Posts by Stephen Judd
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Any word on the phenomenon of pronouncing a distinct final "r"? I've noticed that a lot in the last 5 years or so, mostly among young Polynesians but also more generally.
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I didn't mean "naive" pejoratively. I thought it was just a descriptive term for the rough-and-ready Paul Graham approach. I agree, there doesn't seem to be much benefit in more sophisticated (and statistically correct) approaches.
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you have a prelim to assert that the woman is behaving consistently with having been raped - get her a counsellor or a psychologist, talk with her friends; as well as establishing the extent of her trauma, it's a good opportunity to provide & inform a support network.
I fear that would lead to defenses along the lines of "she can't have been raped, she's too stoic."
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Billy T James? I heard it from Kenny Everett.
Tom: are those the same people who rhyme house with mice?
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How old are you, Graeme?
I'm 38, and I think I'm among the last people who grew up distinguishing those sounds. My daughter doesn't, and she can't even hear the difference.
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made redundant and invited to reapply for her job
Isn't that illegal? I thought that was constructive dismissal. Totally abusive, anyway.
lets not entirely discount the contribution education/training can make.
Of course. I just don't think we should expect it solve everything, or spread it around wastefully.
@Finn on using employer stupidity as a screening criterion: the problem is that those employers can be quite hard to identify. And if they are a minority in your chosen field, it makes it hard to get the foot in the door that will give you the experience in the first place. (Having said that, I wore shorts and jandals to work yesterday...)
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The students were being deceived about their prospects
I have had some dismal conversations with older students who have racked up loans and then either a) had to abandon part-way through because of financial and family stress or b) discovered that their expensive qualification was not the ticket they had hoped for. The push for education carries with it the risk of hopeful people being disappointed with large debts and no asset to show for it.
The idea that more education is the answer for the work force gives me pause anyway. I wonder whether we don't end up with creeping qualificationism, with people needing higher qualifications to do the same jobs with no more productivity. The end result will be that everyone needs a PhD to get an interview at McDonalds. I also think about my own profession (programming) where formal education is helpful, maybe even necessary, but productivity really depends on a long apprenticeship and native talent (viz the Finns of this world, and for that matter me).
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I mean here.
Damnit.
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My plans for the Ruminator are outlined [[http://bazombo.com/burble/entry/title/next_on_the_menu|here].
Lots of code kicking around for the taking if you want to do naive Bayesian stuff. All the hard work is in a) assembling suitable collections of stuff to train your program with and b) taking the time to do the training, which could be arduous.
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Maybe David and I should get together. I am hard at work on The Ruminator in my spare time, juicing it up to recognise phrases rather than just words (what computer scientists and linguists call "collocations"), and some naive Bayesian voodoo to infer categories or topics.
I'm using a bunch of text to train it comprising about year's worth of RSS feeds from NZ news outlets. There are some striking patterns, which if nothing else tell you a lot about the priorities of news reporters...