updates on language technology for Paraguay

As I wrote earlier, we've been working on language technology for Paraguay. There are a few of us on some related projects, with the goal of building both useful translation software for Spanish-Guarani and a nice website where folks can do collaborative translations, eventually with computer-assisted translation included! We're building these tools with reusability in mind too -- they should be applicable to other under-resourced language pairs in the near future.

The first tool is coming along: we've been building out Guampa, the collaborative translation website; we should be ready for the first beta users really soon. We would love some help on this system: if you're into software development and/or want to help build resources for the Guarani language, let's chat!

Coming next, watch for the Tereré translation system and the accompanying Chipa word-sense disambiguation module, completing our "Paraguayan afternoon snack" metaphor for translation tools...

In related news, the Mozilla Paraguay folks have been really busy, gearing up to translate Firefox into Guarani, in collaboration with FP-UNA. The Guarani Ñe'ẽ discussion group has been buzzing about this; from my vantage point in the frozen northern anglohablante climes, it looks like everybody is pumped about this. Pretty exciting times.

language technology for Paraguay

Earlier this month, we went to Paraguay. Why'd we do that?

Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where people are bilingual with a European language and the indigenous language. Paraguayans, the majority of them anyway, really do speak Guarani, or depending on context, a mixture of Spanish and Guarani called Jopará.

While we were there, we talked with Guarani-language teachers at the institutes where they're training translators and linguists. They let us sit in on some of the classes and talk with the students. We're working on building them a computer-assisted translation webapp that will help us collect lots of bilingual text! This is going to be huge.

While we were in the area, we also talked with the local One Laptop Per Child folks; there's an OLPC installation in the little town of Caacupé, which is near Asunción. The OLPC folks said that we should probably go visit local grade schools. Which we did!

It hit me, after the first visit to the schools, how much we were making use of our foreign-white-scientist privilege. We didn't have anything to do with the OLPC project -- aside from a desire to collaborate -- 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 among los niños estadounidenses.

The really interesting thing here: the kids in Caacupé weren't so surprised to see foreign scientist-looking guys coming to talk with them. They were really friendly, and eager to show off what they could do with the laptops! I get the impression this happens fairly frequently.

So there's a lot of stuff that needs to get built, to make computer use in Guarani more pleasant.

• At a very basic level, it's hard for people to type the diacritics that you need for Guarani, if your keyboard layout is set to Spanish. The diacritics for Guarani actually aren't that weird; they've got tildes on some vowels, but you see that in Portuguese too.
• There's no good spellchecker. Guarani morphology is pretty complicated, so this is not an easy thing to build. But we know a guy who's working on it...
• Text-to-speech. They kids in the schools have text-to-speech for Spanish, and they love it! There's a program on the OLPC where you can send messages to a friend's computer, and the receiving computer will speak your message. It's hilarious. But it doesn't work for Guarani. And as you get further out into the country, the kids are more likely to be monolingual Guarani speakers...
• The computer-assisted translation website: we're working on it. I'll write more about this soon...

I gave a talk about all of this at the computational linguistics seminar: here are the slides!

this is something new and beautiful: Coursera and Udacity

Just last week, I finished the coursework for Coursera's machine learning class. It was great! I had a really good time with it, and I'm fairly proud of the accomplishment.

If you've been within earshot of me in the past few months, you probably know that I'm really excited about Coursera and Udacity and their ilk (including, but not limited to, edX, Khan Academy, and Duolingo). There are two experiences I'd like to contrast with taking a course on Coursera.

Some years ago, I was living in Atlanta and working a real job. And I went over to the Georgia Tech math department to see about taking some masters-level statistics classes, imagining that they would let me pay them lots of money in exchange for taking classes at the university where I had just graduated months prior. But it turned out that they wouldn't let me do this without being admitted for a full-time degree program.

Fewer years ago, I was starting my PhD at Indiana, and knowing exactly what I was there to learn, I picked out three classes: one on NLP, a computational linguistics class (from the Linguistics department), and one from Stats. I got a mild hassle from the department about my choices: these were all "fun" classes, and shouldn't I work on fulfilling my breadth requirements? I've since finished my IU coursework, and let me say: not all the classes I had to take as a result were very interesting, or even very well taught. Some were downright bad.

