironically, free recall practice does this better than ‘concept mapping’, a study method specifically focused on the “meaningful relationships among concepts”; in free recall, you must “establish an organizational retrieval structure and then discriminate and recover individual concepts within that structure.”

Remember, retrieval practice is for learning, not just memorizing. I can’t stress this enough. Anki isn’t a container, it’s a tool for organizing practice cues and scheduling roughly spaced reminders, a schedule that depends primarily on your input after feedback (e.g. pushing the easy/hard etc. buttons after ‘flipping cards’ to check answers), not a magical algorithm that can analyze your memories. The automatic aspect of Anki just an arbitrary way of helping you constrain your scheduling choices, making sure you don’t wait a ridiculously long time to review again, or cram your learning, without requiring you to track every item yourself.

More on spaced retrieval.

"Programs are ideas so clear in their intent that they are linked inextricably with meaning; ideas so..."

Programs are ideas so clear in their intent that they are linked inextricably with meaning; ideas so clearly realizable that they can mechanistically express that meaning in—or on—the world. For millenia, the only word humans imagined for such ideas was magic.

Programs are magic, and programming languages are the medium of magic. A good language delivers that magic into the hands of programmers.



- Steve Wolfman

Brief Note on Math in Anki

To learn mathematics, you do a lot of problem-solving, mastering procedures.

I discussed here how you can use Anki to schedule your math practice exercises and get spaced retrieval’s awesome benefits, as spaced problem-solving is superior to unspaced, hence scheduling the problem-solving with Anki (rather than just memorizing an occasional formula or simple calculation) is the most effective way to learn.

At any rate, typing up LaTeX to create cards is rather a pain. It’s not as hard as it first seems, and it has its uses, but, let me state the obvious:

Really, if you’re just copying equations and answers and such from a source while making cards, just use the snipping/snapshot tool that comes with Windows or even built into programs like Adobe’s or Foxit’s .pdf readers. Click and drag into the Add Card window’s desired field, and you’re done. The jpg files are larger than the pngs, but often you’ll have 2KB jpgs vs. 1KB pngs, so it’s generally not a big deal.

  • I’ve linked to this article summarizing some research many times in the past, but forgot to do so in the last post: Desirable Difficulties in Math Teaching. (Desirable difficulties is the mechanism by which Anki works: you make things hard but not too hard by spacing out your learning, and testing (retrieving) instead of just passively restudying.)

And again, take your time working these problems in Anki, using a calculator, stylus/tablet to write stuff out, notes, et cetera. Here, it’s just a scheduler for distributed practice, where you make rough adjustments based on difficulty.

So if you have a list of problems to study, put them in Anki, or use some other tool to schedule them in a distributed way, don’t just arbitrarily work them, or do them once and forget about them (the primary aim is to use a procedure to find a solution, so it doesn’t matter if you memorize the answer as long as you work the problem on each encounter, and evaluate yourself based on procedural knowledge).

Motohiko Odani, “New Born” Viper A



Motohiko Odani, “New Born” Viper A

Black Geas (Clean)

“An interface is ‘clean’ if it is ‘as simple as possible, but not simpler.’” - Einstein via Downey, Think Python

Let’s set aside the magic metaphor that my programming/compsci self-study program Black Geas uses, and try to explain it more cleanly…

  • With ‘natural languagelearning (e.g. learning Japanese), you have the Four Strands. It breaks the process down into input (listening/reading), output (speaking/writing), deliberate study (grammar and vocabulary), and fluency practice (activities to improve how fluidly you can use what you’ve learned).
  • With ‘formal languagelearning (e.g. programming), you have BRACE's breakdown: the structures of the programming language (keywords, punctuation, etc.), code reading (following loops and function calls, tracking variables, etc.), and code writing.

There’s a natural organization in these processes, in terms of how they interrelate, but it’s not a rigid hierarchy per se. You just need to be somewhat systematic about it, to ease the learning curve. So it’s natural to want to build a foundation out of the building blocks, progressively taking on more difficult tasks, using them to complement each other.

The reason that BRACE and the Four Strands exist and promote these views is because years of research indicates that doing exercises based on those breakdowns is the best way to learn.

  • And studies show that spaced retrieval makes for the best types of exercises, for any type of learning (e.g. surgery, mathematics, language). That is, they are done on a spaced schedule, and involve repeated, low stakes self-testing. So, rather than passively studying, or cramming or arbitrarily scheduling your active practice, you should combine these into SR (Spaced Retrieval).
  • The easiest way to implement spaced retrieval is to use an SRS (Spaced Retrieval System or Software, often given the misnomer Spaced Repetition), and the best such software is Anki. You’ll see a lot of fuss over which software has the best algorithm to predict your memory, forgetting curve this and that and blah blah, and other nonsense, but as long as you don’t cram or wait forever between reviews, it doesn’t matter: all that matters is that you have software where you can check your answers, grade yourself and thus roughly adjust the schedule, repeatedly retrieving information and spacing it out in some fashion. The delays between reviews give you space to learn more stuff, and naturally increase into infinity as you master materials.

So for learning a natural language, you create cards to supplement your reading and writing, your learning of grammar and vocabulary, et cetera. Doing otherwise and just reading or studying vocabulary in some other way is much less efficient, i.e. a huge waste of time. If you want to enjoy reading or watching as much as possible, use Anki as a supplement so you can spend more time comprehending as a pure experience, rather than stumbling through, slowly picking up words here and there and missing out on deeper appreciation.

Typically this involves focusing on smaller subsets of what you’re learning. Vocabulary words and example sentences with supporting audio clips and the like. So you make Anki flashcards to study these things the best way possible (spaced retrieval), keeping them integrated with stuff outside Anki, such as watching shows or blogging.

You can systematize this so that everything feeds together to form a fun, efficient study regimen. This is where ja・ミニマル comes in, tying together kanji, vocabulary, grammar, and particular kinds of sentence cards with fun, meaningful activities outside Anki.

For a formal language, there are many kinds of exercises, but typically they’re broken down into memorizing basic structures, being asked to follow and explain snippets of code, or writing small programs to accomplish simple tasks. These are supplemental to reading and writing longer programs, where you learn to relate those smaller structures to each other on a larger scale, for more complex purposes. This way you reduce the overhead during such activities, efficiently internalizing a core set of skills and knowledge which go a long way (think the Pareto principle)

This is where blvk./geSH/ comes in. It’s broken into essentially the same elements as BRACE’s research recommends, with customizations for Anki and additions from the Four Strands framework.

So we have: concepts and structures, that is, learning what lists and functions are, and how, specifically, they manifest in a given language.

  • You study concepts with cued recall (short answer) cards, such as “What is string interpolation?” on the front, with the answer on the back, supplemented with notes and examples.
  • For the language elements we have cards that are like vocabulary production (meaning→word) cards: Front: “Given a prompt to the user, how do we take the user’s keyboard input and assign it to a variable?” Answer on the back, which you can type in: variable = raw_input( ‘Prompt’ ) (with a specific example to illustrate it).

This forms the foundation. Next we have code reading and code writing.

  • Code reading exercises involve figuring out the output of a given snippet of code, and/or describing what it’s doing. So we stick the code on the front and the output/description on the back of Anki cards.
  • Code writing involves figuring out the code for desired effects. This is harder, so scaffolding is best, specifically using something studies showing their effectiveness sometimes call a Parson’s puzzle: we shuffle the lines of code till it’s out of order, and place it on the front, with the desired output. You have to unshuffle it, checking the back, which contains the original, ordered lines of code.

ja・ミニマル has a similar type of card for Japanese sentence output. Given a scrambled list of words and the sentence meaning, you re-order the sentence. I believe in research on output practice, these tasks have names like ‘sentence reconstruction’.

I explain the code input/output exercises a bit more here.

  • The equivalent to the fluency strand of the Four Strands of language learning (where you learn to quickly and fluidly use parts of the language you’ve learned, however basic), is what I call the Wind element in Black Geas.

And that’s it. If the magic metaphor doesn’t work for you, perhaps because it perpetuates a sense of ignorant blackboxing rather than helping you retain a zen-like sense of wonder, just ignore it and the possibly confusing Japanese philosophy stuff. I made it Japanese style magic because I devised Black Geas based on my Japanese self-study background. Geas, pronounced /geSH/, refers to a magical compulsion, popularized amongst nerds via the RPG Dungeons and Dragons, and again by the next generation of nerds via the anime Code Geass, which managed to both misspell and promote mispronunciation of the word.

After I came up with ja・ミニマル and output/unshuffle cards and then used these to create blvk./geSH/, at each stage I discovered they’d essentially already been invented and researched, which gave me a great sense of validation and allowed me to refine my own methods and recommendations. Hopefully you get something out of them, also, or at least take what’s useful from the research and speculations, discarding the chaff.

Note on Anki for Math, & Scheduling

Anki is based on the proven superiority of learning with the method(s) of spaced retrieval: spacing out your review sessions, and testing yourself actively, rather than passively restudying.

Some Anki users have a tendency to think of its effectiveness as requiring bite-sized facts studied in brief sessions, failing cards if you can’t quickly answer them, and allowing only one new item per card. This is often considered universally good advice, but it’s wrong.

Spaced retrieval’s superiority literally just requires spacing your practice sessions, and actively retrieving information. That’s it. You don’t need flashcards for this, and it applies to all sorts of things, including surgery and mathematics. No need to limit yourself using Anki—or Supermemo—dogma. You can space apart your surgery practice sessions, or study then recall an essay, and this is superior to cramming or re-reading.

In other words, you can omit Anki entirely, or conceptually strip it down till it’s just a way to use digital bells and whistles to organize cues to recall something, and/or schedule reminders to practice something in a spaced fashion.

For mathematics, you can simply put ‘solve this equation with this method’ on the front of a card, and take 20 minutes if you want, or however long, to work through the specified equation/method in different ways, writing it out with your tablet and stylus, referencing materials, using a calculator, et cetera. Even if you know an example’s answer already, the point is to get to the answer with a particular procedure that you’re trying to master till it’s automatic, so as long as you work through it, you’re golden.

Don’t even think of such reminders as ‘cards’, really. Grading them, then, is really just using the easy/hard/etc. buttons to settle, based on your performance and what related tasks you have scheduled, on whether to immediately re-study and re-practice, or settle on a rough interval—not too soon, not too far—to re-practice the material. I say rough, as in, it doesn’t matter precisely when. Intervals naturally get longer and longer the better you know material. Thus you reduce the time spent studying, learn more effectively, and make room to learn even more stuff, or to do other activities in spontaneous or less deliberate ways.

Also, for any topic, you can put something on a card that simply and vaguely tells you to recall as much information from a particular essay or passage of text as you can, unaided.

When doing recall of multiple idea units (e.g. facts and concepts), you grade yourself on a target percentage of items remembered. If you consistently forget particular items, just highlight them in some way and/or make separate exercises/cards for them.

  • If you think I’m full of it, just read the research for yourself. Here are many posts for specific papers illustrating the many ways spaced retrieval can be used. For free recall (reading a text and recalling its idea units), et cetera, there’s more here. Also see this post on quick vs. delayed answers (hint: struggling a while before flipping the card is better, if anything, not worse, though you can answer cards quickly for fluency practice).
  • You’ll also note that highly attenuated, algorithmically determined schedules promoted primarily by software developers/web marketing are not significant in the research measuring the effectiveness of spaced retrieval vs. cramming and restudying, and even whether the intervals are equally spaced or expanding doesn’t seem to matter. Expansion, as I mentioned, is mostly an incidental convenience.
  • For the neurotic learners: Don’t worry, one day when Anki can scan your memories in realtime, dynamically analyzing the neural correlates of knowledge as defined by each individual card’s parameters, predictive scheduling may become meaningfully precise.

blvk./geSH/ update

Just added a couple brief bits to Black Gesh's sections on Water (Hermeneutics) and Fire (Magicking) to emphasize conditional statements and variable assignments in loops for the former, and self-contained algorithms in the latter’s unshuffling exercises.

That is to say, at present, for ‘hermeneutics,’ (code-tracing cards) I recommend looking for snippets of code that highlight interesting flows of execution, efficiently developing your ability to follow these dynamics, or for unshuffling (Parsons Puzzles), look for problem-solving ‘templates’ that will most likely be reused in some form in the future. Hermeneutics/Magicking cards are sort of flip sides of the same coin.

Ex:

def find_max(L):
    max = 0
    for x in L:
        if x > max:
            max = x
    return max

That sort of thing, to selectively supplement your full code-tracing and code-writing activities outside Anki (i.e. if you stumble across a tricky loop while tracing a program, or find an algorithm particularly gorgeous).

Or you may wish to postpone such cards until you’ve gathered enough bunsetsu (and perhaps done corresponding ritual cards) and internalized computational (‘meta’) concepts well enough to comfortably browse through programs and extract blocks that seem useful for more intensive study.

As the Void element suggests, Anki in this system is for reducing overhead during wizarding—that is, programming—activities.

Thomas Bayes

Clojure Koans Walkthrough w/ Light Table IDE

Grit better than GRE at predicting success in STEM fields

Grit better than GRE at predicting success in STEM fields:

Computer Science Students Research Programming Language

Computer Science Students Research Programming Language:

… they are looking for ways to make introductory computer science courses more user-friendly.

Their research involves integrating Clojure, a programming language, into introductory-level computer science courses…

The team’s goal is to create a beginner-friendly programming environment with Clojure. To do so, Machkasova and her student researchers are working on incorporating this programming language with Light Table, an integrated development environment that will improve the interface. From there, they can refine error messages and program feedback. The results of their work can benefit not only aspiring computer science students, but also all of Clojure’s users.

Some Clojure (pronounced like ‘closure’, according to its creator) resources:

Meanwhile, the magic metaphor for programming continues in Clojure… Casting SPELS and Data Sorcery in Clojure

Do We Really Need to Learn to Code?

Do We Really Need to Learn to Code?:

“Learn to Code!” This imperative to program seems to be everywhere these days…

tech columnist Kevin Maney argued that all this coding reeducation might soon be unnecessary… He projects that by 2030 we won’t program at all; we’ll simply tell our machines what we want them to do…

Computer scientists have been dreaming of automatic computer programming for decades, but outside of very limited domains… there has been very little sign of tangible progress so far…

As Tom Dean, a researcher at Google, told us, “Programming is [challenging for artificial intelligence] not because it requires concentration and attention to detail but because the path from the conception of what you want to accomplish to the realization of code that actually accomplishes it requires artistry, insight, and creativity as well as incredible mental dexterity…”

It’s certainly possible that machines may someday be able to program themselves, but in a generation in which even the nerdiest, most cloistered programmer in Silicon Valley continues to have a far better intuitive sense of the world than any computer does, that day still feels a long way away.

ja-dark Gary Marcus is one of the folks I reference when I point out that for language processing, we don’t actually use ‘parse trees’/‘syntax trees’ as the old-fashioned generative grammar folks would have you believe; so I’m glad to see the headline here didn’t presage another one of those ‘don’t learn to program, it’s too hard/you’re cramping our style’ screeds.

No, A 'Supercomputer' Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better

No, A 'Supercomputer' Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better:

Okay, almost everything about the story is bogus. Let’s dig in:

  1. It’s not a “supercomputer,” it’s a chatbot. It’s a script made to mimic human conversation. There is no intelligence, artificial or not involved. It’s just a chatbot.
  2. Plenty of other chatbots have similarly claimed to have “passed” the Turing test in the past (often with higher ratings). Here’s a story from three years ago about another bot, Cleverbot, "passing" the Turing Test by convincing 59% of judges it was human (much higher than the 33% Eugene Goostman) claims.
  3. It “beat” the Turing test here by “gaming” the rules — by telling people the computer was a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine in order to mentally explain away odd responses.
  4. The “rules” of the Turing test always seem to change. Hell, Turing’s original test was quite different anyway.
  5. As Chris Dixon points out, you don’t get to run a single test with judges that you picked and declare you accomplished something. That’s just not how it’s done. If someone claimed to have created nuclear fusion or cured cancer, you’d wait for some peer review and repeat tests under other circumstances before buying it, right?
  6. The whole concept of the Turing Test itself is kind of a joke. While it’s fun to think about, creating a chatbot that can fool humans is not really the same thing as creating artificial intelligence. Many in the AI world look on the Turing Test as a needless distraction.

See also: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/no-a-computer-did-not-just-pass-the-turing-test

Meet The Japanese Artist Who Threw Like Pollock And Thought Like Picasso

Meet The Japanese Artist Who Threw Like Pollock And Thought Like Picasso:
“I could say,” Yuichi once wrote, in a passage reprinted in a biography by Masaomi Unagami, “I worship the character.” He describes the incredible pull kanji had on him:

“When I start getting absorbed in writing a single character, I can never forget about this character all day long, though I usually write only in the morning. While pondering how to improve the writing of it I feel as if I have found a solution and thus enthusiastically face a sheet of paper the next morning.”

ja-dark: I prefer Spoon Tamago’s headline better: The Single Character Action Calligraphy of Yuichi Inoue

I get tired of Japanese artists being primarily referenced by how similar they are to Americans; e.g. Koji Suzuki is ‘the Japanese Stephen King’, Tadanobu Asano is ‘the Japanese Johnny Depp’, et cetera. Lazily condescending ethnocentricity that in its prioritization limits the ability to look at figures from other cultures in their own right, regardless of any validity of cross-cultural influences or comparisons.

