Brainwave

Symmetry

2007-11-18T17:25:00.000Z

So there is this so-called by the popular media surfer dude who has a preprint on how the Theory of Everything can be based on the E₈ Lie algebra. I have little clue about theoretical physics so I don't have anything to say on the actual physics idea, but in the comment section of a blog post discussing the pre-print, someone says:

"Beautiful" An off-topic serious question: One sees this this a lot in the scientific literature and I would like to ask why. Evolution built this admiration for symmetric features into us for it's purposes. Why do scientists persist in assuming that a criteria for animals to choose mates is appropriate for choosing theories.

Which I think is an excellent question! I have no answer but I have the impression that beauty as a criterion for science is much more common in theoretical physics than in something more down to earth, such as biology. Indeed one the most beautiful ideas in molecular biology, i.e. comma-free code for DNA, happened to be wrong.

MT helping real people in the real world, now!

2007-11-05T18:16:00.000Z

When the Computational Linguistics department at one of the German universities needs to bring over some candidates for PhD positions for interviews, apparently they get accommodation in a hotel which displays the bilingual information depicted above. This hotel is a very appropriate choice as it leads by example in embracing language technologies to enhance their guests' experience while keeping costs low. Great motivation for future researchers!

ESSLLI 2007

2007-08-22T11:07:00.000+01:00

So ESSLLI this year was at home, in Dublin. Hardly the best destination - rainy, cold, expensive and totally devoid of tourist attractions. But maybe it makes people concentrate more on the scientific content ;-) I had more fun last year in Málaga, but it was still nice to go to ESSLLI once more, and Trinity is definitely a nice central location (although a bit overrun by tourists).

Most of the courses I attended were decent though none was spectacular. The best one was definitely the one by Joakim Nivre and Ryan MacDonald on data-driven dependency parsing: easy to follow, clearly structured, and taught by people who really know what they are talking about.

I hoped the machine-learning course would be interesting but the first day was quite disappointing and I didn't go during the rest of the week.

Other than that, one of the invited talks was on modeling language acquisition. It was a strange affair: the speaker (Ronan Reilly) showed how a supervised learning algorithm, namely neural network with error backpropagation can accurately learn a toy grammar derived from a corpus of child directed speech, using as training material sentences generated with this grammar. Not terribly surprising is it? The puzzling fact was that the speaker proposed this as the model of first language acquisition. I had to leave early so I didn't get to ask the obvious question: where do kids get their error backpropagation? I thought it was more or less generally acknowledged that there is little feedback on errors, and whatever there is, children mostly ignore. So a strongly supervised learning model doesn't say anything about first language acquisition. Or is it me who is really confused?

I don't know if I'll be going to another ESSLLI: next summer I won't be a student anymore (hopefully!) so it might have been my last one. But who knows; it's definitely quite an addictive event...

Chomsky the experimentalist

2007-06-29T12:11:00.000+01:00

I just came across this Chomsky quote:

Corpus linguistics doesn't mean anything. It’s like saying suppose a physicist decides, suppose physics and chemistry decide that instead of relying on experiments, what they’re going to do is take videotapes of things happening in the world and they’ll collect huge videotapes of everything that’s happening and from that maybe they’ll come up with some generalizations or insights.

I'm all for experimental science but I did find it a bit amusing the way Chomsky appeals to its authority. From what I've seen a typical "experiment" in linguistics means the linguist coming up with a more or less convoluted sentence and introspecting to decide whether it's grammatical or not. You can easily guess what proper experimentalists in natural or social sciences would think of such a methodology. (By this I don't mean to say that grammaticality judgments are totally useless per se, just that the methods commonly used to obtain them don't meet the standards of proper experimental research.)