But now there are free online courses that are meant to be good, such that you take the ones you're interested in taking, as opposed to expensive in-person courses that may not be good, but you're obliged to take them anyway -- this is huge.

Whether or not you think that teaching in person is going to stay relevant, not everybody has access to good teachers in person. This remains true even for people at universities.

Moreover, online classes lower the barriers to entering or leaving a course to almost nothing. Want to sign up for a class just to try it out? Nothing could be easier! Don't enjoy it, or it's not what you thought it was, or find out you're busy with other stuff? Nothing lost, try a different one! But if you stick it out and put in the effort, then not only have you learned something, but also you get a certificate that says you finished! (maybe these could be OpenBadges sooner or later...)

There are going to be lots of bytes spilled about these things in the coming years, but just to make it clear: I'm jazzed about helping people who want to learn things get access to material about those things. And the World Music class is starting up soon, which my mother and I are going to take! Because why not?

take five minutes: support open access

tl;dr: Sign this petition to support open access for publicly-funded research!! http://wh.gov/6TH

Here's the situation: there's lots of scholarly work being done. And you, as a citizen of a country, are paying academics to do science (or whatever), write about it, and review the work of other scholars. The work that makes it through the reviewing process gets published, typically in a journal or at a conference.

Here's the problem: a lot of that scholarly work is then inaccessible to you. You have to pay to read it, and often you have to pay a lot. If you're at a well-funded academic institution, your university library has to pay a lot. It's a serious problem for universities as wealthy as Harvard. Where does this money go to? It doesn't go to the academics who wrote the papers, or those who reviewed them: it goes to publishing companies with absurd profit margins who have trouble pointing at what value they add to the process, aside happening to own prestigious journals.

Concretely, this is a problem for the independent researcher, for the small business developer-of-stuff who wants to get the latest developments, for the interested public who wants to read and learn and grow, for the precocious teenager. I've come to care kind of a lot about this issue: it's because I believe in science. I think it's pretty important: it should get out to as many people as possible, not just because the citizens paid for it in the first place, but also so we can make progress faster.

The National Institutes of Health have famously set up an Open Access mandate: all the research that they fund must be available to the public pretty soon after it's published. Many universities are doing the same thing. The Association for Computational Linguistics (who run the conferences and journals where I'm personally likely to publish), do a bang-up job of making all of their articles publicly available, and I'm really proud to be associated with them. But not every professional organization, and not every field's journal are like this. Most are not!

How can you help? Right now, there's a petition on the White House website where you can ask the administration to expand the NIH-style mandate to other funding agencies: I'd really appreciate if you'd take a minute to make an account and sign the petition. Click here: http://wh.gov/6TH

(hrm, I seem to have written about this back in 2007 too)

and we're back

Well done, Internets!

In solidarity with everybody doing the #j18 protests against SOPA and PIPA, I blacked out this blog and my academic web page; I'd be really surprised if this directly caused anybody to call any legislators. My email to my family on the topic was probably more effective: one of my uncles wrote back, saying he'd signed a petition. So: rad!

The protests seem to have been incredibly loud and fairly effective. At this point, a congressperson would have to be incredibly dense to not get the sense that the public outcry against censoring the Internet in the US is enormous. A number of Republicans, including some former co-sponsors, have taken the opportunity to switch to opposing the bills, which seems politically expedient. (article on DailyKos about this. Kos wonders why Democrats seem to be willing to be left holding the bag...)

But even if we manage to get SOPA and PIPA scrapped, we're still left with two fundamental problems.

(1) The MPAA and RIAA can try to break the Internet again later, because they'll still own a significant number of congresspeople. Say if OPEN picks up steam and gets passed, will that be enough for them? The music and movie industries have fought tooth-and-nail against new technologies for decades; what's to stop them from taking another run against the Internet, or against whatever we have in the future? How can we reduce their money and influence, over time? As an angry Internet activist, getting all of your family and friends to boycott all media produced by major labels and studios seems extraordinarily hard. I must admit: I totally bought an Andrew W.K. CD not too long ago, and we have Netflix at our house. Should we cancel it?

(2) More fundamentally: large companies can own congresspeople. How can we take control of Congress, as citizens? Note that I didn't say "take back Congress" -- there's been a disconcerting connection between money and power for our entire history. If you haven't read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, I highly recommend it.

