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| Someday, perhaps soon, I'm going to learn that when I'm looking for some small object -- a book, my shoes, a glass that I'll probably refill soon, maybe a sweatshirt I was wearing earlier... and I can't find it where I left it, y'know, in some sensible place where I can find it again [0], like on the table, or on the floor... ... it's because Lindsey put it away, in some sense ♥ . My book is now on the shelf, or tucked into the book holder in the coffee table. My shoes are in the shoe-cubbyhole by the front door. The glass is in the sink or maybe the dishwasher. I'll stop being surprised sooner or later! [0] I'm keeping it "in cache", in my mental lexicon. It's an efficiency hack. | ||||||||
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Alex R.
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May 12th, 2013
May 5th, 2013
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| Wow, huh. That would be the end of my tenth school year at a university. I need to get this finished, yeah? On Wednesday night, my phone (via Google Now!) alerted me that Ghostface Killah had a show on Thursday night! And I wasn't about to miss Ghostface Killah coming to Bloomington, and Lindsey wanted to go, so we went! His new project is this wild concept album, working with Adrian Younge, and their show was this borderline rock-opera, complete with a fantastic soul band, costumes, costume changes, audience participation, and the plot of the album. And the band was amazing, holy cow. There was this weird tension, though -- I think most of the people at the show were over-excited 21-year-olds who were thinking "holy crap, I'm at a Wu-Tang Clan show!"... they wouldn't stop yelling "Wu! Tang!" and didn't seem all that into the actual show, but were more into the idea of being at the show. It must have been frustrating for the band and Adrian Younge... On the other hand, they did take a few breaks in the plot to do some Wu-Tang classics. Maybe the most amazing part of the show: when they did Protect Ya Neck, they brought some local kids up on stage to do ODB's verse. With the explicit instructions to the audience: if the first kid doesn't do a good job with the verse, he's getting booed off stage. And the first kid wasn't loud enough, or didn't come in at the right time or something, and sure enough, he got booed off stage. Ouch! The second kid, though. He nailed it. A lanky young black guy in a sea of white faces, and he hit it just right! There he was, rapping onstage with Ghostface Killah, and he nailed ODB's verse, and everybody in the audience went bananas (moreso than before, even). At the end of the song, he hugged Ghostface (who was like twice his size; he's a tank), faced the audience like absolutely resplendent, beaming. And he crowdsurfs off the stage, back to his spot in the audience. After the show, we came back home and I finished up my grading for the semester. And! Friday and Saturday, we hung out with Dr. Andy Keep, PhD and his family to celebrate Andy's graduation! He didn't walk and get hooded until yesterday, but he's spent most of the Spring already done and working at his postdoc. And the whole situation was lovely; his family is great. | ||||||||
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April 9th, 2013
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 (what?) Also: please feel free to add your own. http://www.kidnappedbyninjas.com/ | ||||||||
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April 6th, 2013
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| You're probably wondering how fast people run a half marathon in Bloomington. Pretty fast! I did the Hoosier Half Marathon (formerly called the "IU Mini") this morning with a bunch of friends from BARA, and it was lovely! Lindsey and I headed out to the start early in the morning -- she went to cheer -- met up with the BARA folks, stood around and drank some coffee until it was time to go, and then we were off! It's the same course as it has been for the past few years, and the weather was beautiful, and I was basically just going for a run with my friends. There was some sunshine and it was pleasantly cool; nice Spring weather. I wasn't trying to break any records today, but I kept up a pretty good pace since I felt good! Hit it in 1:38:02, going at pretty steady 7:30 minute-miles despite the fairly serious hills. Then we stood around by the finish line and cheered for friends! Yay :) Complete results here, if you're interested. | ||||||||||
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March 28th, 2013
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 lindseykuper and I did a SIGBOVIK paper!To my fannish friends: I hope you like! Or at least, I hope you're not too mad. Fandomized Algorithms and Fandom Number Generation Also, there's an implementation! We have running code for fandom number generation. Check check check it. | ||||||||
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March 26th, 2013
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Over spring break, I went with my advisor Mike and collaborator Alberto on a trip to Paraguay! We're interested in Paraguay mostly because of their interesting language situation -- they're pretty much bilingual there, with Spanish and Guarani. It's one of the few places (maybe the only place?) in the Americas where it's pretty common for non-indigenous people to speak the indigenous language. While we were there, we spoke with Guarani-language teachers, where they're training translators and linguists; we went to a few different schools, observed some classes, talked with language policy folks that Mike knows. Lots of people to meet, and lots to learn about how they're doing translation and language learning. Also on Monday and Wednesday, we went out to the next little town over, Caacupé, where they've deployed One Laptop Per Child laptops for all the kids. We talked to the school administrators there, and also the OLPC folks. They've got this office full of little green laptops there, and kids come to get their laptops fixed up, when they need help. The school administrators told us we could just go visit some schools, so we did. Our visits to the schools were probably the most striking parts of the trip. We went to these little school in Caacupé and strolled right in -- the teachers might have been expecting us -- hopefully the administrators told them we were coming! But we looked really