As to the use of corpus data in research on language, Chomsky's dismissal is hard to make sense of. So OK physicist don't typically record videos of things happening out there, fair enough. But even someone afflicted with acute physics envy should be able to see that there are respectable and highly successful branches of science which cannot and do not rely on experiments to obtain their data. In effect, scientist in those areas do analyze huge "videotapes" of stuff that happened to make generalizations and come up with theories about their domain of study. Obvious examples are paleontology, evolutionary biology or cosmology. You can't rerun the Big Bang to see what happens when you fiddle with such and such parameter. All we can ever hope to do is to watch those videos in the form of red-shifted light from receding galaxies, background radiation etc. And yet, we know way more about the history of the universe than about the workings of human language.

Norvig's spelling corrector in Haskell

2007-04-13T17:27:00.000+01:00

A pretty literal translation of http://www.norvig.com/spell-correct.html in Haskell.

*Main> sc <- getCorrector 
*Main> sc "speling"
spelling

I didn't bother to use ByteString so it's slow.

import Prelude hiding (words)
import Data.Char
import Data.Ord
import Data.Maybe
import qualified Data.Map as Map
import qualified Data.Set as Set
import qualified Data.List as List

words = List.words . map (toLower . (\c -> if isAlpha c then c else ' ')) 

train = List.foldl' (\dict f -> Map.insertWith' (+) f 1 dict) Map.empty 

edits1 word =
    let n = length word in
    Set.fromList $    [take i word ++ drop (i+1) word | i <- [0..n-1]]                                  -- deletion
                   ++ [take i word ++ [word!!(i+1)] ++ [word!!i] ++ drop (i+2) word | i <- [0..n-2]]    -- transposition
                   ++ [take i word ++ [c] ++ drop (i+1) word | i <- [0..n-1] , c <- ['a'..'z'] ]          -- alteration
                   ++ [take i word ++ [c] ++ drop i word | i <- [0..n-1] , c <- ['a'..'z'] ]              -- insertion

known_edits2 nwords word  = Set.fromList [e2 | e1 <- Set.elems (edits1 word)
                                             , e2 <- Set.elems (edits1 e1) 
                                             , e2 `Map.member` nwords ]

known nwords = Set.intersection (Map.keysSet nwords)

correct nwords word = let candidates = fromJust $ List.find (not . Set.null) [ known nwords (Set.singleton word)
                                                                             , known nwords (edits1 word) 
                                                                             , known_edits2 nwords word
                                                                             , Set.singleton word ]
               in List.maximumBy (comparing (\c -> Map.findWithDefault 1 c nwords)) (Set.elems candidates)

getCorrector = do
  nWORDS <- fmap (train . words) (readFile "big.txt")
  return  (putStrLn . correct nWORDS)

Why smart people believe crazy stuff

2006-10-24T19:37:00.000+01:00

It'd always been my impression that intelligence is rather strongly correlated with disbelief in the supernatural (whether in the form of religious belief or plain old superstition). I still think it is correlated but maybe not as strongly as I thought: I've recently met some smart people who believe pretty crazy stories.

And I don't just mean the odd mystically-inclined physicist who thinks the laws of nature are God or some such metaphor. I mean intelligent, educated, somewhat scientifically literate people believing pretty literally in a soul separate from the brain which survives the body's death and goes on to live in some alternative reality. Or some similar off-the-wall story: you get the idea.

There are probably many factors which make this particular mental setup possible but let me speculate as to one of the possibly most important factors. I actually hinted at the possible culprit above: "somewhat scientifically literate". I think it may not be sufficient to have basic secondary school scientific literacy to realize how much ideas such as astrology or an immortal soul are incompatible with the scientific outlook.

It doesn't much matter if you know the details of meiosis or are familiar with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as disconnected facts. You need to be aware of the scientific method as a means to build successively more adequate approximations of reality. You need to know that the whole of science hangs together, that you are not allowed to just pick and choose: accept medicine because it seems to work, but reject evolution by natural selection because it makes you feel like the world is a cold and unpleasant place.