See also:

http://www.formidablemag.com/inoue-yuichi/

http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/09/05/the-single-character-action-calligraphy-of-yuichi-inoue/

The Effect of Music Listening on a Computer Programming Task (.ppt)

The Effect of Music Listening on a Computer Programming Task (.ppt):

Information systems professionals are experiencing workplace stress and loss of productivity during the design phase of systems development.  Music, an aid to mood change, can be a valuable tool for anxiety reduction, and, in turn, an aid in productiveness.  This study focused on the effect of music listening on anxiety and task achievement in computer programming.

See also:

Previously:

CodeSpells Previously: Computer Scientists Develop First-person...

Modern Spellbooks



Modern Spellbooks

"A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages."

“A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages.”

- Anonymous

"A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit… The programs..."

“A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit… The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer’s spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.”

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs aka “The Wizard Book

Brain signals link physical fitness to better language skills in kids

Brain signals link physical fitness to better language skills in kids:
  • Mark R. Scudder, Kara D. Federmeier, Lauren B. Raine, Artur Direito, Jeremy K. Boyd, Charles H. Hillman. The association between aerobic fitness and language processing in children: Implications for academic achievement. Brain and Cognition, 2014; 87: 140 DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2014.03.016

Good Vibrations Bring Braille into the 21st Century

Good Vibrations Bring Braille into the 21st Century:

ja-dark: It uses speech feedback at the letter or word level, in case that’s not clear; they’re working on a vibrating case for haptics

Previously.

Why Google Glass Will Make School Easier For Deaf Kids

Why Google Glass Will Make School Easier For Deaf Kids:

In the future, head-mounted displays could help deaf students in everything from English class to biology lab. Crucially, they eliminate the need to look back and forth between an interpreter and a lab demo or diagrams on the blackboard.

Trends in academic Computer Science

Trends in academic Computer Science:
  • When looking at where the faculty members got their PhDs from, M.I.T was the clear number one producer of computer science professors (it was also where most CS professors earned their bachelor degrees)…
  • “9 of the 10 most theory-heavy universities are private universities, whereas 9 of the 10 least theory-heavy universities are public…”
  • When looking at the breakdown of CS faculty hirings by research area, Huang and his students found that computer science theory is still the overall most dominant primary field of research, by a wide margin… However… there’s a sharp upward trend since 2010 in hiring professors who study systems and informatics, and a decline in the hiring of faculty members who study CS theory since 2011.

Domain-General Processes as the Basis for Grammar (PDF)

Domain-General Processes as the Basis for Grammar (PDF):

An emerging view of grammar sees it as evolving from the application of domain-general processes over many instances of language use; this has profound implications for an investigation into the evolution of language.

While the generative theory of grammar, with its postulation of certain innate language structures, has been most visible to observers outside the field of linguistics, long-term research traditions in typology, discourse analysis, historical linguistics, and corpus linguistics have converged on a view of grammar, termed ‘usage-based’, that explains the properties of human languages as a product of the way cognitive mechanisms apply to a language-user’s experience with language in context…

Rather than conceiving of the syntax of a language as being generated by abstract rules with no connection to meaning (as proposed in the transformational-generative tradition), Construction Grammar posits a direct connection between the conventionalized constructions of a language and their meanings…

As a general research strategy, it is preferable to assume that the ability to acquire and process language is based on domain-general abilities and to postulate abilities specific to language only when domain-general abilities cannot be identified…  I would argue that the acquisition and evolution of grammar… depends in large part on many domain-general capacities. Only after a thorough examination of domain-general abilities should we consider that the acquisition and use of human language requires abilities specific to language.

… a plausible scenario for language evolution begins with the assignment of meaning to certain vocal and/or manual gestures through cross-modal association. These meaningful gestures are in essence ‘words’… Once two words can be strung together, the process of grammar creation can begin. When one word is used in combination with other words yielding a set meaning, a construction is born.

Previously.

Use of gestures reflects lack of language instinct in young children

Use of gestures reflects lack of language instinct in young children:

“All languages of the world break down complex information into simpler units, like words, and express them one by one. This may be because all languages have been learned by, therefore shaped by, young children. In other words, generations of young children’s preference for communication may have shaped how languages look today.”

ja-dark: I rewrote the headline because this research (see also Goldin-Meadow’s work) is more about showing how language, as a complex adaptive system, evolves culturally, constrained by the brain to be optimally learnable by children (this process applies to writing systems also).

The researchers who have pioneered such work on the cultural evolution of language as shaped by the brain don’t believe there’s a Chomskyan language instinct (e.g. innate language acquisition device, universal grammar), and instead there at best may be a genetic predisposition to accommodate rapid changes, and language structures “result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.”

Learning a New Language at Any Age Helps the Brain

Learning a New Language at Any Age Helps the Brain:

Learning a second language may help improve brain function regardless of when you start, according to a new study.

Researchers found that young adults proficient in two languages performed better on attention tests and had better concentration than those who spoke only one language, irrespective of whether they had learned that second language during infancy, childhood or their teen years.

Previously: A bilingual advantage for episodic memory in older adults

Smart subtitles help you learn a second language

Smart subtitles help you learn a second language:

Once downloaded, Fleex extracts the subtitle data in video footage stored on your computer or online – whether it’s a movie in the language you want to learn or YouTube footage – and presents subtitles in both your native language and your target language.

For now, Fleex teaches only English. It does not display all the English subtitles throughout a programme, as that might swamp beginners with too much information. Instead, the subtitles for their own language are shown and, initially, only a low proportion of them are also shown in English. The amount in English offered rises, under the student’s control, as their comprehension grows. Meanwhile, subtitles in their native language gradually drop away.
At any time, selecting a confusing word in an English subtitle will bring up a menu defining the word and outlining its common usage. Idioms and common expressions are explained, too. Fleex costs €4.90 per month on a subscription basis.

ja-dark: For learners of Japanese and Chinese, perhaps use the free originals… (Short version for Japanese: Subs2SRS’s Dueling Subtitles + Morph Man’s Adaptive Subtitles).

Java for Python Programmers

Java for Python Programmers:

(Earlier version.)

If you’ve only learned Python, especially if you’ve just learned it, and want to transition to Java for professional or academic reasons, et cetera, this is a great resource to guide you in your transition.

Creative Coding Online Course — FutureLearn

Creative Coding Online Course — FutureLearn:

Learning to program is no longer just for computer specialists and software developers. People from many different backgrounds now want to understand the basics of programming, because it’s both fun and an increasingly valuable skill.

One of the most exciting ways to learn programming is through authoring your own creative programs. Known as “creative coding”, this growing field uses computer software as a medium to develop original creative expression.

So if you’re an artist, designer, architect or musician who’s interested in how you can expand your creative skills, or even a computer programmer looking to work in creative applications, you will find this course extremely useful…

A background in programming is not assumed or necessary.

"A most important, but also a most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of..."

“A most important, but also a most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language, this influence is—whether we like it or not—an influence on our thinking habits.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming (1976)

How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40%

How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40%:

With a three-step method, Harvey Mudd College in California quadrupled its female computer science majors. The experiment started in 2006 when Maria Klawe, a computer scientist and mathematician herself, was appointed college president. That year only 10% of Harvey Mudd’s CS majors were women. The department’s professors devised a plan.

They no longer wanted to weed out the weakest students during the first week of the semester. The new goal was to lure in female students and make sure they actually enjoyed their computer science initiation in the hopes of converting them to majors. This is what they did, in three steps…

1. Semantics count

They renamed the course previously called “Introduction to programming in Java” to “Creative approaches to problem solving in science and engineering using Python.”  Using words like “creative” and “problem solving” just sounded more approachable. Plus, as Klawe describes it, the coding language Python is more forgiving and practical…

"I am often reminded of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one..."

“I am often reminded of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalizing are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes…”

- Ada Lovelace, the first programmer

"The discipline of programming is most like sorcery. Both use precise language to instruct inanimate..."

“The discipline of programming is most like sorcery. Both use precise language to instruct inanimate objects to do our bidding. Small mistakes in programs or spells can lead to completely unforeseen behavior.”

- Richard Pattis

"The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether..."

“The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”

-

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002)

*A more accurate version than this.

When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950–1960

When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950–1960:

Abstract:

Language is one of the central metaphors around which the discipline of computer science has been built. The language metaphor entered modern computing as part of a cybernetic discourse, but during the second half of the 1950s acquired a more abstract meaning, closely related to the formal languages of logic and linguistics.

The article argues that this transformation was related to the appearance of the commercial computer in the mid-1950s. Managers of computing installations and specialists on computer programming in academic computer centers, confronted with an increasing variety of machines, called for the creation of “common” or “universal languages” to enable the migration of computer code from machine to machine.

Finally, the article shows how the idea of a universal language was a decisive step in the emergence of programming languages, in the recognition of computer programming as a proper field of knowledge, and eventually in the way we think of the computer.

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a..."

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002)

Beyond Cognitive Increase: Investigating the Influence of Computer Programming on Perception and Application of Mathematical skills

Beyond Cognitive Increase: Investigating the Influence of Computer Programming on Perception and Application of Mathematical skills:

This study aimed to provide first-hand accounts of the perceived long-term effects of learning computer programming on a learner’s approach to mathematics.

These phenomenological accounts, garnered from individual interviews of seven different programmers, illustrate four specific areas of interest:

  1. programming provides context for many abstract mathematical concepts;
  2. programming illustrates the important distinction between understanding the application of mathematics in a specific situation and the execution, in general, of a known procedure;
  3. programming habits helped participants divide complex mathematics problems into more manageable tasks; and
  4. the need to use mathematics for more efficient programs decreased participants’ apprehension and increased their motivation toward mathematics.
In short, computer programming provided participants with context, application, structure and motivation for mathematics.

ja-dark: For more research and discussion of what some have called convergent cognition, see my post here. This paper takes a look at the affective aspects more than the cognitive ones.

'explain in plain english' questions revisited: data structures problems

'explain in plain english' questions revisited: data structures problems:

Abstract:

Recent studies have linked the ability of novice (CS1) programmers to read and explain code with their ability to write code.

This study extends earlier work by asking CS2 students to explain object-oriented data structures problems that involve recursion.

Results show a strong correlation between ability to explain code at an abstract level and performance on code writing and code reading test problems for these object-oriented data structures problems.

The authors postulate that there is a common set of skills concerned with reasoning about programs that explains the correlation between writing code and explaining code.

The authors suggest that an overly exclusive emphasis on code writing may be detrimental to learning to program.

Non-code writing learning activities (e.g., reading and explaining code) are likely to improve student ability to reason about code and, by extension, improve student ability to write code.

A judicious mix of code-writing and code-reading activities is recommended.

The challenge of promoting algorithmic thinking of both sciences- and humanities-oriented learners

The challenge of promoting algorithmic thinking of both sciences- and humanities-oriented learners:

Abstract:

The research results we present in this paper reveal that properly calibrated e-learning tools have potential to effectively promote the algorithmic thinking of both science-oriented and humanities-oriented students.

After students had watched an illustration (by a folk dance choreography) and an animation of the studied sorting algorithm (bubble sort), they were invited to predict and perform… the entire step sequence of the algorithm (using the interactive visual learning environment we developed).

The results of the experiment show that while science-oriented students’ performance proved superior to those of their humanities-oriented colleagues, the differences were observed to diminish as both groups advanced with their e-learning tasks.

Although drawing general conclusions would be premature, we can conclude that there are no unbridgeable differences in the way these two groups relate to e-learning processes that aim to promote algorithmic thinking.

Our findings also emphasize the key importance of some motivational principles in facilitating algorithmic thinking: the principle of moderate and progressive challenge, the principle of gradual shift from concrete to abstract and the principle of genuine active involvement.

ja-dark: They should control for the type of examples they use; the ‘folk dance’ example probably offended the sensibilities of the humanities students to the point they couldn’t focus.

自転車を 倒して、ベルをこわして しまいました。 申し訳ありません



自転車を

倒して、ベルをこわして

しまいました。

申し訳ありません

5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus

5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus:

The familiar, hierarchical sequence of math instruction starts with counting, followed by addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division… in early adolescence, students are introduced to… algebra. A minority of students then wend their way through geometry, trigonometry and, finally, calculus…

But this progression actually “has nothing to do with how people think, how children grow and learn, or how mathematics is built,” says… Maria Droujkova…

“Calculations kids are forced to do are often so developmentally inappropriate, the experience amounts to torture,” she says. They also miss the essential point—that mathematics is fundamentally about patterns and structures, rather than “little manipulations of numbers,” as she puts it.

It’s akin to budding filmmakers learning first about costumes, lighting and other technical aspects, rather than about crafting meaningful stories…

Droujkova, who earned her PhD in math education… advocates a more holistic approach she calls “natural math,” which she teaches to children as young as toddlers, and their parents…

Finding an appropriate path hinges on appreciating an often-overlooked fact—that “the complexity of the idea and the difficulty of doing it are separate, independent dimensions,” she says.

“Unfortunately a lot of what little children are offered is simple but hard—primitive ideas that are hard for humans to implement,” because they readily tax the limits of working memory, attention, precision and other cognitive functions.

Examples of activities that fall into the “simple but hard” quadrant: Building a trench with a spoon (a military punishment that involves many small, repetitive tasks, akin to doing 100 two-digit addition problems on a typical worksheet, as Droujkova points out), or memorizing multiplication tables as individual facts rather than patterns.

Previously:

Ergalics: A Natural Science of Computation

Ergalics: A Natural Science of Computation:

Abstract:

If computer science is to truly become a “science”… then it must integrate three equally ascendant perspectives: mathematics, science, and engineering.

The scientific perspective can help us to understand computational tools and computation itself, through the articulation of enduring, technology-independent principles that uncover new approaches and identify technology-independent limitations.

This reorientation will yield an understanding of the tool developers and the tool users and will thus enable refinements and new tools that are more closely aligned with the innate abilities and limitations of those developers and users.

Incorporating the scientific perspective, to augment the mathematical and engineering perspectives, necessitates that the discipline study different phenomena, seek a different understanding of computation, ask different questions, use different evaluative strategies, and interact in different ways with other disciplines.

Doing so will add wonder, engagement, and excitement to our discipline.

More on ergalics.

Derivation of the term:

The phrase “natural science of computational tools as a perspective of computer science” is verbose and awkward. The term “science of computer science” is shorter but still awkward. Hence, we use the term “ergalics” for this new science… It derives from the Greek word ergaleion… translated as “tool” or “instrument.”

ja-dark: Eh. I’m not sold. How about compsciology?

The Clarification of Speech-Related Concepts in Acoustics

The Clarification of Speech-Related Concepts in Acoustics:

“In simple terms, the Café Effect is the tendency, inside a reverberant space, for noise to ‘breed’ noise.

Generally the noise is generated by conversations of separate groups of occupants, who subconsciously compete with the reverberative noise from other groups of occupants, who subconsciously compete with the reverberative noise from other groups and raise their voice such that they can be heard and understood by members of their own group.”

ja-dark: I knew there had to be a label for this.

Brief note on reading in Japanese

I’ve constantly pointed out that meaning, not sound, is the most important aspect of Japanese, especially reading Japanese text. This is due to the nature of kanji and word formation in Japanese.

I didn’t always know this, blinded by coming from an alphabetic background; so I used to have a bad habit that I want to warn you about, in case you have it too.

When you’re reading Japanese, or skimming it, don’t focus on first trying to get the sounds, then the meanings, frustratedly throwing up your hands at this complicated camouflage blocking your flow…

When you see kanji, which comprise the bulk of vocabulary words as compounds, prioritize their meanings, and how these recognizable icons that stand out from the background of hiragana are used to make words (e.g. 漢字 is 漢 and 字, Chinese + Characters = Chinese Characters).

Access to meanings in reading Japanese is direct from the visual, with pronunciations a secondary route. Words in Japanese are primarily formed based on combinations of meanings, not sounds.

You’ll pick up the sounds more easily this way as well, as you’ll have familiar slots to relate them to. No need to look up every pronunciation as you stumble through, as long as you know what the words mean. Sounds are just a useful bonus tool.

This is why we delay sounds when first learning kanji, and in ja-minimal, we place the sounds and kana readings on the front of vocab cards at first, not the back.

Code Hunt - New Coding Game From Microsoft Research

Code Hunt - New Coding Game From Microsoft Research:

Code Hunt is an educational game which you can play in Java or C#. It’s entirely browser based so there’s nothing to install and as you progress through its levels you learn more without having to type in more than a snippet of code…

… what you are expected to do is to modify a code fragment so that it produces the expected results. You get points not only for working code but also for elegant solutions.

Idea: Temporary 日本語 Tattoos

I wonder if it would be interesting to go to a vendor and create a batch of temporary Japanese-language tattoos with various phrases to wear each day… Maybe create a tattoo for each card in that Anki phrases deck, and wear the tattoo all day for each flashcard you fail, like a scarlet letter—err, scarlet bunsetsu. Or a scarlet kanji, if you’re doing Kanji Dark or RTK.

Photo



Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal:

I find the “everybody should learn to code” movement laudable. And yet it also leaves me wistful, even melancholy. Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC.

"Think of the ancient acolytes of magic, seeking to unlock the power in arcane knowledge. Then think..."

Think of the ancient acolytes of magic, seeking to unlock the power in arcane knowledge. Then think of that moment when, having learned street magic tricks such as flow control and data structures, you finally gained access to the API libraries. Think of that sorcerer’s apprentice staring glassy-eyed at the universe of possibilities in a room of musty books…

For what is programming but magic? Wielding secret words to command powerful forces you just barely understand, calling forth the spirits of bygone spell casters to ease your burdens, simplify your workflows, and grant you the ability to surprise and delight the masses.

As you pore over each tome, practicing new forms of magic, you start combining them with the things you learned before creating new spells, thus unlocking new possibilities…



-

Adamson & Avila,

Learning Core Audio

Related.

Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference

Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference:

The functional connectivity results suggest that a default mode of self-awareness may depend upon habitual coupling between mPFC regions supporting cognitive–affective representations of the self and more lateral viscerosomatic neural images of body state.

This dual mode of self-reference is better revealed following MT [Mindfulness Training], where these modes become uncoupled through attentional training.

This hypothesised cortical reorganization following MT is consistent with the notion that MT allows for a distinct experiential mode in which thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations are viewed less as being good or bad or integral to the ‘self’ and treated more as transient mental events that can be simply observed.

As such, the capacity to disengage temporally extended narrative and engage more momentary neural modes of self-focus has important implications for mood and anxiety disorders, with the narrative focus having been shown to increase illness vulnerability. Conversely, a growing body of evidence suggests approaching self-experience through a more basic present-centred focus may represent a critical aspect of human well-being.

Previously: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/86605396212/mindfulness-training-and-neural-integration

Mindfulness training and neural integration: differentiation of distinct streams of awareness and the cultivation of well-being

Mindfulness training and neural integration: differentiation of distinct streams of awareness and the cultivation of well-being:

A present view of neuroscience suggests that when energy and information flow in the various circuits of the brain, we generate the neural correlates of mental experience.

We can propose that one possibility for a mechanism by which mindful awareness may lead to enhanced well-being is in the way this state of attentional focus alters our relationship—our internal stancetoward our own mental processes.

When individuals refine the ways in which they see the fabric of the mind itself it becomes possible to intentionally alter the flow of mental experience.

In this way, seeing the mind with more depth and clarity of focus would allow the mind—the regulation of the flow of energy and information—to be transformed.

For example, if we can disengage old habits of neural firing from creating their automatic and engrained emotional reactions, such as depression or anxiety, we can reduce mental suffering and enhance the growth in our internal world toward mental health.

This shift in the focus of attention—the way we use the mind to channel the flow of energy and information through the various circuits of the brain—changes the pattern of activity in the brain.

With repetition, such mindful practice can create intentional states of brain activation that may ultimately become traits of the individual.

In neuroplasticity terms this is how new patterns of repeated neural circuit activation strengthen the synaptic connections associated with those states that then lead to synaptic strengthening and synaptic growth.

This is the mechanism by which practice harnesses neural plasticity to alter synaptic connections in a way that transforms a temporary state into a more long-lasting trait of the individual.

The developmental trajectory from effortful state to effortless trait can be seen as a fundamental component of how mindfulness can alter engrained patterns of psychopathology.

This may be the comon mechanism underlying the burgeoning of studies that suggest that mindfulness-based approaches are effective in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety and in the prevention of relapse in depression and drug addiction

Before mindfulness training, an individual may be unaware that there are distinct energy and information paths within awareness. Instead, the mind is experienced as an amalgam of busy thoughts and feelings and automatic reactivity and habitual responses.

The notions that one can ‘change one’s mind’ or to even not identify with these mental activities as the totality of who one is are ideas often not even in one’s worldview prior to immersion in mindfulness training.

With such training, the ability to distinguish different streams of information flow becomes possible.

Noticing the differences between sense and story, between primary experience-dependent ‘bottom-up’ input and the secondary ‘top-down’ chatter of prior learning becomes a fundamental tool of the mindfulness approach.

Once this distinction, this noticing of the contents of the mind, is readily accessible through intentional practice, the capacity to alter habitual patterns is created and the possibility becomes available for relief from self-preoccupied rumination, self-defeating thought-patterns, negative autobiographical narratives and maladaptive patterns of emotional reactivity.

Discerning the mind, seeing the mind with a more refined inner eye, allows the individual to not become lost in these top-down mental processes that often enslave awareness in preoccupations derived from the past and worried about the future.

This is how we are kept from ‘living in the present’.

The first step in mindfulness training is to learn to become aware of the difference between bottom-up sensory experience and the top-down chatter of our narrative minds.

Previously: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/86575670262/reframing-stress-stage-fright-can-be-your-friend

Five Emotions Invented By The Internet

Five Emotions Invented By The Internet:

The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation. During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter. The individual will switch between the open applications/tabs in a fashion that appears organized but is functionally aimless, will return to reading some kind of ‘blog post’ in one browser tab and become distracted at the third paragraph for the third time before switching to the Gmail inbox and refreshing it again.

The behavior equates to mindlessly refreshing and ‘lozenging’ the same sources of information repeatedly. While performing this behavior the individual feels a sense of numb depersonalization, being calmly and pragmatically aware that they have no identifiable need to be at the computer nor are they gleaning any practical use from it at that moment, and the individual may feel vaguely uncomfortable or ashamed about this awareness in concert with the fact that they continue to perform the idle ‘refreshing’ behavior. They may feel increasingly anxious and needful, similar to the sensation of having an itch that needs scratching or a thirst that needs quenching, all while feeling as though they are calm or slightly bored.

Previously: http://ja-dark.tumblr.com/post/86575670262/reframing-stress-stage-fright-can-be-your-friend

Reframing stress: Stage fright can be your friend

Reframing stress: Stage fright can be your friend:

ja-dark: For those who want to move past their stand alone complex yet feel a similar kind of dread for L2 speaking as they do public speaking, etc., then this might help.

To summarize Jaak Panksepp and other researchers and theorists, so-called emotions really have only a few basic primal templates, which through conditioning and social learning we use to construct these elaborate illusory bundles we label as various ‘emotions’.

Once you realize this, it’s simply a matter of deconstructing and reframing.

"Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”"

“Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.””

- Frank L. Visco, How to Write Good

Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages

Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages:

The present research assessed the potential effects of expecting to teach on learning.

In two experiments, participants studied passages either in preparation for a later test or in preparation for teaching the passage to another student who would then be tested.

In reality, all participants were tested, and no one actually engaged in teaching.

Participants expecting to teach produced more complete and better organized free recall of the passage and, in general, correctly answered more questions about the passage than did participants expecting a test, particularly questions covering main points, consistent with their having engaged in more effective learning strategies.

Instilling an expectation to teach thus seems to be a simple, inexpensive intervention with the potential to increase learning efficiency at home and in the classroom.

ja-dark: I’ve gone over free recall here, and the usefulness of preparing to teach/explain even if you don’t intend to actually teach here and other places. It’s a nice little hack to study as if you’re going to teach, even if you know you aren’t really going to… it’s kind of like a placebo: a placebo works even if you know it’s a placebo.

This is connected to the benefits of solo output practice, also.

Learning-to-write and Writing-to-learn in an Additional Language

Learning-to-write and Writing-to-learn in an Additional Language:

Baduk (the Game of Go) Improved Cognitive Function and Brain Activity in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Baduk (the Game of Go) Improved Cognitive Function and Brain Activity in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder:

Previously:

Make Your Own (Writing) Slant Board

Make Your Own (Writing) Slant Board:

Handwriting is highly useful for learning Japanese (including learning kanji and vocabulary); according to research, you learn and remember more effectively when you write by hand. I have emphasized this recently and frequently in the past.

You combine it with spaced retrieval (e.g. Anki) to amplify the effects of handwriting, so you write much less and avoid copying down the kanji many times.

At any rate, if you do a lot of handwriting you should probably start using an angled surface; there are many ways to accomplish this. One old-fashioned tool is the ‘writing slope’; there are of course lecterns as well. These are all ridiculously expensive, even the tabletop lecterns.

A popular device for children is essentially the same as a writing slope, typically called a ‘slant board’. Its benefits are touted for the development of handwriting, and also for making reading easier. This too is ridiculously expensive to buy premade.

However, the above article shows one way you can make your own writing board with binders. I’m sure you can think of your own variations.

There’s also various types of tablet stands out there, if you’ve gone paperless like me. However, I’m not confident these are good for handwriting (as opposed to reading or swiping), in terms of spaciousness and durability.

If this weren’t so expensive, I’d recommend it, as I like the way it’s designed to fit over a keyboard.

3 Ways Coding and Gaming Can Enhance Learning

3 Ways Coding and Gaming Can Enhance Learning:

Deviant writing and youth identity: Representation of dialects with Chinese characters on the Internet

Deviant writing and youth identity: Representation of dialects with Chinese characters on the Internet:

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of the representation of dialect with Chinese characters on the Internet.

Deviating from the standard Chinese writing system, the Internet-savvy youth transcribe their native dialects on an ad hoc basis, which celebrates multiplicity, creativity, individuality and resists uniformity, standardization, and institutionalization.

… the paper discusses how the written Shanghai Wu words are explored to mark a distinct visual style and to articulate a distinct local youth identity…

"The origin of the term ‘shibboleth’ is to be found in the Book of Judges, 12, 5-6: forty-two..."

“The origin of the term ‘shibboleth’ is to be found in the Book of Judges, 12, 5-6: forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed by the Gileadites after being identified by their inability to realise the initial post-alveolar fricative in ‘shibboleth’, pronouncing it instead as ‘sibboleth’.”

- David Brett, Eye Dialect: Translating the Untranslatable

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Beyond weight loss: a review of the therapeutic uses of very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diets

Beyond weight loss: a review of the therapeutic uses of very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diets:

The CNS cannot use fat as an energy source; hence, it normally utilizes glucose. After 3–4 days without carbohydrate consumption the CNS is ‘forced’ to find alternative energy sources… high-fat/low-carbohydrate diets leads to the production of higher-than-normal levels of so-called ketone bodies (KBs)… a process called ketogenesis…

KBs are then used by tissues as a source of energy…

Emerging data suggest a possible therapeutic utilization of ketogenic diets in multiple neurological disorders apart from epilepsy, including head ache, neurotrauma, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, sleep disorders, brain cancer, autism and multiple sclerosis…..

ja-dark: They also mean, in case it’s not clear, that after that process, your brain runs primarily on ketones, instead of sugar.

Please forgive me for the tone and rambling length of this post. Also, keep in mind there’s always exceptions to general results.

Previously as part of my ‘Limitless’ series (originally based on my posts here) on general ways you can improve your learning, I mentioned the benefits of both intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet (e.g. enhancing memory, reducing depression).

The research is for the most part still in its early stages, but I can’t stress enough how amazing ketosis is, in my humble opinion. Don’t confuse this with the ketoacidosis of Type-1 diabetics.

In the past, I emphasized Omega-3 as basically my ‘Limitless’ pill (in the film it’s a fictional intelligence-enhancing pill called NZT-48)… Really, its benefits pale in comparison to ketogenic dieting (especially in combination with intermittent fasting), in my opinion. I try to avoid anecdotal evidence, but I’m basing this on a year of life-changing personal experience, research I’ve found, and countless anecdotes from others.

Those who have trouble with attention, OCD-like behavior, social anxiety, depression, tiredness, etc.—a whole litany of ailments you’ve assumed were just a part of your life, I think a few weeks of ketogenic dieting with or without intermittent fasting will shock you. I must emphasize that there’s a transitional period of the ‘keto flu’, where for perhaps a week as you become ‘keto-adapted’ you’ll feel tired and grouchy and lose a lot of water weight. Then, the switch is flipped, and you’ll never be the same.

The ketogenic diet is not a “brand”, nor is fasting. It’s a set of principles for eating in a radically different way. Ditto for intermittent fasting. It’s very flexible, but I think a good primer, in terms of giving you an idea of what to eat, is this book. Just extrapolate the gist of that book, don’t take it as gospel, this guy’s a bit of a guru, and I hate gurus (I’m not a guru, I’m a non-entity, a tumblr/wordpress subdomain). Combine it with the well-researched advice in this book, find a happy medium. There’s tonnes of sites, videos, etc. on the topic, also.

The key is to keep your carbs at 5-10% of your daily caloric usage. If you use 2000 calories a day, keep your carbs between 25g-50g. Err toward less. Eat the usual prescriptions for protein intake. Keep it between 70g-150g/day, I think. Modulate your fat intake based on how you feel and your weight loss goals: for me and for this post, weight is irrelevant here. It’s all about the mind and emotions. At any rate, a good maintenance level will be anywhere from 100-150g fat, most likely. Make some of that coconut oil, another amazing thing that’s high in MCTs (medium-chain triglycerides).

This is a hard diet to get used to because it’s so different. You may find it too disheartening to unlearn and relearn how to eat. But it’s so worth it. I write this post, stepping a bit outside of the Dark Japanese persona, because I truly think this is the sort of eating lifestyle that most kids should be living long-term. It’s actually far cheaper, grocery-wise, as well. Half the cost, I’d say, once you get the hang of it. If I could go back in time to advise my child self…

The [Stylus] Is Mightier Than The Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking

The [Stylus] Is Mightier Than The Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking:

Abstract:

The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing.

In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.

We show that… laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.

ja-dark: I’ve discussed how useful it is to incorporate handwriting into learning Japanese more than once. Here’s another summary on the general benefits of handwriting for learning and memory.

I must emphasize that this is different than advocating the use of cursive, or the kind of ridiculously inefficient method of teaching kanji (writing characters over and over again) that many schools in Asia, or at least China, force onto kids.

I also want to repeat that personally, I went paperless years ago. I recommend the tablet and stylus combo. Galaxy Note, Surface Pro, etc. Something with a Wacom digitizer.

Visual vernacular: rebus, reading, and urban culture in early modern Japan

Visual vernacular: rebus, reading, and urban culture in early modern Japan:

Abstract:

In Japan, the image has long been a primary locale for linguistic experimentation and a crucially important site for the localization of language.

This article explores the ways in which the rebus, as a distinct form of verbal/visual play, became a platform in early modern Japan for radical language experimentation contiguous with, and a precursor of, the more well-known political reform movements of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries (such as genbun itchi “unification of the spoken and written” and hōgen bokumetsu “eradication of the dialects”).

As I show here, the rebus was a key instrument through which the inflection, syntax, terminology, and visual language of the capital circulated in early modern Japan, reaching both hypo- and hyper-literate circles, and inculcating a sense that the witty language of the Edo urbanite was Japanese language par excellence.

To understand this movement of knowledge, we need to consider closely the full material range of early modern popular texts, and particularly we need to plumb the depths and terms of linguistic experimentation taking place along the fertile seam between the spoken sound and the written sign.

To this end, I provide a brief genealogy of visual play with homophones in classical Japan before moving to the early modern period where I focus on several deep readings of both hypo-literate (“illiterate map”) and hyper-literate (rebus narrative) forms to examine the creation of what I call a “visual vernacular.”

Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance

Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance:

Abstract:

Research on learning has primarily focused on the role of doing (experience) in fostering progress over time.

In this paper, we propose that one of the critical components of learning is reflection, or the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.

Drawing on dual-process theory, we focus on the reflective dimension of the learning process and propose that learning can be augmented by deliberately focusing on thinking about what one has been doing…

We find a performance differential when comparing learning-by-doing alone to learning-by-doing coupled with reflection.

Further, we hypothesize and find that the effect of reflection on learning is mediated by greater perceived self-efficacy.

Together, our results shed light on the role of reflection as a powerful mechanism behind learning.

The Language of Game Development

The Language of Game Development:

Computer Beats Grandmaster Yoda at Go

Computer Beats Grandmaster Yoda at Go:

Invented over 2500 years ago in China, Go is labeled a “deterministic perfect information game,” along with tic-tac-toe, chess, checkers, and Othello. But despite decades of attempts, no computer has been able to defeat a Go sage without a handicap. Even Crazy Stone’s “victory” against Yoda was only accomplished thanks to a four-stone lead.

To give you an idea of why computers haven’t yet cracked Go, consider the opening of a game of Chess. White has 20 possible moves, after which Black also has 20 possible moves. Once both sides have played, there are 400 possible board positions.

On the other hand, at the beginning of a game of Go, Black has 361 possible moves, and White can follow with 360 different moves, resulting in 129,960 possible board positions after the first round.

Related:

nihongogasuki: 左 vs. 右 Left vs. Right



nihongogasuki:

左 vs. 右
Left vs. Right

"In the Middle Ages, “grammar” was generally used to mean “learning,” which..."

In the Middle Ages, “grammar” was generally used to mean “learning,” which at that time included, at least in the popular imagination, a knowledge of magic. The narrowing of “grammar” to mean the rules of language was a much later development…

Meanwhile, “grammar” had percolated into Scottish English… and the word eventually became “glamour,” used to mean specifically knowledge of magic and spells.

"Glamour" was then introduced to English… and took on the meaning of "enchantment," and later "alluring charm" and our current "exotic and fashionable attractiveness."



- Evan Morris, The Word Detective

Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-Century Japan:

The Perry intrusion… prompted the rise of “western learning”: language study quickly expanded to include English, French, and German; and the content of learning emphasized European law and political philosophy.

But the concepts that defined this content of western thought did not translate well; they did not fit naturally with existing Japanese concepts.

Hence the translation of western political theory necessitated the invention of new terminology with which to engage the new political language.

Accordingly, Japanese efforts to translate western political theory must be understood as both problems of language, the creation and circulation of new concepts, as well as problems of action, and the usage of new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be implemented in a “westernizing” Japan.

Also: Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Japan’s Yu Terasawa Named ‘Information Hero’ by Reporters Without Borders

Japan’s Yu Terasawa Named ‘Information Hero’ by Reporters Without Borders:

What's happening with science fiction in Arabic?

