Happy towel day you hoopy froods!
Category: Quotes
There’s a very real chance that I’m going to want to post every single day of this calendar.
Today is my favourite “holiday” of the year.
Happy Towel Day you hoopy froods!
When you are staying at a friends place and they do online marketing as a day job, they get creative at your expense.
Received my copy of “The Meaning of Liff”. Immediately rewarded with some great words.
Abilene adj
Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow.
Abligo n.
One who prides himself on not even knowing what day of the week it is.
I never fail to think of Arthur Dent every week after a late night of playing hockey on Wednesday.
‘This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.’
– Douglas Adams,
The local eatery brought their A game today
just got this text from from @grantisagrant
soon his transformation will be complete
the ghost in the machine
as I moved my old posts to the new site I was struck by just how long it has been since I posted anything at all. if you knew where to look online you could confirm that I continued to exist, but it wasn’t readily apparent. I have had a number of interactions in public recently that have followed a simple script
<them>Woah! I haven’t seen you in years
<me> Yeah… I exist now and then
… spend an hour catching up …
<them> I hope to see you again soon
<me> hopefully it won’t be so long this time.
given that I am not actually a ghost, what has happened in my life that makes it appear that I only exist now and then? the short answer, I am doing a master’s degree in computer science full time and am completely wrapped up in my school work.
the longer answer makes up the bulk of this post. when I applied to do my masters I had every intention of working in the human/computer interaction field, but instead I have found myself pursuing machine learning. during the winter semester last year I took a course about machine learning and discovered that it is a field that connected well with my experiences teaching and working in online education.
so what is machine learning? often I will describe computer related work as “black magic” rather than trying to communicate the details of the work to people that don’t understand it. machine learning is a process where, even knowing all the details of the implementation, I am left believing it is some form of magic. in practice machine learning is the process of solving classification, categorization, or identification problems by training a system with some example data, and then introducing an unknown dataset you want to work with.
you might think to yourself, that seems kind of boring or pointless. trust me, it isn’t. everywhere I look in the media I see mentions of “big data” and “cloud solutions”. these are leveraging machine learning techniques to identify potential customers, treads you might be interested in, or how you will spend your money.
for the final project of the course I took we were presented with a dataset of short camera reviews collected from the web. of the ~45000 reviews in the dataset 2000 of them were labelled as “Pro” for a positive review and “Con” for a negative review. the remaining ~43000 reviews had no label at all. the goal was teach a machine learner from the small set of labelled reviews and have it identify the rest.
some of the training reviews
Pro “Very versatile”
Pro “great picture quality”
Pro “small, simple, cheap”
Pro “Compact, Lightweight, Easy to use, Good for use with little kids, No wasted film, Preview pictures and delete ones you don’t like”
Con “Battery hog, missing ac adapter and charger”
Con “Close-up capability”
Con “Menus are small.”
Con “Technology is still expensive, disks can be filled fast too, user needs a computer to get all the benefits”
as you can see there is a lot of variety in the training examples. some are lists of words, some are full sentences, some are short, and some are long. for the project I created a neural network and trained it using a technique called backpropagation. coming into the problem it seems like it would be quite difficult to determine intentionality from text alone, especially when the samples are all over the place.
instead I was shocked at how well my software could learn to identify intentionality in simple sentences. below I have included some examples from the unlabelled set along with the classification my learner gave them
Pro “Great resolution, versatile, zoom capability”
Con “It is just a bit noisy”
Con “battery usage high, availability of accessories low”
Pro “Portable size and great picture quality!”
Pro “reasonable price; user friendly camera”
Pro “The price!”
Con “CAN’T HEAR ON THE EARPIECE”
skimming through the ~43000 there are definitely some that it classifies incorrectly, but generally I found myself agreeing with the conclusions the software came to. it is truly a strange experience to write a piece of software from scratch and have it accomplish a task like this. everything that happens is something that I explicitly told the program to do, and yet the output is more than the sum of what I put into it.
after completing the project I couldn’t stop thinking about communication mediums and human ability to determine intentionality. the idea that humans communicate more non-verbally than verbally is an old one that is often dragged out to admonish the future generations for too much texting and technology. in my experience it is largely true that people have a hard time determining intent in text only mediums and from this I suspected a machine learner would struggle even more. instead I found that the necessary information is contained in text alone, but we likely haven’t learned to identify it.
I think there are a lot of interesting lessons to be learned about people in the process of teaching learning to computers.
an update! no way!
after a long hiatus I have made strides towards resurrecting website and turning it into something functional. for too long it has been in a half completed state of disrepair as a result of my choice to use it as a learning opportunity.
I recently concluded that I need my website to not be a project, but instead a tool that will enable me to explore ideas related to other projects and events in my life. as a result this iteration of my website is a wordpress install that I will modify to meet my needs. sometimes reinventing the wheel just isn’t a productive avenue.
as the header states I plan on writing about teaching, programming, and communicating ideas more generally. over the last few years these have been the subjects that have remained consistently relevant and interesting through life changes. I have also brought along the old posts I wrote, primarily for my own benefit. looking through them inspires some interesting reflection.
“a woman has the last word in any argument. (anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument)”
some of the best comments on the state of education from steve jobs almost 15 years ago.
What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy.
saving the trees with email, but what about our sanity
Now I am probably not your typical computer user, what with having a degree in computer science and all, but I think that there is a problem that we all deal with daily that most don’t even realize is a problem. Now I have somewhere in the ball park of 3 to 15 different email addresses, at any given moment sending an email to 10 of them may end up somewhere that I check and will respond. This is absolutely out of hand! Fear not though for I retain my sanity through the simple fact that my inbox is always empty. Yes Empty. About a year ago I listened to a talk given by a gentleman named Merlin Mann called Inbox Zero (Click here to listen, or watch the video below). I really suggest listening or watching, however if you are really lazy and don’t want to the gist of the talk is that if you don’t need it DELETE it, if it can be replied to in 3 sentences then use just 3 sentences, and finally learn the joy of search.
Watch (or listen) Away!
food for thought
Over my spring break I took some time to listen to the book “The Last Lecture” which was written by Randy Pausch and is based on the lecture he gave by the same title at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007. He was diagnosed with Cancer and used the lecture as an opportunity to pass on some advice to his children (who are small now) so he can influence them when they are older. The book was great and so is the talk. It is full of sound advice and also things that seem common sense at first but often we need to hear them again. I would encourage people to pick up the book or if you have some time to check out the video of his lecture below.