There is also the fact that you have to be willing and able to ask the right questions and follow the answers to their conclusions. If you think science is mostly right, but there is something more out there you have to be willing to check if this something out there is actually a possible extension to already established scientific facts. For example you may think physics and biology are correct as such, but they just fail to mention the immortal soul, so you are free to believe in it. And you want to because it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling and makes you less afraid of death. Well not quite.

There's all the well known problems with dualism. To dumb down, if the soul is supposed to control the body then it has to interact with it somehow. If it is material then it's just some part of the brain which science can study and explain, and it's unlikely to survive the death of the rest of the brain. If it's immaterial, then how can it have a causal effect on a material object like the brain? Energy doesn't come out of nowhere, and so on.

There's more prosaic implausibilities and inconsistencies. Do only humans have a soul? Which of the extinct hominins, if any, had it too? At which point in the evolution of our species did we acquire it? At which point during our embryonic development do we get it? As soon as conception? If so, then most soulful beings don't even get to be born, as most pregnancies end in an unnoticed early spontaneous abortion. You can probably try to speculate about answers to these issues, but I bet when you're finished you'd be left with a kind of soul that you'd no longer want quite so much to believe in.

And some smart people who don't know much outside high-school science plus their own narrow area of expertise might just not have come across too many ideas that would make them want to ask and be able to answer those kinds of questions. Some combination of philosophy of science, cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and embryology are the ingredient that might be missing. My bet is that many people, smart or otherwise, have only a very vague idea or none at all about those areas. If they had more, I am willing to risk a guess that they would be a bit more picky about the crazy stuff they choose to believe in.

I guess some soul believers still wouldn't go all the way: probably some would be tempted by the Kurzweil-style singularity stuff as a last recourse -- I've just noticed right now that a relatively smart acquaintance of mine is into it. But no matter, its a progress anyway...

Linguistics and Ruby Programming

2006-05-04T15:37:00.000+01:00

Apparently customers who bought this item (Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log) also bought Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas, for some strange reason. The correlation must be pretty strong, I guess, as Amazon actually suggests to buy the two together.

I'll probably buy the first one. And maybe the second too, if for some reason I get kicked out of the PhD program and have to take on some crappy job as a script monkey web developer.

Intriguing research under silly cover

2006-02-20T12:31:00.000Z

Freakonomics - I must have walked past this title dozens of times on my way to the science section of the Dublin Hodges & Figgis bookstore - but the silly title and trashy cover design apparently sent the wrong message and I never picked it up, until yesterday. I started reading, and after a few pages decided to buy and read the whole thing at home. Notwithstanding claims of extravagance to be found on the cover and in the introduction, it is pretty much good old social science. What's refreshing about it is that the author doesn't seem to have an ideological agenda driving his research. He just does his thing, i.e. study patterns in the data, without advocating any particular policy. You can occasionally find this type of social science research in the Scientific American but my impression is that it's rarer than it should be. The issues the book touches upon are mix of the trivial and the serious, most with a connection to economics, the study of incentives, and finding patterns in statistical data. There are also topics only loosely related to what is normally understood as economics, such as the link between legalized abortion and the drop in the crime rate in the US in the 1990's. This only makes an economist's take on them more interesting though. Some other highlights include detection of teachers cheating on their students' standardized tests, sumo wrestlest rigging competitions and the study of salary structure of crack-cocaine-dealing gangs. For obsessive parents there is a chapter where they can find out how little impact their efforts are likely to have on their kids future prospect. Plus a history of Ku Klux Klan and a study of discrimination in a TV show. Overall, a nice read for a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Virgins in paradise

2006-02-02T10:41:00.000Z

As freedom from religion is for me an important issue, I've been following with interest the recent news story about Muslim reactions to the publication of cartoons of Muhammad by a Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, later also republished in other European papers. I found the caricatures online in a couple of places . None of them had me rolling on the floor, but I did laugh at the one shown above, although it took a few minutes of research to actually understand what the score with virgins in paradise is. For the benefit of those as ignorant of the Qu'ran as me, apparently one of the rewards awaiting Muslim men in heaven is the ensured access to a ready supply of virginal houris:

And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds... We created the houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand...
(Penguin translation by NJ Dawood, fragment of sura 56. See also this Guardian article)

Leaves one wondering what are the rewards women get in return for their chastity here on Earth. ..