People much more insightful and more dedicated than me have written quite a lot about this, but I suspect the solution really is campaign finance reform. Simply taking away the incentives to make awful decisions, while encouraging good behavior that at least some people like would probably result in a Congress that... makes fewer awful decisions and has a double-digit approval rating. I think term limits would also be useful, so that congresspeople don't have to worry about re-election so often (although, how to incentivize good behavior in the last term? ...), and some sort of rules to keep former congresspersons from becoming lobbyists, so we can prevent the Chris Dodd situation from happening again. He still goes by "Senator Dodd", but this year he quit the senate to become the head of the MPAA.

Oh, also: Super PACs, and the Citizens United decision.

However we move forward: today, a large number of people who had never tried to contact their elected representatives, now have. The more often we do it, the lower the psychological barrier! There are even phone apps: (android, iphone). I use the Android one all the time; it's extremely convenient.

Right. Anyway. Stop reading this blog, and go read what Lawrence Lessig has to say. I'll get back to doing some computational linguistics. Maybe you should too!

reading: Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero

Not too long ago, I read the very thought-provoking Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Doesn't, by Stephen Prothero, likely because it came recommended by Dale McGowan. The discussion of the history of religious education in the US is fantastic.

The main argument of the book is that, until recent decades, we knew quite a lot about Protestantism,  through instruction at home, in churches, and even in the school system. People apparently used the verb "catechize", as something you did to children. But this knowledge of what's actually in the Bible, and actual church doctrines is, these days, largely lost on us in the US, even though we're very caught up in our religious identities and church attendance is huge.

Political discourse is full of religious allusions, but we often don't get the references. I would have appreciated more examples of problems that this causes in practice -- is it really an issue for being a citizen in a democracy?

Prothero notes, early on, that Europeans are much less religious than Americans but more familiar with religious content. Dale McGowan says "faith is most easily sustained in ignorance"; knowing a thing or three about a few different religions makes it easier to not get caught up in any of them. Is the major problem caused by religious ignorance that it makes it easier for preachers and politicians to jerk people around by telling them that God says thus-and-such?

While Prothero doesn't address the question of why the more broadly-educated Europeans don't tend to be churchgoers, he does put forth a policy suggestion, that our curricula should have more information about the world's religions. And while I agree that it's probably a good idea, he doesn't say much about the sorts of changes we might see, with better religious studies education. I must admit, I have a hard time thinking of education-about-religion as anything except a strategy against the influence of seemingly-devout people.

Perhaps I'll pick up his more recent book, God Is Not One, about the fundamental disagreements between different religions, contrasting with the framing you'd get from Huston Smith or Karen Armstrong, who argue that different religions are grasping towards the same fundamental truth. I'm really curious about his personal position, because Prothero identifies himself as an Episcopalian, but hasn't thus far talked about any particular benefits of people believing any particular thing.

CMU's Avenue Project

Before there was HLTDI, there was Carnegie Mellon's Avenue Project, which seems to have had basically the same goal as us -- produce good machine translation systems for under-resourced languages, especially those spoken by under-resourced indigenous people.

Avenue itself doesn't seem to have been under-resourced, though -- they sent people to South America (Chile, Peru, Bolivia...) to collect training data, and seemed to have a lot of contacts with local educators and language experts. They got quite a few papers out of this line of research, and apparently wrote a lot of good software. They had a much deeper pool of money (and arguably talent) than we do.

And now... the website is dormant, the PhD students involved seem to have graduated, the data and software are not publicly available, and the researchers seem to have moved on to other things. (one of the resulting doctors is the illimitable Kathrin Probst, who hipped me to Avenue when we were both at Google Atlanta, although I didn't really grasp how serious it was at the time -- darn her for being so humble!)

They were pretty gracious in giving us the Quechua data that they collected (and said we could redistribute it), and I've been reading a bunch of their papers, but I'm left some sadness about the whole enterprise -- they surely already went through a lot of the problems that HLTDI is going to have to address. Why can't we just check out and fork their code?

... maybe I should ask for their software too. Science is supposed to be easily replicable, isn't it?

Machine of Death Remix Corpus!

Machine of Death is fantastic. And it turns out that most of the stories in Machine of Death allow derivative works...