out of place! Alberto's from Paraguay, if rather more cityfolk -- but Mike and I are so clearly foreign, rolling in with our beards and curly puffy hair. And we walked on in to the school, said hi, and got to talk with teachers and students at two different schools. The kids in both places were really friendly -- they were excited to show us their laptops and how they used them. They use them a lot! Some of the kids already knew how to use Scratch (but I showed some other kids, who hadn't played with it yet). One of the things they really like to do is send messages to one another and have the computer say the message out loud! (OLPCs know how to do that, which is rad). But here's the problem -- the laptops can only pronounce Spanish! There's no text-to-speech voice for Guarani. Yet. And the kids in Caacupé really do speak Guarani -- though they spoke Spanish to us. And there was one little boy who told us he'd moved there from Argentina, so he didn't speak Guarani. The kids were so chatty! I think they're used to foreigners coming to talk to them about the laptops. It hit me, after the first visit to the schools, how much we were really making use of our foreign-white-scientist privilege here. We didn't have anything to do with the OLPC project (aside from a desire to collaborate with them), but here we were, wandering into schools without so much as a release form, talking to the kids. I'm trying to imagine Paraguayan scientists coming to the US to observe technology use in niños estadounidenses. I'm not going to complain about that, though -- we're going to do something good and useful for Paraguay and one of the languages the kids speak! Just... wow. We spent some time talking with the teachers (and drinking tereré, which pretty much everybody in Paraguay seems to drink all the time) about what they'd want in language tools -- one of the major problems is that it's hard to type the funky Guarani ãccẽnts on the OLPC keyboard. I stayed with Alberto's family! They have a lovely house in Asunción, and they took really good care of me while I was there -- they made veggie food even! When I got back, I gave a talk about what we're doing at ClingDing, the computational linguistics seminar: http://cl.indiana.edu/wiki/GuaraniCompu It's really nice to be back. But now: we gotta build this stuff. My work, it's cut out for me. We're going to need about twelve more programmers. It'd be good if they were Paraguayan. | ||||||||
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March 19th, 2013
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| (NOTE FROM THE FUTURE! I meant to post this earlier, while I was still in Paraguay. I'm back now, as I post this on 19 March! It was a pretty good time! Here's the slides for the talk we gave! http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~gasser/Talle Hanging out with my advisor Mike and colleague Alberto; I'll probably write about this trip quite a lot in the near future. But this is the most time I think I've ever spent with Mike all at once; it's pretty cool. Problem with hanging out with Mike (a polyglot, and linguist and cognitive scientist by background) and Alberto, who's pretty fluent in English but a native Spanish speaker -- we end up talking about language a lot, including differences in English/Spanish subjunctive. Here's what we came up with just now, while we're trying to put our talk together: - I suggest that he do it. (OK) - I suggest he do it. (OK) - I suggest he does it. (ungrammatical) - I suggest that he does it. (OK, but has a different meaning) ... the point being, a lot of the time, English speakers drop the subjunctive information, but not in this case... | ||||||||
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February 24th, 2013
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| Talking with my dad on the phone this afternoon, I brought up Open Access and that protest thing we've been doing -- because clearly that's all I talk about these days. He's a real estate developer and self-described capitalist; I love him so much. We just have some seriously different instincts about a lot of things. His suggestions: - "So if the publishers are charging $50 for a paper, why can't you undercut them? Set up a competing publisher where you only charge $10!" - "Maybe give a cut to the authors on every sale..." One of us got the big money hustla/entrepreneur gene. Maybe it's recessive? | ||||||||
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February 17th, 2013
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| I've been hammering on this idea that we should fix the ACM for a while now. So in an effort to do something about it, I launched a petition/protest site! You can sign it to push the Association for Computing Machinery to make CS research papers available to the public -- please sign and share broadly, so we can build momentum and make this a thing! teardownthispaywall.appspot.com Clearly, publishing models are not the world's biggest problem. There are all kinds of worse problems in the world, and even many more worse social problems within computing. But I want to fix this, for a number of reasons. I think it's winnable in the near term. I think we should make the major professional society for CS into something that we can be proud of. The field that invented the Internet, and the professional society currently headed by the guy who invented the Internet should make use of the Internet to get knowledge to everybody, with the lowest possible barrier to entry. Because great new ideas often come from unexpected people and unexpected collaborations. And making it even a little bit harder to get a paper excludes people. There's a huge difference between "ohh, they're not that expensive, and anyway you can find most of them on the authors' websites" and THEY ARE PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE IN A CENTRAL LOCATION ON THE WEB PLEASE READ ANY AND ALL OF THEM THAT YOU FIND INTERESTING. ALSO DO TEXT MINING. And don't you want people to read your paper? Isn't your work important? If it's not, why are you doing it? | ||||||||
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February 14th, 2013
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 ... I'm only so convinced, to be honest. But I suppose I'll hang out here until I have a new first name. | ||||||||
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Alex R.
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