Fuzzy Christmas

2005-12-16T12:40:00.000Z

Last week I was in Barcelona at a Treebank workshop where one of the invited talks was about annotation of temporal expressions. I'm not going to comment much on the talk itself but the treatment of one temporal expression used as a example by the speaker struck me as strangely inadequate.

The expression in question is Christmas and the detailed representation of it included such attributes as EXTENT (1 day), PERIODICITY (1 year) and DATE (yyyy-12-25). The inadequacy lies in the specification of a concrete, discrete span of time, namely the 25th day of the twelfth month. Christmas as normally used is a much more diffuse concept. Depending on the context it can span from 1 day to perhaps the whole month of December. It even seems to be expanding as I grow older -- perhaps when I'm fifty shops will start putting on Christmas decorations in September. So my guess would be that Christmas (unlike Christmas day) refers to the 25th of December only in the minority of cases.

Such fuzzy reference is not uncommon with temporal expression. Consider the Spanish words mediodía (≈ noon) and medianoche (= midnight). I'll talk about Spanish as I'm not quite sure how it works in English. Medianoche is a bit fuzzy but not much. It would be used to refer to the zeroth minute of a given day or a short span of time around it. So if you hear that something happened at midnight, you know that it likely started after 23:30 and ended before 00:30.

The situation with mediodía is more complex. First, it seems to me to be more strechy, not necessarily tightly centered around 12:00:00 hrs. Depending on various factors, such as geographic location, the season or even the day of the week, it might span the period from 11:00:00 to about 15:00:00 hrs. Second, mediodía is not only associated with an astronomically defined moment such as 12:00:00 hrs but also with the time of the midday meal, which in northern Spain is usually taken an hour or two later.

Perhaps a less inadequate way of thinking about temporal expression might be probabilistic, vaguely analogous to the way particles are treated in quantum physics. An electron is not thought of as point-like object with a specific location but rather is represented by a probability distribution (the wavefunction). Instead of a discrete position, we think in terms of the probability of finding a particle in a certain region of space.

So with temporal reference, we can think of the probability that a given moment in time is included in the time-span covered by an expression. In such an approach medianoche would be represented as a curve sharply peaking at 00:00:00 each day. One such peak would look something like this: The curve for mediodía on the other hand would be more spread out, and perhaps it would have two peaks instead of a single one: the first at the astronomical noon, the second coinciding with the midday hunger peak:

I leave the elaboration of the plot corresponding to Christmas as a excercise for the reader. Have fun, and a have warm, fuzzy Christmas!

Hauser, Smolin and Trivers tomorrow in Barcelona

2005-12-02T15:11:00.000Z

If you never heard of them, they are three brilliant and well-known scientists.

Hauser is a cognitive neuroscientist who does research on animal behavior and animal cognition (and also linguistics recently).

Smolin is a theoretical physicist, responsible among others for one of the two contending theories unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity - i.e. quantum loop gravity.

Trivers is an evolutionary biologist, perhaps most well known for work on reciprocal altruism, parental investment and parent-offspring conflict.

Apparently they are among the participants of a literary festival called KOSMOPOLIS 05 in Barcelona. The event is called THIRD CULTURE and details (repeated below) can be found at here

Marc Hauser, Lee Smolin and Robert Trivers. The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
Moderator: John Brockman
Presenter: Eduard Punset
Saturday December 3rd, 7.00 p.m. > Proteus Hall, Barcelona. English, with simultaneous translation

I would have obviously liked to see them and I almost could if I were going to Barcelona a week earlier than I am :( I still plan to enjoy my stay though!