And when I hear "derivative works", I think the word "remix". But what's a remix of a text? Cut-up poetry? n-gram models to generate ominous-sounding emails to your family? Counting how many times the word "of" appears? The original text, but with randomized capitalization? This is for you to decide. Well, it is now. Here's all the derivs-allowed stories, conveniently pulled out and converted to ASCII.

Machine of Death Remix Corpus.

Use this to train your poetry bot, or your story understanding system, or your unexpected other thing! Share and enjoy :)

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

I just recently finished reading Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Dan Everett; it's about the Pirahã people of the Amazon, and the years that he spent with them, originally as a missionary, but then as a linguist.

Everett has great stories to tell, and his telling of them is exciting -- moving to a tiny riverside village in the middle of the jungles of Brazil, with your family, sounds crazy. I can't imagine bringing small children into the rain forest...

His descriptions of the Pirahã culture and language are also fantastic; the Pirahã people only really want to talk about things they've experienced directly, and are largely uninterested in ideas and techniques from the outside world. It's basically not done for them to talk about things that no living Pirahã has seen. They don't appear to have a creation myth of their own, and aren't very much into creation myths that missionaries might have to offer.

And the language has all of these wild properties: most notably, it doesn't seem to feature arbitrary-depth recursion, so its modifiers don't stack, there aren't dependent clauses, and apparently the language doesn't have conjunctions at all. Also it can apparently be whistled or hummed, and it has evidentiality.

The whistle-ability and evidentiality aren't unknown among the world's languages; they just seem strange relative to most of us. The lack of recursion, though, throws into doubt a lot of what we think is inherent and unique in human language. Everett's claims have apparently caused a nontrivial amount of ink and vitriol to be spilled; he's been personally called a charlatan by Chomsky (according to wikipedia).

So, altogether: I enjoyed reading it quite a lot. Everett writes compellingly about his (and his family's) adventures trying to live in the rain forest, about the Pirahã people, about language and cognition and culture, and about his losing his faith gradually, on being confronted with a people who aren't much into abstractions or things that happened centuries ago -- and in fact don't talk about them.

my dialect and subjunctive verbs

I got corrected on subjunctive verb usage today, which I found odd enough to blog about.

My utterance was something like: "If it was..." -- and I got interrupted with "if it were". My immediate response: "My dialect doesn't do that."

Rudeness aside, what would you say, and under what circumstances? What are the odds, do you think, that my interlocutor has the "if I be..." construction?

from Dan Dennett: "Preachers who are not Believers"

From a recent article by Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola, "Preachers who are not Believers", which I saw on the International Cognition and Culture Institute blog.

They managed to reach out and find some actual pastors of churches, who happen to not believe much of what their church-people probably expect they believe, and interview them. They turn out to be really thoughtful, compassionate people. With jobs that must be pretty difficult at times. Awesome paper.

From Jack, age 50, a Southern Baptist minister of 15 years:

“OK, this God created me. It’s a perfect God that knows everything; can do anything. And somehow it got messed up, and it’s my fault. So he had to send his son to die for me to fix it. And he does. And now I’m supposed to beat myself to death the rest of my life over it. It makes no sense to me. Don’t you think a God could come up with a better plan than that?”

“What kind of personality; what kind of being is this that had to create these other beings to worship and tell him how wonderful he is? That makes no sense, if this God is all-knowing and all-wise and all-wonderful. I can’t comprehend that that’s what kind of person God is.”

“Every church I’ve been in preached that the Jonah in the Whale story is literally true. And I’ve never believed that. You mean to tell me a human was in the belly of that whale? For three days? And then the whale spit him out on the shoreline? And, of course, their convenient logic is, ‘Well, God can do anything.’”

“Well, I think most Christians have to be in a state of denial to read the Bible and believe it. Because there are so many contradicting stories. You’re encouraged to be violent on one page, and you’re encouraged to give sacrificial love on another page. You’re encouraged to bash a baby’s head on one page, and there’s other pages that say, you know, give your brother your fair share of everything you have if they ask for it.”

“But if God was going to reveal himself to us, don’t you think it would be in a way that we wouldn’t question? ...I mean, if I was wanting to have...people teach about the Bible...I would probably make sure they knew I existed. ...I mean, I wouldn’t send them mysterious notes, encrypted in a way that it took a linguist to figure out.”

