Week of 2007-11-12

Pretty good week.

• Decided on a project for stats: we're going to mine CTECs and do inference on students' rating of professors. I do wonder what we'll find...
• Also got my topic for my natural language processing project: trying to differentiate between different points of view. For example, a single event (say, SCO suing Novell, IBM and Red Hat) might elicit different responses from people in computer science and people in law, finance, and political history. The job of this program is to find documents describing a different point of view given a single event (or document describing the event).
• Watched a pretty good documentary, NOVA's "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial". The video is online on PBS's site, if anyone want to check it out. It's about the Dover trial on teaching intelligent design in public schools.
• Watched the final part of a catapult competition, where people have to catapult ten ping pong balls into ten cups from eight feet away. The professors' catapult was the best, getting 40%, but of course they didn't win anything.
• Visited the Shedd again, this time got to see some of the behind the scenes stuff. I also didn't realize they had several Gentoo penguins the last time I was there. Working as an animal trainer must be a pretty nice job, similar to being a college professor: you won't get into it unless you are really into that topic.
• Condensed my locomotion code. Only a few things feel as good as cutting the number of files in half, and making the code more robust.

That's it for now.