In due course

2005-10-28T12:12:00.000+01:00

When do things that need to be done get done in Ireland? Of course, in due course. Sorry, couldn't resist a migrant's favorite pastime: having a good laugh at the expense of stereotyping the host country. This particular giggle was triggered by a short email I just received which uses "in due course" twice to promise that stuff will get done, eventually. To me it is strangely reminiscent of a procrastinator's most loved Latin American Spanish word ahorita (right now), which is often used to refer to some unspecified moment in future.

As a good skeptic I decided to try to check if this expression is used disproportionately often by the Irish. OK I know Google hit statistics are notoriously unreliable and all that but that's a blog post, not a scientific paper, right? It's supposed to be for fun. Anyway below are my findings:

Domain	course	"in due course"	"in due course"/course
ie	1,920,000	103,000	0.0536
uk	48,900,000	2,150,000	0.0440
nz	2,570,000	38,000	0.0148
us	6,820,000	39,400	0.0057

I checked the frequency of "in due course" against the background rate of "course" in four mostly English-language domains. And indeed IE comes out top, with a proportion of "in due course" accounting for occurrences of "course" at 5.36%. It's closely followed by the British with 4.4%. Kiwis and USians apparently resort to this expression much less often.

And no, I will not try to say anything about the Irish national character based on this pseudo-study. Just wondering, when will swipe card access be enabled in our new postgrad area?

Where to exercise your skepticism

2005-09-30T14:53:00.000+01:00

Edge.org features an interesting piece by Nassim Taleb. He argues that maintaining a skeptical attitude is costly, so perhaps one shouldn't waste it on relatively benign things, like belief in god. Rather, he says, one should direct one's energy in submitting to empirical scrutiny the claims of market analysts, corporations, the media and the like.

I definitely agree that a healthy dose skepticism in those areas is very recommendable. But I am skeptical about two other assertions: (i) that religious faith is relatively harmless (ii) and that disbelief is a limited resource which requires an extraordinary expenditure of energy. Especially the latter assertion triggers my bunkum alert: where is the evidence? The use of technical sounding words resource and energy makes it sound like some sort of experimentally established result, and it may well be, but the references are not there.

Maybe resisting belief just feels like a very difficult thing to Taleb. Well, it usually feels sort of natural to me. Actually my doubting Thomas attitude often causes me grief in social interactions, when people complain when I remain unconvinced after they have told me some dubious factoid: Why don't you believe me? Do you think I'm making this up? You really will drown if you swim after a meal!
So much for anecdotal evidence.

KEYS CUT WHILE "U" WAIT

2005-09-26T11:56:00.000+01:00

I just saw a sign which announced that while on a bus. I've always sort of thought that the abbreviated spellings like u for you, ur for you're or your, c for see etc, commonly used by young and some not so young people in text messages and email, were just this: abbreviations. But this cannot be right, at least in the case of the above: the number of characters in "U" and YOU is exactly the same. So what is this sign trying to say? Something along those lines?

I know it's cool and trendy to write U instead of YOU but I also know that there is little justification for writing it on a permanent sign, where typing speed is not an issue. So I'll write U, but to be on the safe side I'll also put it in scare quotes.

(Another observation about the use of scare quotes)

Dumb Design

2005-08-29T12:33:00.000+01:00

In his blog Derek Bickerton takes on Intelligent Design and argues against it in simple everyday language. His arguments are non-technical and will probably appeal to non-scientific audience. That's the way to win the cultural war according to Bickerton.

Richard Dawkins argued in "Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight" in A Devil's Chaplain, that debating creationists only gives them the credibility they don't deserve. I guess the best way to decide which strategy is likely to be more successful would be to conduct a scientific study. It is an empirical question after all :)

On a related note, at edge.org Daniel C. Daniel writes: "Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?"

How unhealthy respect for religion warps scientific discourse

2005-07-21T13:23:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went to a talk Russell C. Eberhart was giving at the DCU School of Computing about Swarm Intelligence and specifically about the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. It was an entertaining and informative talk, even though parts of it went over my head.