What's happening with science fiction in Arabic?:

OverDrive Strikes Deal to Distribute Japanese Content

OverDrive Strikes Deal to Distribute Japanese Content:

[Press Release]

OverDrive adds bestselling Japanese eBooks for libraries and schools worldwide

Strategic alliance with MediaDo extends OverDrive network and catalog to Japan as well

OverDrive, the world’s leading digital platform for libraries and schools, today announced a strategic alliance with top Japanese publisher aggregator MediaDo. The alliance, called OverDrive Japan, will enable distribution of popular and bestselling Japanese content, including manga and adult fiction, through the OverDrive network of libraries and schools worldwide. In addition, the new venture extends the OverDrive platform and catalog of more than 1 million eBook and audiobook titles to Japanese libraries and schools…

“We are honored to join MediaDo in forming OverDrive Japan,” said Steve Potash, OverDrive’s CEO. “Japanese content has proven popular throughout the world, and we are delighted to lead the world in making it available to libraries and schools around the world, initially in the Japanese language and ultimately in English and other languages via translation.”

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Skimmability add-on for Firefox

Skimmability add-on for Firefox:

The feature of interest is ‘Jenga’ mode: it emphasizes the first sentence of each paragraph (and an entire paragraph of just one sentence) by shrinking the size of the other sentences; you can also increase the distance between lines.

English texts tend to be deductively organized (emphasis on a topic sentence to lead the paragraph), and often on the web and in news articles make use of the inverted-pyramid style, where the most pertinent information tends to be in the first sentence of a paragraph. Sometimes, though less often, Japanese ‘danraku’ are similarly structured (see also keishiki and imi danraku.

This extension is intended to make ‘satisficing’ strategies easier by enhancing skimmability.

What studies have found is that online readers tend to skim, ‘satisficing’: “reading through text until the rate of information gain drops below threshold and then skipping to the next section of text.” We do this within and across texts. It’s taking a ‘good-enough’ approach to information foraging, where “an alternative approach or solution is sufficient to meet the individuals’ desired goals rather than pursuing the perfect approach,” using “minimum processing resources”.

(We seem to do this for language comprehension in general; I’ve explained why output practice is useful, in part because we tend to gloss over input, not knowing what we don’t know, and not correcting errors or filling in gaps in our knowledge in a timely or efficient fashion—often you’ll see learners online bragging about how they understand “85%” of anime, or some other inflated number they came up with, after weeks or months of self-study.)

Satisficing is actually a similar heuristic—in that it seeks to “maximise the marginal rate of return” by switching tasks to work on the one with “the greatest current benefit” (e.g. the shortest/easiest)—to the concept of the Region of Proximal Learning. In the past I pointed out another way of using a Firefox extension fo enhance what I called ‘proximal reading’ in Japanese, focusing on highlighting well-learned vocabulary words.

I’m using Firefox 27 with compatibility checking disabled, and the Froggy add-on works for English; I suspect getting it to work for Japanese would mainly require some tweaking of the regexp delimiters. There’s an unreleased GX version of the extension which supports Asian languages. Another benefit besides increased skimmability, I suspect, is that it would act as a scaffolding for learning foreign styles of text organization, such as the deductive vs. inductive styles, etc., as unfamiliarity with different styles is known to throw off learners (Hirabe, p. 48)

An unofficially modded use of this extension, then, might add Japanese functionality as well as the option to use the final sentences rather than the initial sentences, in the case of more inductively structured paragraphs. The extension already saves settings from site to site, so if one site, say, the Japanese version of a popular English site, entails a first-sentence approach, and another site a final-sentence approach, these would not conflict.

I should note that if you’re using my method for an ultra-minimalist Firefox, the add-on ruins that with its toolbar (F2 doesn’t seem to disable it).

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'Rice theory' explains north-south China cultural differences, study shows

'Rice theory' explains north-south China cultural differences, study shows:

Related:

System that automatically fills gaps in computer programmers' code gains power

System that automatically fills gaps in computer programmers' code gains power:

Theseus - Always-On Programming Visualizations

Theseus - Always-On Programming Visualizations:

Theseus attempts to provide information on what code is doing without overloading the programmer with, say, a full runtime trace. It displays the run-time state in the code editor using code coloring and notes in the margin. Functions are colored grey if they have not been executed and with a call count alongside if they have…

If you click on the call count then you get more information - arguments, return values and so on listed as a call log at the bottom of the screen. This nests function information so that you can see which function called which. This is particularly useful for asynchronous calls.

You might well think that this is all very minor information and it wouldn’t really help. The good news is that Theseus isn’t a theoretical academic exercise - it exists and you can try it out as part of the Brackets online editor and runtime environment. Just install Brackets and start work with the Theseus add-on.

You enter some code and when you load it into a web page the code editor changes to show you the information gathered from the page. You can carry on editing and exploring the code and using the web page. This makes it possible to understand how the code is affecting the web page.

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OGI’s The Facts Behind the Fiction and ReGenesis: Science & Society

OGI’s The Facts Behind the Fiction and ReGenesis: Science & Society:

Engineered viruses ravaging bodies. Pandemics threatening the lives of millions. Dormant genetic diseases unexpectedly - and tragically - awakening. Scientists seeking to protect humanity through discovery, mindful of the risks of misadventure.

These are just a few of the many exciting stories in ReGenesis, an award-winning Canadian TV science drama series, now on DVD, which ran for four seasons in Canada and is now showing in over 100 countries. The series revolves around the scientists at NorBAC (North American Biotechnology Advisory Commission), a fictional organization based in Toronto and led by a world-renowned molecular biologist, Dr. David Sandström (Peter Outerbridge).

OGI has worked with Shaftesbury Films, makers of ReGenesis, to publish The Facts Behind the Fiction(see below), consisting of fact sheets that explore the science – what’s genuine, what’s plausible, what’s unknown or unlikely – for each episode, allowing viewers to be engaged, entertained, and informed

ja-dark: There’s also similar sites for shows like Numb3rs. Good fuel and motivation for using spaced retrieval (e.g. Anki) and/or free recall to study these topics.

I’ll have to write a tumblr post soon that simplifies how to use free recall (and cued recall) to study texts, inside and outside of Anki.

図画工作 - 佐々木俊



図画工作 - 佐々木俊

アイドル - 佐々木俊



アイドル - 佐々木俊

Listen Mr Oxford don (John Agard)

Me not no Oxford don
me a simple immigrant
from Clapham Common
I didn’t graduate
I immigrate

But listen Mr Oxford don
I’m a man on de run
and a man on de run
is a dangerous one

I ent have no gun
I ent have no knife
but mugging de Queen’s English
is the story of my life

I dont need no axe
to split/ up yu syntax
I dont need no hammer
to mash/ up yu grammar

I warning you Mr Oxford don
I’m a wanted man
and a wanted man
is a dangerous one

Dem accuse me of assault
on de Oxford dictionary/
imagine a concise peaceful man like me/
dem want me serve time
for inciting rhyme to riot
but I tekking it quiet
down here in Clapham Common

I’m not a violent man Mr Oxford don
I only armed wit mih human breath
but human breath
is a dangerous weapon

So mek dem send one big word after me
I ent serving no jail sentence
I slashing suffix in self-defence
I bashing future wit present tense
and if necessary

I making de Queen’s English accessory/ to my offence

The Secret Messages Inside Chinese URLs

The Secret Messages Inside Chinese URLs:

In China, you’re constantly barraged by digits: QQ numbers (QQ is China’s most popular chat service), email addresses, and even URLs. For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.

Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters, especially those who didn’t go to college. To many, “Hotmail.com” might as well be Cyrillic…

Digits are even more convenient when you consider that the words for numbers are homophones for other words. The URL for the massive e-commerce site Alibaba, for example, is 1688.com, pronounced “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”close enough! Those digits can just as often have individual meanings. The video sharing site 6.cn works because the word for “six” is a near-homophone for the word “to stream.” The number five is pronounced wu, which sounds like wo, which means “I.” The number one is pronounced yao, which with a different tone means “want.” So the job-hunting site 51job.com sounds a lot like “I want a job.” Likewise, to order McDonalds’ delivery online, just go to 4008-517-517.com, the “517” of which sounds a bit like “I want to eat… ”

This kind of number-language has become an infinitely malleable shorthand among Chinese web users…

Why don’t Chinese web addresses just use Mandarin characters? Because that’s a pain, too. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which sets the rules for web addresses globally, has periodically hyped the expansion of domain names to include non-Latinate scripts, but Chinese web sites have yet to take full advantage… for web sites that want to expand internationally but don’t want to alienate foreign audiences with unfamiliar characters, numbers are a decent compromise.

Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet’s built-in bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it’s still a fundamentally American system… In 2012, the United States refused to sign an international telecommunications treaty, supported by both Russia and China, that would shift the Internet away from its current U.S.-centric form of governance. In other words, the structure of the Internet is a constant reminder of American digital hegemony, from WiFi standards to GPS. Even the “.cn” at the end of Chinese URLs comes from the English word for China, not the Chinese word for China. You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American 250s to 0748.

Related:

Development of reading ability is facilitated by intensive exposure to a digital children's picture book

Development of reading ability is facilitated by intensive exposure to a digital children's picture book:

Abstract:

Here the author presents preliminary evidence supporting the possibility that the reading ability of 4-year-old children can be improved as a consequence of intensive exposure to the narrative in a digital picture book over a consecutive 5-day period.

When creating the digital version used here, two additional functions were provided with it.

First, the entire story was voice-recorded by a professional narrator and programmed so that it was played as narration from the speaker of an iPad.

Next, as the narration of each digitized page proceeded, the character exactly corresponding to that pronounced by the narrator at that moment became highlighted in red.

When the subjects’ literacy capability with respect to the syllabic script of the Japanese language (kana) was evaluated before and after the exposure, their performance score was found to increase after the exposure to the digital book, whereas such a change was not recorded in children who experienced exposure to the printed version of the same picture book read to them by their mother.

These effects were confirmed when the children were retested 4 weeks later. Although preliminary, the current study represents the first experimental evidence for a positive effect of exposure to digital books upon any aspect of child development.

ja-dark: In order to read Japanese with a method similar to the one in the article, with audio and automatically highlighted text, see this post's instructions and various links.

Previously: Japanese study says e-books more effective in teaching children to read

Japanese study says e-books more effective in teaching children to read - The Japan Daily Press

Japanese study says e-books more effective in teaching children to read - The Japan Daily Press:

No matter what others may say, the digital age does have its advantages. And that includes teaching young children to read better. In a study conducted by Japan’s Kyoto University, researchers found out that children reading an e-book are more likely to develop better reading skills than those using a printed copy.

ja-dark: Wouldn’t you learners of Japanese like to have some well-formatted Japanese eBooks all set up for you? If only someone posted a hidden link to such a collection on tumblr, emphasizing quality over quantity.

That tumblr link would probably be hidden in a shortened URL, because you can customize the URL that’s generated by sites like TinyURL.

What’s funny is, you can make the shortened URL look random, like tinyurl.com/6sEBWcRp … when in fact it might not be random. Someone could have deliberately used the random-looking “6sEBWcRp” as the custom URL. Why would they do such a thing?

By the way, are you familiar with Pastebin? The link is http://pastebin.com … Pastebin also generates random links that look similar to the above. Very similar to strings like “6sEBWcRp” in fact…

By the way, in order to read Japanese with a method similar to the one in the article, with audio and automatically highlighted text, see this post's instructions and various links.

Full Paper: Development of reading ability is facilitated by intensive exposure to a digital children’s picture book

See also:

“Kami”: The Evolution of Japan’s Native Gods

“Kami”: The Evolution of Japan’s Native Gods:

Since ancient times, Japanese people have revered kami, the gods of Shintō. And for over a millennium they have also practiced Buddhism, sometimes conflating Buddhas with their native divinities. Sociologist Hashizume Daisaburō traces the changes in the Japanese view of kami over the centuries.

When the English word God is translated into Japanese, it is generally represented by the kanji (Chinese character) 神 and pronounced kami. However, to avoid misunderstanding, it would be better to think of God, 神, and kami as three separate concepts.

“God” is the supreme being of monotheism and is customarily capitalized to indicate the unique nature of the deity and draw a distinction with the multiple gods of polytheism.

The written Japanese form, 神, is influenced by the Chinese meaning of the character. Common words in both languages using this character, such as 精神 (pronounced seishin in Japanese), meaning “spirit” or “mind,” and 神経 (shinkei), meaning “nerves,” are related to human mental qualities. Pronounced shen in Chinese, the character 神 carries some divine attributes, but they are of a decidedly low rank and far below those of the highest power in Chinese theology, termed 天 (tian) or 上帝 (shangdi) in Chinese.

Japan’s kami were traditionally thought of as anthropomorphized natural phenomena. They included the kami that appear in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and the Nihon shoki (Chronicle of Japan), Japan’s ancient records of myth and history, kami that were worshiped in shrines, and everything possessing extraordinary qualities, including the sun, the moon, the wind, the rain, the sea, large rocks and trees, and even some smaller plants, animals, and people…

ja-dark: See also A New History of Shinto.

Excerpt:

The crux of the matter is that kami shrines, myths, and rituals are a great deal older than their conceptualization as components of Shinto. Therefore, the only way to delve into the history of these shrines, myths, and rituals is by laying the concept of Shinto to one side, at least as a start. Only in this way will it be possible to study these aspects of kami worship in their proper historical contexts…

… this book will take a different approach to that of more conventional histories of Shinto. Such histories have typically assumed that Shinto has been an abiding force in Japanese history, and they present a selection of data that confirms this…

… we will take the reverse approach of tracing the history of some of the main components from which Shinto was construed at a later stage: shrines, myths, and rituals. The difference is that while Shinto historians naturally stress the “Shinto-like” aspects of shrines, myths, and rituals, we make a conscious effort to put that Shinto angle aside, and thereby gain a less preconceived understanding of shrines, myths, and rituals in their contemporary setting, when there is no evidence that they were understood as ingredients of Shinto.

This fragmenting approach is necessary not only to understand pre-Shinto kami cults in their proper context, but also to bring out the process of “Shintoization” that culminated in the Meiji shrine reforms…

Update to links

Just a note to point out that since changing my tumblr name from darkjapanese to ja-dark, fixing old links is a work in progress.

So if you click on links in old posts and it takes you to a ‘not found’ page, it’s probably because it’s linking to ‘darkjapanese.tumblr.com’ instead of ‘ja-dark.tumblr.com’.

I’d found a way to automatically redirect old tumblr links from darkjapanese to ja-dark, but tumblr terminated the old account (which I’d saved purely for redirecting to this account with a page-load script, so that’s probably why), so that no longer works.

Kotodama: the multi-faced Japanese myth of the spirit of language | OxfordWords blog

Kotodama: the multi-faced Japanese myth of the spirit of language | OxfordWords blog:

ja-dark: Previously I wrote about kotodama here. The above article, written by Naoko Hosokawa, a Japanese sociolinguistics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford, focuses on the nationalistic/ethnocentric myths of language ‘purity’ the concept is related to.

My post focused on the ‘magical’ mythology as well as the irony that despite the purity/superiority stuff being way off base, the useful uniqueness of Japanese and kanji and the utility of the kotodama metaphor is actually empirically, linguistically accurate and on point, and the anti-reform measures, however misguided in their execution, prevented a degeneration of the language from occurring due to a bias toward phonocentrism influenced in part by the West.

See also: Kotodama in anime and computer programming.

Nozarashi - 野晒し (のざらし)

Came across this word, as a name, in the manga Bleach.

It’s fairly interesting: it literally means something like “weather-beaten”, exposed in a field, and has the connotation of bleached bones, specifically a skull (WordNet, in fact, places it in the skull synset) found in the countryside someplace, in ancient philosophical folk tales related to the principle of repaying kindness, illustrating a Buddhist system (see). Perhaps the skeletal notion is related to the architectural meaning of 野, which is used as a prefix for hidden structural components.

At any rate, the Japanese tales apparently generally went like so: a man finds a weather-beaten skull outside, and speaks to it kindly or pays tribute in some symbolic way (such as offering a beverage to ‘drink’ [飲む/む]); the ghost of the bones or skull later materializes, perhaps as a pretty girl, and visits him to repay his kindness somehow (e.g. p. 21).

At any rate, given recent events in the manga, a character’s origin story’s similarity to the above tales, and the possibility of reading 野 as both の and や, not to mention the obvious association of ‘bleach’, I find it fascinating. At the very least it makes for some research-motivating apophenia.

Visually the motif can be seen here and here.

Oh, and 散る [ちる], which means fall/scatter, (e.g. fallen leaves… scattered in a field like bones or the corpses of one’s enemies?) can also mean “noble death”; coincidentally, the skull in one philosophical tale talks about how kingly life is in the realm of death.

Kanji Database (for Japanese psycholinguistics, &c.)

Kanji Database (for Japanese psycholinguistics, &c.):

A few days ago I posted this link to an online kanji database with extensive additions related to Japanese linguistics, by the rockstar researcher Katsuo Tamaoka, et al. For those wondering what some of the features mean, e.g. kanji lexical productivity, entropy, etc., here’s the paper which explains it (.pdf). The paper refers to the 2004 version, which has now been updated, but the structure is the same.

Tamaoka, K., & Makioka, S. (2004). New figures for a Web-accessible database of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji, fourth edition. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 36(3), 548-558.

brucesterling: *Because it’s in Japanese



brucesterling:

*Because it’s in Japanese 

ryuicostaworld: 「東京」をGIFアニメで表現した海外から見たTOKYOがカッコよすぎる! – Japaaan

魔法科高校の劣等生 (The Dunce of the Magic High School)

魔法科高校の劣等生 (The Dunce of the Magic High School):

The premise of this anime, which feels like a cross between Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and A Certain Magical Index, is that magic and technology have become hybridized. It delves a lot into the theory behind this premise.

Minus the odd trend of dark-haired protagonists with crossed bangs (see Black Bullet, Hitsugi no Chaika [which also sort of combines magic with technology] for more), and the incest theme, it’s not a bad watch.

