Monday, January 6, 2003

Technical Fun I signed a contract with Reuters news agency last week to get their repository of news articles that are marked up (i.e., by category, etc.). This will be a huge help in improving some of my NLP software tools. In the past, my wife Carol has spent a great deal of time helping me prepare training data for statistical NLP, etc. I have always been a computer geek. My father saw to it that I had access to computers starting in the early 1960s (thanks Dad!), I got a microcomputer (programmable in machine code) in 1976, bought the first Apple-I sold in San Diego (serial number 71), wrote a sucessful commercial product for the Macintosh when it was released in 1984, etc. Last year, I simplified my computer use and environment. I bought a Mac iBook (loaded with RAM), and stopped my constant dual-booting of my PC between Linux and Windows 2000. At the very least, my office is now more tidy. Mac OS X, for me, is the perfect computing environment: UNIX programming environment with a nice GUI and good commercial and free application support. Yesterday, I dragged my old dual Pentium PC (dual processors are vital for properly testing multi-threaded code, BTW) out of storage and set it up running in a storage closet. I installed an X server on my iBook so that I can run my old PC "headless" (i.e., no monitor or keyboard - just remote connections). This will make it easier to do really long AI training runs, etc. without having to leave my laptop running (and busy) for long periods of time. An excellent use for old computer hardware :-) 5:22:39 AM

Happy New Year OK, this is a little late, but to the 15 to 20 people who daily read my web log: Happy New Year! Last year was a little rough - my wife was diagnosed with cancer. The start of 2003 is looking better: she is doing well with her therapy, and we expect a full recovery. What Enables Happiness? Next to the big question: what is the nature of human consciousness?, the question of what enables happiness seems almost self evident. I would maintain that if one's family is safe, has wholesome food to eat (i.e., organic, mostly vegan diet :-), and a comfortable place to live, then true happiness comes from loving other people and definitely not the accumilation of material things. With the news in the U.S. of company CEOs bending laws to make enough money for yet another multi-million dollar vacation home (etc., etc....), it is easy to get pessimistic. However, I believe that this material values sickness is not totally prevalent, and that most people do not suffer from the greed of the immoral people who make the news. In the U.S., we are programmed for greed of material things by advertising, etc. Unfortunately, with the combined efforts of industry and Congress, it seems that the message is for people to borrow too much money for more material goods that they do not really need. I would like to see a graph of spending on SUVs versus education as a function of time (normalized by GNP). Fortunately, we (in the U.S.) do live in a free country - regardless of your political and economic beliefs, please do make sure to constantly let your elected representatives know what legislation you support and do not support. To fight back against the growing trend of corporate bribes (often called "soft money donations") to Congress, it is also a good idea for private citizens to donate regularly to advocacy groups who support your positions, whatever they are. 5:06:21 AM

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