But a disturbing episode during the presentation caught my attention. The speaker was giving an overview of evolutionary approaches to AI and at one point he used a weird disclaimer along the following lines:

It doesn't matter if you believe that evolution happened or not. We are talking about computer applications here, it's not about religion.

He justified himself by mentioning that when giving a similar talk in one of the southern US states, he got comments concerning the reality of evolution, and he wanted to avoid any such questions. There were a few embarrassed giggles from the audience and the talk went on.

It's a small detail, but if you stop to think of it, a remarkable and disquieting thing has happened: An engineering professor addressing an audience of science and engineering faculty and postgrads feels obliged to give lip service to a quaint superstition and ends up sounding as if the biological evolution was a purely religious question, beyond the scope of science, rather than the solid scientific fact that it actually is. A sad cop-out on his part.

I just hope that creationism doesn't take root in other parts of civilized world any time soon. But seeing so many things spreading out from the US to every corner of the globe, maybe it's hoping for too much.

You don't speak the way you think you speak

2005-07-14T13:41:00.000+01:00

People's judgments about their own speech patterns are notoriously unreliable. I noticed it on several occasions. One of the first ones was when I was learning Spanish and people would correct me when I said things like Pasa que sigo resfriado. I was supposed to say Lo que pasa es que sigo resfriado, the former was total rubbish that nobody ever said. But actually the corrector herself would occasionally use the shorter form in casual and rapid speech.

Yesterday I experienced a particularly cute example: a Polish friend was instructing a Belgian guy how to pronounce the Polish word się, and as people often will when adjusting speech for non-native speakers, she said that as /ɕɛw̃/. I started objecting that such a pronunciation never occurred in normal conversational speech and that she herself didn't pronounce /ɛw̃/ (but rather /ɛ/) in się and other words spelled with word-final ę. To which she responded Ale ja tak mówię! (But I do speak like that!), pronouncing mówię, of course, as /'muvjɛ/ :)

For some even more outlandish claims made by someone about their own phonology, check out They have ears, but they hear not on the Language Log.

The scourge of modern civilization

2005-07-06T09:19:00.000+01:00

If I had to choose a single culprit guilty of causing much of the unpleasantness of life in a 21^st century city, a serious contender would be CARS. They are big and dangerous, they stink, they are noisy, they contribute to pollution and climate change and last but not least they tend to be equipped with hysterical alarms that go off at random times during the day and night and go on and on for hours. You guessed, I didn't get much sleep tonight. Y no, no me gusta conducir. I'll stop now though since I decided to try and keep this blog free of rants.

Science and Intellectual Property

2005-06-23T11:14:00.000+01:00

An illuminating talk by Hal Abelson and John Wilbanks on the dangers of thinking of scientific research in terms of (intellectual) property, network effects and monopolizing of scientific publishing. Quite eye-opening.

At one point during the question period Abelson compares the relationship between the science publishing industry and the academia to a colonial economy: the publishers mine the raw materials (by taking away copyright from authors and restricting the ways they can use their own research), process it in some way (by putting papers in a journal etc) and resell them at a big profit to the natives. Some universities are apparently starting to try and reverse this trend by requiring that the faculty not sign copyright agreement which make it impossible for the university to archive and disseminate their research.

Wilbanks talks mainly the Creative Commons initiative and how its relevant to the dissemination of science.

Penicillin in wartime Berlin?

2005-05-30T13:15:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went to see the movie Der Untergang about the last weeks of Hitler and his associates in Soviet-besieged Berlin. The movie is quite good, but a curious and probably anachronistic detail caught my attention.

At the beginning of the movie, a Nazi physician (I think Prof. Dr. Werner Haase) asks another one (Dr Schenck) to collect medical supplies and bring them over to a hospital of sorts where the wounded are treated. He explicitly mentions penicillin as one of the drugs needed. This immediately sounded suspicious to me, as I had recently finished reading Feyman's biography (Genius) and remembered how his wife died of tuberculosis during the period when he worked on the atomic bomb, as penicillin was not yet available for widespread use in the US.