But the reason I mention it is because I’ve been noting the interesting correlations between the concept of magic, language, and computer programming, to the point that I created a system for teaching yourself to program based on this notion of programming as magick.

40 Python Language Features and Tricks You May Not Know About

40 Python Language Features and Tricks You May Not Know About:

ja-dark: For my system on teaching yourself to program using ‘magick’ as a metaphor, see my tumblr, blvk./geSH/.

The new 2136 Japanese Jōyō kanji web-accessible database

The new 2136 Japanese Jōyō kanji web-accessible database:

Tamaoka, Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka and Kawakami (2002) produced the first web-accessible database containing these 1945 standardized kanji.

In 2004, using the Japanese lexical database of Amano and Kondo (1999, 2000), Tamaoka and Makioka calculated additional information (e.g. word frequencies based on the Asahi Newspaper from 1985 to 1998). As such they produced the fourth edition of the web-accessible kanji database which now included several mathematical indexes such as: entropy, redundancy and symmetry.

However, recently (2010) the official Jōyō kanji list has been revised by the Japanese government. It now includes a total of 2136 Japanese kanji which are to serve as a basis for official communication in Japanese.

Kanji lists play an important role in Japanese psycholinguistic research (e.g. Verdonschot et al., 2013). In order to make the detailed properties of the new kanji in the list available to researchers in psychology and linguistics, we have developed a novel web-accessible kanji database including an advanced corpus (i.e. Mainichi Newspaper from 2000 to 2010).

The new kanji database also includes a wide range of important properties such as: kanji frequency, On- and Kun-reading frequencies, On-reading ratio, kanji productivity of two-kanji compounds, symmetry of kanji productivity, entropy, number of meanings, etc. This easy-to-use web site (http://www.kanjidatabase.com/) has especially been developed to grant effortless access to the database and allows for:

  1. Easy selection of kanji from the database following criteria which can be defined by the user, as well as
  2. Pasting of kanji (or even complete texts) and looking up specified properties from the pasted kanji in the database.

ja-dark: It’s possible, hypothetically, that the original 1,945 character version of this database was used as the basis for a certain optimally sorted Anki deck.

In addition to the optimal sort of that deck, I have suggested using the added decomposition field (the field containing the kanji broken down into pieces) alongside the keyword cue during Anki reviews, reducing the workload typically carried with mnemonics (Heisig stories).

Adding the new characters isn’t really necessary: by the time you’ve learned a certain number of kanji with that strategy, learning new kanji as they come along is easy.

That, and the fact that kanji are morphographs, not phonographs, and therefore are invaluable tools to learn vocabulary, is why you shouldn’t try to learn ~2000+ kanji up-front like you learn the kana, but instead should learn them in batches, and as the batches become “well-learned”, you learn vocabulary words containing those kanji, so that the kanji help you understand how compounds are formed, developing your morphological awareness, which hones your understanding of those kanji as they represent morphemes and simultaneously enhances your vocabulary learning, not just for those words, but for all kanji compound words. For details, see sections I.B.1-2 here.

Bonus: You may have noticed Katsuo Tamaoka's name above. He is a rockstar when it comes to kanji research. I have cited him very often.

Chinese Lexical Borrowing from Japanese as an Outcome of Cross-Cultural Influence

Chinese Lexical Borrowing from Japanese as an Outcome of Cross-Cultural Influence:

In recent years, an observable number of Japanese kanji or Chinese character-based lexical items, including some original classical Chinese words with Japanese concepts and meanings, appeared in the contemporary Chinese language.

Why have Japanese kanji-based lexical words and wasei-kango (i.e., the items coined by Japanese but constructed from Chinese lexical roots or its morphological patterns) been borrowed into Chinese lexicon?

Why, when some Chinese characters are borrowed “back” into Chinese, are their Japanese meanings not only maintained but also extended to mean something else in the Chinese context?

Furthermore, why are codeswitching and substitution regarded as necessary linguistic adaptation resulting from lexical borrowing?

To answer these questions, this paper reviews some commonly recognized theoretical assumptions about language borrowing and describes the general socioeconomic and cultural background of such a lexical borrowing phenomenon and some particular paths through which lexical borrowing from Japanese into Chinese becomes possible.

Based on the characterizations of some recently borrowed items, it explores the Japanese socioeconomic and cultural influence on today’s Chinese society and life as reflected in its contemporary language.

A retrospective view of Systemic Functional Linguistics, with notes from a parallel perspective

A retrospective view of Systemic Functional Linguistics, with notes from a parallel perspective:

“I remember Chomsky’s first visit to London. He gave a lecture that we all crowded in to attend and at the end of it Michael Halliday asked him a question, the implication of which was that one of his claims did not hold water.

Chomsky’s dismissal of this very pertinent challenge was magisterial: ‘that is merely a putative counter-example, which does not affect the validity of the argument in any way’.

The phrase ‘putative counter-example’ has stayed with me ever since as a useful summary of the T-G (Transformational Grammar) attitude to data.

It also led me to see Chomsky himself more in the light of a powerful (and bruising!) rhetorician than the heavy weight logician that he was often presented as being.

This is a view that has not diminished with time.”

The Mystery of Language Evolution: We can't know more until we do

The Mystery of Language Evolution: We can't know more until we do:

Hauser, Yang, Berwick, Tattersall, Ryan, Watumull, Chomsky and Lewontin have a co-authored article on The Mystery of Language Evolution. It’s a review of current directions in the field with the basic message that we don’t yet understand enough for empirical evidence from animal studies, archaeology, palaeontology, genetics or modelling to inform theories of language evolution.

Here I summarise the paper and offer some criticisms…

the dogmatic emphasis on discrete infinity as the primary or only language phenotype worth studying is extremely limiting. The concept of discrete infinity itself has been criticized by many (e.g. Hurford), and statements like “no matter how far apart [arguments] are from each other, the [hierarchical] association remains” seem absurd when looking at language from a performance perspective. There are plenty of other factors that have been suggested as important aspects of the language phenotype, such as capacity for massive storage (Hurford, at this year’s EvoLang), joint attention, theory of mind, power and kinship, social structure, to name a few.

The article wilfully resists interfacing with these concepts and the wider field. There are some entirely unsubstantiated claims, and statements like “The distribution of the structural properties of language, such as word order and agreement, do not seem to follow any cultural or historical patterns”, ignore empirical work on this topic (e.g. Dunn et al.). The absence of all the authors from the recent Evolution of Language conference is notable, where they might have been able to interact with current research and learn of new discoveries that could address some of their problems, such as evidence of vocal control in Gorillas from Marcus Perlman.

The title of the article – ‘the mystery of language evolution’ – is revealing. By using the language of religious dogma, they are claiming that language evolution is a ‘mystery’: a sacred domain that can only be interpreted and revealed by the anointed few. The billboard of famous names contributes to this impression. If the intention really is to encourage research in this field, this is a dangerous move.

The dismissal of the contributions from the various fields is also unfair… ”

ja-dark: You can see other fun responses to the kind of nonsense Chomsky, et al., put forth by looking at my previous posts under the Chomsky tag. Impressed Hauser is still able to attach his name to anything. Science!

Speaking of Evolang, glad to see that the attempt of so-called Biolinguistics to infiltrate evolutionary linguistics isn’t doing so well, judging by the schedule. Apparently contemporary linguists aren’t all that interested in pseudoscience trying to dress up Chomsky’s myths.

Mental Chatter and Language Learning

re: Thinking in Japanese

Brian MacWhinney wrote:

“It is fairly easy to get an intuitive grasp of what resonance means in L1 and L2 learning. Resonance occurs most clearly during covert inner speech. Vygotsky (1962) observed that young children would often give themselves instructions overtly.

For example, a two-year-old might say, “pick it up” while picking up a block. At this age, the verbalization tends to guide and control the action. By producing a verbalization that describes an action, the child sets up a resonant connection between vocalization and action.

Later, Vygotsky argues, these overt instructions become inner speech and continue to guide our cognition.

L2 learners go through a process much like that of the child. At first, they use the language only with others. Then, they begin to talk to themselves in the new language and start to “think in the second language.” At this point, the second language begins to assume the same resonant status that the child attains for the first language.

Once a process of inner speech is set into motion, it can also be used to process new input and relate new forms to other forms paradigmatically… These resonant form-related exercises can be conducted in parallel with more expressive resonant exercises in which I simply try to talk to myself about things around me in… whatever language I happen to be learning.”

See also: Inner Speech - L2: Thinking Words in a Second Language

“… changes in the nature of the inner speech through which a person introspects and becomes self-conscious may even lead to reconstruction of the self and the formation of a new linguistic identity.”

(Related.)

How to Think in Japanese

How to Think in Japanese:

Previously I described practicing your Embodied Japanese (日本語) Cognition with thematically linked phrases which describe everyday actions. They are rudimentary, acting as a kind of mental chatter.

I also posted a second example from the primary resource cited in the above article. It’s a set of 20 Japanese/English sequences of the above types of phrases.

One of the great tragedies of your life is that you are unable to process all of my bleeding-edge recommendations.

Such as using a decomposition field (a field containing the kanji broken down into pieces) to study kanji in Anki, where you recompose the kanji based on a keyword and these pieces, reducing the load that mnemonics typically carry (e.g. in the form of Heisig stories).

Or unshuffling sentences for solo output practice.

Or switching to Production vocabulary cards (“flipping them”) after corresponding Recognition cards become “well-learned.”

Or how to study grammar in Anki.

So most likely, recently or just now you have discovered that primary resource for “thinking in Japanese”, and sadly you have done so too late, because it’s now offline!

However, selfless, tireless friend of the people that I am, I will now point out that you can find this resource archived on the Wayback Machine.

Simply click on the Practice Units’ 日本語+English links, found in each lesson’s bottom boxes.

Microbes provide insights into evolution of human language

Microbes provide insights into evolution of human language:

Full Paper: Combinatorial Communication in Bacteria: Implications for the Origins of Linguistic Generativity

Stephen Jay Gould (1996):

“We live now in the ‘Age of Bacteria.’ Our planet has always been in the ‘Age of Bacteria,’ ever since the first fossils—bacteria, of course—were entombed in rocks more than 3 billion years ago.

On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant forms of life on Earth. Our failure to grasp this most evident of biological facts arises in part from the blindness of our arrogance but also, in large measure, as an effect of scale. We are so accustomed to viewing phenomena of our scale—sizes measured in feet and ages in decades—as typical of nature.”

See also.

Using a foreign language changes moral decisions

Using a foreign language changes moral decisions:

Would you sacrifice one person to save five? Such moral choices could depend on whether you are using a foreign language or your native tongue.

A new study from psychologists at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona finds that people using a foreign language take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas, making decisions based on assessments of what’s best for the common good. That pattern holds even when the utilitarian choice would produce an emotionally difficult outcome, such as sacrificing one life so others could live…

The researchers propose that the foreign language elicits a reduced emotional response. That provides a psychological distance from emotional concerns when making moral decisions…

Co-author Sayuri Hayakawa… says the way we learn the language is key. “You learn your native language as a child and it is part of your family and your culture,” she said. “You probably learn foreign languages in less emotional settings like a classroom and it takes extra effort. The emotional content of the language is often lost in translation.”

See also:

“…  our data demonstrating consistent cultural frame shifts in personality display for late second-languages learners—regardless of which is their first language or cultural background—suggest that learning a second language always implies the automatic representation of new cultural frames associated with this language. These in turn provide the individual with a new range of perceiving and displaying his or her own personality—an enrichment of personal space, apparently most welcomed by second-language learners.”

Proceduralization, transfer of training and retention of knowledge as a result of output practice

Proceduralization, transfer of training and retention of knowledge as a result of output practice:

Abstract:

This study investigated the effect of output practice on the proceduralization, transfer and retention of knowledge on English modals, adopting Anderson’s ACT-R model of skill acquisition…

The output group received explicit grammar instruction, a combination of three output tasks including dictogloss, individual text reconstruction, and corrected-close translation, and feedback. The control group were just exposed to the identical texts through listening and reading tasks followed by some questions irrelevant to the target structure.

Results showed that on the posttest, three days after the last treatment session, the output group outperformed the control group in both measures of procedural knowledge and transfer of knowledge.

As for retention, forty days later, the output group’s performance was still significantly better than that on the pretest.

This group also succeeded in retaining its outperformance on both measures of procedural knowledge and transfer of knowledge delayed posttest…

See also.

Bonus.

Spaced vs. massed distribution instruction for L2 grammar learning

Spaced vs. massed distribution instruction for L2 grammar learning:

Abstract:

Memory research has shown that information is retained far longer when instruction and reviews of learned content are given in spaced intervals (spaced distribution) rather than during one uninterrupted session (massed distribution).

Though the spacing effect has been verified in second language vocabulary learning, few studies have investigated the possible application of spaced distribution practice to L2 grammar learning.

A quasi-experimental pre-test, post-test, delayed post-test study was conducted on the impact of spaced distribution instruction on the development of selected grammar items versus massed distribution instruction.

Though the post-tests showed statistically equal gains on all test types for both experimental groups, the delayed post-test results showed the spaced distribution group outperformed the massed distribution group on one test type (error analysis and correction).

Neither group outperformed the other on the delayed post-test results of a second test type (translation).

However, there were far steeper rates of decline on gains from the post-tests to delayed post-tests for the massed distribution group on both tests, indicating that gains made through spaced distribution instruction were more stable.

Previously:

Bonus.

Functional Linguistics - a SpringerOpen journal

Functional Linguistics - a SpringerOpen journal:

Functional Linguistics publishes scholarly articles and reviews in the broad area of functional studies, with a special focus on systemic functional linguistics. The journal aims to provide a platform for the exploration of language and linguistic issues from a functional and meaning-oriented perspective. Areas to be covered in this journal include: language and context, functional grammar, semantic variation, discourse analysis, multimodality, register and genre analysis, educational linguistics, etc.

All articles published by Functional Linguistics are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here

The grammar that L2 learners acquire in a second language...



The grammar that L2 learners acquire in a second language can’t be the same as the grammar of a monolingual native speaker, partly because of the first language grammar they already possess, partly because of the different ways and circumstances in which a second language is acquired and used. It is therefore unrealistic to measure the grammar of L2 users against that of monolingual native speakers; they are bound to be different. But difference does not mean deficiency. An L2 grammar has to do different things from an L1 grammar and forms part of a larger overall system.

A commonsense belief is that learning another language involves learning bits of the native grammar and gradually putting them together into a whole system: first the learner acquires the present tense, then the present continuous, and so on, until all the English tenses have been mastered, rather like a jigsaw puzzle in which all the bits gradually build up into a picture which is only complete when the last bit is in place. But grammar doesn’t work like that. A grammar hangs together as a whole, a complex system of word order, inflections and grammatical systems involved in every sentence; the shapes of the bits of the jigsaw change as more are added and they make a complete picture at each stage…

In the early 1960s people researching children’s language acquisition realised that children have mental grammars of their own at each stage of language development — the ‘independent grammar assumption’. Children don’t so much pick up bits of adult grammar as invent a grammar system of their own… Jerome Bruner claimed that the extraordinary aspect of language acquisition was how well adults coped with children’s language, rather than how easily the children acquired language.

This idea of the learner’s independent grammar was taken up by SLA researchers under the name of ‘interlanguage’ — a name for the learner’s system as a grammar in its own right rather than as a defective version of the target language…

Second language learners are then developing an interlanguage of their own that draws not only on the first language they already know and on the second language they are learning but also on other elements such as the language provided by their teachers and their own language learning strategies. L2 learners’ interlanguage thus has unique qualities of its own rather than being a deficient version of the target language…

Without the concept of interlanguage, most SLA research would cease to exist; it provides a unique subject matter for the discipline that is not the main focus of other disciplines… In line with the independent grammar assumption, the learner is not a defective native speaker but something unique, sui generis; the implicit aim of research is to discover what the L2 learners’ language is like and how it is developing, not to see how L2 learners fall short of monolingual native speakers.

The starting point for SLA research is that L2 learners are not, and can never be, monolingual native speakers – by definition. Without this assumption, SLA research becomes an ancillary study of why L2 users fail to become native speakers and at best provides a footnote to first language acquisition by detailing the L2 problems and pitfalls. If L2 users are unique specimens, SLA research can take on a true independence, looking at their distinctive qualities in their own right independent of monolinguals. SLA research deals with one way in which humans learn language, part of a greater discipline of language acquisition that encompasses L1 and L2 acquisition. Indeed, monolingual L1 acquisition can be seen as an aberration that only occurs when children are deprived of exposure to a second language (Cook, 2009).

Language rules of the Third Reich

Language rules of the Third Reich:

All correspondence referring to the matter [Final Solution] was subject to rigid “language rules,” and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as “extermination,” “liquidation,” or “killing” occur. The prescribed code names for killing were “final solution,” “evacuation” (Aussiedlung), and “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung); deportation – unless it involved Jews directed to Theresienstadt, the “old people’s ghetto” for privileged Jews, in which case it was called “change of residence” – received the names of “resettlement” (Umsiedlung) and “labor in the East” (Arbeitseinsatz im Osten), the point of these latter names being that Jews were indeed often temporarily resettled in ghettos and that a certain percentage of them were temporarily used for labor…

The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies…

See also: The Language of the Third Reich

  • One example of Nazi language manipulation is “Verschärfte Vernehmung” for “enhanced interrogation” aka torture, which may sound familiar to you.

Also look into Lakoff’s ongoing writings on the use of metaphors in politics, such as with war or the environment.

Bonus: Thinking for Speaking

Using your feet to write the kanji

Using your feet to write the kanji:

This fellow (at 2m40s) can write Chinese characters with his feet.

