One of the most energetic voices of my youth is no more.
In a statement on Wednesday night, a representative said: “Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock’n Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”
Who is going to run the Thunderdome in the absence of Aunty Entity?
Uh-oh, my granddaughter Iliana has been warped by living with a grad student.
I guess she’s planning to have it done by her birthday. Everyone finishes their PhD dissertation by the time they are 5, right?
She sure picked a hard topic, though.
Our daughter, Skatje, passed her final defense, and now you all have to address her as Dr Myers. Her parents, Dr Myers and Dr Myers, are very proud.
It’s going to be awkward at Thanksgiving when someone asks us to pass the cranberries.
She might have growed up a little since this photo was taken.
My daughter, Skatje, is doing her PhD defense on Thursday, and Mary and I will be attending over Zoom. Naturally, not wanting to look like a dope, I thought I’d look up her work (finally) and get a little hint of what I’m going to hear. I’m already lost.
Hallo, I’m Skatje Myers, a PhD student in Computer Science (joint degree in Cognitive Science) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, advised by Martha Palmer.
My research focus is in accelerating development of new corpora for semantic role labels (SRL).
I’m investigating techniques for conducting active learning for semantic role labeling: How can we determine which sentences will most improve the model when annotated and added to our training data? This methodology enables us to improve annotation efficiency by selecting only the most informative sentences to annotate.
Additionally, I’m examining approaches for projecting semantic annotation cross-lingually: If we know what the semantic roles are in an English sentence, and we know the translation of that sentence, can we figure out which words to assign those roles to in the target language? These projected annotations may serve either as a starting point for manual annotation that will expedite the process, or as training data themselves.
I’m presently exploring these techniques specifically in regards to developing and expanding a Russian PropBank corpus.
I suspect that plunging right into a thesis defense in this field is going to be bewildering, but we’ll try.
Way to go, Weinersmith. You got me to stick the knife in, do I also have to do my own twisting?
Big Meat is training up influencers to propagandize meat eating.
This has been around for a while. Several years ago, a student at our local high school talked up vegetarianism — I think he even got an op-ed in the local paper — and almost immediately the Cattlemen’s Association showed up at the school to give away free steak sandwiches. I think they’re running scared.
We’ve mostly* given up on red meat for a number of reasons, but one of them is that the meat industry is incredibly wasteful and damaging to the environment. It’s very sad that the Lettuce Industry or Bean Corp. isn’t knocking on my door offering big bucks to chat up their delicious vegetarian items. Moderation doesn’t pay as much as indulgence.
*”Mostly” because we’re not fanatical about it. If we’re out visiting friends or family and they serve a lunch with meat in it, we’ll say thank you and consume it — we’re mainly just trying to cut way, way back on it. Heck, if the Cattlemen’s Association shows up at my front door and hands me a steak, I’ll say thanks and include it in that night’s dinner, and also tell them I won’t ever be buying their dead cows, or encouraging others to order it.
I’ve been through a lot of commencement ceremonies, and they all run together in my brain. It would be nice to say yesterday’s was exceptional, but it wasn’t — it was a joyous occasion, but it was much like many other well-run, appropriately managed events, and that’s good, because what you want out of this is respect and acknowledgement and a great send-off to all the students who are, we hope, going off to happy and successful lives.
As you might expect from a progressive liberal arts college, the program was pretty darned woke. The student body president, Dylan Young, is an American Indian from the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, and he gave an upbeat speech which touched on some of the unpleasantness of the last four years — the pandemic, an ugly incident in which conservatives plastered anti-gay and anti-trans posters all over campus, and the recent regent who whined about how we were “too diverse” — but emphasized student resilience. Our commencement speaker was Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, and he talked up liberal arts and small towns and hope for the future. The one I dreaded, the obligatory speech from a member of the Board of Regents (generally a stuffy lot of boring business people), was a pleasant surprise. Mike Kenyanya seemed to actually like and appreciate what the campus was all about. Maybe the regents aren’t all bad, after all.
It could have been so much worse. The University of Wyoming brought in Senator Cynthia Lummis as a commencement speaker, and she proceeded to give a god-soaked speech, dwelling on the Creator
of the Declaration of Independence and fundamental scientific truths, such as the existence of two sexes
…and got booed loudly. She was clearly taken aback.
Good work, students of the University of Wyoming. I don’t think our liberal students at a liberal university in a liberal state could have done a better job of expressing their displeasure. The only difference is that I think our administrators wouldn’t have brought in a disingenuous, dishonest loon like Lummis.
Elon Musk has announced that he has found a replacement CEO for Twitter, currently rumored to be an ad executive name Linda Yaccarino. That could change. Musk is a dorky flibbertigibbet who might change his mind depending on how the rumor is received.
It doesn’t matter, though. Nothing will improve.
I feel pity for anyone who gets lured into this position, although, given the kind of person who’d willingly associate with Elon Musk, I suspect any sympathy would evaporate after their first day on the job.
Oh, actually, this announcement is a distraction. Quick, focus on the Twitter noise, not the costly recall of Tesla cars in China!
Tesla will recall more than 1.1 million cars in China due to potential safety risks, the country’s top market regulator said on Friday.
Starting May 29, the US company will take back 1,104,622 vehicles that were produced between January 12, 2019, and April 24, 2023, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said in a statement, citing a plan filed by Tesla (TXLZF) with the regulator.
That’s nearly equivalent to Tesla’s total sales in mainland China during the four-year period. From 2019 to March 2023, Tesla sold about 1.09 million vehicles in the country, according to CNN calculations based on figures from China’s state-backed industry associations.
We’ll be talking about moderation. I’m pro-moderation — where do you stand on it?
No. Not at all.
Here’s a video that looks at him from the perspective of his professional duties. You won’t be surprised either at how bad he was at his job, both teaching and clinical work.