Guns, Germs, and Steel on invention

For my holiday break reading, I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. I heartily recommend it! It's about the broad patterns in human history: lots of it is about the development of agriculture ("food production", he usually calls it), how and why it happened where it did, and the historical ramifications as societies develop and come into contact/conflict with other societies.

There's a lot about germs, too. The diseases that a society carries and develops resistances to are extremely important when running into another group. A people can be totally wiped out, faced with a disease it's not accustomed to.

But I wanted to share with you a bit that particularly resonated with me, as a technology-producing person.

Thus, the commonsense view of invention that served as our starting point reverses the usual roles of invention and need. It also overstates the importance of rare geniuses, such as Watt and Edison. That "heroic theory of invention," as it is termed, is encouraged by patent law, because an applicant for a patent must prove the novelty of the invention submitted. Inventors thereby have a financial incentive to denigrate or ignore previous work. From a patent lawyer's perspective, the ideal invention is one that arises without any precursors, like Athene springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.

In reality, even for the most famous and apparently decisive modern inventions, neglected precursors lurked behind the bald claim that "X invented Y." For instance, we are regularly told, "James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769," supposedly inspired by watching steam rise from a tea-kettle's spout. Unfortunately for this splendid fiction, Watt actually got the idea for his particular steam engine while repairing a model of Thomas Newcomen's steam engine, which Newcomen had invented 57 years earlier and of which over a hundred had been manufactured in England by the time of Watt's repair work. Newcomen's engine, in turn, followed the steam engine that the Englishman Thomas Savery patented in 1698, which followed the steam engine that the Frenchman Denis Papin designed (but did not build) around 1680, which in turn had precursors in the ideas of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens and others. All this is not to deny that Watt greatly improved Newcomen's engine (by incorporating a separate steam condenser and a double-acting cylinder), just as Newcomen had greatly improved Savery's.

Foundation Beyond Belief launches!

The new website for the Foundation Beyond Belief is up! The mission is: "To demonstrate humanism at its best by supporting efforts to improve this world and this life; to challenge humanists to embody the highest principles of humanism, including mutual care and responsibility; and to help and encourage humanist parents to raise confident children with open minds and compassionate hearts."

Foundation Beyond Belief is a non-profit, charitable foundation that wants to encourage compassion and charitable giving for [secular] humanists. It's also working on providing support and education for non-theistic parents.

However you might feel about churches, one thing that they're good at is charity and volunteer projects. You're big-hearted and well-meaning -- but do you have somebody reminding you to volunteer for Habitat For Humanity and donate to feed the homeless every week? Apparently in the US, religious people give more to nonprofits than non-religious (according to this guide from Mint, via FriendlyAtheist).

That's what FBB is for. With FBB, you can make one-time donations, or sign up for monthly giving, and you choose how your donation is distributed! Contributions are tax deductible, and go 100% to the organizations benefited! (you can also choose to donate to FBB itself, which of course has operating costs)

There's an online community, etc! Pretty exciting!

Today's viewing: Linus on git.

Not too many months ago, Linus gave a talk at Google about git, the distributed version control system he built for use in managing the Linux kernel. He spoke, in typical non-diplomatic Linus style, about why everybody should switch to git and why CVS, Subversion, Perforce, and non-distributed source control in general is broken.

"There's a few of them in the room, I suspect -- you're stupid!"
-- Linus calls out the svn developers on hand

The Linux kernel team had previously been using the proprietary BitKeeper, which a number of kernel developers (including Alan Cox, with his Mighty Unix Beard) chose not to use. Before that, source control for the kernel was handled by sending patches around -- preferable to using centralized source control, according to Linus.

So let it be known that I haven't actually /used/ git yet, or in fact any distributed source control system -- but I like the idea so far. In this post, I'll outline the reasons Linus lays out for why we should be using git.

First off, the distributed nature of git also has performance and convenience benefits, from the simple fact that it doesn't need to make network roundtrips. Having your own repository on the local machine means that you're always set to go, even if the network is slow or unavailable.

Secondly, traditional source control makes branching and merging branches hard (Linus points out that many real-live software developers have never done it), so you don't want to commit your work until it's ready to be seen by others -- this means that you can't do much version control during the actual code-writing process. Contrastingly, in distributed source control, every checkout acts as its own branch, so each developer has at least one. This has the benefit that you can commit to your own repository whenever you want -- and then back up to previous versions whenever you like.