Visual text hallucinations of thoughts in an alexic woman

Visual text hallucinations of thoughts in an alexic woman:

In this report we describe a patient with a clinical diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies, who had hallucinations of reading her thoughts in the air although she was alexic and unable to read…

She hallucinates her thoughts as kana and kanji…

Other patients sometimes hallucinate text such as musical notation

Japan’s Endangered Languages Still Considered Mere Dialects

Japan’s Endangered Languages Still Considered Mere Dialects:

In 2009, eight languages spoken on the Japanese archipelago were listed among endangered languages in the UNESCO Atlas of the World, including Ainu, Amami, Hachijō, Kunigami, Miyako, Okinawan, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. This post looks at Okinawan, one of the endangered languages in the southern half of Okinawa island in the Ryukyu region, which now constitutes Japan’s Okinawa prefecture. We interviewed Fija Byron, a lecturer and advocate of “Uchinaguchi”, an Okinawan language.

“Japan is often referred as a small, “homogeneous” island, and its linguistic diversity often is under-represented or discounted overseas as well as among the Japanese themselves. Many Japanese are aware of different dialects in their country, but are not as clued in when it comes to the existence of these diverse native languages…

… for Japan, these endangered languages are considered dialects. In Japan, language is considered as something that unites a nation state, and dialect is considered as something unsophisticated, a way of speaking in the countryside. In a country where the myth of Japan being a “one race nation” is widespread, people often feel compelled to conform to social norms instead of striving for diversity. Without being aware of doing so, minorities are pushed aside, both in terms of language and how people see each other… ”

Rethinking Anki and Maturity

Anki defines a “mature” card, which we typically operationalize as “well-learned”, as having an interval (gap between a card’s reviews) of 21 days or higher.

While thinking about the card maturity tagger in this post, it occurred to me that I’ve never really refined that for my own recommended study methods which rely on “maturity”-as-“well-learned” as the criterion to switch from one card type to another.

Now that I review the research, in studies a 21-day interval will give you good retention for about a year. Waiting for that level of retention before switching from recognition to production, for example, seems like overkill, even if we lower our expectations for a 21-day interval’s retention.

So I suspect lowering the threshold to 1-2 week intervals is more than adequate to consider a card “mature” for strategic card-switching purposes.

For the aforementioned add-on, you can change the .py file’s line 12 to lower the threshold; for Morph Man, you can edit the config.py (in the morph folder) lines 15-16 to change mature and known thresholds.

Anki Addon: Card Maturity Tag

Anki Addon: Card Maturity Tag:

As you may know, I advocate switching from Recognition (word → meaning) to Production (meaning → word) when Recognition cards are well-learned.

That is, when you’ve studied a vocabulary word to the point that you can easily recognize it—when the card is “mature” or well-known in Anki, you then begin to learn that word more actively by producing it.

This is because studies show that recognition and production are each of value, and this way you can do both directions in a streamlined way, rather than trying to tackle the more difficult production process from scratch.

However, my previous tutorials required the use of Morph Man, and were relatively complex.

With the above-linked addon, simply remove lines 20-21 from the Mature_Tag.py (in your addons folder; open the .py with your text editor), and you’re done. As you review the Recognition cards, the addon will add a “Mature” tag to the notes as the cards reach maturity; you can then review only the Production cards that have this tag.

Removing lines 20-21 prevents the addon from deleting the “Mature” tag. Relearning is easier than learning, so there’s no need to delete the tag even if you fail a card after it’s been labeled mature, and especially we don’t want it to vanish when we’re trying to review new cards of the Production type that are mature as Recognition.

French Sentence Analyser

French Sentence Analyser:

Previously I linked to this French sentence vocabulary glosser; they changed how the links work so I updated the URL.

For sentence grammar parsing see this tool.

You might use these with this deck.

Anki Deck: 489 Japanese Phrases w/ Dialogues

Anki Deck: 489 Japanese Phrases w/ Dialogues:

Update: Added speaker gender information.

Don’t let the generic ‘Japanese Phrases’ title fool you, this resource is quite cogent, in my humble opinion.

Anki Deck: 489 Japanese Phrases w/ Dialogues

Anki Deck: 489 Japanese Phrases w/ Dialogues:

This is a set of phrases originally intended for Japanese learners of English. Thus the Japanese phrases are natural and well-formed, but the English translations are often somewhat awkward. However, typically there are multiple English translations in the Notes section to clarify things, along with Japanese-language notes (which are concise and thus easily parsed by most learners, I imagine).

There are also dialogues in both Japanese and English; you can use them as adjacency pairs, examples of conversational turn-taking, if you wish. That is to say, you can practice output with them. I have set up cards for this purpose in the deck already, if you want to experiment.

You would play the role of Speaker 2, replying to Speaker 1 in context, and thus would most likely want to choose the cards where Speaker 2’s lines are brief, unless you know most of the words in those lines and can handle the longer sentences.

For more on solo output practice and adjacency pairs in Anki, see this post: http://darkjapanese.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/o1-comprehensible-output-standalone-complex/ (Under the heading “Type 2: Adjacency Pairs and Subs2SRS”.)

The phrases are not out of date, from what I can tell. In fact, I find them very relevant and useful and they capture a lot of things you’ve probably heard often and perhaps found difficult to look up; but the topics are rather dull and outdated feeling—and I think you may quickly learn to hate these imaginary characters, which seem to come straight out of a Japanese person’s nightmare about American office workers. :)

The 1 image listed on AnkiWeb is an ‘inline replay button’ which I suppose was added by some add-on or another. Ironic, as the only audio available for these phrases was for the English lines, and performed in a very hackneyed way, so I didn’t bother including.

A few months back AnkiWeb screwed up all the ratings for the decks, and removed the option to view how many times decks were downloaded. It’s very odd now. Apparently when you upload new decks now, they’re automatically rated 3/5 stars.

Kickstart Koe to learn Japanese while you game

Kickstart Koe to learn Japanese while you game:

Koe‘s design aesthetic is that of a traditional JRPG, like Dragon Quest, Pokemon or Final Fantasy… After you choose the your character’s gender and name, your adventure begins.. you’re dropped off in an airport in a fictionalized city of Japan.

The learning Japanese part will come via items, avatars and combat. Items and skills are used with cards, which feature a Japanese character or characters. These are used in battle. Keep using the same ones, and you’ll become more effective. They can also directly affect your companions/avatars/pets as well. For example, if you capture a cat, you’d have to level up your ね (ne) and こ (ko) cards to improve its stats.

If the Kickstarter is successful, Koe will help teach players Hiragana and Katakana, which would allow basic understanding of the different writing styles of Japanese. Some basic Kanji will be included as well. You’ll also build some vocabulary, learning basic phrases and grammar. Basically, Koe will be the JRPG version of a Japanese phrasebook that you might see in the hands of a tourist.

Typing Practice for Programmers | typing.io

Typing Practice for Programmers | typing.io:

Typing.io is a typing tutor/trainer for programmers. Typing.io’s lessons are based on open source code, allow you to practice typing the key sequences that appear in real code.

Most typing tutors sidestep symbol keys and skip the most frequently typed key, backspace/delete. Typing.io includes these keys, resulting in uninflated WPMs and realistic practice.

ja-dark: I can’t help but think it’s better to just learn by coding…

Online Domains of Language Use: Learners' Experiences of Virtual Community & Foreignness

Online Domains of Language Use: Learners' Experiences of Virtual Community & Foreignness:

… early research on CMC [Computer-Mediated Communication] tended to view the Internet as a monolithic space that was somehow “more egalitarian, democratic, and liberating than face-to-face interactions”… having an “inherent support of democracy”… views… subscribing to the borderless world perception of Internet communication, in which the Internet is deemed to remove cultural difference…

Past research on L2 use and acquisition points to a variety of benefits of the online environment. A reduction in anxiety in comparison to face-to-face speech and greater opportunities for language production have been claimed as some of the most important implications of CMC for L2 learners.

Recent studies are beginning to challenge assumptions of the Internet as a monolithic, placeless space, pointing out, for example, the dominance of English, but domains in which languages other than English preside appear neglected… the question of how participation in online communication affects opportunities for language acquisition, particularly of an Asian language, in a naturalistic setting has not yet been adequately explored, despite the widely accepted benefits of CMC use for language practise outside of the classroom.

The present study utilises a social realist frame to investigate the informal use of CMC by NSs [Native Speakers] of English and Japanese in terms of language choice, identity display, conceptions of nationality and the perceived ownership of online spaces. Importantly, it describes some CMC users who identify themselves online as foreigners, in stark contrast with the idea of the Internet as a placeless space…

Participants’ self-identification as foreign or non-native may have been beneficial in a number of ways… By constructing their identities online as learners of the language, they mitigated any potential loss of face due to their language competency, and by construing themselves as experts in English or as foreigners, they may have made themselves more attractive to Japanese members who were actively looking for a foreign or English-speaking contact… Secondly, by describing themselves as learners, they invited correction and other forms of repair, which were surprisingly frequent in the public forum of Mixi in particular…

Being a part of a virtual community, in particular, gaining access to an authentic audience, was the most important source of motivation for L2 production identified in the present study. A sense of being heard and understood appeared to increase participants’ sense of achievement, and increase the likelihood of their continued engagement in L2 use online

Being an L2 learner was also found to be an important identity for many participants in their online interactions… their identification of themselves as foreigners online is further evidence of their perception of Japanese-owned and moderated domains such as Mixi as Japanese domains, and themselves as outsiders. This finding challenges views of Internet communication as neutral, equalising or more democratic, and demonstrates that it is possible to feel like a foreigner (and to be treated as one) even in what has been viewed as a gigantic, placeless cyberspace.

See alsoThe Practice of Microblogging

Globalization and Japanese Creativity: Adaptations of Japanese Language to Rap (2006)

Globalization and Japanese Creativity: Adaptations of Japanese Language to Rap (2006):

Like jazz and rock musicians before them, many of the pioneers of Japanese rap first learned their craft by listening to American rap as their kata, or basic form. Some initially concluded that rapping in Japanese was impossible. The reasons were simple: the most striking aural patterns in American rap of the 1980s and early ’90s were the rhymes and stress accents, which punctuated and varied the rhythms. However, Japanese verbal arts have not traditionally emphasized rhyming, and the language lacks stress accents. As Japanese is not related to English, or to lndo-European languages for that matter, it has completely different syntax, vocabulary, accent pattems, and phonemes.

A true imitation, from a linguistic point of view, may be to translate the rap lyric from English, but such a translation would not map onto the same rhythm or number of measures. Unlike instrumental jazz or rock music, there is no melody to hide this problem. Therefore, Japanese rappers have had to find ways to exploit the grammatical and phonological features of their own language while upholding a rap aesthetic. Among other factors, they made good use of the subtleties of pitch accent patterns, multi-sourced vocabulary, and flexibility in timing.

Given the vast differences with English, Japanese rap offers an interesting ease study for examining and comparing the interaction between a language and the rhythm of a sixteen-pulse measure. It also poses several questions. What processes are involved in adapting a globalized genre? Where does imitation end and innovation begin? What should be considered the kata for rap: a mixture of speech and music, the sound patterns of African American rap, or the ideology behind hip-hop culture? How does the rappers’ use of the Japanese language show its musicality, expressiveness, and underlying culture?

This paper will explore the two aspects of rap that define the genre and that the Japanese rappers found most difficult initially: rhyme and rhythm. In each section, l will recount the problems the rappers saw in the language, followed by an analysis of their solutions. I will discuss specific features of the Japanese language that rappers exploited to create rhymes and flow. l will question whether the perceived disadvantages of the language really were such. l will close by discussing the issue of imitation and innovation.

Dia Diagram Editor

Dia Diagram Editor:
  • Draw structured diagrams (flowcharts, network layouts, etc)
  • Easy to use (Recommended in 89% of the user ratings)
  • More than 1000 predefined objects and symbols
  • Supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
  • Many import and export formats
  • Scriptable via Python

See also:

An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax

An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax:

Abstract:

Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated.

For this article, we conducted four empirical studies on programming language syntax as part of a larger analysis into the so-called programming language wars…

To our surprise, we found that languages using a more traditional C-style syntax (both Perl and Java) did not afford accuracy rates significantly higher than a language with randomly generated keywords, but that languages which deviate (Python and Ruby) did.

These results, including the specifics of syntax that are particularly problematic for novices, may help teachers of introductory programming courses in choosing appropriate first languages and in helping students to overcome the challenges they face with syntax.

Japanese Pseudocode

As I’ve referenced before, it’s considered very useful to plan out programs with pseudocode; the ‘Pseudocode Planning Process’ (PPP) was popularized by the book Code Complete.

“The term “pseudocode” refers to an informal, English-like notation for describing how an algorithm, a routine, a class, or a program will work. The Pseudocode Programming Process defines a specific approach to using pseudocode to streamline the creation of code within routines.

Because pseudocode resembles English, it’s natural to assume that any English-like description that collects your thoughts will have roughly the same effect as any other. In practice, you’ll find that some styles of pseudocode are more useful than others. Here are guidelines for using pseudocode effectively:

  • Use English-like statements that precisely describe specific operations.
  • Avoid syntactic elements from the target programming language. Pseudocode allows you to design at a slightly higher level than the code itself. When you use programming language constructs, you sink to a lower level, eliminating the main benefit of design at a higher level, and you saddle yourself with unnecessary syntactic restrictions.
  • Write pseudocode at the level of intent. Describe the meaning of the approach rather than how the approach will be implemented in the target language.
  • Write pseudocode at a low enough level that generating code from it will be nearly automatic. If the pseudocode is at too high a level, it can gloss over problematic details in the code. Refine the pseudocode in more and more detail until it seems as if it would be easier to simply write the code.
Once the pseudocode is written, you build the code around it and the pseudocode turns into programming language comments. This eliminates most commenting effort. If the pseudocode follows the guidelines, the comments will be complete and meaningful.”

You can find examples of good and bad pseudocode in the Google Books preview, and more examples by searching Google (for example).

In Japanese, pseudocode is 擬似コード. Here’s an article describing PPP (擬似コードプログラミングプロセス) in Japanese.

As we’re far from programming in Japanese being anything more than an idiosyncrasy at the moment, at least for language learners, I think that as an alternative it would be interesting to practice Japanese by planning your programming in standard languages using pseudocode written in Japanese.

For example (from the above article):

このルーチンでは、与えられた配列をクイックソートを用いてソートする。
与えられた配列が空の場合、エラーコードを返す。エラーコードは共通で利用している
エラーコードを用いて、ルーチン固有のエラーコードは生成しない。
 
ステータスの既定値に「fail」を設定する。
配列の数を取得する。
 
if 配列が空でない場合
   ステータス情報を「Success」に設定する。
   クリックソートを実行する。
 
ステータス情報を返す

It may be an exercise best left to intermediate and advanced learners…

As blvk./geSH/ uses Python 2.x as its exemplar, I’ll point out that you can find Japanese Python documentation and resources here and here. If you search around with the 擬似コード keyword, I’m sure you can find more examples of Japanese pseudocode.

Heavy Snowfall Brings Playtime to Tokyo

Heavy Snowfall Brings Playtime to Tokyo:

Heavy snowstorms hit Japan on Feb 8, 2014. Twenty seven centimeters of snow fell in central Tokyo, for the first time in 45 years. Moro Miya, a writer and a blogger who specializes in introducing Japanese culture to Chinese readers, collected the photos of snowmen and snow-animals that were posted by the netizens on twitter.

Having a yen for dim sum this Chinese New Year: English words of Chinese origin

Having a yen for dim sum this Chinese New Year: English words of Chinese origin:

Chinese food is an obvious influence, but Chinese words have also made an impact on English in other spheres, from martial arts (kung-fu and t’ai chi ch’uan) to philosophy (feng shui and yin-yang). Other words and expressions which have come to English from Chinese include: kow-tow, to have a yen for, to save face, gung-ho, and no can do.

ja-dark: You might’ve thought yen came from the Japanese currency. You’d have thought wrong, apparently:

Origin:

late 19th century (in the sense ‘craving (of a drug addict) for a drug’): from Chinese yǎn.

Inconsolata (Programming Font)

Inconsolata (Programming Font):

“Inconsolata also borrows “micro-serifs” from some Japanese Gothic fonts, which enhance the appearance of crispness and legibility.”

ja-dark: Fascinating. You have to really zoom in to see what the author means.

The East Asian equivalent of serifs are uroko, “triangles at the end of single horizontal strokes… a print analog of the slight dot caused by pausing one’s brush… ”

Ironically, as I pointed out here while emphasizing how all writing systems are constrained through human-culture co-evolution to be learnable, that letters and kanji are now born digital: typography, not calligraphy, and at greater levels of delicacy it’s the fonts least analogous to handwriting, to brush strokes, that are the most readable, contrary to what ignorant kanji-hating Western ‘scholars’ would have you believe.

Sans serif fonts are more readable than serif, and Gothic is more readable than Mincho. Fixed stroke width is more readable than variable, just as with character width.

The fancy brush strokes and uroko prevalent in typefaces like Mincho are nostalgic affectations that decrease legibility for modern readers.

However, as you can read about in this article, the ‘standard’ kaku Gothic characters (unlike the rounded maru) do have tiny points here and there, presumably resulting from the straight, sharp corners. I assume that’s what the author refers to with the “micro-serifs” reference. I haven’t seen any comparisons between maru and kaku, but I doubt there’s a measurable difference in legibility, though I’d place my bet on kaku at very small sizes.

