They grow up too fast

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.

Brain bleach, stat

I’ve been poisoned with unwanted images of a corrupt 70-year-old Republican hopped up on Viagra demanding that a young woman service him, over and over.

Giuliani also took Viagra constantly. While working with Ms. Dunphy, Giuliani
would look to Ms. Dunphy, point to his erect penis, and tell her that he could not do any work until
“you take care of this.” Thus, Ms. Dunphy worked under the constant threat that Giuliani might
demand sex from her at any moment. Even when the Covid-19 pandemic halted Giuliani’s ability
to physically assault her, he demanded that she disrobe during their work-related
videoconferences.

It’s gross and disgusting and vile, but exactly what I should have expected of Giuliani.

A bombshell lawsuit out of Manhattan accuses Rudy Giuliani of forcing a former employee to submit to sex acts as a condition of her employment — including making her give him oral sex while he took calls from then-President Donald Trump on speaker phone.

“He often demanded oral sex while he took phone calls on speaker phone from high-profile friends and clients, including then-President Trump,” ex-staffer Noelle Dunphy claims in the 70-page lawsuit filed Monday.

“Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that he enjoyed engaging in this conduct while on the telephone because it made him ‘feel like Bill Clinton,'” according to the lawsuit, which seeks $10 million in unpaid wages and damages.

Like the worst of Bill Clinton.

I don’t want to hear more about the sex stuff, but I do want the law to dig deeper into the money stuff.

The lawsuit also alleges — buried on page 25 — that Giuliani asked Dunphy for help “selling pardons” for $2 million a pop. Giuliani told her that he and Trump “would split” the fee, the lawsuit alleges.

“He also asked Ms. Dunphy is she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split,” the lawsuit says.

Dunphy said she continued to work for Giuliani despite being “shocked and saddened by what had happened” because she feared losing the $1 million salary he had promised as well as free legal representation he had also agreed to give her.

It’s amazing how you can sit here thinking the crap from the Trump administration couldn’t possibly get worse, and then it does.

Where’s my Big Carrot money?

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.

Everyone hates Elsevier

Everyone. For years. As a grad student I knew what a parasite Elsevier was. Librarians hate Elsevier. You should hate Elsevier, if you don’t already. It’s a company with their boot on the neck of scientific information, and they’re one of the reasons you can’t easily get past the paywalls limiting access to information you already paid for.

Some editors are taking a stand and walking out on Elsevier.

More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier.

The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage, including professors from Oxford University, King’s College London and Cardiff University resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.

In case you’re wondering why…

Elsevier, a Dutch company that claims to publish 18% of the world’s scientific papers, reported a 10% increase in its revenue to £2.9bn last year. But it’s the profit margins, nearing 40%, according to its 2019 accounts, which anger academics most. The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free. They “peer review” each other’s work to verify it is worth publishing for free, and academic editors collate it for free or for a small stipend. Academics are then often charged thousands of pounds to have their work published in open-access journals, or universities will pay very high subscription charges.

That’s right. Somehow we all work for Elsevier. We reinforce that because we voluntarily make our volunteer work in reviewing papers for the publishing companies part of our praiseworthy work listed in our tenure and promotion reviews.

We have to laugh at our situation.

Ball o’ spiders

Isn’t technology wonderful?

That reminds me, I have many balls of spiders to tend to this morning.

When I used to debate creationists

I was reminded on Mastodon that I used to live in Eugene, and shared the city with a particular creationist that I debated, once. Then I was reminded again how old I’m getting because that debate happened in 2008, fifteen goddamned years ago. Bleh. It was a boring debate and I wasted my youth on it.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote about the debate with Geoff Simmons, way back in, I remind you, 2008. Some of you may remember that because you’re getting as old as I am.

It was a radio debate on KKMS, the regional Christian talk radio station, back when they’d occasionally bring me on to humiliate local Christians (they learned their lesson, eventually). I grabbed the recording before the station deleted the archive, and posted it on YouTube so you can enjoy it now.

Jesus, but he was stupid and dishonest. I was wise to finally give up that ugly habit.

Genetics…done!

All finals graded, grades submitted to the registrar, I’m gonna go take a walk. Later, y’all.

(I still have 4 term papers for the writing class to evaluate, but two of them earned an A in my preliminary assessment, so those are easy, and the other two will require a somewhat more thorough review. After I get some fresh air.)

Commencement 2023: the kids are all right

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.