How to get up in the morning: the forceful approach
Topics: Projects | September 15, 2009 @ 5:00 PM
I have phenomenal amounts of trouble getting up in the morning. I’ve tried all sorts of things: alarm across the room, multiple alarms strategically placed to guide me to the bathroom for a shower, spacing alarms apart temporally, using my cell phone so that I think someone is calling, and a couple of others that aren’t coming to mind right this moment. No matter what, I always turn the alarm(s) off and go back to sleep. There was one time when I actually got up and got ready – showered, brushed, shaved, and even ate breakfast (which I almost never do) – but I had a few minutes before I had to leave, and in that time I fell asleep. I’ve missed countless classes because of this problem.
Why do I have so much trouble? Hard to say. Growing up, my parents always managed me and woke me up – I could always turn my alarm off because I knew my parents would wake me up. And when they did, I would go back to sleep until I heard them coming again, at which point I at least sat up so that I wouldn’t get yelled at. I never really learned to control myself in the morning, and as little self-discipline I have when conscious, when sleeping or sleepy it all goes out the window and I’m basically some sort of animal that single-mindedly pursues sleep (if only I pursued sex like that…).
That’s half of the set-up. The other half is that in January (2009), I was starting the last semester of my computer engineering degree, and I needed a design project. What better problem to solve than waking up in the morning? We can worry about “helping people” later, after we, you know, wake up in the morning.
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Real live skeptics!
Topics: Miscellaneous | June 4, 2009 @ 11:18 AM
I was out to supper last night (in Boulder, where I still am), and having discussed skepticism the previous night, the guy I was with pointed to another table where a few people were sitting and two of whom were wearing SkeptiCamp shirts. It was quite refreshing to see skeptics out in the real world and outside of my group of friends. Even though I read about these things all the time, it’s encouraging to randomly see a skeptic (though, for some reason, I’m not sure I’d be as excited to see someone wearing an OUT campaign t-shirt as I would to see someone wearing a skepticism-related t-shirt); it’s a bit like finding Bigfoot. Let this be an encouragement to skeptics to buy and wear their skepticism attire, in the (small) hopes that others can find the like-minded!
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NAACL HLT 2009 impressions
Topics: NLP, Thoughts | June 3, 2009 @ 4:59 PM
So NAACL is just finishing up (I’m at CoNLL tomorrow and the day after). This was the first time I’ve been to a big conference (well, any conference) and it was different from what I expected, but mainly only because of one thing: presenters suck. In order for a presentation to be good, a variety of things must be all be present. The presenter needs to be able to speak English without too thick of an accent; he/she should be able to enunciate; he/she should not be monotonous; he/she should know how to organize presentations and what information is appropriate to give in a presentation setting (vs. that of a paper); and really, most of all, he/she should NOT BE BORING. You take one of these things away, and the presentation’s quality instantly drops, and for people with an attention span like mine, that means that no matter how much I want to hear what the presenter has to say, I don’t.
My supervisor advised me beforehand that these things are more about networking than anything else and gave me some advice on how to do so. And after going through a number of these presentations, I can see that that is definitely preferable (even for someone as socially awkward and gauche as myself) to the waste of time that is many presentations – it almost seems as though I’d simply be better off reading the paper. The only thing that presentations get us is the opportunity to ask questions to the author(s) in person, and if these questions have good critiques they should really be done in an archived manner so that bad papers that somehow slipped through the review process get the criticism that they need. Unfortunately, NLP is very conference-driven and journals don’t play as much of a role as conferences do; in terms of content, journal papers generally simply have more detail (and hence are longer) than their conference counterparts.
Don’t get me wrong; some presentations were great, but they were by far the minority. It’s quite disappointing when you take the time to read through the abstracts to choose which sessions you’d like to attend only to find that you can’t pay attention to the presenter because he’s deathly boring.
On the flip side, I do have some very positive comments about the Student Research Workshop, which is where my paper was accepted for presentation. The workshop provided an opportunity for those students who are earlier on in their academic careers to submit works-in-progress in order to get comments from senior researchers in the NLP community as well as gain exposure. I wasn’t originally planning on revisiting the topic of my paper anytime soon, but some of the comments I was given have me quite intrigued and I may just come back to some of them at some point in the future. Having a publication can also give students a leg up on graduate school applications (if the publication is accepted in time, of course, which wasn’t the case for me). I’m deeply grateful to the organizers and hope I can help (in whatever way) in seeing more of these workshops happen in the future.
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