Personally, I can’t accept the quotes in Inconsolata. They’re angled like raised commas, and angled in the same direction, to boot, like some kind of misapplied smart quotes. The worst of all possible worlds. There’s a modified version which does use straight quotes, but the process subtly changed the font and the modified version lacks the clarity of the original.

Menlo is what I use at the moment. I love the fat, centered asterisk, and the sinuous lowercase L, the latter of which you’ll find in similar fonts such as Source Code Pro, DejaVu Sans Mono, and Monaco.

I’d also like to reiterate my loathing for the jagged diagonals (such as with ミ) in Meiryo, versus my fondness for the lovely Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro.

Rikaisama/Firefox Ctrl-Click Hack

If you’ve recently updated Firefox and like to use Rikaisama's ‘ctrl-click’ feature (via Super Sticky Mode) to open definitions for Japanese text in links with a ctrl-right-click (as ctrl-left-click would open the link in a new tab), you may have found that the context menu pops up and you can't see the definition.

You can either hit Alt to close the context menu, or you can create a new script for Greasemonkey with this code, which disables ctrl-clicks, and start using the ctrl-left-click on links without worrying about opening them in new tabs:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Ignore Ctrl+Click
// @namespace   YourNameHere
// @include     *
// @grant       none
// ==/UserScript==
function discardCtrlClick(e){
  if (!e.ctrlKey) return;
  if (e.target.nodeName != "A") return;
  e.preventDefault();
  return false;
}
document.body.addEventListener("click", discardCtrlClick, true);

If you liked having a shortcut for opening links in new tabs, I personally use FireGestures; you can enable just the Rocker gestures, which allows you to open links in new tabs with or without switching immediately to the new tab by hitting the right-click while holding the left-click, or vice versa. It sounds complicated but it’s actually very intuitive, like a ‘rocking’ motion.

Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming

Further evidence of a relationship between explaining, tracing and writing skills in introductory programming:

Excerpt:

Our data does not support the idea of a strict hierarchy; where the ability to trace iterative code would precede any ability to explain code, and where the development of both tracing and explaining would precede any ability to write code…

Rather than arguing for a strict hierarchy, we merely argue that, for most students, some minimal competence at tracing code precedes some minimal competence at explaining code, and after a student has minimal competence in both of these skills, the two skills reinforce each other and develop in parallel.  

Similarly, we merely argue that that some minimal competence at both tracing and explaining precedes some minimal competence at systematically writing code. After a student has minimal competence in all these skills, the skills then reinforce each other and develop in parallel… writing code provides many opportunities to improve tracing and explanation skills, which in turn help to improve writing skills.

It is our view that novices only begin to improve their code writing ability via extensive practice in code writing when their tracing and explaining skills are strong enough to support a systematic approach to code writing.

Students who are weak at tracing and/or explaining cannot write systematically. Instead, in a desperate effort to pass their course, they will experiment haphazardly with their code…

Until students have acquired minimal competence in tracing and explaining, it may be counter productive to have them write a great deal of code. We do not advocate that students be forced to demonstrate minimal competence in tracing and explaining before they write any code. (Indeed, we suspect that such an approach would lead to motivational problems in students.)

However, we do advocate that educators pay greater attention to tracing and explaining in the very early stages of introductory programming courses, and that educators discuss with their students how these skills are used to avoid a haphazard approach to writing code.

ja-dark: Lest you think the skillsets noted here be divided strictly, based on skill level. Better to take a staggered, piecewise, complementary approach, as with the godai model used in blvk./geSH/

Japan by Bicycle - Complete Documentary and free 300 page eBook

Japan by Bicycle - Complete Documentary and free 300 page eBook:

Figure 1: Two examples of each of the three BRACElet examination...



Figure 1: Two examples of each of the three BRACElet examination question components of Explaining, Tracing, and Writing.

The composition of the examination framework is based upon a recognized set of essential programming skills. It has been well reported that students should be able to explain code, trace programs, and write code. More importantly, it appears that these three components form a hierarchy of skills.

At the bottom of the hierarchy is the knowledge and understanding of elementary programming constructs including basic definitions and data types, selections, and iterations.

In the intermediate level is the ability to accurately read and trace code.

At the top of the hierarchy is the ability to write non-trivial and correct code using programming constructs.

With this hierarchy in mind, each iteration of the BRACElet project specifies that examinations should comprise at least one instance of each of the three components detailed below: 

  • Explaining: Several “explain in plain English” questions to test comprehension of written code. 
  • Tracing: A reading component of code which involves the ability of the student to trace code and not be distracted by variables and memory allocations. This task also includes the ability to understand and use diagrams to explain code. 
  • Writing: A writing component, where students write a small program to solve a problem.

ja-dark: This hierarchy and related tasks are dealt with in Black Geas (specifically, the Earth, Water, and Fire strands, and in part through Anki).

How to study programming on mobile touch devices: interactive Python code exercises

How to study programming on mobile touch devices: interactive Python code exercises:

Abstract:

Scaffolded learning tasks where programs are constructed from predefined code fragments by dragging and dropping them (i.e. Parsons problems) are well suited to mobile touch devices, but quite limited in their applicability. They do not adequately cater for different approaches to constructing a program. After studying solutions to automatically assessed programming exercises, we found out that many different solutions are composed of a relatively small set of mutually similar code lines. Thus, they can be constructed by using the drag-and-drop approach if only it was possible to edit some small parts of the predefined fragments. Based on this, we have designed and implemented a new exercise type for mobile devices that builds on Parsons problems and falls somewhere between their strict scaffolding and full-blown coding exercises. In these exercises, we can gradually fade the scaffolding and allow programs to be constructed more freely so as not to restrict thinking and limit creativity too much while still making sure we are able to deploy them to small-screen mobile devices. In addition to the new concept and the related implementation, we discuss other possibilities of how programming could be practiced on mobile devices.

ja-dark: While creating a variation of my o+1 method in Anki for learning to code, I found that someone had already started the process. As of yet, I don’t believe there’s an Android or iOS app, though they’re working on this ‘MobileParsons’ app.

In blvk./geSH/ you use Anki for Parsons puzzles, after shuffling the lines elsewhere. Focusing on the indentation as well as the order makes the puzzles “2D.”

Planning and the Novice Programmer

Planning and the Novice Programmer:

Abstract:

Planning is a critical, early step on the path to successful program writing and a skill that is often lacking in novice programmers. As practitioners we are continually searching for or creating interventions to help our students, particularly those who struggle in the early stages of their computer science education. In this paper we report on our ongoing research of novice programming skills that utilizes the qualitative research method of grounded theory to develop theories and inform the construction of these interventions. We describe how grounded theory, a popular research method in the social sciences since the 1960’s, can lend formality and structure to the common practice of simply asking students what they did and why they did it. Further, we aim to inform the reader not only about our emerging theories on interventions for planning but also how they might collect and analyze their own data in this and other areas that trouble novice programmers. In this way those who lecture and design CS1 interventions can do so from a more informed perspective.

ja-dark: Concludes that pseudocode is very effective. Black Geas recommends planning w/ pseudocode in the Fire strand, here.

A study of the influence of code-tracing problems on code-writing skills

A study of the influence of code-tracing problems on code-writing skills:

Abstract:

A study was conducted to find out whether solving code tracing problems helps improve code writing skills of students. Students were asked to answer a code writing quiz before and after a problem-solving session on code tracing. Increase in the score from pre-quiz to post-quiz was treated as improvement in code writing attributable to code tracing. Repeated measures ANOVA was used to analyze the data collected over three semesters. The results of the study are that whenever a statistically significant difference was observed between pre-quiz and post-quiz scores, post-quiz mean score was higher and standard deviation was smaller, confirming better student performance on post-quiz than on pre-quiz. The improvement in code writing pertained primarily to language syntax. The improvement was observed even among the students who scored 100% on code tracing problems. Finally, the students whose code writing skills improved due to code tracing had spent 10% more time on code tracing than the others.

The use of code reading in teaching programming (PDF, p. 9)

Abstract:

Programming is an intertwined process of reading and writing. So far, computing education research has often focused on the writing part. This paper takes a further look into the role of reading source code in learning to program. In order to complement the findings from literature, we conducted interviews with programming instructors using the miracle question, on the role of code reading and comprehension. The analysis of these interviews describes this role in terms of the five categories conceptualization, occurrences, and effects of successful code reading, challenges for learners, as well as approaches to facilitate code reading. As a result, we suggest to take a further look into the different reading processes involved in programming, in order to add to the knowledge about programming instruction.

Conclusion:

In the literature, as well as in our interviews, we found many possible uses of CR [Code Reading], and also many aspects of learning programming where CR is needed. CR is connected to comprehending programs and algorithms, or algorithmic ideas, as well as details, like e.g. semantics of constructs. Additionally there are many possible uses of CR in terms of tasks based on reading in order to facilitate learning to program…

Despite being an essential part of program comprehension, code reading is mostly just implicitly reflected in teaching programming and is worthy of deeper inspection.

ja-dark: The latter paper has an interesting breakdown of code reading, re: learning to relate code blocks, etc. See the diagrams on p. 14. There are many papers on Code Reading, and a book as well. Code Reading is discussed in the Water strand of blvk./geSH/.

The CLOZE Procedure and the Learning of Programming

The CLOZE Procedure and the Learning of Programming:

Abstract:

Many students find great difficulty with the learning of programming. This paper discusses some of those difficulties and ways in which the cognitive load that students experience can be reduced. One way of reducing the load is to make use of the cloze method that is used in English comprehension testing. When used with the learning of programming, the cloze method requires students to fill-in and complete a part-complete solution to a programming problem that has been given. A code restructuring tool, CORT, has been built by the author to support this method and utilised by students in an introductory programming course. Initial results suggest that students were encouraged and motivated whilst using CORT and that the time taken to complete problems and the help required were less than for students who did not use the tool.

Learning Beginning Programming with Cloud-Based Cloze Programming Practices

Abstract:

There is a trend in Taiwan to offer computer programming as an elective course for all high school students. Although students seem to be quite enthusiastic about learning to program at the beginning of the course, students’ enthusiasm quickly dissipated when the practice program becomes too complex for them to bear. To help students learn better, we have implemented a cloud-based cloze programming practicing system. The system allows teacher to upload a program and then block out part of the program that is intended for students to practice. The blocked out code can be as simple as a variable declaration or as complex as a complete function. In the extreme case, the entire program could be blocked out, meaning students have to write the complete program. Therefore, teachers can have students practice a particular aspect of programming by supplying multiple programs and block out the same part of the program for students to fill-in. Students can submit their completed program online and the system will automatically compile and execute the program with pre-assigned input data. Any compiler time error, execution time error, or incorrect output would be reported back to the students for debugging. The on-going teaching experiment has the teachers teach programming as usual, but prepare cloze programming tasks for students to practice. Many such cloze programming exercises of various difficulties have also been developed.

ja-dark: See also the koans here. For example, these online Ruby koans. Cloze exercises are recommended in the Water strand of Black Geas here.

PEP 20 (The Zen of Python) by example

Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python Slides....



Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python

Slides. Hettinger’s Python tips on Twitter.

"- I can call spirits from the vasty deep. - Why so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when..."

- I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
- Why so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?
SHAKESPEARE, KING HENRY IV, PART I

- The modern magic, like the old, has its boastful practitioners: ‘I can write programs that control air traffic, intercept ballistic missiles, reconcile bank accounts, control production lines.’ To which the answer comes, ‘So can I, and so can any man, but do they work when you do write them?’



- Frederick BrooksThe Mythical Man-Month

blvk./geSH/

blvk./geSH/:

Black Geas is now online. Version 1.0. It is a metamagickal systema for those who aspire to the empowerment of electronic wizarding by designing their own self-regulated study regimens.

It is rough around the edges, but will one day be as well-oiled as its sibling, ja・ミニマル.

Japanize (Ruby programming language)

Japanize (Ruby programming language):

From this post comparing Ruby to Japanese. It’s explained in detail there. Not to be confused with the Japanize in this entry which discusses gradually ‘delocalizing’ your interfaces.

Could be fun to play with if you want to practice doing maths in Japanese.

Here’s a post on Japanese Mathematical Terminology. And one on Japanese programming languages. See also.

Batch clearing Rainlendar tasks

You may have seen this post on automating your study schedule with Rainlendar. It can sometimes be a pain to manually mark each task as Completed, one at a time. And for the longest time I assumed that this was all you could do, which was quite frustrating.

But it turns out you can indeed mark them Completed all at once:

  1. Open the Manager (right-click the calendar, etc.),
  2. Search for the tasks, perhaps by typing the category (e.g. Japanese)
  3. Either ctrl-click or select All, the way you would with files and folders,
  4. Right-click and select Change Fields (there’s also a button),
  5. Scroll down a bit and check the Status box,
  6. Select Completed in the dropdown.
  7. Hit OK.

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his..."

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination… Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be…

Not all is delight, however…

First, one must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work.



- Frederick BrooksThe Mythical Man-Month

CodeSpells: Embodying the Metaphor of Wizardry for Programming

CodeSpells: Embodying the Metaphor of Wizardry for Programming:

Magic is a metaphor that crosses both programming and fantasy RPGs. In programming, what an expert programmer can do is often referred to as “magical”… It can then be considered that expert programmers have a suite of “magical spells” that they can use at any time to solve various problems. These spells might be small programs they have written, methods, or simply concepts they now understand (e.g. the “Iterate through an array spell”).

Similarly, in most fantasy RPGs, players often have magic spells that they can use at any time to solve various problems. Comparable to the “spells” of expert programmers, RPG players may start with simple spells, and have to earn and learn how to use more complex ones. CodeSpells embodies the idea of “spells” as both an artifact that players can see, read and write and also an executable object that players can use to interact with the world and solve problems.

To fully immerse the players in CodeSpells we designed a similar resource that they might find in any other fantasy RPG, a spellbook. This spellbook provides them with information about how spells work and when they might be useful. Players can use the spellbook, along with the Non-Player Character’s advice, to navigate through quests.

Most importantly though is the spellbook’s dual purpose as a learning resource. Players are encouraged to read through the spellbook, but also to execute spells to test them out. Being in a non-competitive environment allows them to take their time in fully understanding the effects and limitations of each spell. Modifications can easily be made in the in-game IDE… This particular resource is the gate to programming within CodeSpells and is essential to immersion and embodiment.

One word at a time: Mental representations of object shape change incrementally during sentence processing

One word at a time: Mental representations of object shape change incrementally during sentence processing:

Abstract:

We report on two experiments that ask when and under what linguistic conditions comprehenders construct detailed shape representations of mentioned objects, and whether these can change over the course of a sentence when new information contradicts earlier expectations.

We used Japanese because the verb-final word order of Japanese presented a revealing test case where information about objects can radically change with a subsequent verb.

The results show that language understanders consistently generate a distinct and detailed shape for an object by integrating the semantic contributions of different sentential elements.

These results first confirm that the tendency to generate specific shape information about objects that are involved in described events is not limited to English, but is also present in Japanese, a typologically and genetically distinct language.

But more importantly, they shed light on the processing mechanism of object representation, showing that mental representations are initiated sentence medially, and are rapidly revised if followed by a verb that implies a change to an object shape.

This work contributes to ongoing research on incremental language processing – comprehenders appear to construct extremely detailed semantic representations early in a sentence, and modify them as needed.

Fitness Landscapes in Cultural Language Evolution

Fitness Landscapes in Cultural Language Evolution:

Abstract:

Computational experiments in cultural language evolution are important because they help to reveal the cognitive mechanisms and cultural processes that continuously shape and reshape the structure and knowledge of language. However, understanding the intricate relations between these mechanisms and processes can be a daunting challenge. This paper proposes to recruit the concept of fitness landscapes from evolutionary biology and computer science for visualizing the “linguistic fitness” of particular language systems. Through a case study on the German paradigm of definite articles, the paper shows how such landscapes can shed a new and unexpected light on non-trivial cases of language evolution. More specifically, the case study falsifies the widespread assumption that the paradigm is the accidental by-product of linguistic erosion. Instead, it has evolved to optimize the cognitive and perceptual resources that language users employ for achieving successful communication.

“There is a wide consensus among researchers working on cultural language evolution that language is a complex adaptive system (CAS), which means that many linguistic phenomena are emergent properties of the complex interplay between cognitive, perceptual and social constraints on language users as they engage with each other in local interactions. Computational models are an important tool of the CAS approach because they demonstrate the consequences of these complex dynamics on a scale and time course that is unimaginable with human subjects…

This paper subscribes to the theory of cultural language evolution as proposed by Steels (2011). One of the cornerstones of the theory is the biologically-inspired mechanism of linguistic selectionism, which involves two kinds of processes:

  1. Processes that create linguistic variation in a population.
  2. Processes that select variants to become dominant conventions.

The theory thus hypothesizes that linguistic variants may be selected if they increase the “linguistic fitness” of a language. In order to test this hypothesis, we need a good understanding of the relations between the space of possible languages (given the linguistic variants at hand) and their linguistic fitness. Fitness landscapes can offer a valuable tool for visualizing these relations.”

blvk./geSH/

blvk./geSH/:

It’s still ‘compiling’, but will arrive in February.

This will be a minimalist program for designing efficient self-study regimens to learn coding and computer science. I should clarify that by ‘program’ I mean a kind of system or course of action(s), not a piece of software. In future I shall describe it with another term.

At an abstract level it derives from ja・ミニマル, which is oriented to natural, rather than formal, language. There is startling overlap between the two, united by the general constraints and capacities of human learning.

As a small set of guiding principles, Black Geas should be applicable to any programming language, but will use Python 2.x as its exemplar.

