Sharp Dressed Man

aka: Why you should always take your wife with you on business trips. 

Scott is giving his talk at the conference today, so we’ve chosen a suitably professional ensemble with a few fun elements thrown in too.  I stick to the general rule that when wearing a suit, men’s accessories should be kept to a maximum of three, including the watch but excluding the wedding band.

So we went for a black suit with a conservative blue and white stripped shirt with white collar and cuffs.  For accessory number 1- the cufflinks, we went with his black lego pair.  This is after all an academic conference.

For the tie, we also went the less conservative route.  We then paired it with accessory number two- his St. Andrew’s Cross tie bar.

For accessory number three, he chose to wear his watch.  It’s one of those skeleton affairs, and he loves it. 

So here are the final results:

I’m sure he will be thrilled this evening when he sees his pictures plastered all over the interwebs, but I couldn’t help it.  He looked far too good for me to resist. 

Preparation And Planning

It isn’t long now until we fly out to Hong Kong, and we’re really looking forward to it.  We’ve been doing plenty of planning, figuring out where to go, how to get there, what to eat, and importantly what NOT to eat.  You can be sure we’ll fill you in on all the hopefully not too gory details (we’ll have WiFi).

I’m also fully prepared for my talk at the conference.  Having ironed out a lot of kinks with a very patient audience of one at the weekend, I was ready to give the talk at work.  There were two reasons for this: the first was as a practice for me; while the second was to introduce others in the company to what we’re doing in R&D.  All told it was a great success, and I’m prepped for the real thing, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Oh and the temperature just hit 38 C/100 F,  so we’re ready for a break in more moderate climbs!

A Note On Cantonese

In preparation for our trip to Hong Kong next week, though many of the people we encounter will speak English, we thought it would be nice to attempt to learn a bit of basic Cantonese.  So far we’ve encountered some features that make it quite a nice language.

• Cantonse is gender neutral.  There is a word for “I”, one for “you” and one that covers “he/she/it”.  That’s a big plus over the gendered-ness of French for example, where everything seems to have a gender.
• There is no tense in Cantonese verbs.  There is just the one word for “be” for example, much simpler than the irregular chaos that is the English “be” (I am, you are, she is, etc).
• There are a regular marker words.  There is a single possessive marker, a plural marker and a question marker, much like Japanese.

However – and this is a biggie – Cantonese is a tonal language. This means that you can have one single word said in multiple ways, each with a different meaning.  I can just about get my head around the idea of high, medium and low pitch.  Where it gets complicated is the rising and falling tones.  Thai has one of each, making a balanced set of five tones.  Cantonese has a second rising tone, bringing it to six!

This means that for each syllable you can keep your pitch steady at one of three different levels; you can drop your pitch; you can raise it, or you can raise it more.  This site explains it well and has a nice English example: try saying “international”.  Sound it out .. “in-ter-na-tion-al” … lots of intonation.  Course, the difference is that if you say it a different way, you aren’t suddenly saying “parrot” or “yes, please I would like some boiled intestines.”

Nowson, 2009

You’ll be pleased to hear that I received confirmation today that my paper has been selected for a prominent workshop on topic sentiment analysis, which is very nice indeed! The conference is in Hong Kong, and thankfully I don’t have to go alone on this trip – Amanda is coming too!  We’re not going until November, but we’re already looking forward to giant Buddhas, hairy crabs, Fu Sing’s and happy vegetarian monks.  We’re very excited!

The Nowson Brand

I always thought it would be fun to own the Nowson domain.  So that’s exactly what I did.  Who knows what we’ll do with it in the future, but for now please to enjoy my new academic website: nowson.com.

Chewy Toffee Cookies

Yesterday Scott mentioned that he’s been working very long hours from home, and he has indeed.  I’ve missed him very much (though my Harvest Moon farm is now THRIVING! ).  Along the way, to keep his spirits bolstered, I used some of my extra free time to whip up a batch of Chewy Toffee Cookies.  They are incredibly helpful for selecting topic driven features (or so I’ve heard).

Chewy Toffee Cookies

1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup shortening
1/4 cup honey
1 large egg
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 ounces crunchy toffee bits (bits-o-brickle)

Preheat oven to 180c.  Mix sugar, butter, shortening, honey and egg in a large bowl.  Stir in flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.  Stir in toffee bits. Drop by 1/4 cupfuls 2-inches apart onto ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake 12-14 minutes or until edges are golden brown.  Cool 3-4 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Makes 24 cookies.

(*I couldn’t find a recipe I liked, so I combined a few to come up with this one.)

Click To Submit

Just wanted to let you know that I’m currently enjoying my frst evening off for a while.  It’s always the same when you’re writing a paper – even though it was for work I was still doing it at home in the evenings and on the weekends.  But it’s in now – and I’ll let you know how it goes in three weeks time.

Wish me luck! 

An Oddly Timed Day

Here I sit at lunch time getting ready to head into the office.  Not back to the office after lunch mind, but in for the first time today.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m starting my day late – it’s been going for hours, with many more to come.

I started at 4:30 this morning with a call to the US.  I had time to prepare, take the call and write up my notes before heading back to bed to try for a nap.

After lunch I’ll be at work until 8 this evening for a two hour teleconference with Europe.  You’ll agree 5am-8pm is a pretty long day, so a relaxed morning was definitely called for.

In addition, to help those of us on the late call get through the long day, Amanda is sending me in with treats.  Some of you may recognise them, though it’s the first time she’s made them in two and a half years!

Blinded By The Science

I know that it’s Friday and you’d probably rather read something fun and flippant, but I thought I’d tell you about what exactly I’ve been doing for the last few weeks at work.  Now I mentioned a wee while back that I was lending some computational linguistics smarts to assist some of our big projects, and during that process I’ve developed quite a few things which may or may not mean anything to you, but I’ll list for you anyway: a voweliser, a punctuator, a compound word checker and a hyphenation error analysis system.

Now if that doesn’t impress you then (apart from being completely unsupportive ) maybe you’ll be more impressed when I tell you just how happy I’ve made a few people.  By and large a lot of what we do on some projects is an intense manual effort, and the help that I’ve lent has saved a lot of time.  And by a lot I really mean it – not hours or days, but weeks and months of human effort.  I’ve even heard talk of now being able to “smash the budget” on one project.

Being described as “crucial” and “invaluable” is always good for the ego.

Scott Does Dallas

For the last little while at work I’ve been at the centre of the redevelopment of our core experimental framework.  It’s been essential work but is very rewarding – this week I finally got back to doing some pure feature extraction/text classification.  But no sooner had the improvements started rolling in than I was pulled off to help on another project.

It’s never the easiest thing to be asked at such short notice to join a project in the middle, not knowing any of the background, but if my mad computational linguist skillz can help out in any way I’m more than happy to oblige.

As per usual, I can’t give you too many details, but this is a big, tight deadline, high pressure project. I’ve been in the meetings every morning, and staying back every evening to help out in any way I can – which mostly means building smart stuff.

I’m glad it’s Friday because I’m exhausted.  But just you wait to see what we’ll be blogging over the weekend.