Centralized approaches to source control are particular drag when people are depending on your committed code as correct, or at least non-breaking -- you're not allowed to commit until your changes are ready for the rest of the team. As a project gets bigger, the associated test suite (hopefully) does as well, eventually leading to a pretty involved testing procedure that developers are supposed to complete before committing. And as Linus puts it, "... people make one-liner changes and ignore the test suite, because they know that those one-liners can't /possibly/, /possibly/ break." And then these breaking changes get pushed out to the rest of the team. The alternative approach, with git, is that you commit to your own version of the repository whenever you want, and when you're ready, your teammates can pull from you -- but in the mean time, you get all the benefits of having your own branch(es).

Thirdly -- social benefits! In his development process, Linus only pulls code from ten or fifteen other developers, whom he trusts to have filtered "up" appropriate changes from the people that they interact with. As he puts it, "if you have determined that somebody else is smarter than you -- go for it!" So the Linux kernel source control process mirrors the social networks of trust that make the whole thing happen. In the end, a lot of people end up only looking at the Linus branch, the defacto "official" one.

This dodges the social issue of giving out commit access to the central repository. Traditionally when managing a project, you create this class of people who are "ostensibly not morons", and typically, you make that group of people too small. Distributed model makes this go away, because everybody has his own branch. And if you happen to do good work in your own branch, then people start pulling from you! "That alone means that every single open-source project should use nothing but a distributed model."

So. That's what Linus said. Will everyone switch to git or some other distributed source control? We'll find out. Adoption would certainly be helped out if major project-hosting sites like Sourceforge or Google Code added git support. But sort of the point of the distributed model is that there's no one central hosting point...

Maybe I'll try it out. I'll let you know.

this blog post: for you, $50.

I recently met a fellow who's working on a doctorate in literature, but his previous background is in Library Science^W. I wasn't sure what the interesting problems in library science might be, so I wandered over to the wikipedia article and started falling through the links.

A few links out, I ran into the Serials Crisis article. Apparently (and Wikipedia articles close to the "Library Science" one are never wrong), the costs of subscribing to scholarly journals keep on going up -- libraries only have so much money for subscriptions, but there are ever-more academics and subfields, thus more journals. And if a given library cancels its subscription from a particular journal, that publisher's fixed costs are still fixed, so prices increase for the remaining subscribers.

The traditional academic journal system had seemed pretty shaky, especially in light of the Web; upsetting publisher websites (Springer, ACM Portal, IEEE's site...) seem like their sole purpose is to keep the enterprising students from reading an article. In light of how most of the science behind the articles is publicly funded in the first place, the articles seem like they should be public as well.

I wouldn't mind seeing companies like Springer just going away; universities seem totally capable of hosting journals -- over the web especially! There may be some compelling reason for the current system, and I'll try to find it out... but for the short term, tools like Google Scholar could go a little further out of their way to help us find the full text of an article!

Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_journal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_publishing
The Serials Crisis: A White Paper for the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholarly Communications Convocation
The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing

further readings: one day, I'll have something coherent to say about type systems

The first finder of any error in my books receives $2.56; significant suggestions are also worth $0.32 each. If you are really a careful reader, you may be able to recoup more than the cost of the books this way.

However, people who have read the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves should not expect a reward for criticizing the ways in which I use commas. Punctuation is extremely important to me, but I insist on doing it my own way.

-- Don "The Lion" Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming homepage.

*laughs* We love you, Don.

Also: there's so much to read in this life. I've recently picked up books on proper C++ technique, security, and proper unit testing, and I'll probably give those some priority on my ever-growing Queue. Of course, there's all those books on statistical NLP that need to get read in the near future if I'm going to be of any help to anyone.

I've been in on a few conversations recently about C++ and pitfalls and bugs that can arise when using it. The more I think about these, particularly random language-specific casting rules and several different competing ways to represent strings, the more I think that Haskell is going to be a good idea. Or possibly SML.

retrocomputing from the other side of the pond

Here's what I found out on my recent voyage through the wikipedias! Semi-vicarious nostalgia ahoy!

