汉字标准格式

这个专为中文网页而设的 汉字标准格式（CSS）实在很棒！前些日子和 ChinaTeX 采访／闲聊时才说起，要找专针对中文内容的 Typography 样式，实在很难，没想到两个多月后就在 Twitter 看到了。

Another Grad School Quote

By Seamus Bradley, while explaining some reasons for his tendency for “over-the-top” L^aT_eX solutions to simple problems:

Because as a PhD student, procrastination is an important part of staying sane.

Closer to home, I‘m finding the need to make a little happy something everyday to carry me through. Ah, just another typical day in a grad student's career (or the lack of one).

Recursively Fixing File Permissions

Ahhh, the joys of restoring/moving files from a FAT32 external hard disk to a *nix system. Everything is 777, grrrrr. The all-knowing Google kindly directed me to try the following:

$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

to chmod all files to 644, and

$ find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755

to chmod all directories to 755. Ahhh, the joys of bash commands.

Mounting USB Devices in VirtualBox

Mounting USB devices on guest systems in VirtualBox seems to be a big headache for many people (yours truly included). But I think I’d finally figured it out.

It boils down to these two most crucial points for me:

1. Use the same usernames on your host and guest systems.
2. Create an empty USB filter for your guest system. This will automatically mount any devices to the guest system as soon as they are attached physically.

Use the same usernames on your host and guest systems.

• When installing your guest systems, create users with the same login name you’re already using on your host system.
• To make things easier, choose a username without space characters.

Create an empty USB filter for your guest system.

• With the guest system off, open the Settings of your guest system.
• Open the Ports → USB pane.
• Make sure you have enabled USB 2.0 (EHCI) controller.
• Click the icon with a blue circle on the right. This will add an empty device filter that matches anything.

Now try starting your guest system, log in with the same user name as the one currently active on your host system, and attach a USB device. Hopefully things will… work!

ERA Journal Ranking List Dropped

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has decided to remove ERA journal rankings in view of them “focusing ill-formed undesirable behavior in the management of research”.

(Although I’m guessing people here will just pretend they never read this and do nothing about it until 3 years later.)

[Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr] chastised the research community, saying: “There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings.

“One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers.

“In light of these two factors — that ERA could work perfectly well without the rankings, and that their existence was focussing ill-informed undesirable behaviour in the management of research — I have made the decision to remove the rankings, based on the ARC’s expert advice.”

Australian Academy of Science Secretary for Science Policy Professor Bob Williamson has this to say:

“In our recent submission to the Australian Research Council, the Australian Academy of Science argued strongly that key areas such as interdisciplinary research and new research were seriously disadvantaged by journal ranking,” Professor Williamson said.

“This affected not only areas of science and technology, but also interactions between the sciences and the humanities.”

“It has been very distressing to see some universities using publications in highly ranked journals as the basis for funding, promotions, and even staff appointments.

“The ranking of a journal as A* does not mean every paper in it is first rate, and some very good papers may appear in smaller journals.

So how would the new ERA initiative include as changes? One proposed measure is to move more towards a peer review system. More comments from various experts here: interesting reads.

Upcoming LaTeX Talk

ｷｬ━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━!! MOSC2011 has posted about my upcoming L^aT_eX talk!

Spanish and Tolkien and Arrancars

西班牙语是《魔戒》的作者——铎金教授最喜欢的语言之一，原因是他认为语音很美（我也这么认为），所以我其实对 Bleach 里破面们的名字非常爱不释手。

CICLing 2011: Sound Bites

I just don’t have time for long posts these days T_T so here goes: a bulleted list of sound-bites.

Jun’ichi Tsujii

• As engineers, you’d want to create applications that just work (so stats-based systems fit the bill nicely).
• As scientists though, you’d want to know when and why things don’t work sometimes, and is it worth your while to try handle these special (if they are) cases at all.
• And for this purpose, stats-based models can be like black-boxes that you can’t really inspect… and this is where computational linguistics can provide insights.

Hans Uszkoreit

• Don’t believe in the F₁ score blindly. For some applications you really just want the precision; for others recall is much more important.
• Example: for a system detecting possible reports of terrorist activities, a 1.0 recall means much more than 0.01 precision, because you can certainly afford a human perusing 100 reports and confirming that 1 genuine terrorist report.
• Unfortunately many inexperienced journal reviewers (Hans actually said that) would still insist that the system’s F₁ is too low and can’t be convinced of the more important role of recall in such cases.

Diana McCarthy

• Is word sense disambiguation still relevent especially when we talk about tagging with reference to a sense inventory? Because we increasingly feel this phenomena about words having a continuum of meanings rather than discrete ones (except in the case of homographs).
• I don’t have an answer for this though. Thoughts welcome!

(Thanks Prof McCarthy. I hope my idea works! Even if only somewhat.)

Chris Manning

• No, we don’t have special funding for the Stanford NLP tools development. T_T
• Yes, it’s really hard to maintain the code and projects as people leave. T_T
• Yes, it’d be nice if we had a long-term development team to take care of the software engineering and maintenance stuff so that the research students can concentrate on doing research, but this is really hard (impossible?) in reality. T_T

(Prof Manning… what can I say except that I/we feel the pain too? T_T)

Geilivable

今天学了一个新字，或是不同语言的同一个 concept:

[英] geilivable = [大陆流行语] 给力 = [大马华语流行语] 够力