enlg practice talk

ENLG talk went ok. I felt very unready, what with me tripping over myself last night (two rehearsals at home) and this morning. Trip trip trip. But somehow survived the practice talk. Some weak spots, got very long and boring in the beginning, which is BAD, first impressions and everything and a couple of sloppy bits otherwise. Also failed to give a proper motivation. Oh well.

But comments say that it was clear, so I ought to be happy. P thinks I'm not quite using the remote control right, in that now you lose the sort of natural transition between slides when the guy sticks a new slide on the transparency, or pushes a button on his computer. I agree, but I'm addicted to being able to stand right up next to the screen where I can interact physically with my slides. Ideally, the laptop would be within reach, actually slightly out of reach but no more than one step.

I guess I'm making progress. I made a conscious effort to go reeeeeaaaaaalll slow, don't know if that worked. Talking slow just does NOT come naturally to me.

Always room for improvement. Wonder if I'll ever hit a hole in one, just cinch it the first time. It seems like I'm always going to need several practice talks with people commenting, just fold it over and over and over again until it flows out naturally. Can't believe there are people who don't rehearse.

My ideal talk, sort of the goal in my speaking life is to produce the Perfectly Comprehensible Talk. Still a long long ways to go. One of my problems is a kind of heavy handedness. I don't know how to leave things unsaid, how to work with not-saying. So I end up doing lots of blah blah about obvious things. I've seen other people just get it Right, a kind of light touch, no blah blah, no need to be all excited and animated, they just go, zero bullshit, zero stress, posé, full clarity. But that's not me. Oh and honesty and correctness are important too, but I hope I've gotten that bit down.

Otherwise, helped A with GenI a bit and attended a nice tutorialy talk about presupposition by MS .

Anyway, guess my month of June is over now.

short day

Today felt very short: team meeting (saw a good talk by one of our PhD newbies, and had some enjoyable cake by another newbie); sat around having coffee after lunch; now leaving early for gym.

Got in this morning and started to stub out the polarity filtering article; got kiloword written, but it's all freewritten crap, same old page blanche problems. I'm wondering how much of my Masters thesis and my ESSLLI (or other) papers I can melt into this. Also worried about our examples, can't seem to find a good example that illustrates structural ambiguity; everything we have to sell the techinque shows lexical ambiguity, which might confuse things because we really are just using it for structural. Problem with structural ambiguity is finding a simple, minimal example using the same lexical items, with two mutually incompatible things. You want something that looks like

A1 B1
A2 B2

such that A1 and B2 don't really go well together. (Anyway not incrementing my page counter because the text is all filler)

Writing some more code. Have a new 'experiments' directory dedicated to scripts and results related to specific experiments. Definitely LOVE the new libgeni (ghc -package GenI) because I can now do scripts like this without making a mess of the GenI stuff or writing huge Makefiles, whatever. Just cute little one-off packages that do one specific job without trying to save the world. Sorry I keep going on about this libgeni shit... it's just that sometimes you do something, and you keep finding out, time and time again that it was the right decision after all and you wonder what the heck you've been putting it off all this time. This is one of those situations, one less headache!

Building now a simple parser for the annotated pass/fail/output stuff. Just a bit of Parsec code, nothing special (yay Parsec! simplifies life so much). Hope I'm doing this the right way. I hope I'm not programming too much. I always have this problem of making things too complicated. If I was a better programmer, I would figure out how to do this in a simple elegant fashion that doesn't actually involve writing a new script/program.

bayesian reasoning for idiots (erics)

Also reading this very nice intro to Bayesian reasoning. I see this stuff OVER and OVER again, and each time I have to think very hard and derive the theorem myself to make sure it makes sense. I convince myself and then forget all the intuitions. I sound like a combination of all the things is this blurb:

Maybe you don't understand what the equation says. Maybe you understand it in theory, but every time you try to apply it in practice you get mixed up trying to remember the difference between p(a|x) and p(x|a), and whether p(a)*p(x|a) belongs in the numerator or the denominator. Maybe you see the theorem, and you understand the theorem, and you can use the theorem, but you can't understand why your friends and/or research colleagues seem to think it's the secret of the universe.

talk UI

I'm not going to comment on the content of the talk I saw this morning (which I did appreciate, although I don't have enough background or big picture knowledge to see its full significance), but I can say that it seemed to get all the UI parts right: no fluff (stupid flashy things), but discrete where-are-we markers, bib references on the slide without needless mention à haute voix, highlighting the ONE thing you need to pay attention to; etc. It's all about small details. The reason I get so obsessed with this kind of stuff [again, probably doing it badly myself] is that (i) it is relatively easy (ii) it can go a long way, be a big difference between me getting lost and disconnecting or following along and learning something. Hard, because you don't want people to worry too much about presentation (instead of content), but you do want them to worry just enough to make the presentation as easy-to-digest as humanly possible. It's not about dumbing things down but getting the stupid little details exactly right.