In the early 1980s, the BBC started an initiative called the BBC Computer Literacy Project, a major part of which was the production of the BBC Micro, a machine produced by Acorn Computers, complete with its own line of peripherals including expandable memory and various pluggable co-processors. There was an associated television show, The Computer Programme, which ran in various incarnations through the decade and featured music from Kraftwerk. The computers came with BBC BASIC, a rather more advanced system than the BASICs that were shipping stateside -- it had proper named subroutines and if/then/else, features most users on the MS-DOS side of things wouldn't see until QBASIC.

The mind-blowing part of the project was Telesoftware, whereby computer programs were sent embedded in the broadcast television signal, using Teletext, which is how the closed-captioning data was sent in Britain at the time. Analogue technology like broadcast TV feels so alien these days... but the Beeb was busy using it to send example programs to eager learners at home.

There seems to be a pretty active online community of BBC/Acorn enthusiasts out there, two and a half decades later.

You know how to use the Googles, of course, but here's another, more detailed overview of the BBC/Acorn system.

Alice wants him. Bob fears him. Charlie wants to be him.

Bruce Schneier not only has a Bruce Schneier Facts page devoted to him -- he's aware of it and has a favorite Bruce Schneier Fact.

My favorite so far: "Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it." -- Bruce Schneier in the comments

Programmatic poetry: oh noetry!

Automatic generation of texts has been on my mind for rather a while. Particularly, I've been thinking about poetry and the what characterizes it, in contrast to, say, technical manuals or want ads. Some (five?) years ago, my cohort Esther and I had set at the generation problem from an ontology standpoint, trying to figure out what it would take to get thematic relationships into an automatic poem. We didn't get very far, probably because at that point my first instinct was to code everything from scratch in C!

Anyway, it turns out that there are non-me people interested in this sort of thing, and the ever-helpful Graham has pointed out a bunch of interesting things happening in the field!

- The prosthetic imagination is a blog by a one Jim Carpenter, who's been working on Erica T. Carter (aka "the electronic text composition project", mentioned on GrandTextAuto here), which uses probabilistic grammars to generate free verse poems. I think the output is pretty convincing ("convincingly what?"); according to Mr. Carpenter, it's rather unnerving to readers who've been informed that they were composed by machine.

It's interesting how people react, when confronted with "creativity" from a non-human source; one is reminded of Douglas Hofstadter's surprising reaction to David Cope's lovely work with algorithmic music composition, which makes music, in a sense, in the style of other composers.

I'll have to read more, but I'm not entirely sure, if it's just using hierarchical grammars, how Erica is different from The Postmodernism Generator (the best-known use of the world-famous dada engine)... but I'll report back on this later.

- There is an Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo. Interesting!

- Gnoetry is another system out there, and a very prolific one at that, apparently connected to this super-fascinating Beard of Bees publishing group. Language is a prosthesis of an ancient neuro-chemical regime; but now the chemical author is dead. Gnoetry places language at a remove from its typical sources: pre-conscious governance, psycho-historical flux, conscious-mind narration. YES. I will be getting in contact with these guys.

- At upenn, they have a series of readings, M^<4|\3, with all sorts of "literary uses of technology" things going on, including, next week, Flarf poetry (!) .

- Speaking of literary uses of technology, the GTR Language Workbench looks like something between Eclipse and a word processor... I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.

I'm all excited. Let's get hacking.

Possibly interesting, but almost definitely not useful!

- My aunt, years ago, had a Newton eMate 300, and I recently found a Newton PDA while cleaning out the space behind an A/C unit -- in any case, I've had this weird fascination with Newtons for years. Now, you can relive the Newton Magic that you probably never experienced in the first place, under emulation! The Einstein Platform is a Newton emulator that works pretty well -- and you can find Newton ROM images here. It's kinda interesting. (Although I got stuck in fullscreen mode once, careful!)

- Self. It's been ported to Linux. It's one of those languages that one feels like one should learn more about. It has interesting family relationships with SmallTalk and Dylan and JavaScript...

- Thinking Meat celebrates the holidays. I just found this blog, but over at the Thinking Meat Project, she has a lovely article about taking part in the culture around the holidays and coming to terms with the cognitive dissonance from enjoying good Bach choral music while feeling like one shouldn't be participating in religious rites, for consistency's sake. It can hard to balance these things, particularly soon after giving up a faith.