A “geas” ( /ɡɛʃ/ ) is a mystical compulsion. In programming, “black magic” refers to techniques that work for occulted reasons. The trappings of magic will permeate this primer on becoming a sorcerer—I mean, a programmer.

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist w/ Python 3: Interactive Edition

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist w/ Python 3: Interactive Edition:

Benefits of this Interactive Textbook

  • You can experiment with activecode examples right in the book
  • You can do your homework right in the textbook.
  • You can interact with other learners to discuss homework
  • Interactive questions make sure that you are on track and help you focus.
  • Codelens helps you develop a mental model of how Python works.
  • Audio Tours help you understand the code.
  • Short videos cover difficult or important topics.
  • You can highlight text, and take notes in scratch editors

Previously: Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python 2.x (Enhanced; Free eBook PDF)

The Critical Period Hypothesis in Second Language Acquisition: A Statistical Critique and a Reanalysis

The Critical Period Hypothesis in Second Language Acquisition: A Statistical Critique and a Reanalysis:

Abstract:

In second language acquisition research, the critical period hypothesis (CPH) holds that the function between learners’ age and their susceptibility to second language input is non-linear. This paper revisits the indistinctness found in the literature with regard to this hypothesis’s scope and predictions.

Even when its scope is clearly delineated and its predictions are spelt out, however, empirical studies–with few exceptions–use analytical (statistical) tools that are irrelevant with respect to the predictions made.

This paper discusses statistical fallacies common in CPH research and illustrates an alternative analytical method (piecewise regression) by means of a reanalysis of two datasets from a 2010 paper purporting to have found cross-linguistic evidence in favour of the CPH.

This reanalysis reveals that the specific age patterns predicted by the CPH are not cross-linguistically robust.

Applying the principle of parsimony, it is concluded that age patterns in second language acquisition are not governed by a critical period.

To conclude, this paper highlights the role of confirmation bias in the scientific enterprise and appeals to second language acquisition researchers to reanalyse their old datasets using the methods discussed in this paper.

ja-dark: I didn’t realize anyone actually still believed in the critical period hypothesis. Amazing! That their research would be flawed is sort of a given.

Adults aren’t blank slates (tabula rasa), they’re tabula repleta. They can learn both statistically and deliberately with great efficiency, their experienced brains remaining highly plastic, always changing and creating new cells, but systemic issues cause age-of-acquisition effects (more like time-of-acquisition effects), proficiency levels which are predominantly misjudged against an illogical monolingual native-like standard.

Bilingualism is not monolingualism, and being a native speaker is merely a historical fact which you already have in your biography, or you don’t.

The sooner you ditch the obsolete notions of fixed learning constraints that induce helpless inaction, and the idea of an illusory, binary not-native/native skill level, the quicker you can use strategic methods which let you use the language, as you want: to become a functionally bilingual adult, not an imaginary monolingual, natively immersed child afraid to use his or her best learning tool, the language(s) he or she grew up with.

Brain-Based Translation: fMRI Decoding of Spoken Words in Bilinguals Reveals Language-Independent Semantic Representations in Anterior Temporal Lobe

Brain-Based Translation: fMRI Decoding of Spoken Words in Bilinguals Reveals Language-Independent Semantic Representations in Anterior Temporal Lobe:

Abstract:

Bilinguals derive the same semantic concepts from equivalent, but acoustically different, words in their first and second languages… Here, we measured fMRI in human bilingual listeners and reveal that response patterns to individual spoken nouns in one language (e.g., “horse” in English) accurately predict the response patterns to equivalent nouns in the other language (e.g., “paard” in Dutch). Stimuli were four monosyllabic words in both languages, all from the category of “animal” nouns…

Response patterns discriminative of spoken words [across languages (across-language generalization)] were limited to localized clusters… These results corroborate the existence of “hub” regions organizing semantic-conceptual knowledge in abstract form at the fine-grained level of within semantic category discriminations.

ja-dark: As I’ve said before, it’s best to use definitions in your most proficient language when learning a new language, and ignore silly advice to ‘go monolingual’. You can’t know more than one language and be monolingual. It’s simply impossible. Your brain will always translate anyway, as the languages interact in your mind, so don’t worry about ‘translation’: we’re learning meanings, not definitions, so the definitions should be transparent, not opaque. Use the definitions that will act as the clearest windows onto the concepts that you’re connecting to new word-forms.

After you map the semantic units to words, you truly begin the process of robustly contextualizing them and fleshing out their nuances through usage. By building up constructions and networks of the new language this way, this is how you strengthen your ability to independently use it when you want to.

CodeSpells: On the nature of fires and how to spark them when you're not there

CodeSpells: On the nature of fires and how to spark them when you're not there:

This paper looks at non-institutional learning to see what, if anything, can be transferred from these scenarios into the classroom to improve institutional learning.

Several of the components of inspiration due to non-institutional learning that the authors noticed from responses from professionals (about their first coding experiences) and a study of young girls playing CodeSpells are exploration/creative play, trouble stopping, empowerment, and learner-imposed structure.

Educational games and IDEs (Scratch, Alice, etc.) are the main examples that contain some of these aspects, but do not achieve all of them. The authors propose the gamification of some preexisting educational tools such as Alice, and they are continuing work with CodeSpells as well.

Excerpts:

Programming as Empowerment: In CodeSpells, for example, the code a player can write directly correlates with the efficacy of that player within the 3D world. What one can code and what one is empowered to do go hand-in-hand…

… a drive to explore, play, and create… appeared to be fueled (rather than dampened ) by syntax errors. Of the 6 groups video taped, 4 of them encountered some syntax error that they resolved either by undoing the error they introduced (55% of the time) or asking the undergraduate student that was near them (45% of the time). In all cases, acts of self-structured activities followed these interludes.

A particularly interesting phenomenon occurred with regard to what one might call “logic errors”. One group of girls made the mistake of levitating an object so high into the air that it could not be reached. They were able to retrieve the object, however, by jumping onto another object and levitating it (and thus themselves) sufficiently high enough to reach the original object. This emergent use of code to surmount challenges of one’s own making is an act that fits our definition of exploratory play. Logic errors were seen in all 6 groups recorded, but we note again that the exploration seemed to be fueled (rather than dampened) by things going awry.

Previously.

Vision and multitasking: Brain can perform more than one function without sacrificing time or accuracy

Vision and multitasking: Brain can perform more than one function without sacrificing time or accuracy:

Many studies suggest that pushing your brain to multitask — writing emails, for instance, while watching the day’s latest news and eating breakfast — leads to poorer performance and lower productivity…

Conventional wisdom on the multitasking brain suggests that simultaneous tasks would result in competition between the two processes and a bottleneck resulting in poorer performance…

But for at least one everyday task — visual sampling (the act of picking up bits of visual information through short glances) — multitasking is not a problem for the brain… during visual sampling, the brain can handle various visual functions simultaneously…

"… when scanning your book shelves for your blue cover copy of ‘Moby Dick,’ you only have access to detailed visual information such as the text on the spine where you are currently looking," explained Eckstein. "To view the titles and authors of surrounding books, you would have to shift the line of sight by moving your eyes, and for large gaze shifts, the head. To find ‘Moby Dick,’ your brain has to do at least two things: analyze the book you are currently looking at to decide whether it is ‘Moby Dick,’ but also to select candidate blue books in the periphery for an eye movement for future inspections…"

The team of researchers… discovered that the human brain has the capacity to perform both functions rapidly and accurately, at the same time and independently…

Previously:

Cárdenas' America Can Code Act

Cárdenas' America Can Code Act:

Today, U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-San Fernando Valley) introduced the 416d65726963612043616e20436f646520 Act of 2013, also known as the America Can Code Act. This legislation would designate computer programming languages as “critical foreign languages” and provide incentives for state and local schools to teach more computer science beginning as early as Kindergarten.

The official short title of the name is believed to be unique among Congressional legislation. “416d65726963612043616e20436f646520” is the hexadecimal code translation of “America Can Code.”

“The very name of this law demonstrates that programming is simply another language,” said Cárdenas. “Learning and communicating in a foreign language can have a tremendous impact on a student, both culturally and educationally. Computer programming creates a similar impact, while also providing a critical skill in today’s global economy.”

Neural division of labor in reading is constrained by culture: A training study of reading Chinese characters

Neural division of labor in reading is constrained by culture: A training study of reading Chinese characters:

Abstract:

Word reading in alphabetic language involves a cortical system with multiple components whose division of labor depends on the transparency of the writing system.

To gain insight about the division of labor between phonology and semantics subserving word reading in Chinese, a deep non-alphabetic writing system, fMRI was used to investigate the effects of phonological and semantic training on the cortical circuitry for oral naming of Chinese characters…

… in contrast to findings from studies of English word naming, we observed considerable overlap in the neural activation patterns associated with phonological and semantic training on naming Chinese characters, which we suggest may reflect a balanced neural division of labor between phonology and semantics in Chinese character reading.

The equitable division of labor for Chinese reading might be driven by the special statistical structure of the writing system…

ja-dark: Interesting to see this for a naming (sound-oriented) task. That said, I’d expect it to lean more towards the visual for Japanese use of Chinese characters, but not by much, because they retain a surprising amount of regularity in mapping characters to sounds.

In the past I’ve referenced how reading Chinese characters is more multimodal than reading the alphabet, weighted towards the visual→semantic in parallel to the phonetic, so it’s a different mental exercise in terms of cognitive load and working memory (e.g. visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop, sensorimotor encoding) and the written expression of meaning.

It’s qualitatively and quantitatively different, with advantages we’re just beginning to understand as we move away from Western sound-oriented orthographic biases to appreciate the visual expressivity and distributed workload of morphographic (kanji/hanzi) writing systems.

Advantages such as increased cognitive fluidity and visuospatial skills, mnemonic links between vocabulary and characters, alternate routes to convey meaning, breadth of literacy acquisition options, stylistic scope, proximity to natural dynamics of the the brain and language, and the intrinsic benefit of diversity itself in expanding our understanding of those mechanisms of operation for the brain and language.

To see previous entries that discuss how we read Chinese characters, check my posts under the “kanji” tag.

"The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs kindling."

“The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs kindling.”

- Plutarch, 100 CE

Christiansen tackles 'cultural evolution' in new book

Christiansen tackles 'cultural evolution' in new book:

Highlighting the integrating role of cultural evolution across the social sciences and the humanities, similar to that of organic evolution in biology, the Department of Psychology’s Morten H. Christiansen is the co-editor and one of three dozen contributors to the recently published “Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language and Religion” (MIT Press, 2013).

“In our species, genetic evolution and cultural evolution are inextricably linked,” Christiansen writes in the new book’s introduction. “Our bodies are adapted to acquire and use culture, and our cultures are adapted to help our genes perpetuate themselves…”

Christiansen notes that “although a growing body of research has established the key role of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior, wider application of these insights has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, key players from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history and economics were convened to explore the central role of cultural evolution in human social structure, technology, language and religion… ”

Previously.

Applying Cognitive Load Theory to Generate Effective Programming Tutorials

Applying Cognitive Load Theory to Generate Effective Programming Tutorials:

Many programmers, including novices, often attempt to solve their coding problems by searching the web for example code. Because these programmers are invested in their current project, they are motivated to discover a solution to their problem.

While searching the web for a solution, they may encounter source code that addresses their issue and also contains programming concepts that are new to the user. Unfortunately, novice programmers often struggle to understand the source code and can fail to successfully integrate the code into their programs.

To help novice programmers understand unfamiliar source code, we propose automatically generating tutorials from source code to help these programmers acquire new programming skills in the course of working on their own chosen projects.

In this paper, I describe our prior work on how automatically generating walkthrough tutorials helps novice programmers learn new programming concepts found in unfamiliar code.

Following this, I introduce my proposal to use Cognitive Load Theory to improve the effectiveness of learning new programming concepts from generated tutorials. To accomplish this, I propose automatically generating personalized tutorials based on a user’s programming expertise.

ja-dark: The last few paragraphs of the paper describe the idea of presenting only a single new programming concept for a given tutorial; especially complex concepts are broken into multiple tasks of increasing complexity.

I’ve been working on the untitled coding equivalent to my ja・ミニマル program of Japanese self-study, so it’s fun to see the above, which is, in a more procedural, syntactic way, similar to using the Anki add-on Morph Man, which tracks users’ vocabulary knowledge so they can study items with minimal new words. One thing I’ve wanted for a while is a similar metric for grammatical complexity, using, in part, dependency distance.

One guiding principle I’m using as I design my own regimen is related to the paper’s idea: identifying minimal independent fragments of code for any given Anki card’s purpose; but I digress.

Bear in mind that there’s a few approaches to managing cognitive load, including using multiple senses and complementary task types that burden different resources.

10 Facts You Didn't Know About The Taiji Dolphin Slaughter

10 Facts You Didn't Know About The Taiji Dolphin Slaughter:

1. The dolphin slaughter isn’t actually a tradition.

Proponents of the practice are quick to call it a “cultural tradition,” but the practice of en masse dolphin killing truly started when the motorboat engine was invented and adopted into the mainstream. “This is like one generation, and that’s not ‘traditional,’” says Lincoln O’Barry of the Dolphin Project. “[The Japanese] could go kill with traditional whaling and go in big 20 man canoes and paddle out and kill a whale, but they’d never slaughter 100s of dolphins before…”

3. The entire local fishing industry isn’t based on the dolphin slaughter.

Taiji’s fishing industry isn’t entirely contingent on the relative success of the dolphin slaughter. Stopping the slaughter would put “50 people out of business,” says O’Barry. While 50 out of 300 is still a considerable percentage, those 50 happen to be the richest people in the small town who make most of their profits specifically from the slaughter. ”There are 300 other fishermen in Taiji that fish for other things, not dolphins.”

7. The Japanese are also taking action against the slaughter.

2013 was the first year there was a Japanese activist standing up in protest at the cove. “This is about identifying and showing that it’s not all Japanese people,” says Lincoln. “There was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment during the big whaling movement in the 1970s. All that really accomplished was that Japanese-American kids would get beat up on the playground. You can’t boycott a race of people just because of what a handful of people are doing in Taiji. That’s insane.

ja-dark: Sometimes people will argue that it’s hypocritical to, say, eat hamburgers and protest the dolphin slaughter. There’s truth in that, but it’s actually perfectly reasonable to relate to living things more if they’re closer to you in intelligence or affect (e.g. dolphins, whales, horses, cats). Intelligence and positive emotions are of practical value: to individuals, humanity, and life in general, and therefore worth protecting—and cultivating further, so issues like this are actually a great place to start, in order to elevate our existence towards sustainable happiness.

My main concern is #7, for very pragmatic reasons. I’m afraid that if the world turns against Japan, all the time I spent learning Japanese will be wasted.

Code Kata & Koans

Code koans and kata are a fascinating pair of programming language self-study concepts. They’re forms of repeated self-testing, associated with test-driven development and deliberate practice.

  • Test-driven development here is a software development process you can boil down to ‘red-green-refactor’: begin with a failing bit of code (red), fix it (green), and refine it (refactor).
  • Deliberate practice is the now popular concept of how the quantity of hours spent practicing, rather than innate talent, is the key to skill acquisition. The quantity of hours is modulated by the quality of your practice (e.g. forget the popular number of 10k hours). For an example in the language learning realm, see this post.

Kata are generally defined like so: “A code kata is an exercise in programming which helps a programmer hone their skills through practice and repetition.” The concept originated here, taken from the idea of a martial arts kata, where the “goal is to internalize the movements and techniques of a kata so they can be executed and adapted under different circumstances, without thought or hesitation.”

To streamline this process, many people create and share kata online. Here are some resources for kata:

Koans are progressive sequences of what you could describe as a specific kind of kata where you fill in blanks (cloze deletion) to fix code fragments. They were originally developed for Ruby, taken from the Zen idea, but you can find collections of koans for many languages.

Here are some koan resources:

I think these two self-study practices, kata and koans, would go well with scheduling that uses the spacing effect. The benefits of spaced retrieval apply to many types of learning beyond facts and such, including procedural, motor, and inductive.

There are, I imagine, a few ways one might use Anki cards as cues for such exercises. While there is a syntax highlighting plugin for Anki, the type-in-the-answer feature probably doesn’t allow line breaks and indenting well, so you’d be better off using an IDE/text editor alongside Anki, similar to the way you might with a book’s exercises.

In the future I will go over other ways to use Anki for formal language (e.g. programming) self-study.

Another possibility is applying the TDD red-green-refactor style to natural language self-study, output practice especially. Perhaps one might take adjacency pairs (see here and Type 2, here) for ‘unit tests’ and turn them into pragmatically unsound instances of conversational turn-taking that must be corrected. The notions of recasts, clarification requests, cloze delete, etc., would apply here, and refactoring could incorporate a few alternate wordings or phrases to achieve the same communicative goal in the discourse, perhaps with backchanneling, gestures, implicature, etc.

At any rate, as you know if you’ve read my previous posts linking to research, self-testing isn’t merely a passive diagnostic process, it’s an active learning and relearning mechanism. So keep in mind that while programmer blogs often refer to kata and the like as a means to maintain or deepen already-learned knowledge, they can also be used to learn new things.

As an aside, an interesting notion related to refactoring is code smell: “any symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem.” This fascinating wiki has an entry for language smell, also.

Signature whistles in free-ranging populations of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins

Signature whistles in free-ranging populations of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins:

Abstract:

Common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) use individually distinctive signature whistles which are highly stereotyped and function as contact calls. Here we investigate whether Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (T. aduncus) use signature whistles… Our results suggest that signature whistles are commonly used by T. aduncus.

See also'Name That Tune' Algorithm Used to Identify Signature Whistles of Dolphins