Archive for the 'Odds'n'Ends' Category

10-01-21

Tags: I was working at home in my office upstairs when Ethan and Jessie came home from school. Ethan soon figured that he’d left his bookbag in the car and he told Jessie:
    I am gonna ask daddy to get my bag.
Jessie:
 
    Why don’t you go get the bag and I will tell daddy.
 
Ethan said […]

">Siblings
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09-11-15

Tags: Never mind what Health News 4 is promoting (or how I got there). I am just fascinated by how honest their small prints are — they tell you that the story, pictures, and comments are (possibly) fake. What about the icons at the top of their page? 
 
It is important to note that this site and the stories […]

">Honestly fake
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09-11-06

Tags:  

Google Lab’s newest toy, Script Converter, looks pretty interesting, although I have no idea how to read the "Indian scripts" in the output. 

">Google’s Script Converter

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09-10-21

Tags: Last Friday, Ethan, 6, weighed himself in the YMCA locker room and announced excitedly "I am 47lb!"
"I am 147lb," I said.
"Some pumpkins are 2000lbs, you know", he snapped back.

">Ethan on pumpkins and me
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09-09-15

Tags:psy117 Statstics Teaching NY Times published an article online on Sept 10 (according to the website, a version of this article appeared in print on September 11, 2009, on page A15 of the New York edition) titled Heckler’s District Mostly Supports the Outburst, in which the reporters cited 5 interviewees in support of Joe Wilson’s shouting "You lie!" during President […]

">Support or MOSTLY support?
»»» (Teaching, Odds'n'Ends, Statstics) | 0

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09-09-12

Tags:Linguistics Being a non-native speaker of English, I wonder about the name of BBC’s World Have Your Say – why "have"? Is "world" plural? Or is this imperative? "World has your say" clearly sounds bad, but can anybody tell me why?

">BBC - World Have Your Say
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09-09-09

Tags:Computing I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom to manage/edit raw photo files from my Nikon D80. With my pictures spreat to a number of computers, I have recently adopted a recommended strategy to consolidate Lightroom catelogs to an external hard drive so that I can open the pictures on any computer.
After exporting a whole catelog from […]

">Lightroom Catelog on an external drive
»»» (Computing, Odds'n'Ends) | 0

09-06-16

Tags: Ethan, my 5 year brother, was asked to fetch the newspaper this morning. 
"Oh, brother!" he cried.
"You don’t have a brother,"I teased.
"Yes I do, I am a brother!" he said matter of factedly.  
 
– guest post by Jessie 

">The evolution of the oh brother joke
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09-06-16

Tags: Like many smart kids, Ethan, 4 at the time, sometimes had to be corrected for grammar.
"hey, Ethan, do you say he do or he does?" I hinted.
"He do what he does." he said matter-of-factedly.

">He do what he does
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09-06-16

Tags: Picking among his favorite pants and shorts this morning, Ethan, 5, proclaimed
"I like life because it is interesting. "

">More Ethan Quote
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09-06-16

Tags: Ethan will be 6 in less than a month, and boy, hasn’t he grown intellectually and spiritually.
 
Yesterday was the last day of school and he came home early. By early afternoon I found him lying on the floor, bored. Then he turn to me and said:
"Dad, you know, you can’t really do nothing. Like I am doing nothing, but […]

">Ethan on God and Existential Philosophy
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09-05-15

Tags: Seriously, I found this word — unincluded — in a Ph. D. dissertation draft.
… and five 5-year-olds, who were unincluded due to reading ability. 
It was not a joke, at least I wouldn’t find it funny in the middle of the Method section. And no, the author is a native English speaker.

The "word" has, […]

">Unincluded, really?

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09-05-07

Tags:Computing Why did they think they needed a keyboard?

 

">Add a pen, the Kindle DX could be my note-taker

»»» (Computing, Odds'n'Ends) | 2

09-04-28

Tags:Teaching My colleague Liz Brannon has a new paper on the sense of 0 (nill, null, zero) among rhesus monkeys.
PsycNET
Empty sets as part of the numerical continuum: Conceptual precursors to the zero concept in rhesus monkeys.
Merritt, Dustin J.; Rugani, Rosa; Brannon, Elizabeth M.
Current issue feed Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Vol 138(2), May […]

">Monkeys have zero knowledge
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09-04-23

Tags:
Anybody knows what is the "Batesian" method of eye correction?
 
 
 

">LIFE image: Batesian method of eye correction?
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09-04-22

Tags:Computing Education Teaching Google Trends shows an interesting contrast between the search volume of "reading" and "math". It’s scaled on so that the frequency of "reading" over the years averages to 1.
 
A few interesting observations:
1. nobody cares about reading or math when the holidays are near. (it’s also possible that the overall search volume […]

">Google Trends: reading vs math
»»» (Computing, Teaching, Odds'n'Ends, Education) | 0

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09-03-09

Tags:Computing Amongst the hypes of Alpha, I looked back at MIT START, a natural language search engine, and found evidence of … well, what do you call it in an age of knowledge computation?
Here, start with START, and click on one of the pre-defined queries, Why is the sky blue? . And you get the following […]

">Sky is blue. Copy that 10 times.
»»» (Computing, Odds'n'Ends) | 0

09-02-18

Tags:Computing Linguistics One of those things pop up in your mind after 1:30am:
So far as I know, no computer programming language has a counterfactual conditional statement:
IF_CF (A) Then_Would_Have_Been  B
Logically something like this is pretty straightforward to add: it’s not like we don’t know how to deal with modal logic (well, a lot less but […]

">Why are there no Counterfactual statements in computer languages?
»»» (Computing, Odds'n'Ends, Linguistics) | 0

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09-01-14

Tags:Computing One thing I noticed lately as I watch the comments/spams on my blog site is that the spams are getting very personalized. Just today someone left what appears to be a relevant and somewhat intelligent comment on one of my old blog entries, except for the links and email.
Name: Payday Loans | E-mail: paydayloanslady@gmail.com | URI: http://www.checkcity.com | IP: 69.169.144.5 I agree. I don’t see […]

">Spammers may be contributing to the economy in ways you don’t expect
»»» (Computing, Odds'n'Ends) | 0

08-12-23

Tags: Orlando, FL. Dec 23, 2008. 
Jessie woke up this morning, and said she dreamed of the fudge she saw last night at a candy store in Downtown Disney:
"It was only $1.30, and it was soooo yummy!" she said.
Ethan cried: "that’s unfair!" 
 

">Unfair
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