PAT ROBERTSON IS DEAD! Everyone must dance.
He really was an awful person. It’s just too bad he lived to spew lies for 93 years.
Rebecca Watson reams out his corpse.
I took this little survey in the Washington Post that takes into account your income, number of dependents, and region of the country you live in, and it tells me that I am officially and totally middle class. I’m right smack in the center of the arbitrarily defined boundaries that delimit “middle class” — and that the way I got to this point was by getting rid of those pesky kids who were holding me back. Fifteen years ago, I discovered, I was way down deep in lower middle class territory.
Your household has a middle-class income, and you have the financial security associated with the middle class. Your income is similar to others in your Zip code above the median for rural Minnesota. Rural Minnesota is an inexpensive place to live, and you would still be considered middle income anywhere in the country.
It’s a comfortable place to be, but there is no hope that I will ever be wealthy. That’s good enough.
I won’t ask you what class you fall into, because only a grifter cares about that sort of thing.
A MacOS port of No Man’s Sky dropped this past week. Let’s try it out! This will be a short stream (half hour?) at 10 Central time today, and I’ll give it a quick trial.
This is all shiny and new, so I’m not going to be shocked if it crashes a few times. I also have no idea about performance — I’ve been running this on an Intel machine running PopOS Linux before this, and now I’m going to try it on a Mac Mini with an M1 chip and 16GB. Fingers crossed — it would be nice to see the Mac become a viable machine for gaming.
Wow, that went smoothly. No crashes. Performance was far better on my inexpensive little Mac then it is on my bigger, fancier Linux box (but to be fair, the Linux machine is 7 or 8 years old).
Apologies if you tuned in expecting nothing but gamer/gearhead talk, I mainly chattered away about our current research project. And spiders, naturally.
We’re in summer research training mode. Mary & I took one of our students to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse so that she could learn what the life of an arachnologist is like.
It was a little more kinetic and colorful than I expected. But good! These spider-verse movies are spectacular and intense.
To bring us back down to earth, this morning we’re headed out to Glacial Lakes State Park for some real spidering, which is a little more sedate.
They forgot the part where, when the experiment works, it unleashes an unspeakable horror that will destroy our way of life.
Exactly like what goes on in my lab every day.
Yikes. The Mac version of No Man’s Sky just dropped on Steam, and like all the previous updates is totally free to all who already own it.
I’m downloading it now, but won’t be able to get to it for a while. Maybe this weekend.
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.