I checked some details: apparently the first penicillin injections were carried out in Germany in October 1944 and so it seems unlikely that Germans commonly used penicillin to treat infections at the end of the WWII. Industrial production of large quantities of the drug was restricted to the US, and the Nazi physicians portrayed in the movie might have heard of it but probably not have enough of it to use it in the daily treatment of the hundreds of wounded.

Language Quiz #4 - Hausa?

2005-05-24T17:09:00.000+01:00

Just saw Language Quiz #4 posted by Mark Liberman on Language Log. The challenge is to guess what language is being spoken in a short audio clip. My guess is that it is Hausa.

I didn't do any fancy analysis: in fact I didn't even transcribe the sample. I listened to it several times and tried to pick out a few individual words (or what sounded to me like words). The first I thought I heard was actually misleading: there is a sequence that is approximately like /harbitski/, which sounds like a Slavic surname. That would suggest that perhaps the answer was some language spoken in ex-Soviet territory.

I kept on listening and decided to google for what I think are two words at the very end of the sample: masa zanga. The first two hits strongly suggested that the answer was Hausa. Also, in the snippets displayed by Google, I saw the word tsarom which I was pretty sure I could hear just following the false mention of Mr Harbitski. I tried to confirm the Hausa hypothesis by goolging for all the word candidates (and switching harbitski to harbi): harbi masa zanga tsaron. The first hit is from Deutsche Welle and is in Hausa!

Nature on Spanish astronomy

2005-05-16T10:44:00.000+01:00

I found an interesting article in Nature which describes the flourishing astronomical research in the Canary Islands and the new telescope that is being built there, which is going to be the largest optical telescope in the world when finished. But not all is rosy in Spanish science. The article also talks about the deep ingrained bureaucracy that so often impedes research, as well as other spheres of activity, in Spain:

Because permanent research positions in Spain are regarded as civil-service jobs, Spanish applicants tend to be favoured. Those with foreign qualifications must undergo an expensive accreditation process, lasting several years, before they can apply to take the formal examinations required for an appointment. This bureaucracy will ultimately hinder Spanish astronomy's development, argues Kidger. For example, the Armenian astronomer Garik Israelian, a rising star at the IAC, has been encouraged to take up Spanish citizenship to help with his career. "I have many Armenian colleagues who are professors in Britain and the United States who have had none of these problems," says Israelian.

Such stuff is also one part of the reason why I am doing Spanish NLP in blustery Dublin rather than sunny Barcelona :)

Linguistic-creationist antics on Language Log

2005-05-10T09:27:00.000+01:00

Creationism aka Intelligent Design lobbyists in the US is expanding in the scope of disciplines that they consider their area of expertise. After scoring important victories in biology, now they target lingustics! Don't believe it? You're right, but check out those Language Log posts for a good laugh: Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings Chomsky testifies in Kansas

Redundant conditionals

2005-04-27T13:43:00.000+01:00

Just stumbled upon the following method definition in some Java code I've been reading:

boolean punctuation(String letter)
    {
       if (letter.startsWith("F"))
       {
          return true;
       }
       else
       {
          return false;
       }
    }

Of course, this could, and should, really just be:

boolean punctuation(String letter) { return letter.startsWith("F"); }

Is it something specific to Java, and similar imperative programming languages, that encourages such redundant verbosity? I don't remember seeing similar constructs in code written in functional languages.

Seen on LinguistList: A Challenge to the Minimalist Community

2005-04-12T10:35:00.000+01:00

Richard Sproat and Shalom Lappin posted a challenge to the LinguistsList that asks proponents of the Principles and Parameters approach to linguistics (which rebranded itself as Minimalism in early nineties), to provide empirical support for the poverty of stimulus and largely innate UG by implementing

by May of 2008, a working P&P parser that can be trained in a supervised fashion on a standard treebank, such as the Penn Treebank, and perform in a range comparable to state-of-the-art statistical parsers.

