Today's entry is a video blog post on perception, including an enlightening excerpt from my fave French author, Bernard Werber. Sorry for the crappy pronunciation!
I wonder what else we are raised to perceive or not perceive. Do Indians have a different perception of spiciness? Can Chinese speakers perceive musical pitch more easily? Hmm...
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
How to Speak American
All of these are catchphrases from television or movies that have made it into everyday English conversation, at least in the states. How many do you know or use?
- How YOU doin'?
- That's what she said.
- Holy ___, Batman!
- Is that your final answer?
- Soup (or whatever ) Nazi
- No soup for you!
- I KNOW!
- Whatchu talkin' about Willis?
- Fuhgedaboudit!
- That's hot.
- Not that there's anything wrong with that.
- Silly rabbit. (Trix are for kids)
- Oh no he di'n't.
- Frak!
- I have a bad feeling about this.
- Smarter than your average bear.
- Save the cheerleader, save the world.
- Whoa!
- Resistance is futile.
- These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Japan is a Lonely Place
Looking back, some of my best memories were made when hanging out with the Computing Science Student Society crew at SFU, and chilling with my co-workers at Google, Santa Monica. There's just something about enjoying life with people who are like you. That is, you laugh at the same things, you speak the same way, make clever word play and jabs, and mix it up with inside jokes and nerdy references. You watch a movie and laugh at the same places, get enthusiastic about eating at a particular place, oooh and ahh at interesting news. You feel connected. You feel like you belong. And it's just... fun.
Japan is lonely.
There is no word play, because communicating means using simple, easy-to-understand English. Cultural references need to be explained. Explaining jokes sucks. People ask where you're going to work after you graduate, because of course, you're not going to stay in Japan. You feel like you don't belong, and you'll never belong.
In no way am I disparaging my school and my lab. They're the only things that are making this bearable.
But I do miss laughing. The hearty, American laugh and enjoyment of life, silliness and camaraderie. The smile when I say "Holy smokes, Batman!" instead of a confused glance away. My own uncontrollable guffaws when someone imitates Darth Vader, instead of my ignorant and clumsy questioning about Japanese subculture.
I'm about as multicultural as anyone I know, but the longer I'm away from North America, the more I realize that I am Canadian. I am American. And as cool as the pastures are overseas, the grass is definitely very green back home.
Japan is lonely.
There is no word play, because communicating means using simple, easy-to-understand English. Cultural references need to be explained. Explaining jokes sucks. People ask where you're going to work after you graduate, because of course, you're not going to stay in Japan. You feel like you don't belong, and you'll never belong.
In no way am I disparaging my school and my lab. They're the only things that are making this bearable.
But I do miss laughing. The hearty, American laugh and enjoyment of life, silliness and camaraderie. The smile when I say "Holy smokes, Batman!" instead of a confused glance away. My own uncontrollable guffaws when someone imitates Darth Vader, instead of my ignorant and clumsy questioning about Japanese subculture.
I'm about as multicultural as anyone I know, but the longer I'm away from North America, the more I realize that I am Canadian. I am American. And as cool as the pastures are overseas, the grass is definitely very green back home.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Reading Groups
And thus ends the hell week. Three assignments handed in, and a presentation for my reading group. Helped with frog experiments, sent out the newsletter for DigitalEve Japan, and played softball. I thought it would all kill me, but I didn't even have to pull a tetsuya (all-nighter). Yatta!
I absolutely love the reading groups we do in our lab. We're reading Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, also lovingly known as "PRML". Indeed, it's a tough book to get through, and "doing a presentation" is not just slapping together some slides about a topic you already know. To present a chapter from the book, you really have to:
Step 1: Read the chapter (how many times did I fall asleep...)
Step 2: Understand the chapter (deciphering an incomprehensible language has become my specialty)
Step 3: Decide what's important (less is more)
Step 4: Make the slides (pictures of bunnies help)
Also, for every single presentation I do, I start with a "hook". It's the most important part of a presentation. If you don't tell the people why they should listen to you, they won't.
Typically I start with a problem targeted to my audience. "Here's problem X. Has this ever happened to you?" They start nodding, and no matter how inane the solution, they will listen. Works every time.
Anyway, I'm just happy because, although my slides were in English, I managed to present in Japanese! It was the 2nd time I tried doing a talk in Japanese, though I had to fall back to English a few times. And, despite the language barrier, more than one labmate told me it was easy to understand. Yay!
Doesn't the bunny make EM for GMM look less scary? I think so.
Edit: Here is my full tutorial on Expectation Maximization and Gaussian Mixture Models. It also includes an overview of K-means. All pictures (except for the bunny) are from Christopher Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.
I absolutely love the reading groups we do in our lab. We're reading Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, also lovingly known as "PRML". Indeed, it's a tough book to get through, and "doing a presentation" is not just slapping together some slides about a topic you already know. To present a chapter from the book, you really have to:
Step 1: Read the chapter (how many times did I fall asleep...)
Step 2: Understand the chapter (deciphering an incomprehensible language has become my specialty)
Step 3: Decide what's important (less is more)
Step 4: Make the slides (pictures of bunnies help)
Also, for every single presentation I do, I start with a "hook". It's the most important part of a presentation. If you don't tell the people why they should listen to you, they won't.
Typically I start with a problem targeted to my audience. "Here's problem X. Has this ever happened to you?" They start nodding, and no matter how inane the solution, they will listen. Works every time.
Anyway, I'm just happy because, although my slides were in English, I managed to present in Japanese! It was the 2nd time I tried doing a talk in Japanese, though I had to fall back to English a few times. And, despite the language barrier, more than one labmate told me it was easy to understand. Yay!
Doesn't the bunny make EM for GMM look less scary? I think so.
Edit: Here is my full tutorial on Expectation Maximization and Gaussian Mixture Models. It also includes an overview of K-means. All pictures (except for the bunny) are from Christopher Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.
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