On a related note, recently I came across Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments by Pullum and Scholz who argue that this arguments has been largly taken on faith rather than examined against evidence, such as corpus data.

Probabilistic Linguistics

2005-04-08T15:32:00.000+01:00

Among the rather impoverished linguistics collection at the DCU library I found Probabilistic Linguistics, 2003, Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay and Stefanie Jannedy, eds., MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London. I have started to read it and it looks promising. What it promises is to look at all those gradients pervasive in language data that are so often totally ignored within generative approaches to language, including those relatively NLP-friendly, such as HPSG or LFG. See if we can be a little bit more precise about, for example, those question marks used to indicate differing grades of grammaticality...

Intelligent spam

2005-03-24T15:21:00.000Z

I just received two almost identical spam messages (Spam 1, Spam 2). Both purport to be from a Ghanaian clergyman seeking interpreting services. Just regular African scam fare, it would seem. But the curious thing is that they seem to be customized per recipient, which makes them seem more credible than is usual in this type of hoaxes. One of the spams has Bishop Fosu Kuffor coming to Dublin and asks me to interpret for his Spanish speaking wife. In the other message the (dis)honorable bishop goes on a trip to Poland and likewise wants me to translate for his Hispanophone spouse. The spooky thing is that I speak Polish, Spanish and English, I was born and lived in Poland for many years. I am also currently living in Dublin. Now using some information retrieval techniques you could probably infer the former circumstances from my web page and Internet sources. But I have been in Dublin for a few weeks only and don't yet have that information on my homepage! Will future advances in AI, clairvoyance included, originate from spam research?

Cold-resistance of inhabitants of Poland

2005-03-22T15:52:00.000Z

A common reaction I hear from Southern Europeans when I complain about cold weather is: "Oh, you should be used to it, you are Polish after all". I have come across this apparently innocent comment so many times that I decided to respond in writing and at length (something that would not be appropriate in an inconsequential conversation). The informally expressed idea that Poles and other inhabitants of climes with harsh winters should not be bothered by cold can be interpreted in at least a couple of ways. First it may be meant to invoke the familiar phenomenon of sensory habituation, when the intensity of some sensation diminishes with prolonged exposure. So, just as you stop noticing a strong smell after a while, one should also stop noticing cold after a more or less prolonged period of being exposed to it. This could make a certain amount of sense if I arrived in a relatively mild climate straight from a Poland gripped by polar cold. In that case people could plausibly believe that I would not be too susceptible to a gentle cold spell in, say, Spain. But that is not the case, as I had those exchanges when living permanently on the Mediterranean cost. So habituation, if indeed there was any, would have disappeared by then. The second interpretation is that Polish people have biological adaptations that make them cold-resistant. There are indeed some ethnic groups that do seem to have biologically adapted to extreme cold, like the Inuit, who have a lower ratio of body surface to body mass (i.e. have a stockier build) than, say the Masai. But I don't think Polish people actually have any such morphological adaptations (certainly none that would be obvious to a casual observer). There are several factors that make their existence unlikely. Polish climate is nowhere as cold as in the Arctic. Second, the inhabitants of the zone have in all likelihood not stayed there long enough to develop morphological or physiological adaptations to local climate. And third and most important, any possible selective pressure towards evolving biological ways of dealing with cold would be seriously attenuated by cultural adaptations to the climate, such as warm clothes, warm and energetic food and well insulated and heated housing, and staying indoors in cold weather. Those mean that even during cold winters one rarely feels cold in Poland. Some of these important ways of dealing with cold weather, most notable adequately prepared housing, are much less common in Southern European countries such as Spain. And so it is entirely justified and not just plain contrarian that a Pole complain that they are freezing in a damp and airy Barcelona apartment in January.

The first post

2005-03-22T15:21:00.000Z

I have caved in to the peer pressure and decided to start a blog, like everybody else.